Why Día de Muertos is Not a ‘Mexican Halloween’: Reflecting on a Key Theme of Latin American Culture
2021/10/27 Leave a comment
Pablo J. Davis
The differences between Halloween and Día de Muertos, beneath superficial similarities, illuminate a key theme in Mexican, Latin American, and Hispanic/Latino/Latinx cultures: acceptance of death as part of life, and the high value placed on remembering and staying emotionally connected with our departed loved ones. These sensibilities, very different from those surrounding Halloween, have begun to influence the dominant culture as Día de Muertos celebrations grow more widespread across the US.
As the days grow cooler and shorter in the Northern Hemisphere and October draws to a close, Halloween (Oct. 31) draws near… with El Día de los Muertos (or Día de Muertos, for short) (Nov. 1-2) right behind. Many in the US perceive Día de Muertos [Day of the Dead] as a ‘Mexican Halloween’. But is it, really? The two holidays have elements in common – both relate broadly to death, most notably – but are profoundly different. And the differences tell us something important about the cultures of Mexico, Latin America broadly, and Hispanic/Latino/Latinx communities in the US.
Translating Cultures (Not Just Words)
The ways in which ‘Halloween’ is not equivalent to ‘Día de Muertos’ remind us of the linguistic concept of ‘false friends.’ Take the Spanish/English word pair argumento/‘argument’: seemingly synonyms, they can fool the unwary. For argumento means ‘plot,’ as of a story; an ‘argument,’ in Spanish, would be discusión.
A subtler situation involves words that really do mutually translate, but refer to cultural, social, or other realities that don’t map onto one another so neatly. Though the term is not generally applied in this way, instances like these can be thought of as an even trickier variant of the ‘false friends’ phenomenon.
Case in point: Engl. ‘friend’ appears in every English-Spanish dictionary as Sp. amigo/a, and vice-versa. Yet in the US, at least, ‘friend’ is often applied to relationships that are not particularly close, where native Spanish speakers tend to use less intimate terms like conocido/a (‘acquaintance’) or companero/a (‘classmate’ or, in a work setting, ‘colleague’). Differences like these can cause confusion, misunderstanding, even hurt; they can take years of experience (for example, through immigration) to fully grasp.
Halloween and Día de Muertos
The differences between Halloween and Día de Muertos are, in some ways, even more subtle than cases like amigo/‘friend.’ Sharing the same time of year, similar subject matter, and some of the same symbolism and imagery, the two holidays seem close equivalents if not downright interchangeable. But they map quite differently onto their respective cultures.
Halloween is largely about defying and even mocking death, about neutralizing its terrors by rendering them theatrical. There is a kind of daring psychological play involved, a dancing around the macabre. It might even make sense to think of Halloween as reframing ‘horror,’ as genre and aesthetic, as a form of ‘comedy.’ (Of course, Halloween has multiple meanings; another important one is as an occasion for the wearing of masks and disguises generally in a spirit of playful mockery, which makes it akin to Carnival in the typology of celebrations.)
Día de los Muertos, in Mexican culture (along with its equivalents elsewhere in Latin America, a few of which are noted below), is something else entirely. Within its logic, there is no terror in death, and nothing morbid in the skulls and skeletons of the dead. One remembers, celebrates, honors one’s deceased parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, other loved ones – people often say‘mi muertito’ or ‘mi muertita’ [my darling dead one].
Over the centuries that unfolded after Contact and Conquest, Ancient, pre-Columbian and pre-Christian traditions of ancestor worship and love intertwined with the Christian calendar and rites to create something new: a case of what scholars refer to as religious ‘syncretism.’ (The word’s Greek roots mean ‘union’ and ‘communities.’) This joining together of different beliefs and practices is something Catholicism in particular has readily lent itself to over the centuries – if not officially, then certainly in popular practice. Cuban santeria and Haitian vodun ‘voodoo’ are two particularly well known examples.
Thus the celebration of the Día de Muertos came to coincide with All Souls Day, or the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed, on the Christian calendar. Elaborate ramifications of rituals and practices have evolved. They include the baking of cakes in the form of skulls and skeletons, the making of skeletal figurines often fully dressed and adorned with hats and other accessories, the fashioning of altars bearing photographs of beloved dead and containing offerings to them, the creation of satiric verses, and a rich graphic tradition of death-related iconography (most famously in the work of José Guadalupe Posada, whose ‘La Catrina’ is shown above), and others.
Baked treats are particularly important to the holiday: one’s dear departed are understood to return from the grave on Día de Muertos to enjoy the sweet bread known as ‘pan de muertos,’ cakes, and other confections set out for them. Think how heavily reuniting with deceased loved ones figures in popular ideas of Heaven; inviting one’s muertitas and muertitos to savor baked treats springs from the same emotional logic. This communing with dead kin also takes place through cleaning, decorating, and spending time at their graves during the holiday.
A Key to Latin American Culture
Día de Muertos is not unique to Mexico (though its intensity and cultural centrality there are probably unparalleled). Across Latin America, kindred cultural-religious practices abound. One example is Brazil’s Dia de Finados [Day of the Dead], a loving tribute to the dead, though generally more solemn and less festive than its Mexican counterpart. Another is Bolivia’s Día de las Ñatitas, celebrated on November 8, revolving around reverent decoration of little skulls (ñato/ñata literally means ‘snub-nosed’ and is often used to refer to small children; ñatita is an affectionate feminine diminutive referring to the skulls), symbolizing ancestors and considered to have protective powers toward the living. The cult of San La Muerte [Saint Death], a folk saint personifying death, is deeply rooted among the people of northern Argentina, southern Brazil, and Paraguay – the Guaraní culture zone – is deeply rooted in popular culture, though not officially recognized by the Catholic Church.
The unblinking acceptance of our mortality, the inseparability of death as part of life, and the imperative of staying connected with our departed loved ones – the emotional core of Día de Muertos – thus form a thread that runs through much of Latin America’s cultural map. Argentina’s Atahualpa Yupanqui (1908-1992) movingly expressed the heart of this idea. In his anthem of a half-century ago, ‘Los hermanos’ [My Brothers and Sisters], the immortal composer, guitarist, and folklorist penned (and this writer translates) the verses:
Yo tengo tantos hermanos [I have so many brothers and sisters,
que no los puedo contar. [I cannot count them all.
En el valle, la montaña, [In the valleys and the mountains,
en la pampa y en el mar. [On the pampas and at sea.
Cada cual con sus trabajos, [Each one with his work,
con sus sueños, cada cual. [with her dreams each one.
Con la esperanza adelante, [With hope up ahead,
con los recuerdos detrás. [with our memories behind.
. . .
Y así, seguimos andando [And so we journey on,
curtidos de soledad. [Hardened by loneliness.
Y en nosotros nuestros muertos [And inside us, we carry our dead
pa’ que nadie quede atrás. [So that no one’s left behind
Yo tengo tantos hermanos [I have so many brothers and sisters,
que no los puedo contar . . . [I cannot count them all . . .
It would be a serious mistake, though, to think of this acceptance of death as part of life as entirely missing from US culture. It is not. Faith communities have it, and it tends to be stronger (generalizing pretty broadly) in the South than the North, among working class people than highly educated professionals, and among African Americans than Whites. Where this sensibility is largely absent is from the dominant middle-class culture, which gives death a very wide berth, treating it as something uncomfortable and preferably not talked about – the ‘great unmentionable.’
As Día de Muertos celebrations grow more and more widespread in the US, through both immigration and the gradual adoption of the festivity beyond the holiday’s original ethnic boundaries, the enactment of this very different view of life and death is influencing the dominant culture. This is what has always happened when large groups of people find themselves in sustained contact with each other, and the US has always been a particularly intense arena for these interactions and influences. It is not far-fetched to imagine Halloween and Día de Muertos evolving over time into complementary, paired holidays, each with its contrasting emphasis, joined together in something not unlike the mutual linking of the very different sensibilities of Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
Further Reading
- Stanley Brandes, ‘Sugar, Colonialism, and Death: On the Origins of Mexico’s Day of the Dead,’ Comparative Studies in Society and History 39(2) (Apr. 1997), 270-299.
- Stanley Brandes, ‘The Day of the Dead, Halloween, and the Quest for Mexican National Identity,’ Journal of American Folklore 111 (Autumn 1998), 359-380.
- ‘Day of the Dead,’ Catholic Online.
- Stefano Bigliardi, ‘The Argentine San La Muerte and the Investigations of Walter Alberto Calzato.’
- Rachel Nuwer, ‘Meet the Celebrity Skulls of Bolivia’s Fiesta de las Ñatitas,’ Smithsonian Magazine (Nov. 17, 2015).
Copyright ©2021 by Pablo J. Davis. All Rights Reserved.
The author, an attorney, holds graduate degrees in History from The Johns Hopkins University (M.A. and Ph.D.) and Columbia University (M.A.); he has taught Latin American History and Culture, and Comparative History of the Americas, at Franklin & Marshall College, The University of Virginia, The University of Memphis, among other institutions. He is also an experienced professional translator, mainly between English and Spanish. An earlier version of this essay appeared at https://interfluency.wordpress.com in October 2011.
Interfluency: Translation+Culture 