Sugar cane is often used to create an arch over the altar, and from this bunches of flowers are dangled. Sometimes the petals are pulled and scattered over the altar, extending to the floor and beyond to help guide wandering spirits. They can be strung into garlands and draped around altars.
Also put out are food and alcohol offerings, candy, belongings of the deceased person, candles and burners that smoke with copal, a tree resin that has been the scent of the rituals since long before the conquest. Traditional altars in the Mexican style always feature a picture of the loved one being remembered. (The Aztecs are also the root of sugar skulls, which are a contemporary version of the often grisly skull racks once displayed at the great temple of Tenochtitlan in Mexico City.) Thus it too remains because Muertos, approved by the Roman Catholic Church early on, condensed the 14 days into the two feast days of All Saints’ and All Souls’ days. With colors, flowers and invocations of their names, those who’ve suffered two of the three deaths, for now, marked one more year without being fully forgotten, just as Ofelia Esparza expects.Blood-red cockscomb is an amaranth that is also used abundantly during this feast day, but it is more closely related to ancient Aztec traditions.ĭuring their 14 days of honoring the dead each year, the Aztecs made cakes of amaranth seed to offer to the war god Hummingbird, Huitzilopochtli. “But it might as well be beautiful and colorful, una ofrenda florida, con color.Īs she looked on, others added photos to the altar or just stood back to admire and reflect. Just like - I guess, not our life - but the altar itself, everything on it: the flowers, the candles, the papel, everything is ephemeral, just like our life,” she said. “Everything changes, todo se acaba, and then it starts new again. “I feel honored to be able to share my great-grandfather with others, not only as an Angeleno, as an African American, and as a product of the northeast San Fernando Valley,” Washington said.Įsparza sat on a concrete bench behind the altar, wearing a brilliant purple huipil-style poncho and a crown of multicolored flowers. When I think of Día de Muertos, I think of my grandfather. World & Nation Latinx Files: Para mi abuelito Luís “And the first thing they said is, ‘We really hope you like the bridge.’” And they were gushing over Mama,” Rosanna recalls. “We were greeted by the director, the producer and the screenwriter. When Disney initially sought to trademark the phrase “Day of the Dead,” sparking significant public backlash, Ofelia and Rosanna were among the cultural luminaries who were asked to advise on the film that would eventually become “Coco.” By the time Pixar released an animated film inspired by the tradition, the 2017 hit “ Coco,” commercialization was already entrenched, with big-brand stores selling calavera-like decorations and Halloween costumes. Now, tequila labels sell special Day of the Dead editions and Mattel makes a hot-selling Day of the Dead Barbie. Along with budding iterations at Galería de la Raza in San Francisco and other cultural spaces from the Chicano Movement era in the state, Day of the Dead eventually seeped past the barrio. The workshops and ofrendas soon became a Self-Help tradition. She is credited with helping expand appreciation of Day of the Dead, a once-intimate observance with Indigenous roots that now transcends cultural boundaries and faces growing commodification in U.S. Sprightly and small-figured, speaking with an elder’s even command at 89 years old, Esparza is one of the most revered visual folk artists in California, if not the country. “That’s why we need to keep doing this, and pass it on to our children.”
“And for her, it was an obligation to remember,” Esparza said of her mother, Guadalupe Salazar Aviles. The phrases, like her traditions around Día de los Muertos, echo across decades of building offerings for departed souls, at home and out in the public. It was as if Esparza was hearing it once more now, this maxim repeated around her as she was growing up. “But the most final, the most dreaded, terrible death of all,” she said, “is to be forgotten.” “Our second death is the day that we’re buried, never to be seen on the face of the earth again, which sounds very final. They were making orange paper flowers, the blooms crinkling loudly, taking shape in their hands. “The first death is the day that we give our last breath, the day that we die,” said Esparza one recent evening in Boyle Heights as she and her daughters prepared for Day of the Dead. altarista, or altar maker, was remembering her mother’s words. “We all suffer three deaths.” Ofelia Esparza, the East L.A.
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