The Dead Who Come Home

The Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos, kept on 1-2 November across the feasts of All Saints and All Souls, is the Mexican observance in which the dead are believed to return briefly to visit the living. Families build home altars (ofrendas) laden with photographs, marigolds (cempasuchil), candles, water, the favourite foods of the departed and sugar skulls, and gather at cemeteries to clean and decorate graves and keep vigil, in a spirit that is affectionate and festive rather than mournful.

Its character is a genuine fusion. Scholars debate the balance, but the observance clearly weds indigenous Mesoamerican attitudes to death and the ancestors with the Catholic calendar of All Saints and All Souls brought by the Spanish, the two settling onto the same early-November days. Much of the now-iconic imagery is more recent still: the elegant skeleton La Catrina derives from an early-twentieth-century print by the engraver Jose Guadalupe Posada, and the observance's global visibility owes much to twentieth-century muralism and to film. UNESCO inscribed the indigenous festivity on its Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2008. It is a national holiday in Mexico and widely kept across the Mexican diaspora.