For example, my maternal grandmother and our family’s matriarch, Mama Alicia, was born in Sinaloa, a state in the northern part of Mexico, and later raised her three daughters (my mom and two aunts) in Tijuana, a city nestled right at the U.S.-Mexico border. Often, older generations don’t know how much about the holiday either. Even sharing pan de muerto (sweet bread with bone-shaped engravings and anise seeds) amongst the living relatives and decorating sugar skulls has been a foreign tradition to me because I’ve only done it once and with a friend’s family, not my own.
Nor did I really understand that joyous, celebratory nature of the day, the significance of displaying photos of the dead beside a dish or dishes of their favorite food, lighting candles, laying bunches of marigolds, or sprinkling marigold petals to attract the souls of the dead to the offerings with their strong scent. Yet another example of the region’s European and Indigenous cultural blend, the holiday has roots in both Catholic and Aztec celebrations of death, including All Saints’ Day, All Souls’ Day, and Quecholli, a celebration that influenced the practice of building ofrendas, or altars, with food.īut I’ll be honest, up until this year, I didn’t know that. In Mexico, observance of the holiday is rarely celebrated except in the southern part of the country, and even Mexico City didn’t begin hosting its iconic Day of the Dead parade until 2016 when the James Bond film Spectre depicted one in its opening scene. Contrary to popular belief (and unfortunately, Pixar’s Coco), many Mexican-American families don’t observe Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, including mine before this year.
0 kommentar(er)
