The Day of the Dead (Spanish: Día de (los) Muertos) is a holiday traditionally celebrated on November 1 and 2, though other days, such as October 31 or November 6, may be included depending on the locality. The multi-day holiday involves family and friends gathering to pay respects and remember friends and family members who have died. The celebrations can take a humorous tone, as celebrants remember amusing events and anecdotes about the departed. The festival is widely observed in Mexico and among people of Mexican heritage in other parts of the world. It falls during the Christian period of Allhallowtide. Some argue that there are Indigenous Mexican or ancient Aztec influences that account for the custom, though others see it as a local expression of the Allhallowtide season that was brought to the region by the Spanish; the Day of the Dead has become a way to remember those forebears of Mexican culture.
Traditions connected with the holiday include honoring the deceased using calaveras and marigold flowers known as cempazúchitl, building home altars called ofrendas with the favorite foods and beverages of the departed, and visiting graves with these items as gifts for the deceased. The celebration is not solely focused on the dead, as it is also common to give gifts to friends such as candy sugar skulls, to share traditional pan de muerto with family and friends, and to write light-hearted and often irreverent verses in the form of mock epitaphs dedicated to living friends and acquaintances, a literary form known as calaveras literarias.
Origins, history, and similarities to other festivities
Mexican academics are divided on whether the festivity has genuine indigenous pre-Hispanic roots or whether it is a 20th-century rebranded version of a Spanish tradition developed during the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas to encourage Mexican nationalism through an "Aztec" identity. The festivity has become a national symbol in recent decades and it is taught in the nation's school system asserting a native origin. In 2008, the tradition was inscribed in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, « as practised by the indigenous communities of Mexico ».
The Day of the Dead originated in both Indigenous Mesoamerican beliefs and Spanish Catholic traditions. According to some scholars argued that pre-Columbian civilization, including the Aztecs, engaged in rituals like honoring the deceased, which later became associated with Catholic observance including All Saint's Day and All Soul's Day during the period of colonization.
On the other hand, according to some historians, many of the modern parts of the celebration and the elements are seen as more directly associated with European customs and were modified in Mexico as a means of fostering a sense of national identity.
Overall, the holiday is widely understood despite have different ideas about the celebration. Some see it as a tradition that developed over time. As well as, combining different aspects such as historical elements, cultural, and adding religious elements.
Views differ on whether the festivity has indigenous pre-Hispanic roots, whether it is a more modern adaptation of an existing European tradition, or a combination of both as a manifestation of syncretism. The beginning of the Christian observance of Allhallowtide, including All Saints' Day and its vigil, as well as All Souls' Day, is observed on the same days in places like Spain and Southern Europe, and elsewhere in Christendom. Critics of the Native American origin claim that even though pre-Columbian Mexico had traditions that honored the dead, current depictions of the festivity have more in common with European traditions of Danse macabre and their allegories of life and death personified in the human skeleton to remind of the ephemeral nature of life. Over the past decades, however, Mexican academia has increasingly questioned the validity of this assumption, even going as far as calling it a politically motivated fabrication. Historian Elsa Malvido, researcher for the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH, or National Institute of Anthropology and History) and founder of the institute's Taller de Estudios sobre la Muerte (Workshop of Studies on Death), was the first to do so in the context of her wider research into Mexican attitudes to death and disease across the centuries. Malvido completely discards a native or even syncretic origin arguing that the tradition can be fully traced to Medieval Europe. She highlights the existence of similar traditions on the same day, not just in Spain, but in the rest of Catholic Southern Europe and Latin America such as altars for the dead, sweets in the shape of skulls and bread in the shape of bones.
Agustin Sanchez Gonzalez has a similar view in his article published in the INAH's bi-monthly journal Arqueología Mexicana. Gonzalez states that, even though the "indigenous" narrative became hegemonic, the spirit of the festivity has far more in common with European traditions of Danse macabre and their allegories of life and death personified in the human skeleton to remind us the ephemeral nature of life. He also highlights that in the 19th-century press there was little mention of the Day of the Dead in the sense that we know it today. All there was were long processions to cemeteries, sometimes ending with drunkenness. Elsa Malvido also points to the recent origin of the tradition of "velar" or staying up all night with the dead. It resulted from the Reform Laws under the presidency of Benito Juarez which forced family pantheons out of Churches and into civil cemeteries, requiring rich families to have servants guard family possessions displayed at altars.
The historian Ricardo Pérez Montfort has further demonstrated how the ideology known as indigenismo became more and more closely linked to post-revolutionary official projects whereas Hispanismo was identified with conservative political stances. This exclusive nationalism began to displace all other cultural perspectives, to the point that in the 1930s the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl was officially promoted by the government as a substitute for the Spanish Three Kings tradition, with a person dressed up as the deity offering gifts to poor children.
In this context, the Day of the Dead began to be officially isolated from the Catholic Church by the leftist government of Lázaro Cárdenas motivated both by "indigenismo" and left-leaning anti-clericalism. Malvido herself goes as far as calling the festivity a "Cardenist invention" whereby the Catholic elements are removed and emphasis is laid on indigenous iconography, the focus on death and what Malvido considers to be the cultural invention according to which Mexicans venerate death. Gonzalez explains that Mexican nationalism developed diverse cultural expressions with a seal of tradition but which are essentially social constructs which eventually developed ancestral tones. One of these would be the Catholic Día de Muertos which, during the 20th century, appropriated the elements of an ancient pagan rite.
One key element of the re-developed festivity which appears during this time is La Calavera Catrina by Mexican lithographer José Guadalupe Posada. According to Gonzalez, while Posada is portrayed in current times as the "restorer" of Mexico's pre-Hispanic tradition, he was never interested in Native American culture or history. Posada was predominantly interested in drawing scary images which are far closer to those of the European renaissance or the horrors painted by Francisco de Goya in the Spanish War of Independence against Napoleon than to the Mexica tzompantli. The recent trans-Atlantic connection can also be observed in the pervasive use of couplet in allegories of death and the play Don Juan Tenorio by 19th-century Spanish writer José Zorrilla which is represented on this date both in Spain and in Mexico since the early 19th century due to its ghostly apparitions and cemetery scenes.