Day of the Dead Crosses Borders

U.S. tourists are making the pilgrimage to the world-famous Day of the Dead epicenter, Oaxaca, Mexico. Families in Palm Springs can head to the local museum Sunday to view altars to the dead. In Los Angeles, revelers can choose between Halloween and Dia de los Muertos parties, and some fetes are mixing Mexican altars with American masquerade.

From San Francisco to Austin and New Orleans, Mexico’s Nov. 2 Day of the Dead is becoming a crossover holiday, bleeding through cultural borders and being appropriated by the those who have transformed Halloween from a children’s trick-or-treat opportunity to an adult costume ball.

Rooted in pre-Columbian Mexico, the Day of the Dead is a time when families honor deceased loved ones. Cemeteries fill with candles, marigolds and relatives who picnic by tombstones, setting a place for the deceased or even speaking to them. Home altars display photos of those who have died. Special poems are written, often about the imagined death of someone still living--underlining the celebration’s ritualized acceptance of mortality.

The holiday’s growing popularity in the United States is a “cultural crisscross, like the American taco,” said Tomas Benitez, the director of Self-Help Graphics in East Los Angeles, which will host one of the city’s biggest celebrations Sunday. “The Day of the Dead is becoming more and more widespread. It’s not just something for Latinos anymore.

“It can be unique in its Mexican Latino identity, and at the same time not just for Latinos in its audience,” Benitez said. “That’s what sharing culture is all about.”

In Los Angeles, the Day of the Dead is anything but. The festival has moved out of its traditional haunts--Olvera Street and East Los Angeles--and made inroads into Santa Monica schoolrooms, Silver Lake galleries, and parks and community centers in Pasadena and San Fernando.

It is even creeping into the Los Angeles “Gothic” youth cult among those who affect, along with heavy eyeliner and black fingernail polish, a privileged disaffection with American consumer culture. Like Seth “the Goth King” Lindberg, for whom Halloween is so over.

“I pretended for a little while that Halloween was about something more than candy and Power Rangers masks, but it wasn’t,” Lindberg wrote in a Web site essay. “The Day of the Dead is different. It’s really cool. Festivals like these thrive on the fact that they haven’t entered into the strip-mall mentality of America.”

“This is a festival that hasn’t been touched by Hallmark,” Lindberg wrote. “A real and honest celebration, not a cardboard cutout or a placating placebo shunting individuality for some homogenized dream of plastic masks.”

Some parties are mixing the holidays. An Echo Park fete is billed as a “Dia de los Muertos Halloween Fun House Party.” Two Venice screenwriters will have a Day of the Dead altar at their Halloween masquerade.

Benitez went to the Halloween party at Montebello Park Elementary School in East Los Angeles. His son’s class also had made an altar.

“He’s gotta be Godzilla” for Halloween, Benitez said of the boy. “We are Americans, after all. But I would like to see the Day of the Dead impacting schools more broadly. Some of the traditions coming from Latin American countries probably justify a greater place in the schools.”

And though both holidays spring from ancient equinox rites with Christian veneers, Halloween cannot provide children with the same spiritual orientation, Benitez said.

“The modern context of Halloween--ghouls and goblins and pumpkins--is not the same,” Benitez said. “The Day of the Dead is not about ghouls and goblins, it’s about life and death. In celebrating death, you are celebrating life as part of the same cycle, welcoming death as part of life.”

Two Separate Celebrations

In that spirit, Martha Duran Contreras, a teacher at Will Rogers Elementary School in Santa Monica’s Ocean Park neighborhood, had a Halloween party for her class Friday, but planned to spend the weekend setting up an altar for a classroom Day of the Dead party Monday.

Her altar will include photos of her family and her dog--the Aztecs believed dogs guided departed souls to the underworld. Traditional altars also include a rod to drive away evil spirits, a mat to welcome the deceased for a visit with the living, and something for the dead to eat.

On Monday, the children--Latino, Asian, black, white--will make paper skeletons and sugar skulls, she said.

“I try to keep it as separate from Halloween as possible. They’re two completely different things,” Duran said. “Halloween is a night of witches and scary evil kinds of things in which death is something to fear. The Day of the Dead is a joyous day when we laugh at death.”

For Nobel Prize-winning Mexican writer Octavio Paz, the coexistence with death was one of the profound cultural distinctions between Mexico and its neighbor to the north.

“The word ‘death’ is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips,” Paz wrote in “The Labrynth of Solitude.” “The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it.”

And like the cadence of the Spanish spoken by Mexicans, this is deeply rooted in Mexico’s pre-Columbian past.

“Life extended into death, and vice versa. Death was not the natural end of life, but one phase of an infinite cycle. Life, death and resurrection were stages of a cosmic process,” Paz wrote.

In pre-conquest Mexico, the Day of the Dead celebration took place during the Aztec feasts of the dead, which fell in the Gregorian months of July and August. But the rites probably originated in previous cultures as old as 2,000 years.

The conquering Spaniards tried to sanitize the holiday by moving it to the Christian All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, in the same way they built Roman Catholic churches on top of pyramids in Mexico and Central America.

Halloween is probably rooted in a similar autumn equinox celebration, Samhain, observed by the Celts in Ireland, Scotland and France, according to Jack Santino, a Halloween expert at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. Celebrants placed food on their doorsteps to appease the wandering souls of the dead on the eve of the Celtic New Year--now All Hallows Eve, he said. Like raucous Irish wakes, it was a time of lusty celebration.

The holiday was recast by the Roman Catholic Church in a campaign, begun by Pope Gregory I in 601, to Christianize pagan holidays, Santino said. Celtic New Year’s Day was rebaptized All Saints’ Day, observed Nov. 1. When the image of the wandering dead refused to die, the church added All Souls’ Day, Nov. 2, he said.

The Spanish Catholics grafted those dates onto the New World holiday. In Mexico, Nov. 1 is the day to honor dead children’s souls, and Nov. 2 is the universal Day of the Dead, but in the most traditional areas, it is often preceded by a “week of the dead.”

Experts differ over how American-style Halloween got underway. Some date its arrival to the coming of Irish immigrants. The celebration may have been flavored by the Danse Macabre, a grim medieval parade begun during the years when Europe was consumed by the plague, experts say.

Dia de los Muertos Revived in L.A.

And as Americans flock to Oaxaca for the undistilled traditions, some are dismayed to find another growing trend--little children trick-or-treating for Halloween, a byproduct of what some Mexican academics call the borderization of the United States and Mexico.

The revival of the Day of the Dead among Los Angeles Latinos began 25 years ago, and many of the leaders were the Chicano artists of Self-Help Graphics. It occurred at the same time Mixtec Indian immigrants began a similar revival in Tijuana, which celebrated Halloween.

Margarita Sosa, 50, remembers growing up in East Los Angeles listening to her mother’s stories about the Day of the Dead.

“It sounded magical, so colorful,” Sosa said.

When the Los Angeles Day of the Dead revival began, she was among the first to bring her five children to paint their faces like skulls and march in the parade.

Sosa has placed an altar in her home each year since her son Christopher died in 1982. She also nestles photos of her father, father-in-law and a deceased family dog among the traditional marigolds used to decorate altars and cemeteries.

“Now I experience that magic in my own home when I light the candles on my altar for my son at home,” she said.

And the observance allowed her to tell her children about family history and to pass on the family’s culture and tradition, Sosa said.

Non-Latinos are attracted by the “deeper meaning. Everyone has loved ones who are dead. No one is excluded,” she said. “It has really grown. I think it’s going to get bigger than Cinco de Mayo. It’s not just a party, it has a personal, spiritual expression. It touches hearts and spirits.”

Times staff writer Robert Lopez and researchers Scott Wilson, Chuck Holmes and Steve Tice assisted with this story.