Festival for departed souls begins with food

Culture is a really flexible thing, says Tempe resident and cultural anthropologist Linda McAllister. At a Dia de Los Muertos observance in Guadalupe a few years ago, she saw a Big Gulp as a grave offering.

"The biggest one," she said. Beverages are a common offering on ofrendas, altars constructed in homes and cemeteries across Mexico for the festival that is The Day of the Dead -- the day that departed souls return to earth.

McAllister, who holds a master's degree in art history, specializes in Mexican folk art and looks at food as an extension of folk traditions. She has lectured on food as ritual and ephermeral art.

Dia de Los Muertos traditions "vary from town to town because Mexico is not culturally monolithic," McAllister said. "Things are very different from Yucatan to Central Mexico to the northwest to Northern Mexico."

Day of the Dead is a family event to remember ancestors, whose spirits visit the earth once a year. This concept of the cycle or circle of life is a strong tradition with many native and indigenous peoples worldwide, says Heard Museum Educational Services Manager Gina Laczko said.

"To me, it's a very interesting and in so many ways a very healthy view of death, which Americans find so difficult. Americans don't even want to talk about aging, let alone death.

"In agricultural societies, as in many traditions around the world, if you have life, you have death. It's considered a passage from one type of living to another, and that's something that was believed in pre-conquest Mexico," Laczko said.

This cyclic view fused with Catholicism's All Souls Day on Nov. 2 and All Saints Day on Nov. 1 to become Day (or Days) of the Dead, Laczko explained. In a society without written family trees, celebrants tell stories to their children, "and it's not just the landmark things about your parents or great-grandparents," she added. "You remember a lot of anecdotal things, such as what was her favorite food, or that time he got me with that good practical joke."

Although many Americans see the prototypical dancing skeletons and celebration of death as macabre or related to Halloween, it's not, Laczko and others emphasize. As harvest festivals both fall at the same time of the year, but El Dia de Los Muertos is not scary. It's reflective, but not sad.

What relates it to Halloween in many minds are images of cavorting skeletons. Laczko notes that these are a direct result of the work of Mexican press artist Jose Guadalupe Posada, who died in 1913. Posada inspired muralist Diego Rivera and others with his caricatures of the rich and political, all depicted as skeletons. Katarina, a skeletal figure in a plumed hat and dress, has become the instant visual signal of El Dia de Los Muertos.

Katarina and company are in evidence all over Mexico as altars are set up Oct. 30 and 31. In homes, tables are covered with flowers, fruits, vegetables, candles, incense, statues of saints, photos of the deceased. The sky is represented by a sheet or strings of paper cutouts.

Traditionally, the flowers used are marigolds, and the incense used on the altar is copal, the resin from a particular tree. Like moles and chile-laced dishes prepared for some of the ancestors, the flowers are quite aromatic and the copal has a distinctive smell.

The aromas are used or consumed by the spirits, which, like the scents, can't be seen. The foods are eaten (or given away) by the living later, after their essence has been consumed, Laczko explained.

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Pan de Muerto

Chicken in Pipian Sauce

Festival for departed souls begins with food