Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond

Stanley Brandes' Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead, published by Blackwell in 2006, is a scholarly study of the Day of the Dead in Mexico and its diaspora, tracing the holiday's history, its indigenous and Catholic strands, and its transformation as it spread beyond Mexico. Its strength is that it is a peer-reviewed academic monograph by an established anthropologist of Mexican culture, grounded in fieldwork and archival research. Its limit is that it is one scholar's synthesis current to the mid-2000s, so a claim resting on the holiday's more recent commercialization or its spread into new communities since publication needs a more current source alongside this study.