Día de los Muertos

Posted on October 30, 2009

Greetings, all–

I love Halloween, but I’m more partial to Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead (in some cases, people commemorate more than one: Días de los Muertos). Generally celebrated on November 2, Day of the Dead is a day in which you reflect on your own mortality and think about and honor those who have passed from your life. It’s also a holiday people use to mock death, but also to recognize that life ends, and in satirizing death, you’re recognizing that cycles of life include death.

In many parts of Mexico, people will go to cemeteries and clean off graves and leave offerings. Some people will remain and have a picnic near their loved one’s grave, and they’ll offer the deceased his or her favorite food and/or drink when he/she was alive. Often, there are parades during this holiday, in which people dress up as calaveras (skeletons). Many people also construct altars in remembrance of their deceased loved ones, and the altars will be decorated with marigolds, sugar skulls (skulls made from sugar, flour, and water), and other offerings as well as pictures of the loved ones and objects that meant something to them in life.

The Day of the Dead most likely derives from indigenous rituals in which pre-Hispanic peoples in what is now Mexico and Latin America comemmorated their ancestors and acknowledged the cycles of life. This site provides a bit more info on that. You’ll find celebrations throughout Latin America, the American Southwest, and areas of the U.S. in which large Latino populations reside, though the holiday is crossing over into other communities.

Some of you may be familiar with the iconography of José Guadalupe Posada, a Mexican printmaker in the late 19th century who started poking fun at Mexican society by portraying people as calaveras–that is, rich people, poor, everyone was a calavera dressed in the trappings of his or her social class and engaged in every day activities. The point was, we are all the same under our skin, so to look down on others as lesser made no sense. Posadas prints were popular during the era of the Mexican Revolution and beyond (early 20th century), because of his indictments of class hierarchy, and the macabre yet whimsical ways he lampooned class and death.

Posada’s images–especially after his death in 1913–came to be associated with Day of the Dead celebrations, and that’s why you’re probably familiar with them though you may not have known the artist behind them.

At any rate, I’ll be firing up some candles on November 2nd. However you celebrate Halloween or Day of the Dead, have fun and be safe!

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