Tag Archives: dia de los muertos

Dia De Los Muertos-Day of the Dead: Mexican Holiday

Text: 

Me: “Do you have any holidays, rituals, or beliefs that you would like to share?”

DR: “Yes, I can talk about Dia de los Muertos.”

Me: “Is it a traditional holiday within your culture?”

DR: “Yes it’s a Mexican holiday typically celebrated Nov 1st-Nov 2nd every year. November 1st is dedicated to children who have died while November 2nd is the day celebrated for all other deceased people. The tradition usually happens at the cemetery or at one’s home. In the home, an altar is set up for the deceased people or individuals. They have decorations such as papel picado (colorful paper), cempasuchil which is a type of flower, and food that the deceased once loved. There are usually religious figures around the altar, most famously La Virgen de Guadalupe and other holy saints. These two days are meant to celebrate the life of the ones who have passed on and to allow them to come back in spirit while joining us in the real-world. It is often normal to see people painting their face to look like skeletons; this is to create a unity and to blur the line between the dead and the living.” 

Context (informant’s relationship to the piece, where they heard it, how they interpret it):

-DR’s relationship to this traditional Mexican holiday stems from her Mexican and Salvadorian culture as it’s an important holiday that is celebrated within her home. Her relationship to this traditional holiday also stems from the connection that she shares with her family as they honor their loved ones that have passed. For example, DR’s mother’s grandfather is always recognized and celebrated as her mom’s side of the family always goes to the cemetery, decorates his grave, and has a picnic with the foods that he loved. DR would hear about this holiday all through her life as she grew up in a typical Mexican household. DR has always been exposed to Dia de los Muertos as her own family traditionally celebrates it but she has also been exposed to it by attending a predominantly Latino grade school where the holiday was always honored and evident; an altar was typically displayed in her school’s library. DR interprets this holiday as a beautiful tradition that shouldn’t be looked upon with a somber attitude. Instead, DR interprets this festive practice as a happy way to remember our loved ones in a celebratory manner.

Analysis(what kind of personal, cultural, or historical values might be expressed) YOUR interpretation:

-The overall cultural value within Dia de los Muertos stems from a typical Mexican culture considering this holiday has originated and is widely evident in various parts of Mexico following the Mexican heritage. The cultural value of community is evident within this holiday considering Mexican communities come together to celebrate and to pay their respects. The personal values that are expressed within this celebratory holiday follows the religious and spiritual beliefs of many Catholic individuals. Given that Catholicism is typical for Mexican families to condone in, it is evident that the emphasis of celebrating one’s spirit during Dia de los Muertos is related to their idolization of religious figures (La Virgen de Guadalupe/Mother Mary) since many Catholics believe that the spirits of those who have passed on can still be present in the real-world. I interpret this holiday as an ethereal practice of remembrance, community, and love. Given the fact that I have not accurately celebrated this holiday despite my Mexican culture, I can appreciate the concept of acknowledging one’s passing instead of mourning them with a sad and downhearted connotation. Overall, I can see this holiday as a joyful practice where one’s spirituality is met, pronounced, and proven, given that many religious individuals feel deeply that the spirits of the deceased have the power to rejoin others in unity. Dia de los Muertos follows the ideology of being a cyclic holiday considering the cycle of one’s life, time, and season is evident and celebrated. Not to mention, the idea of post-productive life can be seen as the main emphasis of this holiday considering death is targeted as the means for festivity. A traditional practice that differs from the celebratory event of Dia de los Muertos is modernized funerals. Within American society, funerals are seen as disheartening events that are used to mourn those who have passed. Black clothes, tears, and white flowers within a traditional funeral are elements that can be contradicting to the colorful decorations, bright orange cempasuchil flowers, and the light-hearted picnics that take place during November 1-2.

Día de Muertos

Context:

F, 18, is a Mexican student at USC. He is from Ciudad Juarez, a city in Mexico that borders El Paso, Texas. F told me about the Mexican festival called Día de Muertos or Day of the Dead.

Text:

Every November 2nd, I celebrate with my family a popular Mexican tradition called “Día de Muertos”. This day is celebrated to remember the people that have passed away. We put together an altar in which we include pictures of the people we remember along with objects that reminds us of them. An example is that we put a picture of my grandfather and a book as he loved reading. This tradition helps us stay in touch with our loved ones and remember that they are with us every step of the way.

Analysis:

Día de Muertos is a traditional Mexican festival that happens yearly on November 2nd. It aligns with many other death-related celebrations such as All Souls Day or Halloween because of the life cycle calendar. Many cultures celebrate death around fall and winter, as they symbolize death and the end of a cycle. Then, in spring, the cycle starts anew and begins with fertility and birth celebrations. In this tradition, it is believed that the Day of the Dead is a liminal period in which the dead can visit their living relatives, this liminal period creates a space for magic and festivities that fit outside of the norm. In this traditional festival, people leave objects that the deceased enjoyed during their lifetime on the altar, so they can take joy in them once more.

Día de los Muertos

Text:

AG: “In the Mexican culture, they believe that our ancestors that have passed come back to the land of the living for two nights. We build ofrendas, which are little, a shrine is not the right word, but you put all their favorite foods, pictures of them. Alter is a more colloquial term. 

In our culture, we believe that people die three deaths. The first is when we physically die, when our bodies just stop working, our hearts stop, whatever. The second is when we’re lowered into the ground and buried, so we’re out of sight, or cremated, I guess. And the third one is when there’s no one left to remember us. There’s three deaths or three phases of death.

Usually, my parents put up an alter and we put up pictures of people who have passed in our family with a bunch of flowers, candles, because the candle represents their spirit, essentially. Sometimes we’ll go to, they have a cemetery, called Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and they put a bunch of marigolds up. They do a bunch of alters, ofrendas all over, and you can just visit and pay your respects, and just really reflecting on the lives of the people who have come before.”

Context:

AG is a 20-year-old Mexican-American college student from Los Angeles. She celebrates this holiday, which falls on the first two days of November, with her family every year. On this holiday, the living reunite with the spirits of their deceased ancestors. AG said that in comparison to melancholic death rituals like funerals, Dìa de los Muertos is a happy event which celebrates the people who passed away rather than mourning their deaths. She explained that according to Mexican belief, the first two deaths, physical death and burial, are inevitable. However, the third death, which she describes as “dying in the land of the dead” where individuals “fade into oblivion,” can be avoided by remembering individuals who passed away. Dìa de los Muertos functions to prevent this final death, as AG explained, “you preserve their memory through storytelling, through folklore, thereby keeping them alive through their spirits.” 

Analysis:

I find the Mexican folk belief in a realm between life and obsolescence very compelling. Many ideologies delineate life and death as two incompatible states of being which never intersect, so that once a person has passed away, the living have no way of accessing them. This boundary blurring view of life and death places power into the hands of the living, so that there are specific things that they can do and practices that they can carry out in order to come into contact with their lost loved ones again. This power of being able to reconnect with the dead comes with responsibilities, however, where one must continually honor and memorialize their loved one’s lives if they want to maintain this connection. The insistence upon keeping a person’s memory alive after their passing, which prevents the deceased from entering the third stage of death and disappearing, conveys how deeply one’s ancestry and elders are valued and respected in Mexican culture.

Dìa de los Muertos exemplifies the ritualization of liminality, where specific traditions and extraordinary practices are carried out at the time that the realm of the dead and the realm of the living overlap. That the holiday is comprised more of celebration than of mourning shows the comfort found in the belief that physical death doesn’t mean spiritual death.

Dia de Los Muertos

Informant information
Nationality: Afro-Latina American  
Occupation: Teacher 
Residence: California
Date of Performance/Collection: Apr 9, 2022
Primary Language: English 
Other Language(s): Spanish

Background
My informant is my co-worker who is Afro-Latina and while sitting at the front desk, we started talking about Dia de Los Muertos.

Performance 
X-  Whatever you put on your altar is supposed to– it’s like– so on your altar, you’re putting, ideally, you’re putting objects and food and bread that were like favorite dishes from the person who died, so you’re celebrating the person who died and usually celebrate on the first and second. The first I believe is for the children or that’s the second, the second is children,  the first for the adults, and what happens is on the first, the veil comes down, and that allows for the souls to pass back onto the land of the living and they are supposed to come and see the altar and eat the food and drink the liquor and you just celebrate with your family members or whoever and that celebration in the evening. And cultures go– go down to the graveyard and go build their alters around the gravestone then they go back to their houses and they eat all the food and they celebrate the life of the person who passed because day of the dead isn’t about mourning, it’s about celebrating them and so you’ll put their photos of who died and it’s it’s it’s really just like a celebration of living like a grand party. 

Thoughts
I didn’t know much about Dia de Los Muertos before having this conversation with X, but I learned a lot in understanding that it is not a day of mourning but of celebration and I think that’s really beautiful.

Dia de los Muertos

Nationality: Mexican, Afro-Caribbean, Native (South) American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Prosser, Washington
Performance Date: April 13th, 2013
Primary Language: Spanish
Language: English

When we made the offerings for Dia de los Muertos, we left out water. I asked other families, and they told me you customarily leave oranges, and bread, and you leave salt in the shape of a cross to symbolize something good for the returning dead. You also light a candle for each person that had died in your family, so they could find their way back to you during the festival of the dead… I have all of these aunts and random people, tons of them, on my mom’s side, and eight on my dad’s side, so it was a lot of candles. But I didn’t understand about the water, so I asked my dad for the explanation…

Water represents light, like a lighthouse, leading them (the dead), asking them, showing them the way like a beacon, making sure they go to the right house.

Also you’re not allowed to put out the candles, they HAVE to die out themselves. But as for the water, dad said that if you saw bubbles in it the next morning, you know that they visited… I believed it as a kid, but I’m pretty sure it always had bubbles, no matter what…

 

How did you come across this folklore: “I refer to these as “sketchy stories from my (step)father”/sketchy things he did when I was a kid…”

Other information: “My dad has a lot of stories like these, but my mom was big on not sharing them, or letting us hear them—so I heard this in my teens, when were allowed (finally) to ask and he would actually answer… my mom said it would invite bad people/things to us or something…”

This ritual is almost like a more spiritual version of what kids are taught to do for Santa, leaving out cookies the night of Christmas Eve and in the morning there would be bitemarks or crumbs as evidence that he had visited. But Dia de los Muertos is not quite as commercialized of a holiday, and unlike Christmas, offers another opportunity to connect with the dead.