WHAT IT IS

A transitory return

UNESCO lists it as the Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead, reference 00054. Proclaimed 2003, inscribed 2008.

The description says it commemorates the transitory return to Earth of deceased relatives and loved ones. The dead come back, they eat, and they go.

THE DATES

1 and 2 November

Halloween falls on the night of 31 October and works on fright. Dia de Muertos falls over the next two days and works on welcome.

National Geographic puts it as terror and mischief on one side, an explosion of colour and life-affirming joy on the other.

THE CORRECTION

Not pre-Hispanic

Mexico's own INAH opens its article on the origin with it: contrary to the popular idea, widespread and accepted in Mexico, Dia de Muertos is not of pre-Hispanic origin.

1 November is All Saints. 2 November is All Souls. Both were Catholic feasts for centuries before anyone crossed the Atlantic.

THE REAL AZTEC ONES

August, not November

INAH names the Mexica festivals for the dead: Miccailhuitontli, the small feast, and Huey Miccailhuitl, the great one.

They sat in the eighth and ninth months of the Mexica calendar, roughly August into September. Nowhere near the start of November.

YOUNGER THAN THE AEROPLANE

Reworked in the 1930s

INAH cites the historian Elsa Malvido, who traced how the festival was reworked during the Cardenismo period, 1934 to 1940, into a secular national symbol.

That does not make it fake. It makes it mestizo, which is what Mexico actually is.

THE ALTAR

Ofrenda

an object offered, in someone's memory

Mexico's dictionary gives its own example sentence: el dia de muertos llevan sus ofrendas al panteon. On the day of the dead they take their offerings to the cemetery.

Water first, to settle the thirst of a long journey. Then food, then photographs, then a candle.

THE FLOWER

Cempasuchil

Tagetes erecta, the marigold

The dictionary defines it botanically, then adds the use: very much used to dress graves, above all on the day of the dead.

The petals go on the floor because they are directions. The altar is the destination. The path is the signage.

TEN MEANINGS

Calavera

The Diccionario del espanol de Mexico lists a skull, a skeleton, the figure of Death, a sugar skull with a name on its forehead, a joke epitaph for a living person, a printed cartoon, the money children ask for on 2 November, a man who stays out late, a car's red tail light, and the hole worn through the heel of a sock.

One word, ten meanings, and only three of them are about bones.

SHE STARTED AS AN INSULT

La Catrina

National Geographic gives the sequence. Jose Guadalupe Posada made an etching for a literary calavera, dressed death in fancy French clothes and called it Calavera Garbancera. Diego Rivera later named her Catrina.

Look up catrina in the Mexican dictionary and there is no skeleton at all. It is a glass jug, about a litre, used to serve pulque in cantinas.

THE NEWEST PART

A film invented it

The 2015 James Bond film Spectre opens with an enormous Day of the Dead parade through Mexico City. No such parade existed. It was built for the camera.

El Financiero, 2 November 2024, reports the Mega desfile began in 2016 because of that film, and that 1,028 volunteers staged the first one.

WHAT TO SAY

Quien es?

Who is it. If a Mexican friend shows you their ofrenda, that is the question. Every photograph on that table is a specific person.

The altar exists so that somebody will ask.

Tap for the full piece, with the vocabulary table and the say-this-not-that list.