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davechile · Joined: 17 Mar 2006 Posts: 87 Location: San Francisco, CA

When is it truly celebrated in Mexico and is it best in Qaxaca? I am driving through Mexico to CR and want to time the trip to enjoy this very Mexican holiday.

Dave

MELEE · Posted: Mon Aug 27, 2007 11:13 pm Post subject:

Dia de los Muertos is on November 2nd.

On the first of November (Dia de Todos Santos) the souls of children who have died come to visit. So families who have lost children creat alters for them. The adult souls can come the next day. So in a sense it goes on for two days.
Oaxaca and Michoacan are famous for having traditional celebrations in public places. But remember that this is a very FAMILY orientated holiday with much of the activity going on in family homes or at family grave sites.

davechile · Joined: 17 Mar 2006 Posts: 87 Location: San Francisco, CA

So, there are not any festivals or unique parades?

Phil_K · Joined: 25 Jan 2007 Posts: 2041 Location: A World of my Own

Some towns have public displays, where you can see the altars erected for (departed) loved ones. These usually consist of a glass cabinet in which are placed photos of the person and food and objects dear to that person. Even mundane things like his favorite brand of cigarettes! The base is decorated with the petals of a traditional flower (whose name I forget). In Tepotzatl�n, the last town in the north of the metropolitan area, exactly where the caseta exit to Quer�taro is, the park in front of the main church has a life-size modeled "parade" of a funeral procession with the mourners being catarinas (traditional Mexican image of the dead, elegantly dressed skeletons!)

notamiss · Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 3:12 pm Post subject:

Check out a search like this one: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22day+of+the+dead%22+mexico+tours. It looks as though there are some touristy events that you can experience. Indeed most of them seem to be in Oaxaca, but here is a website that mentions some places elsewhere in Mexico (go down to the section "Traditional Places"): http://www.aeropuertosmexico.com/Ingles/fiestase.htm.

But really the best way to do D�a de los muertos is to marry into a Mexican family and do the altar thing in your own home, visit the altar in your kids' school, take your nieces and nephews out to mortear, spend the day in the pante�n at your relatives-by-marriage's tombs, and so on. A little late for this year, but good luck for 2008.

davechile · Joined: 17 Mar 2006 Posts: 87 Location: San Francisco, CA

Notamiss

You are hilarious! Yeah, there is some poetry in Marrying for the Dead...hahaha

TheLongWayHome · Joined: 07 Jun 2006 Posts: 1016 Location: San Luis Piojosi

It's celebrated more in la huasteca and rural places, you might want to head off the beaten track to some pueblito to see the real deal. Try not to marry anyone though. Otherwise it's just altars in shopping malls. THe worst thing about it is that it's followed by the horrendous and completely unecessary celebration of Halloween, why?

Guy Courchesne · Joined: 10 Mar 2003 Posts: 9650 Location: Mexico City

MELEE · Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 6:34 pm Post subject:

When I first came to Oaxaca, I wasn't happy to see bits and pieces of Halloween among the day of the dead celebration. But I've changed my take on it.
Culture is always in flux, always evolving, because it's living. No culture should ever be expected to stay the same, especially not because outsiders think it is quaint.
However what is sad is to see people abandon their traditions. I don't know the north of Mexico well, and it seems like there Halloween may be supplanting the Day of the Dead, if that is true than it is sad.
But here in Oaxaca, that is not what is happening (though it may seem like it to some outsiders because they don't see all of what is going on, they don't see what goes on inside the homes). Oaxacans are incorporating many aspects of the US Halloween celebration into their Day of the Dead Celebrations. That is a perfectly normal thing to happen when two cultures are in contact through immigration, tourism, and electronic media.
Our own Halloween customs are syncretic.

The City of Oaxaca puts on various events aimed at tourists, both national and international. Many years ago I saw a wonderful play written to explain the traditions to outsiders. I highly recommend that. I also witnessed in horror 7 or 8 tourbuses full of camara flashing tourists traspe through the Xoxocotlan cemetary as if it were a zoo or sorts. Please don't do that.

notamiss · Posted: Tue Aug 28, 2007 6:47 pm Post subject: Hallowe'en in the north

A 30-something friend from San Luis Potos� told us that when he grew up in SLP, everyone practiced an American-style Hallowe'en. The region doesn't have a local D�a de los muertos tradition so Hallowe'en was what they did. In recent years there's been some sort of cultural campaign to throw out the "foreign" traditions and go back to "our" Mexican Muertos traditions, but it doesn't feel right to him and his fellow Potosians, because those Muertos traditions are (he tells us) "foreign" ones imported from central and southern Mexico. The Hallowe'en he grew up with is his region's tradici�n t�pica to him.