Week 11: Dia de los Muertos

By Tannia Esparza Diaz

El Dia de Los Muertos is celebrated on November 1st and 2nd to make offerings to dead relatives and celebrate death and life. This celebration is based on the belief that on these nights the spirits of the dead visit their relatives and enjoy the feast offered in their honor.

I remember always being excited for el Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead)! Every year October came with anticipation, and while my friends were anxious for candy and costumes I was preparing for bread, candles, prayer, and celebration. Weeks before November 1^st and 2^nd my mom and my tias would get together to discuss who was going to make what bread, what polvorones, and what dishes. Making bread took days, and I remember waking up with my mom in the middle of the night to check on how much the dough had risen. By October 31^st my mom and my tias had prepared a huge feast of mole, posole, camote, polvorones, gusanitos, chocolate, atole, ponche, fruta, tequila, cerveza, cigarettes, lots and lots of pan, and all of our dead relatives’ favorite antojitos. All of this was set up on tiers of boxes covered with carpetas and manteles bordados. Veladoras and small candles and photographs were set up for each relative we were commemorating and flores de Zempoalxochitl were spread all over the altar. On October 31^st my mom’s entire family of 9 brothers and sisters and their wives and husbands and daughters and sons came over to my house to pray the rosary and remember our ancestors and our loved relatives who had passed away and celebrate their yearly return to feast on the physical pleasures of taste and human warmth. My house smelled of fresh sweet bread, tears, and laughter. Dim lighting and flickering candles were reflected on the faces of little ghosts, bunnies, and vampires anxiously waiting for “trick or treat.” Nostalgia on the faces of my tios and tias mourned their country and remembered old days in Mexico. These are the October memories of my childhood, survived by ancestral longing and a rebellious refusal for assimilation.

This year, Dia de los Muertos in the land of my parents made me quiver with emotions unintelligible to my mind.

On Saturday November 1^st my host mom, Cristi Bustos Vargas, and I walked the streets of colonia Ocotepec here in Cuernavaca. We began our Dia de Los Muertos Celebration with a toast of frozen paletas de coco and piña to prepare our panzas for the big feast. Led by scattered Flor de Zempoaxotchil petals on the ground, we came across the church where Liberation Theology activist and supporter, Archbishop Sergio Lopez Arceo gave mass years ago. Concheros gathered outside of the church and performed the legacies of Indigenous danza around an altar in honor of Indigenous identity and tradition. While Cristi and I became part of the masses of people that filled the streets, the sunset came with bright pink clouds and trusted the night to a crescent moon that saw fireworks and candles from the sky.

Cristi and I visited ofrendas in people’s homes, dedicated to the dead who had passed during the year. The first home we visited led our way to the altar with candles on the floor. We walked into a room filled with all the food, the bread the veladoras, and the flowers I remembered from my mother’s altars in my childhood. Everything was there. This time however, the altar revolved around a body made up of old clothes and shoes and a sugar skull, shaping the figure of an old woman who had recently died. At the foot of her bed was an enlarged picture of her while she was alive. My reaction to the altar happened as soon as my eyes made way to the old woman’s face in the photograph. Without warning to myself or the people around me, my body began to shake and I began to cry. An unknown force of emotions, feelings, and thoughts came over me. I was in the presence of a family who had recently mourned their loved “old woman.” That love was being manifested in that altar that contained so much of who she was and still is. They were openly sharing their love, their loss, their celebration to anyone who came into their home. There I was in the home of someone I had never met thinking about my mother’s yearly drifting gaze and happy/sad/mournful tears. I thought about all of the songs we sing to remember mi abuelita Chanita. I thought about all of the deaths I have celebrated, remembered, and mourned. I thought about the life of that old woman and wondered what she had lived through, what she had seen, how she had felt. I cried and I smiled at the same time knowing that she would return to see her family and eat her pan. I believe that night the old woman’s spirit was present and I feel blessed to have been able to be with her in her home. Earlier that night I saw a beautiful Zempoaxotchil flower on the floor. Before leaving the altar I thanked the moon for her light and left the old woman the flower I found. I figured she already knew it was for her anyways.

I continued visiting ofrendas with Cristi, feeling every family’s pain and joy, thinking about death and life with contradictions and welcoming the lessons of my ancestors.

Altars are filled with food and items enjoyed by the dead when they were alive and candles and flowers are displayed so that the dead can make their way home.