How Dia de Los Muertos went beyond a holiday to allowing people to deal with grief

Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is this weekend. And a new book and related exhibit showcase how artists introduced imagery associated with the holiday to Americans as part of the Mexican-American Civil Rights movement.

Mathew Sandoval is a teaching professor at Barrett, the Honors College at Arizona State University and author of "Día de los Muertos: A Chicano Arts Legacy."

Sandoval joined The Show to talk more about it.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: What got you interested in this holiday and how it’s seen as a window into the culture?

MATHEW SANDOVAL: Yeah, you know, my first encounters with Dia de los Muertos came much later in life. Actually, my first encounter with Day of the Dead was in Guatemala. So even though people associate Dia de los Muertos with Mexico specifically, it's a much larger Latin American tradition. So that first opened my eyes that this thing is much bigger than, like, just the cultural heritage of Mexico.

And then I truly, truly got interested in Dia de los Muertos when I began to practice the ancestral tradition of creating an ofrenda every year for Dia de los Muertos. And at that point, it became clear to me that this thing was beyond just a holiday, that this is an opportunity that allows people to heal, allows people to deal with grief from losing people.

And so once I saw the efficacy of the holiday, I became much more interested in knowing its cultural roots and knowing much more about its history.

BRODIE: What was it like for you, finding out about it, as you say, a little bit later in life and at a point, I assume, in your life and maybe even in your career, where you could really sort of see the multi-layered nature of it?

SANDOVAL: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, part of it is that I became fascinated with it at a much older age, which I found through interviews was pretty common for most Mexican Americans and most Latinos in the United States, which is to say, for many of us, the vast majority of us, this wasn't an, it wasn't a family tradition.

BRODIE: It wasn't something you did as a kid.

SANDOVAL: Definitely not something I did as a kid. It was only something I encountered once I was in college and in grad school. And I found that that was really common among other Latinos and Mexican Americans my age.

BRODIE: Why is it then that so many Hispanics who are of your age didn't grow up with this tradition? Why is it that you only discovered it later in life?

SANDOVAL: Yeah, part of it has to do with, like, the origins of Day of the Dead in the United States more generally, which is that it's not something that many Mexican immigrants brought with them as a cultural tradition. As they immigrated here to the United States. Part of that had to do with the fact that, like in Mexico, Dia de los Muertos is traditionally celebrated in the cemeteries.

And for many early migrants here in the United States, their ancestors weren't buried in the cemeteries because they were just recently arrived here. So part of it had to do with the fact that Day of the Dead didn't necessarily take root in U.S. soil. It took a long time for that to happen.

And that really begins with the Mexican American civil rights movement, led by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. That's when we see the revitalization of a lot of different aspects of Mexican cultural heritage, including in especially Dia de los Muertos.

BRODIE: Yeah. What was the significance of this holiday and sort of the imagery associated with it as part of the larger civil rights movement?

SANDOVAL: Yeah, so part of the larger project of the Chicano movement, or Mexican American civil rights movement, was developing a sense of self pride in one's culture. And so that paved the way for primarily Mexican American artists to begin to dive deeper into their heritage, even if it wasn't a family tradition, but to try and recuperate aspects of culture and tradition and heritage that maybe hadn't been celebrated in the United States.

And Day of the Dead becomes so gravitational for so many people because Day of the Dead is huge in many parts of Mexico. And so that becomes something that artists begin to recuperate immediately in the 1970s.

BRODIE: The imagery is also very, at least now, recognizable. It's very distinctive. I guess, like you, when you see one of the visual representations of Dia de los Muertos, you generally have a sense of what it is. I wonder if that sort of helped it take off in this country?

SANDOVAL: Yeah, for sure. Part of it had to do with the fact that skull and skeleton iconography had been somewhat popular as a form of folk art in Mexico, and Mexico as a country and nation, would promote Dia de los Muertos imagery and folk art to American tourists.

So U.S. population was generally kind of attuned to the fact that skull and skeleton imagery was central to Mexican national identity. And therefore, that kind of iconography becomes recuperated by Chicano artists, because for them, sugar skulls, skulls and skeleton in general don't just mean death, but they also become a symbol for what it means to be Mexican in general.

BRODIE: So we talked a little bit about how the iconography and the idea of Dia de los Muertos was part of the civil rights movement. I'm wondering if there's a balance between introducing particular cultural traditions to a new audience, to new people, as it were, and also being able to retain control of it to some extent.

I mean, we hear so much about cultural appropriation and, you know, you can buy sugar skulls and skeleton iconography at places that I'm guessing are not traditional Central or South American type shops.

SANDOVAL: So, like Target, Walmart, Home Depot.

BRODIE: I mean, I was gonna name any, but those would be among them. I mean, is there sort of a balance or is there a danger, I guess, in introducing something that is so culturally sensitive in some ways, to a broader audience?

SANDOVAL: Yeah, there's definitely a danger, and we're already experiencing that danger. We have been experiencing that danger for the last at least two decade in the United States specifically, which is to say that mega-corporations, conglomerates, are starting to take Dia de los Muertos as an opportunity to sell merchandise, make merchandise, sell merchandise. That is starting to ramp up, and it's only accelerating here right now.

So, like Dia de los Muertos, objects which are made in Taiwan or made in China now populate almost all of the big box retail stores in the autumn. On the other hand, it's always counterbalanced with the fact that most people who organize these Dia de los Muertos community celebrations throughout the year, United States specifically, make them open to the broader community.

That it's not just for Latinos, it's not just for Mexican Americans, that's for the broader community in general. And one of the reasons that they do that is, one, the recognition that this concept of death is like the thing that unites all of us, fundamentally does, since that's one thing we will all experience.

The other thing is that in many ways, and I'm thinking here about the way Dia de los Muertos has been celebrated in our own Valley community. It's always been multicultural.

BRODIE: So you mentioned that one of the ways that you got interested in Dia de los Muertos is setting up an ofrenda. Can you tell me about what went into your thought process in terms of A, doing it, and then B, what you wanted as a part of it?

SANDOVAL: Yeah. You know, the first thing that I did before I built my first ofrenda, which was for my dad, is I actually sought out advice from people who had had this cultural tradition, a part of their family tradition for much longer. So I reached out to what we would call our cultural elders.

I made my first altar for my dad because that was the most significant loss that I had experienced up until that point. I lost my dad when I was in my early 20s. It was very impactful, losing my father. I didn't really have the tools available to know how to deal with that grief.

And what I found in making my first altar for my pops was that it actually was very soothing. It was not just beautiful in, like, a sentimental way, but it also really allowed me to deal squarely with the fact that that person is gone. But that on particular set of days, the end of October, beginning of November, I can revisit him in a kind of symbolic way, where the symbolic kind of encounter that I have with the spirit of my father becomes way beyond symbolic and becomes real.

Like, I feel like I have a real connection with him. And one of the things I've found in my research is that often that is exactly how other people feel in making the ofrenda, that it makes them feel closer to the ones that they've lost. Whether or not they truly believe that the spirit of the dead returns, they definitely believe that it activates a memory that makes you feel close to the one that you lost.

And that is, that is healing. That is valuable, and that is worth putting the time and effort and money into, like, making an offering for someone who you've lost.

BRODIE: All right, Mathew, thanks so much for the conversation. I appreciate it.

SANDOVAL: I appreciate it. Yeah.

BRODIE: Mathew Sandoval is a teaching professor at Barrett, the Honors College at ASU, and author of the book "Dia de los Muertos: A Chicano Arts Legacy." The related exhibit will be at the Hispanic Research center at ASU through early December.