EACH YEAR, on the evening of November 1, the border between the living and the dead thins and frays, allowing the spirits to transgress. Out on the cobblestone streets of Santa Fe de la Laguna, a small city in Michoacán, old women bustled from house to house carrying pan de muerto and fresh fruit, visiting their neighbors who had lost someone that year.
I ducked my head under an entryway draped in golden marigolds. Right above the door hung a framed picture of Jorge, who was only twenty-six years old when he died. In the photo he wore a backwards baseball cap. Behind him were posters from bands. “Slipknot? I don’t know about that, Jorge,” I thought, wondering if it was bad form to judge the dead for their taste in music. “Oh, the Misfits! That’s a good choice.”
Through the entryway was Jorge’s three-tiered altar, or ofrenda. Each item his family and friends brought to his altar was designed to entice him home that night. Since Jorge died that year, his family erected his altar at the family home. In years to come they will move the offerings to Jorge’s grave at the cemetery. He will continue to return as long as his family continues to show up, inviting him to come back among the living.
At the base of his altar was a black chalice of copal incense, its pungent aroma wafting into the air. Candles and marigolds adorned a three-foot-tall pile of fruits and breads. The pile would only grow as the evening went on and more members of the community stopped by to make their offerings. When Jorge returned he wouldn’t be a corpse reanimated, but a spirit, consuming the bananas and breads on his own spiritual plane.
At the center of his altar was Jorge’s favorite white T-shirt, illustrated with a sad clown and “Joker” written in script. A bottle of Pepsi awaited his return (the appeal of which I understood—gross as it sounds, I’d come back from the dead for a Diet Coke). Further up there was more traditional Christian imagery, several Virgin Marys and a very bloody crucified Jesus. Strung from the ceiling were colorful paper cutouts of skeletons riding bikes.
About a dozen members of Jorge’s family gathered around the ofrenda, preparing to receive visitors until late into the night. Toddlers ran underfoot wearing sparkly princess dresses, their faces painted as skeletal catrinas. They held small pumpkins for gathering candy from adults.
Sarah had come ready with a bag full of candies. Word got out among the children, and she was swarmed with catrina-faced kids with their pumpkins, many with lit candles inside. “Se?orita! Se?orita, gracias!” Sarah dropped down to their level, doling out the candy with the calm, loving disposition of the elementary school teacher she had once been. “We made these same pumpkins with candles in them for Días de los Muertos in my classroom every year, but one little fire and the administration makes you stop,” she said with a wry smile.
Santa Fe de la Laguna is home to the Purépecha, an indigenous people known for their unique pyramid architecture and their feather mosaics made from prized hummingbirds. In 1525, with a population debilitated by smallpox, and aware that the formidable Aztecs had already fallen to the Spanish, their leader pledged allegiance to Spain. Today, school in the region is taught bilingually, in both Purépecha and Spanish.
Many of the elements that welcome the dead today—the music, the incense, the flowers, the food—were already in use among the indigenous people before the Spanish conquest in the sixteenth century. At the time of the conquista, a Dominican friar wrote that the native people were happy to adopt the Catholic festivals of All Saints and All Souls because they provided the perfect fronts for their existing festivals honoring the dead.
Attempts were made over the ensuing centuries to eradicate the practices, which were “above all, horrifying to the illustrious elite, who sought to expel death from social life.” In 1766, the Royal Office of Crime banned the indigenous population from gathering in their family cemeteries, cruelly cutting them off from their dead. But the customs, as they so often do, found a way to persist.
Over one home in Santa Fe de la Laguna, a sign in Purépecha read, “Welcome home, Father Cornelio.” Cornelio’s altar took up an entire room. I laid my bananas and oranges atop a growing pile, while the family’s matriarchs swooped in to offer us large, steaming bowls of pozole and mugs of atole, a hot drink of corn, cinnamon, and chocolate. For the families, this night is not just a one-way acceptance of offerings for their dead; it is an exchange with the community.
Observing the action from the corner of the room was Father Cornelio himself, in the form of a full-sized effigy. Effigy Cornelio sat on a folding chair, wearing a poncho, black high-tops, and a white cowboy hat tilted down, as if taking an afternoon snooze.
In the center of the altar was a framed photo of Cornelio in which he wore the same white cowboy hat as his effigy. A wooden cross rose up behind the picture. Hanging from the cross were the iconic calaveras, or brightly colored sugar skulls . . . and bagels. “Sarah, is it normal to hang bagels off the altar?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said. “You’ll see a lot of bagels.”
After visiting several family homes to make offerings, I asked Sarah which altar had most moved her. “The happiest time was not with the altars, it was with the children.” She gestured to a boy, three or four years old, toddling past with his pumpkin bucket, wearing a Superman cape. “It’s bittersweet. Right now, my son, he would be exactly that age.” Bashful, the little Superman held out his bucket for candy.
WE CONTINUED our journey south to the larger town of Tzintzuntzan, which holds a raucous street festival during Días de los Muertos. Vendors cook pork and beef on large metal skillets, music blasts from speakers outside local businesses, children pop firecrackers in the streets. Up a gently sloping hill, at the edge of town, sits the local cemetery.
Walking into the cemetery on the evening of November 1 was nothing short of revelatory. The cemetery glowed with the light of tens of thousands of candles, which the families plan and save all year to provide for their returning dead. A small boy worked diligently at his grandmother’s grave, relighting or replacing any of the hundreds of candles that had been snuffed out. The candles’ radiance mixed with the smell of marigolds and incense, creating a golden haze drifting among the graves.
In recent years, many cities in the United States have begun holding events for Días de los Muertos, including a massive celebration at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Hollywood Forever is only minutes down the road from my funeral home in L.A., and I have attended the celebration several times. Hollywood’s celebration is impressive in scale and execution, but in feeling and emotion it falls miles short of Tzintzuntzan’s. It felt safe inside the walls of this cemetery, like being in the center of a glowing, beating heart.