The holiday grew from the meeting of two different relationships with the dead — the pre-Columbian Mexica (Aztec), Maya, Nahua, and Purhépecha traditions that honored the ancestors as a continuing presence in the life of the community, and the Catholic traditions of All Saints Day (November 1) and All Souls Day (November 2) that arrived with the Spanish in the sixteenth century. The two traditions did not so much replace each other as braid together into something unmistakably its own.

For a men’s community whose members know what it feels like to carry the dead with us — to be shaped by the men who are no longer here, from the AIDS years and from every quieter loss — Día de los Muertos is a holiday that gives us a specific permission: to be with our dead, in color, in sweetness, in ordinary gladness as well as in grief.

History

The Indigenous roots of the observance go back several thousand years. Mexica rituals honoring the dead were originally held in the summer month of Miccailhuitontli (roughly August), and were overseen by Mictecacihuatl, the “Lady of the Dead,” whose modern iconographic descendant is La Catrina. After Spanish contact, the Catholic calendar shifted the observance to the first two days of November to coincide with Allhallowtide — and the pre-Columbian understandings of the dead’s continuing presence settled into the Christian liturgical frame without being extinguished.

The modern form of the holiday was shaped significantly by the twentieth-century Mexican public artist José Guadalupe Posada, whose satirical engravings of elegant skeletons — the famous Calavera Catrina — became the holiday’s most recognizable image. Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and the muralist generation that followed carried the imagery into the twentieth-century national culture.

In 2008, UNESCO added Día de los Muertos to its list of Masterpieces of the Intangible Heritage of Humanity. The holiday has since become one of the most-visible Mexican cultural exports in the world, celebrated widely in the United States, where more than 38 million people of Mexican descent live, and increasingly in cities with no particular Mexican connection at all.

Observances

The Indigenous roots of the observance go back several thousand years. Mexica rituals honoring the dead were originally held in the summer month of Miccailhuitontli (roughly August), and were overseen by Mictecacihuatl, the “Lady of the Dead,” whose modern iconographic descendant is La Catrina. After Spanish contact, the Catholic calendar shifted the observance to the first two days of November to coincide with Allhallowtide — and the pre-Columbian understandings of the dead’s continuing presence settled into the Christian liturgical frame without being extinguished.

The modern form of the holiday was shaped significantly by the twentieth-century Mexican public artist José Guadalupe Posada, whose satirical engravings of elegant skeletons — the famous Calavera Catrina — became the holiday’s most recognizable image. Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, and the muralist generation that followed carried the imagery into the twentieth-century national culture.

In 2008, UNESCO added Día de los Muertos to its list of Masterpieces of the Intangible Heritage of Humanity. The holiday has since become one of the most-visible Mexican cultural exports in the world, celebrated widely in the United States, where more than 38 million people of Mexican descent live, and increasingly in cities with no particular Mexican connection at all.

Male Perspective

Día de los Muertos is one of the great festivals of memory and love. Jonathan’s Circle is a brotherhood of men of every orientation and gender identity, and the holiday meets every one of us at the altar — the ofrenda — on which we place the names, the photographs, and the favorite objects of those who have gone before us.

For brothers of Mexican and Latino heritage in the Circle, these two days are home ground. Many of you grew up with the ofrenda already in the house, the pan de muerto on the table, the marigolds laying their path from the altar to the door. The holiday will mean what it has always meant to you, and the Circle is grateful for what you bring to our shared observance.

For every other brother, the invitation is to learn, to attend a public ofrenda if there is one near you, to bring a photograph and a candle, and to let the holiday do what it has been doing for several thousand years — remind us that the dead are not gone, and that they are gladdened when we remember.

The holiday also carries a specifically queer thread that is part of its contemporary life. Mexican and Mexican-American LGBTQ+ communities have long made specific place for the queer dead within Día de los Muertos. Ofrendas built by LGBTQ+ organizations and churches regularly include the names of community members lost to AIDS, to anti-queer violence, and to the ordinary attrition of time. In cities with large Mexican-American populations, Día de los Muertos processions and public ofrendas have been an important LGBTQ+ community observance for decades. The Chicano gay poet Francisco X. Alarcón wrote often of the holiday as the day when “my dead come to me.”

For LGBTQ+ brothers whose families of origin did not or could not welcome them — and for whom the family altars at home may not include their names — the holiday has often offered a specific liberation: the chance to build an ofrenda for your own chosen family, your own beloved dead, in whatever form of recognition the official family would not provide.

Whatever brother you are and whatever dead you carry, the altar is yours to build. Bring a candle, a photograph, and a name said aloud.

Summary

Día de los Muertos is the Mexican observance of the dead, held on November 1 and 2, and it is one of the most alive holidays in the world. For the men of Jonathan’s Circle, the two days are a chance to build an altar, light a candle, name a name, and keep the great long company of the beloved dead in the brightness of color and sweetness and song.