Day of the Dead Celebrated Across Mexico

Saturday, celebrations began for all over Mexico and many in parts of the United States for Day of the Dead.

The Mexican tradition of celebrating the dead and the ancestors is being revived in states all over the country.

Traditionally, Mexicans grace their homes, altars and cemeteries with traditional orange flowers, called “cempasuchiles,” and other color artifacts. They set up altars to loved ones who have passed away and adorn them with flowers, photos, offerings of beans, corn, salt, water, and maybe tequila. People paint their faces to look like decorative colorful skulls, and the children ask neighbors and family members for “calaveras,” or sugar skull candy.

Nearly 80,000 people took part in the “Skull Parade” in city of Aguascalientes, celebrating an ancient Mexican tradition of celebrating death and honoring the ancestors. According to Alejandro Ponce, Tourism Secretary of the state, the tradition is a way of showing tourists how Day of the Dead is celebrated in Mexico, particularly in  Aguascalientes.  

In Merida, a town near the popular tourist destination of Cancun, residents, dressed in traditional indigenous attire were joined by tourists in a parade from the Paseo de la Animas by the Arco de San Juan cathedral toward the town cemetery, flanked by 312 altars along their path.

Olga Marisela Urzua Franco, who has been in charge of the family festival of constructing altars to the dead in the west coast Mexican state of Nayarit, told Notimex that that local the tradition of constructing tombs of cardboard is to pay homage to dead loved ones and to teach the local youth about traditional Mexican customs.  

On the night of October 31, candles are lit, and cardboard coffins and altars are carried for children who have died, sometimes containing or adorned with actual clothing from the deceased minors.

On November 1, at midnight, a public dance is held outside the house where the community altars have been placed.

There was heightened security in many towns across Mexico for the festivities this year, marked by an increased police presence.

Day of the Dead has also spread north of the Mexican border. Dozens of people joined in a Day of the Dead pilgrimage which takes place every year to commemorate immigrants who died trying to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexican border through the Arizona desert.

“We have been coming here for 14 years to celebrate the lives of each of the immigrants who we never knew, but who have fathers, mothers, brothers, spouses, and children somewhere,” Isabel Garcia, director of the Arizona Coalition for Human Rights, who organized the trek.

In 2014, 122 migrants died along the Arizona border according to the Forensic Medical Office of Pima County, Arizona, where many of the bodies are buried. Each year, the group constructs wooden crosses marked with “unknown” and decorate them with flowers, and carry them on the march.

Since the pilgrimage began, the group has built more than 2,000 crosses.