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    • Day of the Dead social protest date announced
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    Day of the Dead social protest date announced

    Harry Posted on

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    On Saturday, in the middle of the Rio Grande, two groups of 10-foot-tall skeleton puppets will approach each other from opposite sides of the river. US-Mexico border They meet in a symbolic embrace in honor of the families they love in El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico. they lost their lives In their efforts to reach America.

    Giant Día de Los Muertos papier-mâché figures, called mojigangas, will assemble as part of a Day of the Dead vigil in El Paso run by the Border Human Rights Network, an immigration reform and human rights advocacy organization.

    “We want to remember the families who didn’t have the chance to see their loved ones,” said Fernando Garcia, the group’s founder and executive director. “For us, this is a disaster.”

    More: Day of the Dead: A visual guide to this Mexican holiday

    Día de Los MuertosThis holiday, which is primarily a Mexican holiday of indigenous origin and celebrated in the first two days of November, is generally considered a time for families to celebrate their deceased loved ones with altars or ofrendas bearing photos, treats, and reminders of the new year. things they enjoy. But even though the tradition took root in America, its purpose eclipsed reunion and remembrance and provided a vehicle for social commentary and dissent on current issues from the days of the Vietnam War until 2000. Covid-19 pandemic.

    “Day of the Dead is a way to think critically about whose lives we choose to honor,” said Mathew Sandoval, an associate professor at Arizona State University’s Barrett Honors College who teaches cultural studies and social movements. “This is a form of political protest, electing people who stand for something we want to bring attention to.”

    In addition to challenging immigration policy, activists and artists across the United States have also created Día de Los Muertos altars and events in connection with the Black Lives Matter movement and Israel’s military occupation of Palestinian territory. 25th anniversary of the cultural center at SOMArts in San Francisco.This The annual Day of the Dead exhibition “Día de Los Muertos 2024: Bearing Witness” features altar installations dedicated to the lives of Palestinians lost in Gaza.

    Meanwhile, a few miles away in the city’s Mission District, Mexican American muralist and organizer Lucia Ippolito is organizing a separate public exhibition of Día de Los Muertos altars honoring Palestinian lives.

    “I think the Day of the Dead is one of the most political celebrations we have,” said Ippolito, who sees the connections between the plight of Mexican, Syrian and Palestinian immigrants and refugees and sees his project as a form of solidarity. “As we honor our ancestors and those who died, it is important that we also remember the families who lost their lives in other global struggles.”

    A call to action with grief and remembrance

    Saturday’s border vigil in El Paso and Juarez will include a reading of the names of those killed this year in the El Paso sector of U.S. Customs and Border Protection. A similar reading will be held Saturday in Tucson, Arizona, where local group Coalición de Derechos Humanos will lead its 24th event.This annual Día de Los Muertos procession.

    Alba Jaramillo, a local organizer with Derechos Humanos, said the incident not only saddens those who have died crossing the Sonoran Desert but also highlights policies that activists say have worsened the problem.

    “This is an advocacy event where we call for changes in immigration policy,” Jaramillo said. “We have the deadliest land migration route in the world.”

    According to the New York Center for Immigration Studies, at least 5,400 people The number of people killed or missing along the US-Mexico border between August 2014 and August 2024 has reached record levels in the last few years.

    “This is really a way for the community to amplify calls for justice in the context of anti-immigrant violence,” said Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, an anthropology professor at Loyola University Chicago who works with immigrant advocacy organizations.

    García, U.S. border policies aimed at deterring crossings by directing the flow of migrants to risky areas have done little to stop people from trying to cross, said the El Paso-based advocacy network. Instead, deaths soared. And the cultural tradition of Día de Los Muertos offers a way to simultaneously honor their memory and demand change.

    “If no one talks about family members or does anything to remember them, they are forgotten,” he said. “This is the essence of what we are trying to do: never forget that thousands of immigrants (tios, abuelitos, brothers and sisters) have died because of immigration policy. And if we don’t remember them, they will die again.”

    How did politics help the rise and spread of Day of the Dead?

    In some ways, the sociopolitical currents that persist throughout the Day of the Dead are part of its legacy, starting with its origins in commemorative traditions willingly maintained by indigenous peoples who resisted Spanish missionaries’ efforts to forcibly convert them to Catholicism.

    “From that perspective, it’s already political,” said Sandoval, a professor of cultural and political studies at Arizona State.

    Regina Marchi, a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, said indigenous people at the time who celebrated such traditions with festive, all-night graveyard libations rose up and rebelled in some cases after considering exploitation. abuse that led to the deaths of many loved ones.

    Ultimately, this tradition would merge with Spanish Catholic celebrations of All Saints’ Day on November 1 and All Souls’ Day on November 2. But until the 1920s this remained primarily a rural, regional celebration.

    This changed after the Mexican revolution, when it became part of national efforts to unite the fragmented country around a common identity and culture. Regional musical forms like Día de Los Muertos and mariachi have been pushed front and center.

    “These are things we think of as Mexican now,” Sandoval said. “So it was political in that way, too.”

    The first documented public Día de Los Muertos celebrations in the United States were started in the early 1970s by Latino artists and educators in California who embraced the tradition as an expression of Chicano and Mexican American self-identity.

    At the time, the Mexican American community was still outraged over the disproportionate death toll of Chicanos in the Vietnam War and the death of civil rights activist and Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar by a police tear gas projectile following a chaotic confrontation. Major Chicano-led war protest in 1970.

    The events they are launching will transform Día de Los Muertos in the United States from a family tradition marked specifically at home or in cemeteries to one often built around street processions, art exhibitions, and other communal events.

    “Mexican Americans felt empowered, and it was a way to display ethnic pride,” Sandoval said.

    The dead commemorated by 1970s community advocates included family members and Mexican and Mexican American cultural icons such as artist Frida Kahlo, revolutionary figure Emiliano Zapata, and farmworker union leader Cesar Chavez. But it also included community members lost to social injustices: journalist Salazar, farmworkers poisoned by pesticides, teenagers killed in gang violence, and the disproportionate death toll among Mexican Americans serving in Vietnam.

    Among the images they adopted were Catrinas (clothed skeletons depicted as living characters) and skulls created by early 20th-century Mexican political cartoonist Jose Guadalupe Posada. Posada used such images to mock the hypocrisy of urban upper-class society. However, at the time, Posada’s drawings existed separately from the altar commemorations of the dead practiced among rural indigenous peoples in the southern and central regions of the country.

    Chicanos in Los Angeles and San Francisco bring these things together, said Marchi, author of “Day of the Dead in the United States: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon.” While these communities produced Catrina-style art, they also created multi-layered indigenous-inspired grahams covered in marigolds, copal incense, and edibles such as chocolate and pan de muertos, a sweet bread baked for the holiday.

    In the decades since, reformers and Latino communities in the United States have produced Day of the Dead altars that spotlight the victims of other sociopolitical ills, such as the AIDS epidemic, the tragedy of September 11, wars in Central and South America, and American-sponsored wars. Hundreds of female factory workers from post-NAFTA maquiladoras killed in Afghanistan and Iraq and in Juarez in the 1990s and 2000s.

    More recently, they have focused on victims of police brutality and the COVID-19 pandemic, who are disproportionately people of color.

    As with those honoring the lives of Palestinians, altars and memorials do not always focus on Latinos. According to Sandoval, Day of the Dead altars include victims of Russia’s war with Ukraine and U.S. World War II altars. It commemorates the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

    “Tradition is really about honoring and deeply respecting those who have died,” said Marchi, author of Day of the Dead. “If you don’t remember them, then they’re really dead.”

    Harry
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