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Chicana/o Studies

Día de los Muertos/Day of the Dead Altar at EGSC (2023)

Ofrenda photo
Ofrenda table
Ofrenda table

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!

 

 

 

Day of the Death/Día de los Muertos

El Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is a festivity from Mexico. Its origins date back to the Mexica empire (also known as Aztecs) 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!
Memory Pad with remembrance about departed loved ones (2021)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!