Day of the Dead in Mexico

Día de los Muertos en México

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The symbolic reunion with our deceased, tiny and big –children and adults–is one of the most transcendent rituals of Mexican culture and it is celebrated the Mexican way with a BIG party of many forms, flavours, smells and colours.

Since Mexico is a country shaped by a large diversity of cultures, the celebration of the Day of the Dead has different meanings and practices according to the region in question –included are the historical and ecological factors, its inherited cultural traditions as well as elements of foreign origin incorporated into the beliefs and local customs– however in some way they coincide in the meanings as well as in the same sociocultural practices. This way, we have the same celebration that acquires particular and distinctive features between regions, localities and even between families of the same community, but that supports the same sense: to remember and to pay tribute to the deceased.

From before the arrival of the Spaniards to Mexico, the peoples who inhabited what today is known as the American Continent had complex rituals of worship to the dead. In particular, for the peoples who were habitants to Mesoamerica , the duality ' life–death' acquired a cosmologic significance in which the border between life and death is diluted, giving sense to life through death and to death itself, through life. In the pre-Hispanic Mexico certain rituals dedicated to the deceased were coinciding with the end of the agricultural cycle of the corn, the pumpkin, the chick-pea and the bean; these products were incorporated to the offerings dedicated to the deceased probably as a symbol of life and death.

Because of its importance – to the preservation of cultural identity, as well as to safeguard the cultural diversity and the human creativity The Indigenous Festivity Dedicated to the Dead was proclaimed by the UNESCO, in 2003, “Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity” . This festivity takes place in groups of territories located in the Center–South region of Mexico that comprises an average of 41 towns.

A Fusion of Cultures

The firm conviction that death was the transition to another life explains the fact that in many burials of this epoch, and even in some of and the actuality, there have been vessels that contained food and tools that the deceased used in life.

On the other hand, the catholic religion in 385 A.D. instituted the celebration of All Saints' Day on November the first and All Souls Day on the following day. These celebrations of the catholic calendar interwove during the colonial epoch, with the rituals that the original peoples dedicated to their deceased, resulting in very particular forms to the celebration of the Day of the Dead in Mexico in a special way amongst the indigenous peoples living in the center and south of the country. Later this custom became generalized to the non-indigenous population.

The confrontation between the ritual calendars of the original indigenous peoples and the violent imposition of the liturgical calendar of the catholic faith to which those people were submitted, propiciated an adjustment to the significance in the ceremonial practices that gave birth to a fusion of cultures that persist to this day.

The Popular Tradition in Mexico

The Festivities of the Day of Dead are a series of facts and customs, which takes us from the withdrawal to the partying, from the crying to the joys of remembering; our dead loved ones take permission to stroll and make their presence to be felt among us.

We receive them with a fortitude in which the happiness and the sadness intermingle; we arrange their graves to share with them in vigil; we prepare offerings that we place in our houses and/or on their graves; we prepare the meals and drinks they used to enjoy; we play music and dance in their memory; compose poems, some deeply moving and others with a mocking sense. In a word, we cry, we laugh and we even mock at the death and the deceased, but that of course, with all respect.

This way, we share a rite in which year after year we meet symbolically, the living and the dead persons, in an act that serves the living to remember our deceased and to reaffirm our beliefs that some day we will meet again with them in the world of the pacific coexistence. One might say that the celebration of The Day of the Dead is an affirmation of the memory and the unavoidable future to which we will all arrive; it is an act that allows us not to forget by means of remembering. This ritual allows us to conciliate with ourselves and reaffirm us with our past.