Dia de los Muertos

A short description of a Dia De Los Muertos festival in San Lorenzo Cacaotepec.

A Short Story by Ian Gonzalez

"In the 1970s, secular Day of the Dead celebrations were initiated in the United States as a way to communicate messages of Chicano identity. As the US Latino community became more ethnically diverse in the 1980s and 1990s, new Latino populations participated in these public festivities, creating pan-Latino celebrations. At the same time, non-Latinos began to embrace Day of the Dead as an alternative way to remember the departed. The observance of the holiday in new ways and by new groups of people has sparked negotiations around ownership and meaning, illustrating that hybridity and authenticity are complexly related rather than oppositional concepts."

"Abstract: This article analyzes the origin and meaning of artistic representations of death — principally skulls and skeletons — in Mexico's Day of the Dead. It challenges stereotypes of the death-obsessed Mexican by tracing mortuary imagery in the Day of the Dead to two separate artistic developments, the first deriving from religious and demographic imperatives of colonial times, the second from nineteenth-century politics and journalism. Now generally perceived as belonging to a single, undifierentiated iconographie tradition, cranial and skeletal images of death have become virtually synonymous with Mexico itself."

Article in the journal Artes De Mexico.