The Day of the Dead history of social protest, he explained

On Saturday, halfway over the Rio Grande, two groups of 10-foot-tall skeleton puppets will approach each other from opposite sides of the US-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico and meet in a symbolic hug in honor of the families whose loved ones have they lost their lives in their attempt to reach America.

Giant papier-mâché Día de Los Muertos figures, called mojigangas, will unite in a Day of the Dead vigil led by the Border Network for Human Rights, an El Paso-based immigration reform and human rights advocacy organization.

“We want to remember the families who didn’t have the chance to see their loved ones,” said Fernando Garcia, the group’s founder and executive director. “For us, it’s a catastrophe.”

Day of the DeadThe holiday with indigenous, mainly Mexican roots, marked the first two days of November, is commonly seen as a time for families to celebrate loved ones who have died with altars or offerings, carrying photos, tracts and other memories of things they enjoyed. But even as the tradition took root in America, its purpose eclipsed reunion and remembrance, providing a vehicle for social commentary and dissent on issues of the moment, from the days of the Vietnam War to Covid-19 pandemic.

“The Day of the Dead is a way to think critically about whose lives we choose to honor,” said Mathew Sandoval, Barrett Associate Professor, Honors College, Arizona State University, who teaches cultural studies and social movements. “It’s a form of political protest, electing people who support something we want to draw attention to.”

In addition to challenging immigration policy, US activists and artists have created Día de Los Muertos shrines and events in connection with the Black Lives Matter movement and the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territory. At SOMArts in San Francisco, Cultural Center 25^th The annual Day of the Dead exhibit, “Día de Los Muertos 2024: Bearing Witness,” features shrine installations dedicated to Palestinian lives lost in Gaza.

Meanwhile, a few miles away in the city’s Mission District, Mexican American muralist and organizer Lucia Ippolito is putting together a separate public display of Día de Los Muertos altars honoring Palestinian lives.

“I think the Day of the Dead is one of the most political holidays we have,” said Ippolito, who sees connections between the plight of Mexican, Syrian and Palestinian immigrants and refugees, and sees her project as a form of solidarity. “As we honor our ancestors and our dead, it is important to also recognize the families who have died in other global conflicts.”

Along with pain and remembrance, a call to action

Saturday’s border vigil in El Paso and Juarez will include a recitation of the names of those identified as having died this year in the El Paso sector of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. A similar recitation will take place Saturday in Tucson, Arizona, where the local group Coalición de Derechos Humanos will lead its 24th.^th the annual Día de Los Muertos procession.

Alba Jaramillo, a local organizer for Derechos Humanos, said the event not only grieves those who died crossing the Sonoran Desert, but draws attention to policies that activists say have exacerbated the problem.

“This is an advocacy event, where we’re calling for changes in immigration policy,” Jaramillo said. “We have the deadliest land migration route in the world.”

According to the Center for Migration Studies in New York, at least 5,400 people died or went missing along the US-Mexico border between August 2014 and August 2024, with the annual death toll reaching a record high over the past few years.

“It’s really a way for the community to amplify their calls for justice in the context of that anti-migrant violence,” said Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, a professor of anthropology at Loyola University Chicago who has worked with migrant advocacy organizations.

Garcia, of the El Paso-based advocacy network, said U.S. border policies designed to deter crossings by diverting immigration flows to risky areas have done nothing to stop people from trying to cross. Instead, deaths skyrocketed. And the cultural tradition of Dia de Los Muertos offers a way to simultaneously honor their memory and demand change.

“If no one speaks or does anything to remember family members, they are forgotten,” he said. “That’s the essence of what we’re trying to do: never forget that thousands of migrants — uncles, abuelitos, brothers and sisters — have died because of immigration policy. And they will die again if we don’t remember them.”

How politics helped the Day of the Dead spread and spread

In a sense, the sociopolitical currents that run through the Day of the Dead are part of its legacy, beginning with its origins in memorial traditions intentionally maintained by indigenous peoples resisting Spanish missionaries’ efforts to forcibly convert them to Catholicism.

“In that regard, it’s already political,” said Sandoval, a professor of cultural and political studies at Arizona State.

Regina Marchi, a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, said in some cases, indigenous populations who marked such traditions with celebratory graveyard drinking during that era rioted and rioted. after reflecting on the exploitation and abuse that led to the death of so many loved ones.

Eventually, the tradition would merge with Spanish Catholicism’s All Saints’ Day, November 1, and All Souls’ Day, November 2. But until the 1920s, it remained primarily a rural, regional holiday.

This changed when, following the Mexican Revolution, it became part of national efforts to unify the fractured country around a common identity and culture. Dia de Los Muertos and regional musical forms such as mariachi were pushed front and center.

“These are things that we now consider Mexican,” Sandoval said. “So it was political in that way as well.”

The first documented public Dia de Los Muertos celebrations in the US were launched in the early 1970s by Latino artists and educators in California, who embraced the tradition as a statement of Chicano and Mexican-American self-identity.

At the time, the Mexican-American community was still seething over the disproportionate death rates of Chicanos in the Vietnam War and the death of civil rights activist and Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar, killed by police tear gas during a chaotic protest massive war led by Chicanos in 1970.

The events they launched would transform Día de Los Muertos in the US from a family tradition marked privately at home or in cemeteries to one often built around street processions, art exhibitions and other community events.

“Mexican Americans felt empowered and it was a way to show ethnic pride,” Sandoval said.

The dead commemorated by community advocates from the 1970s included family members and Mexican and Mexican American cultural icons such as artist Frida Kahlo, revolutionary figure Emiliano Zapata, and farmworker union leader Cesar Chavez. But they also included members of the community lost to social injustices: the journalist Salazar, agricultural workers poisoned by pesticides, teenagers killed in gang violence, and the disproportionate number of deaths among Mexican Americans serving in Vietnam.

Among the images they adopted were Catrinas—dressed skeletons portrayed as living characters—and skulls, created by Jose Guadalupe Posada, an early 20th-century Mexican political cartoonist who used such images to poking fun at the hypocrisies of upper-class urban society. But Posada’s illustrations at the time existed separately from the altar commemorations of the dead practiced among rural indigenous populations in the southern and central regions of the country.

Chicanos in Los Angeles and San Francisco brought these things together, said Marchi, author of “The Day of the Dead in the US: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon.” Those communities produced Catrina-style art while creating indigenously inspired multi-tiered offerings topped with marigolds, copal incense, and edible offerings such as chocolate and pan de muertos, a celebratory sweet baked bread.

In the decades since, reformers and Latin American communities in the US have produced Day of the Dead altars that highlight the victims of other sociopolitical ills—the American-sponsored wars in Central and South America, the AIDS epidemic, the tragedy of 9/11, the wars. in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the hundreds of post-NAFTA maquiladora factory workers killed in Juarez in the 1990s and 2000s.

More recently, they have focused on victims of police brutality and the COVID-19 pandemic, who are disproportionately black.

As with those honoring Palestinian lives, shrines and commemorations do not always focus on Latinos. According to Sandoval, the Day of the Dead shrines commemorated the victims of Russia’s war with Ukraine and the American internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

“The tradition is really about honoring and deeply respecting the departed,” said Marchi, author of Day of the Dead. “If you don’t remember them, then they are truly dead.”