Día de Muertos in Oaxaca

The festival

What is Día de Muertos in Oaxaca

Día de Muertos is the celebration in which, according to Mexican tradition, the dead return for a few hours to visit their families. In Oaxaca, the capital of the state of the same name in the south of the country, the date is observed intensely: houses, markets, churches and squares fill with altars, the streets host troupes with music and costumes, and families bring flowers, candles and food to the graves. The city calls this period Todos Santos, and the scent of copal, egg-yolk bread and freshly cut cempasúchil fills the historic center.

The celebration combines beliefs of the peoples who lived in the territory before the arrival of the Spaniards with the Catholic feasts of All Saints and All Souls, introduced in the 16th century. For indigenous communities, the period coincides with the end of the annual maize cycle, and it is believed that the dead can bring abundance or hardship to the family depending on how well they are received. In 2008, the indigenous festival dedicated to the dead was inscribed by UNESCO on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

The center of the celebration is the altar, the ofrenda. Set up at home in the last days of October, it brings together photographs of deceased relatives, candles, copal, water, salt, fruits, bread, chocolate, mezcal and the dishes each person liked, beneath cane arches decorated with orange cempasúchil flowers whose fragrance, according to belief, helps the souls find their way; petals spread from the gate to the altar mark the entrance to the house. Tradition distinguishes days dedicated to children and to adults, but the sequence of tributes varies between communities and families. In the end, the food from the offering is shared among family and neighbors, and visitors exchange bread and chocolate from house to house.

On the nights of the celebration, cemeteries light up. At the Panteón General (also called Panteón de San Miguel), near the center, whose visiting hours should be checked in the local program, and at the old cemetery of Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán to the south of the city, families clean and decorate graves with flowers and candles, talk, eat, listen to music and spend part of the night beside their dead. In the streets, the celebration is noisy: the comparsas—neighborhood processions of people dressed as skeletons, devils, old women and figures that satirize local life—move through neighborhoods and villages with brass bands, dance and stop from house to house. In the large parade that crosses the center, catrinas, mojigangas, giant papier-mâché puppets and floats from several regions of the state also take part. In the villages of the Etla valley, these comparsas are called muerteadas and can last all night. In the historic center there are colored sand carpets with motifs of the festival, such as in the Plaza de la Danza, and altars in squares and public buildings.

Children go out in the streets asking for their calaverita, a sweet or a coin, and newspapers and schools circulate calaveras literarias, humorous verses that imagine the death of living people. The Catrina, an elegant skull linked to José Guadalupe Posada’s Calavera Garbancera engraving and Diego Rivera’s reinterpretation, appears in parades and on painted faces as a figure of the tradition. On the outskirts of the city, fields of cempasúchil in bloom receive visitors during the season. The same period is celebrated in other parts of Mexico: on the island of Janitzio and on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro in Michoacán, the nighttime vigils gather boats lit by candles, and in Mexico City a large parade travels along the Paseo de la Reforma to the Zócalo.