Children trick or treat and wear Halloween costumes for a full week during Day of the Dead season in Mexico.
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Halloween’s influence is transforming popular festivities around Día de los Muertos and its ceremonial customs in rural and urban areas of Mexico in some fascinating ways.
A girl dressed as a ‘catrina’ takes part in the Catrinas Parade in Mexico City to celebrate Day of the Dead.
Yuri Cortez/AFP via Getty Images
An obscure Mexican engraver named José Guadalupe Posada created the satirical skull in the early 1900s and sold it for a penny. But after he died, it took on a life of its own.
Part of the Christian tradition of Allhallowtide, All Souls’ Day – or the Day of the Dead – takes on special meaning as COVID changes the way we think about life and death.
The mass-marketing of the Day of the Dead is evident in the costumes that people buy for the day.
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Kirby Farah, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
It may sound like a solemn affair, but the Day of the Dead – which blends indigenous and Catholic ritual – is a convivial celebration that allows Mexicans to reconnect with deceased loved ones.
Many in the Western world lack the explicit mourning rituals that help people deal with loss. On Day of the Dead, two scholars describe ancient mourning practices.
Day of the Dead Oaxaca, Mexico.
Copyright Colleen Nordstrom
Australia has few public rituals around death, leaving people to figure out how to process grief alone. But Mexico’s Day of the Dead, with its focus on art and community, could help us cope better.
For more than 500 years, she has wandered, weeping and searching without rest. A ghostly woman in white who is said to have murdered her children, she is doomed to roam the earth, searching for their lost…
Director of the Center for Mexican American Studies and Associate Professor, Department of English and Department of Mexican American and Latina/o Studies, The University of Texas at Austin