In an intriguing twist, one of the main motivators in changing that perception was the southward creep of Halloween from the United States. In the early 1970s, writers and intellectuals came to view Halloween as, in the words of journalist María Luisa Mendoza, a “fiesta gringa” with “witches on a broom and pointy hats, cats, and pumpkins that are a pleasure to read about in detective books but are absolutely unconnected to us.” Mendoza wrote that her fellow Mexicans were ignoring the children who begged for pennies and cleaned car windshields just to survive, while in rich neighborhoods, “our bourgeoisie mimic the Texans and allow their children to go into others’ houses dressed ridiculously and to ask for alms, which they will receive.”
During this time, as scholar Claudio Lomnitz wrote, the Days of the Dead “became a generalized marker of national identity” that stood “opposite of the Americanized celebration of Halloween.” Those who had once rejected the Días de los Muertos (or who lived in areas where it had never been practiced at all) came to see the celebration as very Mexican. Not only did Días de los Muertos return to major cities—looking at you, James Bond parade; the festival also came to represent the struggles of many disenfranchised political groups. These groups adopted Días de los Muertos to mourn for those kept from the public eye, including sex workers, indigenous and gay rights groups, and Mexicans who had died trying to cross the border to the U.S. In the last forty years, Días de los Muertos has come to represent popular culture, tourist culture, and protest culture throughout Mexico. And Mexico itself is viewed as a world leader in practicing engaged, public grief.
“I GREW UP with elders that were self-hating Mexicans,” Sarah explained, as we sat in our hotel room in Michoacán the next day. “They were taught they had nothing to be proud of and everything to be ashamed of. They needed to assimilate. To be happy in America was to be as white as possible.”
Sarah’s grandparents moved from Monterrey, Mexico, in the early twentieth century and settled in the East Los Angeles neighborhood known as Chavez Ravine. In 1950, the government sent letters to the 1,800 families of Chavez Ravine, mostly low income Mexican American farmers, informing them that they would have to sell their homes to make way for public housing. The displaced families were promised new schools and playgrounds and housing priority when the developments were finished. Instead, after removing the families and destroying a community, the city of Los Angeles scrapped the public housing plan and partnered with a New York businessman to build Dodger Stadium. Supporters of the new stadium, including Ronald Reagan, called the critics “baseball haters.”
Mexican Americans from Chavez Ravine were driven further east of Los Angeles by discriminatory housing practices. Sarah’s parents came of age in this environment of displacement. They had Sarah when they were both nineteen.
“To this day, when my grandmother and aunts and uncles talk about Chavez Ravine, they are heartbroken. They miss it so, so much,” Sarah said.
When Sarah was born, she was not allowed to learn Spanish. She had lighter skin, which made her the favorite grandchild. Her Mexicanness was confined to the home. Growing up in Los Angeles, she bounced between a distant mother, her Hollywood costumer father (who to this day identifies not as Mexican, but as ‘American Indian’), and her grandparents. Sarah grew comfortable being an American who happened to be Mexican, but felt little tangible connection to her family’s culture.
In 2013, after ten years as a preschool and kindergarten teacher, Sarah fell in love with her partner Ruben* and the pair felt ready for a child of their own. She became pregnant. To Sarah, this child represented a chance “to be a real family, my family, a chosen family, something no one could take away from me.”
This dream was not to be. Her son died when she was six months pregnant. The months that followed the death were a time of “nobody and nothing.” Sarah was estranged from her parents. She felt alone. There were days when she wanted to wander into the field of orange trees behind her house and disappear. Then there was the blame: Did I lift a heavy thing the wrong way? Did I eat the wrong thing? “The archetypal woman is as a bringer of life,” Sarah said, “but my body was a tomb.”
Sarah felt radioactive to all her friends and coworkers. She knew people wanted to live in a world where children are precious and invulnerable. “I was asked by society to hide my grief,” she said. “They didn’t want to confront such horrors. I was the face of those horrors. I was the boogeyman.”
Sarah scoured the Internet for stories from other mothers who had suffered the death of a child. She found websites made by well-meaning women, often with a very Christian overtone (e.g., “my angel has taken his place in the Lord’s arms”) and stories that offered platitudes and euphemisms. To Sarah, these feel-good pick-me-ups were nothing but empty clichés. The accounts could not capture the wrenching agony and longing that she felt.
Searching for comfort, she landed on the doorstep of her own heritage. “Sarah, you’re Mexican. You come from arguably one of the most death-engaged cultures in the world,” she thought. “How would your ancestors deal with this tragedy?”
MEXICAN POET Octavio Paz famously said that while citizens of Western cities like New York, Paris, and London would “burn their lips” if they so much as uttered the word “death,” “the Mexican, on the other hand, frequents it, mocks it, caresses it, sleeps with it, entertains it; it is one of his favorite playthings and his most enduring love.”
This is not to say Mexicans have never feared death. Their relationship with death was hard-won; it emerged after centuries of brutality. “Rather than becoming a proud and powerful empire,” Claudio Lomnitz explained, “Mexico was bullied, invaded, occupied, mutilated, and extorted by foreign powers and independent operators alike.” In the twentieth century, as the Western world reached its peak of repression and death denial, in Mexico a “gay familiarity with death became a cornerstone of national identity.”
For Sarah, coming to terms with her son’s death wasn’t an attempt to erase her fear of mortality; she knew such a task was impossible. She just wanted to engage with death, to be allowed to speak its name. As Paz said: frequent it, mock it, caress it.
Many children and grandchildren of immigrants, have, like Sarah, found themselves severed from their family’s cultural rituals. The funeral system in the United States is notorious for passing laws and regulations interfering with diverse death practices and enforcing assimilation toward Americanized norms.