San Andres Mixquik, Mexico
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Marigolds line the road from the Land of the Dead to San Andres Mixquik, a small town on the outskirts of Mexico City. Ángel Jiménez del Aguila, who died in 2010, has only to follow the trail of flower petals, the scent of smoldering copal, and the rhythm of danzon music to find the old porch where his wife and children are waiting.
According to Mexican tradition, on the first two days of November each year, the door between the world of the living and the world of the dead opens. Today is Día de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead.
Often misunderstood as Mexico’s version of Halloween, Day of the Dead is different depending on who you ask.
It’s a festival to remember dead relatives, a celebration of Mexican-ness, an ancient holiday with roots in the Aztec empire, a not-so-ancient arrangement of Mexico’s Feast of All Saints, and the setting for the Disney movie Coco.
“This is an act of faith, love and peace,” says Ángel’s daughter, Marta Nacieri Jiménez Bernal. For her, the Day of the Dead is above all “a magical moment when life and death become one.”
“It’s twelve o’clock, father, welcome home!” said Martha, swinging the incense burner back and forth over the golden flowers that snaked from the garden gate to the drawing room of her childhood home. “welcome.”
A trail of marigold petals leads to the ofrenda, an altar covered with more flowers, colorful cloth, fruit, candy skulls, and pictures of Angel and other relatives.
Martha breaks a chunk of copal into the censer as she kneels before the altar. She stands up and holds up a plate of pan de muertos, sweet baked bread shaped like a skull.
“Father, welcome home with the children,” said Martha, her voice shaking with emotion. “You know we love you and we’ve been looking forward to this day being with you again. Welcome, Ángel Jiménez.”
In recent years, Day of the Dead celebrations have taken on new influences, some borrowed from Hollywood.
The day the Jiménez family welcomed their loved ones into their home, the popular Day of the Dead parade filled the streets of Mexico City. The practice is quite new, having been adopted after the opening scene of the 2015 James Bond film Spectre, in which Daniel Craig is shown passing through a lively Day of the Dead parade.
Even in San Andres Mixquik, known for its traditional festivals, local families themselves don’t wear costumes, but some do wear spooky Halloween costumes like those sold in the United States.
For the Jimenez family, Day of the Dead is a deeply personal tradition. They take pride in preparing the altar with fruit from the local market and carefully cleaning the gravestones of their relatives. Martha also collects flowers by hand from chinampas, traditional floating gardens cultivated by the Aztecs hundreds of years ago, making the ritual intimate and rooted in her family’s history.
“It’s a treasure, a gift. What we live for is an inheritance,” says Martha’s mother, Leonor Bernal Roque. Her earliest memory is of her grandfather decorating the family altar when she was five years old.
“From the age of five, I began to feel love for my ancestors,” she says.
She says Day of the Dead teaches that “death is a transition, not a punishment.” People “must practice gratitude toward their ancestors.”
“Memory should matter,” says Leonor.
Day of the Dead is celebrated over three days in San Andres Mixquik. On October 31st, the family will commemorate the souls of the children at the altar. The next day, November 1st, they greet adult relatives like Martha’s father Angel. On the third day, families gather at the cemetery from morning until night to decorate the graves and say goodbye.
The holiday’s roots lie in the Aztec Empire before the Spanish conquest in 1521, but modern celebrations blend indigenous Mexican themes with the European Christian tradition of All Hallows’ Day, where some Christians visit deceased loved ones in cemeteries.
According to historian Héctor Zaraus, shortly after arriving in the Americas, Spanish monks realized that the Aztecs held their own festivals to commune with their deceased ancestors.
“In the Aztec, Zapotec and Mayan calendars, one of the months was dedicated to the dead, but with the arrival of the Spaniards it was adapted to November 1st and 2nd,” says Zalaus, a scholar at the Mora Institute in Mexico City.
Zalaus said graves decorated with indigenous elements, especially marigolds, are the most prominent part of the modern ceremony. Even the photographs displayed on home altars have their roots in ancient times. Zaraus said the Aztecs “used clay figures to depict their dead.”
However, there are multiple ways to celebrate Day of the Dead. María del Carmen Eugenia Reyes Ruiz, a professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, points out that the celebrations vary across Mexico. She also says that while some aspects of modern celebrations may have roots in ancient times, others are much more recent additions than is commonly believed.
“I think it’s also worth noting that Mexico’s way of celebrating with colors, candles, altars, flower boulevards, etc. is not common throughout the country, nor is it as ancient as we often think,” Reyes says. “It’s a very romantic and beautiful idea, but it’s not entirely accurate.”
Reyes said many other cultures have similar rituals, some even older than Mexico. For thousands of years, Chinese families have celebrated Qingming after the spring equinox, cleaning and decorating their ancestors’ graves and offering plates of dumplings.
“This may sound a little unromantic, but I want to be clear about something,” Reyes says. “The idea of celebrating the Day of the Dead is certainly part of Mexican culture, but it’s not unique to Mexico.”
The sun has set in San Andres Miscuic, but the cemetery here is filled with light. Almost the entire town gathers here for the final special celebration of the Day of the Dead. The door between this world and the next world has closed, and the time has come to say goodbye.
After days of cleaning graves and decorating headstones, the cemetery is filled with color and lit with flickering candles. It’s noisy – people chatting cheerfully, remembering loved ones, playing music, eating food and toasting with mezcal. A nearby church bell rings.
Even though tourists from all over the world roam the cemetery, the Jimenez family treats the holiday as a sacred communion, inviting outsiders just to respectfully witness and participate. Martha says that even these tourists, some from as far away as Japan, participate in the festival. Their curiosity is part of what keeps the tradition alive.
“It becomes a kind of communion,” she thinks as she stands by her father’s grave. “It creates a bond, a connection with them. Even if we don’t know them, we know that they come with respect and a desire to know about our heritage. So we respectfully invite them to come and experience our tradition, get to know it, preserve it, and take it home with them.”
Martha’s 19-year-old niece Diana agrees. She has her face made up to look like a skull and holds a candle under her chin.
“Tourists can also prepare their own offerings if they have family members, so this tradition never disappears,” says Diana. “My family, especially my aunt (Martha), is the one who deeply instilled this tradition in us.”
As the night ends at the cemetery, the family toasts Ángel with mezcal.
“My family is happy and happy because these days have been a lot of hard work,” says Martha. “Some brothers came from far away, and some couldn’t make it here.”
Martha doesn’t have any children, but she knows she’s leaving the Day of the Dead tradition to her nieces and nephews long after she’s buried in this cemetery.
“I want them to feel welcome the day I leave,” says Martha. “I want them to remember me and know that their aunt is coming and that I love them in the most natural way possible. I want them to accept me with all the love I’ve given them – and I know they will. I’m sure of that.”
