Día de los Muertos Is Not Halloween
*I know you know this. I’m posting it so that you can share it with your misinformed friends and family. It’s not “Mexican Halloween.” VL
By Daniel Cubias, Huffingon Post Latino Voices
Back in the 1960s, the great essayist Joseph Mitchell wrote about his awe at seeing murals depicting “animated skeletons mimicking living human beings engaged in many kinds of human activities, mimicking them and mocking them…. I was astonished by these pictures.”
He was describing, of course, the imagery of Día de los Muertos. In Mitchell’s era, the Latin American holiday was exotic and largely unknown to U.S. readers, and he was performing his writerly duty of passing along intriguing cultural information to his audience.
[pullquote]”… is it inevitable that some aspects of the Latino experience get homogenized and trivialized and morphed into something unrecognizable?”[/pullquote]Today, we all are familiar with Día de los Muertos — the white face paint on celebrants, the ubiquitous illustrations of grinning skulls, the small panoramas of skeleton musicians and dancers. However, there is still great confusion in America about what this holiday actually signifies. Although it takes place at the same time of year as Halloween and shares the theme of ghostly visitors, there are fundamental differences.
Día de los Muertos is a time for people to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died. The goal is to pay respects to late loved ones, honor their lives, and acknowledge the fragility of life.
Halloween, in contrast, long ago lost its religious and spiritual roots. Today, it is a time for kids in Iron Man masks to ingest 18 tons of candy, and for guys dressed like Captain Jack Sparrow to do vodka shots and leer at women dressed like sexy nurses or sexy window washers or sexy rutabagas.
This proximity and superficial similarity of the two holidays has led to some confusion.
For example, Knott’s Scary Farm has set up a Day of the Dead Scare Zone. Over at Change.org, there is a petition (closing in on 1,000 signatures) calling out the California theme park for misappropriating Día de los Muertos. According to the petition, the Scare Zone is “extremely inappropriate and culturally insensitive,” and it is “little more …
This article was priginaly published in Huffington Post Latino Voices.
[Photo by Karol Franks/Flickr]
