Joyful. Ironic. Soulful. Intimate.
These are some of the words that have characterized Mexican attitudes toward death for decades, both within Mexico and the world over. Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, a Mexican tradition in which people celebrate and mourn the departed, is famous for its festivity and color — so much so that it has been recognized by UNESCO as an exemplar of humanity’s cultural heritage. That it could not be more different from a self-serious funeral is a point of national pride.
Today, though, it’s become hard to find joy or irony in death in the face of the parade of homicides, disappearances and economies of extortion that punctuate life in Mexico. The combination of the holiday’s commercialization and the dark reality of national violence has made it trickier for people to observe Día de los Muertos, and especially to embrace its original meaning. The time has come to reclaim it.
Over the course of Mexico’s history, Día de los Muertos has provided an intimate space of encounter between the living and the dead at home and at grave altars. Families prepare lavish offerings of the deceased’s favorite food and drink, decorate altars with marigolds and sugar skulls, and gather in cemeteries to clean and adorn graves for the annual reunion. The holiday, which has its origins in a Catholic festival that was invented in 11th-century France, honors virtue on Nov. 1, All Saints Day, and then calls for remembrance of beloved sinners on Nov. 2, All Souls Day.
Although the Catholic framing of the festivities may have faded — a process spurred by the secularist revolution in mid-19th-century Mexico — it’s important to remember its original logic of dual remembrances. On All Saints Day, we honor the immaculate souls in heaven; on All Souls Day, originally conceived to benefit those in Purgatory, we remember our dearly departed as they were, with all of their virtues and vices. The altars that people set up to honor their departed often include loving nods to their more sinful appetites — a pack of cigarettes; a dish of rich, chocolaty mole; a shot of cane alcohol. We adore our dead with all of their foibles. We look to death in order to smile at the spectacle of life.
This idea became especially influential in Mexico’s post-revolutionary period, in the 1920s and 1930s, when many of the country’s most prominent intellectuals and artists, including the muralist Diego Rivera, embraced the Mexican people’s playful connection to death and to their dead as a source of inspiration. The iconography of everyday death, most famously conjured by the Mexican engraver José Guadalupe Posada, became a source of national pride: in the country’s hybrid Indigenous and European heritage, in its ability to lampoon the conceits of the living, in the blood that had been shed as it cast off dictatorship and exploitation, in the democratic nature of a death that comes for everyone.
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