This weekend, Mexican American families across the United States will come together to honor their ancestors with altars, flowers and sugar skulls on the Day of the Dead (Dia de los Muertos). In recent years, the celebration has become more commercialized, leaving many in the community wondering how to preserve the centuries-old tradition while evolving it to keep it alive.
The Day of the Dead is traditionally an intimate family affair, celebrated with home altars – ofrendas – and cemetery visits to decorate graves with flowers and sugar skulls. They prepare favorite foods of their deceased loved ones and hire musicians to perform their favorite songs.
Skeletons are the focus of ceremonies, symbolizing the return of bones to the living world. Like seeds planted in the soil, the dead disappear temporarily, then return every year like an annual harvest.
Families place photos of their ancestors on their ofrendas, which include paper decorations and candles, and are decorated with offerings of items loved by their loved ones, such as cigars, a bottle of mezcal, or a plate of mole, tortillas and chocolate.
Day of the Dead celebrations in the United States and Mexico continue to evolve.
The 2017 release of Disney’s animated film “Coco” transformed celebrations in northern Mexico and made Day of the Dead more popular and commercialized in the United States, said Cesario Moreno, senior curator and visual director of the National Museum of Mexican Art. American cities organize festivals, and Mexico City holds an annual Dia de los Muertos parade.
Moreno said Coco provided a way for people who were not part of the Mexican American community to learn about tradition and embrace its beauty. But it made the celebration more marketable.
“The Mexican American community in the United States celebrates Day of the Dead as a cultural expression,” Moreno said. “It’s a healthy tradition and it has an important role in the grieving process. But with Coco, it pushed it into mainstream popular culture.”
With its growing popularity, Day of the Dead is often confused with Halloween, which has changed the way it is celebrated and people understand it, Moreno said.
In recent years, some inside and outside the Mexican American community have built models devoid of color, leaning toward a more minimalist aesthetic.
Colorful altars have been a part of Mexican and Central American culture since the arrival of the Spanish and the conversion of Mexico’s indigenous tribes to Catholicism. Some families are now building altars without the flowers and picados — multicolored, lacy wall hangings featuring hearts and skulls — that were present in years past.
That’s OK, Moreno said, as long as the meaning isn’t lost.
“If people are looking to do something a little different, that’s OK,” Moreno said. “But if people stop understanding the essence of this tradition, if they start changing that, then that is what I am against.”
Ana Sissi Lerma, a Mexican American living in Texas, suspects that minimal designs satisfy the desire to create Instagram-worthy content.
“I believe you can put on the altar what you want and what connects you to your loved ones,” Lerma said. “But if your reasoning is just that you like the way you look, then I feel like that loses some of the reason we make altars.”
American companies are trying to make money off Dia de los Muertos as they have Cinco de Mayo, focusing on profit rather than culture, said Sihela Mota Casper, director of Latinos in Heritage Preservation, a nonprofit that supports the preservation of Latino culture. Major stores including Target and Wal-Mart now sell build-your-own kits, Mota-Kasper said.
“It is starting to be culturally appropriated by other individuals outside the diaspora,” she said.
Although she is not Mexican, Beth McCray has lived in Arizona and California and has always been surrounded by Latin culture. I have been creating an altar for Day of the Dead since 1994.
She began collecting items related to the celebration in the early 1990s and has amassed a collection of over 1,000 items. She holds a party to celebrate this day every year.
“This is the most wonderful celebration because you are inviting the loved ones you lost,” McRae said.
“I threw my first Day of the Dead party in San Diego with my very meager collection of items, and it became an annual event,” she continued.
McRae said she tries to be respectful by making sure the jewelry she puts on her products comes from Mexico, and by focusing on her lost loved ones.
“It’s done with respect and love, but it’s an opportunity to raise awareness for people who aren’t familiar with the culture or aren’t from the culture,” McRae said.
Salvador Ordorica, a first-generation Mexican American who lives in Los Angeles, said traditions must be reinvented so that younger generations want to keep them alive.
“I think it’s okay for traditions to change,” Ordorica said. “It’s a way to keep that tradition alive as long as the core of the tradition remains in place.”
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Associated Press reporter Maria Teresa Hernandez in Mexico City contributed.