The Joys of Day of the Dead in Oaxaca, Mexico

Intro

Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead is a hauntingly beautiful festival unique to Mexico. It combines the ancient Aztec custom of celebrating ancestors with All Souls Day, a Roman Catholic day of prayer and remembrance of the departed, brought to Mexico by Spanish invaders in the early 1500s.

Some people try to compare it to Halloween due to the wonderful costumes and the theme of death but this is where the comparison ends. Dia de los Muertos is more like a family reunion with your ancestors, it’s time to celebrate their memory with offerings, parties, and parades. It is also a light-hearted reminder that death is part of life.

We timed our trip to Mexico so that we would be there for Dia de los Muertos and we choose Oaxaca City to celebrate it as it came up in our research again and again as a really fun and authentic place to do so. Here is our experience!

Photo essay

For a festival surrounding death, the decorations are pure joy. Walking around the city of Oaxaca leading up to the Day of the Dead Festival is truly a delight. The skeletons look happy, cartoon-like, and charming. Some kind of paper Mache is painted in bright colours with grinning smiles and intricate details, topped with flower crowns, cowboy hats, or devil horns.

They are everywhere, hanging from balconies, climbing up walls, standing tall and proud in the street adorned in red party gowns, lipstick, and feather frilled hats. Some are small peeping out the corner of a window, others are life-sized, sitting on a bench waiting for you to join them and one towers over everything and everyone right in the centre of town. They never failed to bring a smile to my face.

I love the Dia de los Muertos bunting, purple, orange, and black is strewn across the city. There are some truly stunning art murals with an intense depth of colour, that I instantly fell in love with.

I adore street art and Oaxaca has plenty of stunning examples, but it was great to also see some beautiful pieces of sugar skull artwork in Oaxaca with incredible intensity and depth of colour.

We were lucky that our walking tour on the first day took us to a charismatic neighbourhood called Xochimilco, in the street there was a street-wide sand sculpture of skulls, bones, and skeletons painted blue and adorned with candles and flaming orange marigolds. These sculptures are usually created in the cemeteries but this year, the government closed the cemeteries due to fears of overcrowding increasing the spread of Covid. This community decided to take the sculpture to their streets instead.

This neighbourhood also has a competition for the best ofrenda, which are later on open on display for the public. An ofrenda is an altar that pays respect and homage to a family's ancestors. It typically displays treasured photographs of the deceased, marigolds, candles, religious iconography, and favourite things of the deceased, particularly food and drink. I noticed that typically at the top of the ofrenda were the eldest generations of the family, with black and white photographs crowning the display with the photographs becoming more and more recent as you move your eyes down the ofrendra.

We came back in the evening to look at the ofrendas and I felt incredibly grateful and humbled to be granted this personal, intimate, and poignant insight into people's lives.

One family, in particular, had drawn temporary artwork on the ground outside their home made out of flower petals and sand.

Sadly again due to Covid the usual large-scale parade and festivities had been cancelled this year. But luckily for us, our walking tour guide gave us the tip to this neighbourhood for the festival as they had been granted permission from the council to hold a smaller-scale parade and celebration. We asked where we needed to go and he told us just to follow the music.

Follow the music we did and it lead us to parades, performances, and celebrations. We felt very fortunate to be able to participate. We had our faces painted in the street and called along as it all began. Ladies with giant purple and turquoise circle skirts twirled round and round with baskets of flowers balanced on their heads to a band playing trumpets, flutes, and drums.

They were joined by an excitable man dressed all in white twirling a blow-up ball on a stick and people in a whole host of wonderful costumes.

My personal favourite was this enormous grim reaper who had been cursed with zero spatial awareness due to the massive paper Mache elements of his costume. He kept tripping over and bumping into people, it really tickled me.

Children looked weirdly adorable in full sugar skull costumes. I felt so happy to have my make-up done in the street and to don my marigold headband!

It was a true Mexican street fiesta!

Final Thoughts

Although I was initially disappointed that we missed out on the full-scale event that usually takes place due to Covid (we travelled here in November 2021). The fact that the graveyards were closed and the huge parade in the city centre was cancelled was a shame however it led us to a different experience of the festival.

It lead us to a small, authentic, local celebration that felt incredibly special to be a part of. We might have missed this in favour of a larger more touristy version. I felt happy and humbled to be let in on this intimate celebration and be allowed into people's homes to see their ofrendas and to remember their families.

I would still love to return one day to see the full scale of the festivities and of course the graveyards in their full glory but I wouldn't have changed this experience for the world. I hold it very dear to my heart.

Feliz Dia de los Muertos! Happy Day of the Dead!

Thank you for reading! Hearts and tips are always welcome and your support is very much appreciated.

This story was originally published on Medium

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