The Story of Día de los Muertos

Día de los Muertos — the Day of the Dead — is Mexico's great festival of remembrance, kept on November 1 and 2. Its roots run deep into the Indigenous world: the Mexica, the Aztecs, and their neighbors honored their dead in festivals watched over in myth by Mictecacíhuatl, the Lady of the Dead, with offerings of food, flowers, and song. When Spain colonized Mexico, those observances met the Catholic feasts of All Saints and All Souls — and the beautiful thing is, neither one erased the other. They married. Día de los Muertos is their child.

Families build ofrendas — altars, at home and at the graveside — and layer them with photos of the dead, candles, water and favorite foods for the journey, pan de muerto (the sweet "bread of the dead"), sugar skulls with names written on them, and clouds of cempasúchil, the Mexican marigold whose color and smell are said to guide the spirits home. November 1 is for the angelitos, the children who've died. November 2 is for the adults. At night the cemeteries fill up with candlelight, music, food, and stories. Even the festival's famous smiling skeleton, La Calavera Catrina, started out as a joke with a point — a satirical print by José Guadalupe Posada in the early 1900s, teasing the rich: death comes for everybody. UNESCO named Día de los Muertos part of the world's Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2008.

It is not "Mexican Halloween." Halloween plays at being scared of death. Día de los Muertos just refuses to be. Here, grief wears flowers, eats well, and laughs out loud. In the Grove: we set out marigolds and photographs, cook something the ancestors loved, and remember that grief and celebration were never opposites. And for Jennifer's family, this one is simply heritage — her mother's people are from Monterrey.