Día de los Muertos/Day of the Dead Altar at EGSC (2023)
Día de los Muertos/Day of the Dead Featured Collection
Visit our Featured Collection about Día de los Muertos/Day of the Dead to see a selection of books available physically at the UCSB Library on this topic!
El Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is a festivity from Mexico. Its origins dated back to the Aztec times when they honored their departed ones using skulls. After the Spanish Conquest and the introduction of Christianity to the indigenous people of Mexico, a syncretism process developed where native people merged their belief systems within the framework of Catholicism, and a new tradition was created. The Catholic Church traditionally celebrates All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day on November 1 and 2, which are days associated with memorializing the dead, as a way to evangelize the indigenous populations and get them to forget their “pagan” traditions. Instead, indigenous populations combined their own traditions with the new ones and created the holiday that we know today! To learn more about the Dia de los Muertos explore this page to access articles, databases, and online digital collections!
History
The Día de los Muertos is now a global festivity, and it is celebrated wherever the Mexican diaspora exists. In California, you can see Mexican American families visiting the cemeteries in East Los Angeles. Self-Help Graphics & Art, a well-known Chicana/o and Latinx non-profit, have been celebrating this holiday for over 40 years in Los Angeles. We do have some of their work in the Special Research Collections in the library, and some of their work can be seen in Calisphere so check them out!
Traditionally, people build altars in their home and decorate them with ofrendas: offering for the dead. The most common offerings are:
Tamales
Chiles
Water
Tequila
Pan de muerto, a bread specifically made for the occasion
For decoration, people use:
Flowers, orange or yellow cempasúchil flowers, or marigolds, whose strong scent helps guide the soul home
Votive candles
Calaveras, sugar skeletons
Catrinas, ceramic figurines depicting a skeleton socialite, based on the drawings of the Mexican printmaker, José Guadalupe Posada created in 1910.
This holiday is not only a religious one. For many artists and activists, el Día de los Muertos, serve as cultural and political signposts. Prints, posters, murals, and related representations of the catrinas y calaveras, has their origin in the protest art of Mexican printmaker, José Guadalupe Posada, who used his satirical caricatures of the Mexican elite walking the street as a skeleton dressed in their finery, to mock their adoption of European clothes and practices, as well as a social critique to the inequalities and social injustice from the upper class toward the working and poor classes during the presidency of Porfirio Díaz (1830-1915).
These political and cultural practices continue in the 21st century. Artists collective like Self-Help Graphics & Art used the iconography around Día de los Muertos as a way to reaffirm their connection with Mexican heritage. Other artists continue using these images in murals all across California for a variety of reasons. Today, we can say that El Día de los Muertos is an American holiday, just like Memorial Day!
You can search for academic articles, book chapters, images, and more about El Día de los Muertos/ Day of the Dead, by using the UC Library Search Box, as well as the databases that focus on Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies research and primary sources. Below are some sources you can check out! To learn more about how to search these and any topic for your classes, explore this guide!
This archive of publications focused exclusively on US Hispanic history, literature, and culture from colonial times until 1960. You can search for "dia de los muertos" to find poems, videos and related materials about this holiday.
Contains records for all types of materials in the areas of Mexican-American topics. Since 1992 the database has also indexed materials on other Latino cultures, e.g., Puerto Ricans, Cuban Americans and Central American immigrants. Subject coverage includes art, language, sociology, public policy, economics, history, literature, politics, and law.
Date Coverage: 1967 - present
Materials Indexed: Book Chapters; Books; Journal Articles; Magazine Articles
The NYPL holds over 600 items created by José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913) and is one of the largest collections of original Posada prints outside Mexico. They have digitized their collection, and now you can see the original broadside with Posada's caricatures! In this online exhibition, you can explore the collection by themes that explore his use of skeletons in his caricatures.
A selection of images and videos from across many libraries, archives, and museums in CA. Notice that many of these images are from the CEMA collection here at UCSB!