Día de los Muertos/Day of the Dead: The Gift of Remembrance

August 23 – November 4, 2007

According to Nobel laureate Octavio Paz , Mexico ’s Día de los Muertos “is a festival of welcome for the souls of the dead which the living prepare and delight in.  The souls return each year to enjoy for a few brief hours the pleasures they once knew in life.” 

Día de los Muertos—Day of the Dead—is observed in early November and honors ancestors and loved ones who have died.  During pre-Hispanic times elaborate rituals were performed by cultures throughout Mesoamerica to worship and remember the dead.  After the Spanish Conquest, the ancient celebrations of the dead were shifted on the calendar to correspond with the Catholic

observances of All Saints’ Day (November 1^st) and All Souls’ Day (November 2^nd).

Not to be confused with Halloween which has a more ghoulish quality, Día de los Muertos is a joyful remembrance with feasts and festivities in which death is recognized as part of the natural process of living.  Celebrated in different ways throughout Mexico , festivities may include colorful pageantry and masked dances that tease and mock Death.  Special foods, pan de muertos—bread of the dead—and sugar skulls can be enjoyed.  The sugar skulls and other Day of the Dead toys are the gentle teachers for children in the lessons of Death’s acceptable inevitability.

Día de los Muertos is an important family event when graves are cleaned, painted and decorated.  In homes, altars or ofrendas are created with special foods, candles, toys, marigolds (the flower of the dead) and other enticements to tempt the family’s departed ones back to Earth for a short visit.  The celebration begins during all-night vigils at gravesides on the evening of October 31^st and culminates the day of November 2^nd.  When traveling spirits mark their return, a solemn gaiety pervades.

In her catalogue Artesanos Mexicanos, Judith Bronowski writes:

The Death motif has been used extensively since the pre-Columbian era: carved stone skulls on temple and statues, skulls carved out of rock crystal, or superbly inlaid with turquoise and gold.  During the revolution of 1910 the great commentator/engraver José Guadalupe Posada published his satirical cartoons of skeletal figures, calaveras, to draw attention of a largely illiterate audience to the social injustices of the time.  The Posada engravings have had a significant influence on the culture and on many Mexican artists such as the muralist, Diego Rivera.

Posada’s engravings continue to influence artists today long after his death.  Some of Mexico ’s best known folk artisans have been inspired by Posada’s imagery, including the Linares family of Mexico City who make distinctive papier mâché skulls and figures, and the Aguilar family of Oaxaca who craft fanciful clay skeleton figures.  Papercuts based on Posada’s imagery are made in tissue paper banners.  Many other unknown folk artists continue to create works that are amusing and whimsical.  Some of these works depict La Catrina, a woman wearing a broad-brimmed hat and dressed in fine clothes, one of Posada’s best known calaveras.  These works made of wood, clay, tin, papier mâché and a variety of other materials have found a market outside of Mexico .  Indeed, many of these expressive folk art creations are made, not so much for the Mexican celebration, but for collectors in the United States who have embraced the artistic fancy of these works.