Loved ones who have died will be celebrated Friday and Saturday for Día de los Muertos, a traditional observance of Day of the Dead.
TPR's Marian Navarro spoke to folklorist Norma Elia Cantú, the Norine R. and T. Frank Murchison Professor of the Humanities at Trinity University, about the Mexican holiday and how the celebration has evolved across the U.S.
Navarro first asked Cantú about her memories of celebrating Día de los Muertos as a child.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Cantú: It was a religious holiday, so obviously there was a Mass. And we also went to the cemetery. We would go clean the tomb, set up the flowers, eat some delicacies like caña — sugar cane. The flower vendors were everywhere. It was really an overload for the senses with the smells and the colors and all that.
But it was kind of low-key, and it was certainly not at home. We did not set up an altar or ofrenda at home. Going back to the origins, it is a religious Catholic celebration. It just happens to coincide with some indigenous celebrations as well. It's a syncretism that you find in the celebration even today, even as ... it has veered off from that religious to something else. When I first came to a celebration in San Antonio, I think it was in the '90s, there was a party and that was no longer the religious kind of celebration that I had known before.
So, things have changed. I see the different elements in that change, going from a strictly religious observation to a more celebratory, communal, cultural celebration.
Navarro: Like you said, they were very private celebrations within families, going to the cemetery and honoring their loved ones that way. Now it is very much so a public celebration that we see now. What do you think is gained by this change, and what do you think may be lost by the change?
Cantú: Any time things change, culturally, things are lost, but also gained. And one of the things that's gained is that the celebration continues. It perpetuates it because it adapts. It fits the needs of the community at that point in time, which may not be the same as they were before. And I think having it be more communal fulfills a need in communities to celebrate their culture and to acknowledge their roots.
What has been lost, I think, is that intimacy of doing it en familia. Now, that's not to say families aren't doing it now. A lot of families who did not have it before have taken up the idea of doing an ofrenda at home for their beloved that have passed on. That includes, of course, family, but also close friends.
So, one of the changes is, for example, having an ofrenda for people who have passed who are not your friends or relatives. They may be public figures, they may be artists, singers like Selena — there's all kinds of ofrendas to Selena. Anyone that was beloved by the community, and those are more communal. It's not necessarily individuals doing that.
Navarro: You're talking about ofrendas. Can you explain a little bit about the significance of ofrendas and why they're important to Día de los Muertos?
Cantú: The ofrenda or altar … now, altar in English refers both to altar and ofrenda. The difference is that the ofrenda is in honor of someone. The altar is in honor or for, el altar, is for a deity. So, you often see the Virgen de Guadalupe or [a] Jesus figure, some holy figure for the altar. But for the ofrenda, it is for the people who have passed. Now you see ofrendas that have only two levels, the ground level and then a box — it's decorated. Whereas the more traditional one would have up to nine levels of offerings.
Each level would have a different content, depending basically on who is doing it and for what purpose and for whom. The reason they are nine is that in the inframundo, according to the Mexica, the inframundo has nine levels. Those nine levels correspond to each of those levels on the ofrenda. So, when one passes, when you die, you go through those nine levels to get to Mictlan, the place of the dead.
Navarro: These ofrendas are significant to a community and that’s something that we see very often when we have big events in a year, in a life. So, those ofrendas really do tell a moment in time for a community.
Cantú: I would definitely say that the ofrendas, the communal ofrendas, like the one for Vanessa Guillen at that point in time or for the children in Uvalde, those bring community together to grieve and to remember and to celebrate the culture and honor the group or the person who has passed.
Navarro: I think something that's really unique about Día de los Muertos is that at its core, it's about loss — the loss of somebody that you loved, that you cared about, maybe that you didn't even know. That celebration of loss is something that was seen in the Mexican culture and the indigenous culture, but not necessarily something that's always seen in the culture here in the United States. How has Día de los Muertos reframed that view about death and loss here in the U.S.?
Cantú: In the mainstream U.S. society, perhaps, it wasn't as celebrated or as acknowledged. Death is not something that you talk about. I would suspect that it has reframed it for people who, perhaps in their ancestry, had the celebration and did that but in other traditions as well, but have gotten away from it.
The presence of the celebration, publicly, brings it back and again. I think aside from appreciating the tradition in the Mexican culture, I think they also, of course, think of their own traditions and their own ways of remembering those that we have lost.
I invite anyone who goes to the celebrations to consider why it is being held and who is putting it on. To be critical in a good sense, to not criticize but to be critical thinkers about why it is happening and how it affects you. How does it impact you in your life, in your thinking? Internalize it, embrace it.
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