The Day of the Dead’s Ethics of Love
Olof Ohlson1
Mexico’s famous religious holiday is usually treated as an occasion to exhibit national identity, or for its macabre imagery and dark humor, but something much more universal is at play in this feast of skulls and altars: an ethics of love and care passed down the generations.
I am often left perplexed by colleagues’ attitudes to Mexico’s beautiful Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) celebration. Some frown upon the decadence and inauthentic commercialization of the festivity, as if ruined by Americanization and tourism. The academic gloom is well illustrated by Hugo Nutini’s lament of the celebrations in rural Tlaxcala, grieving its ‘culture loss and decay’ as he observed that during his own lifetime it ‘has changed almost beyond recognition’.2
Juanita Garciagodoy’s less nostalgic prophecy of where the festivity is heading is nonetheless equally bleak: ‘Although Días de muertos is undoubtedly an occasion for extravagant spending, it does not approach the style of continual consumerism that characterizes U.S. celebrants of the Hallowe’en… the most important belief the exporters of Hallowe’en wish to inculcate is that [of] the consumption of seasonal, disposable merchandise.’3

Joining the choir of pessimists, Néstor García Canclini has reservations against what he sees as the Mexican bourgeois’ promotion of popular culture as a fossilization of folklore that turns it into an apolitical museum. Celebrants become repositories of racial virtues and ancestral beliefs. He worries about the appropriation of traditional culture and the absence of intellectual property rights for local artisans within capitalism’s cultural industries.4
True as their assessments may be, academics too often reveal themselves as haters of fun. Their fears stand in starkest contrast to my own long-lasting love affair with the fiesta. It is also out of touch, as far as I can tell, with local celebrants whose enthusiasm more often than not rivals my own.
Let’s hear for ourselves what celebrants think as they receive guests from afar in a welcoming spirit that mixes joy and pride. We are on a backstreet to Pantheon Míxquic, in San Andrés Míxquic –a predominantly Nahua community of approximately 12,000 inhabitants, located in the southeastern borough Tláhuac in Mexico City. Here in Míxquic a famous candle ceremony, la alumbrada, takes place at the cemetery where an evening vigil is held on November 2.
The candles are lit when the clock strikes seven and shines up the tombs littered with yellow marigold petals around food gifts, so-called ofrendas (offerings) the souls of the dead are said to come and take in the aroma from. La alumbrada is the crown jewel of the Day of the Dead celebrations in the capital that unfolds over a month, the crescendo that supposedly showcases the ‘original’ Nahua vigil in the candle-lit semi-darkness at the pantheon around the Temple and Antique Convent of the Apostle Saint Andres Míxquic and the saint’s basilica.
On the street behind it, Jaime has opened the door to his house to visitors who have come to partake in Míxquic’s famous rendering of the world-renowned celebration. Jaime had put up a little sign notifying pedestrians that they were invited to step into his living room free of charge to admire the extravagantly decorated altar he had made.
Me: Could you be so kind and explain your ofrenda to me?
Jaime: Of course, the offering is made to our relatives who are no longer with us. Their souls come and take from the food that we give to them. It contains food, salt, and tequila. The altar is composed of three levels which each represents something. The highest level is the sky, the middle represents earth, and the lowest is the underworld. And here at the altar is my grandmother and Ariel, my grandpa.
Me: Why did you open the door for tourists to see your ofrenda?
Jaime: So that they feel this tradition that we have as theirs, so that tomorrow they can go back home and make one for themselves. We are a town that has this tradition, but, it would be very nice if this custom flourished everywhere. For us it is a very personal and sentimental tradition, during the few days when we faithfully believe that people who are not physically with us today can reach us and that we maintain this contact with our dead. And when you receive guests for a party you try to give the best of yourself, the best of what you have.
According to foul-mouthed skeptics, Míxquic is notorious for its packed streets, funfair like atmosphere, and unbearable swarm of visitors at the cemetery and its old convent where tourists go to snap photos in the faces of the locals who are deprived of any peace when honoring their lost loved ones. But for Jaime, and most celebrants I talk to, a principle of generosity with the living as well as dead visitors, and a horizontal ethics of commemoration, reigns supreme this special day.
Gradually from such encounters, I have come to realize that the problem I have with the anthropological cynicism towards the Day of the Dead, is its tendency to take apart the religious commemoration piece by piece, instead of paying tribute to its holistic entirety. Intellectual observers enjoy reducing it to an identity project that expresses national pride.
For the most noted scholars researching the Day of the Dead, Elsa Malvido, Juanita Garciagodoy, Stanley Brandes, Claudio Lomnitz, among others, more than anything else, the Day of the Dead is understood to have shaped Mexico’s national identity and created a romantic myth of the Mexican’s special relationship to death, in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution (1910-19) during the socialist state that then came into being.5
For Mexico’s greatest artists of this epoch, Octavio Paz, Juan Rulfo, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo, death in various ways exhibited the importance of a unifying symbol that bridges over ethnic and class divides. In Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo, entering the world of the dead is a sort of homecoming via the ghost town of Comala; in Kahlo’s self-portrait Thinking about death, it is constantly on her mind, internal to her person, and in Rivera’s Dream of a Sunday afternoon in Alameda Park, it is at the center of the pre-revolutionary bourgeois society through the satirical cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada’s skeleton lady, la Catrina.
La Catrina is the personification of death during the feast today, originally mocking the makeup of the female dandies of the era. With faces white as skulls, Posada says memento mori to remind the upper-class that they too shall die.

Source: Olof Ohlson
Nowadays, no one even dares to quote the most famous passage ever written about the festivity, Octavio Paz’s poetic paragraph I cite beneath, for other purposes than to prove the great essayist and Nobel laureate’s guilt of the crime of romanticizing. The Labyrinth of Solitude says: ‘To the people of New York, Paris, or London, ‘Death’ is a word that is never pronounced because it burns the lips. The Mexican, however, frequents it, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it: it is one of his favorite toys and most steadfast love.’6
Sure, this may be a myth the Mexicans like to tell themselves about themselves and that foreigners love to listen to, and no one believes in the idea of national character anymore, but that washes away none of the poetry this ink was carved with.
It is a juvenile posture, to wish that the Day of the Dead would be an untouched pre-Hispanic relic or grieve the fact that it isn’t. One of its many beautiful sides, is exactly that it finds itself in a continuous state of creative reinvention.
No other event shows this better than the largest happening of the entire celebration program: Mexico City’s Great Day of the Dead Parade. Hundreds of thousands crowd the streets and millions more watch live on TV as carnivalesque floats and columns after columns in full masquerade gear march through the city. Only that the whole spectacle began inspired by the opening scenes of the James Bond movie Spectre from 2015. Elsewhere, in Mérida for instance, where I celebrated last year, the Disney movie Coco is now part of the municipality’s official feast, as a ‘Broadway style musical’.
It is also a mistake to think that its adoptability and popularity reduce any of the sacredness of this commemoration rite. Its beating heart is its generosity, intimate care, and love-filled effervescence; a taboo free and humoristic way of relating to death and remembering one’s dearly departed. What the Day of the Dead is really about beneath all the macabre imagery is something naked and elementary: a tribute to family love and intergenerational care.
For its universal potential to be unleashed, its high time to myth-bust its supposed Mexicanidad (Mexican-ness). Under the nationalistic mythological debris, one finds a death commemoration that ticks all the boxes of common cross-cultural symbolism such as those related to the regeneration of life in the face of death Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry once theorized,7 and that anthropologists from the very dawn of the discipline liked to compare before that sport became taboo and particularism’s insular reign began.
Much like the ancient Celtic predecessor to Halloween, Samhain, marked the completion of the annual cycle of cultivation, Mexico’s tribute to the dead marked the corn harvest, which remains Mesoamerica’s predominant food crop. As Elsa Malvido has argued, it is a typical peasant harvest festival.8
Garciagodoy sees other similarities, ‘Catholic funerary rites were an adaptation of Egypt’s ceremonies for Osiris, god of life, death, and grain, who was murdered on the seventeenth day of the autumnal month of Athyr, which corresponds to November in the Gregorian calendar. Around that time, the Egyptians believed the spirits of the dead visited their family homes. Their relatives set lamps to guide the spirits to where they had prepared food for them. These practices were carried to Europe by the Romans, whose god of life and renewal, Bacchus, was influenced by Osiris’. She concludes that if there is any human custom that has been ubiquitous, it is ‘the one of giving presents to the dead’.9


Philippe Ariès, for example, informs about the Roman commemoration of the dead, that ‘Ovid relates that on the Day of the Ferial, the Day of the Dead, the Roman sacrificed to Tacita, the mute goddess, a fish with its mouth sewn shut, an allusion to the silence that reigned among the… spirits of the departed. This was also the day on which offerings were taken to the graves, for at certain times and in certain places, the dead emerged from their sleep like the unclear images of a dream and sometimes troubled the living’.10
Stanley Brandes, in turn, traces most customs of the Day of the Dead back to baroque Spain and writes that ‘the presence of such clear European analogs casts doubt on the pre-conquest roots of the Day of the Dead in Mexico’.11 The Day of the Dead, argues Brandes, ‘promotes an interpretation of the world in which Mexico is unique… and above all culturally distinct from the two powers that have dominated the country throughout its long existence: Spain and the United States’.12
But today, when San Diego has its own festivity, Santa Ana’s Dia de los Muertos Festival, and New York too hosts its version, these boundaries are being erased. It can no longer be its presumed geographical roots that make it unique, but still there is something that without a shadow of a doubt makes it stand out from the crowd of popular holidays who more often than not are characterized by their emptiness.
Admitting that there may not be much uniquely Mexican in commemorative food offerings to the dead, that this distinctiveness is something the nation has blown out of proportions to expand its tourist sector and forge a well-cut image for the mirror, the role the festivity has played for such enterprises is nonetheless only one level of analysis. I wish to recalibrate our attention and direct it to its ritual togetherness by the archaic means of love and care.
During the festivity, celebrants travel to popular squares to buy alfeñiques (sweets made of cane sugar molded as tiny skulls); pan de muertos (bread of the dead); watch public altars at ofrenda fairs; partake in the official program that may include things such as nocturnal light shows; parades; masquerades; musicals; altar-building workshops; museum exhibitions, and one’s own cooking, collecting and buying of the required things to decorate tombs and altars with. They always include cempasúchils (marigolds), the Aztek flower of the dead.
It is the town’s cemetery, Pantheon Míxquic, that is the center of the celebration in San Andrés Míxquic where the alumbrada is now about to begin. It is 2 November and tens of thousands of visitors are pouring into town to make the touristic pilgrimage to the pantheon, where local families are putting the finishing touch on their lavish tomb decorations.


These celebrants do not share the anthropologist’s fear of cultural appropriation or decadent outside influences; the preoccupation of the older generation is to make a suitable ofrenda for their dearly departed, and the preoccupation of the younger is equally to make it a beautiful one for the selfie –for this is among the world’s most Instagram-able nights. And while the anthropologist will motivate why he or she is there in more pretentious terms, most celebrants are happy for visitors to take part and photograph their alumbrada ceremony.
Me: Who are you waiting for tonight?
Doña Isabela: My dad, my grandparents, my little sister, and my mother-in-law. We’ll soon light up the offering. This we do to light the way for the ánimas (souls). And after we have lit the candles, we stay until midnight.
Me: What did you decide to decorate the tomb with this year?
Doña Isabela: My dad, for example, really liked roses, so I decided to put roses on the grave and not only the marigolds.
Me: What do people here think about all these tourists coming?
Doña Isabela: I’m very happy that they come to visit our town, they are most welcome.
While your average anthropologist may have his or her reasons for wishing to be the only foreigner present when sacred events unfold at what they call their ‘field site,’ celebrants at Míxquic’s go about their business in a hospitable state of heart. But anthropologists and celebrants alike are eager to make sure that this grand institution shall live on and prosper for generations to come.
Me: What does this tradition mean to you?
Don Francisco: What happens here is that we have this feeling that we and the dead are one. We are together. The tradition is, since my father liked beer, and he liked cigars, and mole, then that is what we are putting, those things that they liked.
Doña Alicia: It’s a pleasure for us to do this. We feel our loved ones in our hearts.
Don Francisco: When I pass away, I hope my wife at least puts a cigarette for me.
Doña Alicia: I hope that our children and our grandchildren will continue this tradition, because it is very beautiful. May it never end.
The drinking and eating with the dead during the commemoration manifest reciprocal bonds of intergenerational love and care. This is captured, according to Stanley Brandes, by the simple act of putting forth the favorite meal or things of one’s lost loved ones once a year, just as you then can expect the same for yourself from your own children when you have passed away. Don Francisco does this for his father and hopes his wife shall do it for him when the time comes, and doña Alicia hopes their children will continue to carry out the commemoration when they themselves are no longer there to oversee it.
These strong bonds of family love and the notion of a continued reciprocity between the living and the dead are aided by the belief, as Kristin Congdon phrased it, ‘that the dead do not go away forever, that they can return to visit,’ which teaches children from an early age to ‘respect death and that if they do not do so, it could result in severe danger’.13
For the idea that the tomb and altar offerings are about love is a relatively recent idea, which in and of itself reflects a change in the emphasis of what the tradition symbolizes and why it is carried out. Offerings used to be made to the dead, as much for one’s melancholic longing to be with them again as in order to secure their services in life, guarantee a good harvest and make sure that grievous souls did not cause harm or misfortune to the living who did not please them.
Such beliefs have now resided and taken a back seat to make way for the all-conquering global cult of love as the new queen of human emotions, sprouting out of the skulls of the dead, and thought to motivate the deeds of men alike. There is a flow of it back and forth from the world of the living and the world of the dead. As Magnus Course has written about purgatory, ‘For Catholics, prayers for the dead allow one to both ease their suffering in Purgatory and to accelerate their passage through it. Thus love for the deceased is not founded solely upon memory, but rather a continuing social life of mutual care and assistance’.14
With risk of being repetitive, celebrant after celebrant stress the same essential essence of the party known as the Day of the Dead: it always comes back, it seems, to an act of family love.
Me: What does this day mean to you?
Ana: For us it is a very beautiful day since it is a way to say goodbye to our loved ones. In this case, my parents. I have been coming here since I was nine years old because my mother died very young. I’m 46 and it’s been a lifetime. But it is not lost time because for me it is with a lot of love that we say goodbye and receive our loved ones. We start on 31 October, and we welcome them into the house with all our love because we feel that they are there with us, and then we come here to be with them at the pantheon. It is special to us, and it is like being with them again, fused spiritually.
Me: Who are you welcoming back tonight?
Doña Carmen: My parents. This is the arrival of our faithfully departed who come to visit us and to be with us, and it is the first time that my mom is coming back this year; the first time that she isn’t here but is here anyway in a different way.
Me: Does it bother you or do you feel uncomfortable that there are so many people around here taking photos and asking questions?
Doña Carmen: No, the truth is that it is very cool. We feel very happy to see the town so full because it is an acknowledgment of the traditions that we have here and people can learn from everything that we do. So it fells very nice. More than anything else it is pride. My mother always instilled it in me. I love making the offering. It is something that I enjoy a lot, more each year.
Don José: My father is buried here. It is 55 years since he passed away and since then it is my generation’s turn to come like this to carry on with the tradition. Here there is a mixture of the pre-Hispanic and the Catholic. For us, the pre-Hispanic tells us that the souls of our loved ones come to visit us today, on 2 November, and then they return to the places where they are. That is the pre-Hispanic tradition. The Catholic religion teaches us, well, teaches us that the souls don’t really come, that they are in the Lord’s heaven and there they are, nothing more. But on this special day we remember them precisely because we know that they are present. They are in another dimension, but they are with us. That is how it is. Obviously, they don’t go to the material plane but remain in the spiritual plane. And we, when we make the offering in the house and light the candles here, we remember our loved ones and we do it with the idea that they are here in our hearts.
From the point of view of celebrants, the Day of the Dead comes to view for its ethics of intergenerational care and continued family bonds, in a grandiose tribute to love beyond death. ‘It is believed,’ wrote Ochoa Zazueta in a classic study of Míxquic in a passage as true now as it was then, ‘that the departed relative visits the home and takes pleasure in the foods that in real life pleased him or her. The visitor, since he or she is a spirit, can only aspire to enjoy the aroma of the ofrenda, with which they remain satisfied’.15 The living, meanwhile, are equally content with the allured to and felt inner presence of their departed, once annually, brought back to life by the loving gesture of the gift-offering.
- This research is funded by grant No #2021/11138-0, of the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). The opinions, hypotheses and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of FAPESP. [↩]
- Nutini, Hugo 1988. Todos Santos in Rural Tlaxcala: A Syncretic, Expressive, and Symbolic Analysis of the Cult of the Dead (New York: Princeton University Press), p. ix. [↩]
- Garciagodoy, Juanita 1998. Digging the Days of the Dead: A Reading of Mexico’s Días de Muertos (New York: University Press Colorado), p 160-61. [↩]
- García Canclini, Néstor 1981. Las culturas populares en el capitalismo (Havana: Casa de las Americas). García Canclini, Néstor and Piedras Feria, Ernesto 2008. Las industrias culturales y el desarrollo de México (México, DF: siglo XXI) [↩]
- Brandes, Stanley 2006. Skulls for the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond. (New York: Blackwell Publishing). Garciagodoy, Juanita 1998. Digging the Days of the Dead: A Reading of Mexico’s Días de Muertos. (New York: University Press Colorado). Lomnitz, Claudio 2005. Death and the idea of Mexico. (New York: Zone Books). Malvido, Elsa 2006. “La Festival de Todos Santos, Fieles Difuntos y su Altar de Muertos en México, Patrimonio “Intangible” de la Humanidad”. Patrimonio Cultural y Turismo, 16: 42-55. [↩]
- Paz, Octavio 1961. The Labyrinth of Solitude: Life and Thought in Mexico. Translated by Lysander Kemp. (New York: Grove Press Inc), p. 57. [↩]
- Bloch, Maurice and Parry, Jonathan 1982. Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge University Press) [↩]
- Malvido, Elsa 2006. “La Festival de Todos Santos, Fieles Difuntos y su Altar de Muertos en México, Patrimonio “Intangible” de la Humanidad”. Patrimonio Cultural y Turismo, 16: 42-55. [↩]
- Garciagodoy, Juanita 1998. Digging the Days of the Dead: A Reading of Mexico’s Días de Muertos. (New York: University Press Colorado), p. 130. [↩]
- Ariès, Philippe 1981. The Hour of Our Death. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf), p. 23. [↩]
- Brandes, Stanley 2006. Skulls for the Living, Bread to the Dead: The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Beyond. (New York: Blackwell Publishing), p. 117. [↩]
- Ibid. [↩]
- Congdon, Kristin 2003. “Making Merry with Death: Iconic Humor in Mexico’s Day of the Dead.” In, Of Corpses: Death and Humor in Folklore and Popular Culture, edited by Peter Naváez. (University Press of Colorado), p. 200. [↩]
- Course, Magnus 2022. “The Meaning of Purgatory”. AEON, 22 July, 2022. [↩]
- Ochoa Zazueta, Jesús Angel 1973. La muerte y los muertos: cultos, servicio, ofrenda y humor de una comunidad. (México, DF: Sep-Setentas), p. 97. [↩]
OpenEdition le sugiere que cite este post de la siguiente manera:
Olof Ohlson (29 de octubre de 2024). The Day of the Dead’s Ethics of Love. Ankulegi antropologia espazio digitala - espacio digital de antropología. Recuperado 17 de junio de 2025 de https://doi.org/10.58079/12lbq