Towering over Legion Park, a 15-foot skeleton in a flowing red dress and wide-brimmed hat will greet visitors to Woodburn’s Fiesta Mexicana this weekend. With accents of black lace, her gown is patterned with roses, a nod to Portland, the city of roses.
She is La Catrina, Mexico’s elegantly dressed symbol of death, and a reminder that “what is remembered cannot die.”
“When a person dies, people still remember them,” Esther Velázquez Loza, the artist who created La Catrina, said in Spanish. “That person doesn’t die. They die when the person has stopped thinking about them and remembering them.”…