Mexico's Day of the Dead celebrations mix indigenous customs and European thought in surprising ways

Every year, residents flock to Janitzio Island, five hours west of Mexico City on Lake Pátzcuaro in Michoacán, to visit the graves of their deceased relatives.

On the evening of November 1st, Noche de animas, or Night of the Souls in Purgatory, families bring a meal to share with their ancestors. They will also use the time to clean the graves and decorate them with elaborate candle and marigold decorations. Some will sleep the night between the gravestones.

In Mexico City, people in colorful customs will take part in parades wearing large skull masks while skull-shaped floats parade through the streets to the rhythm of Aztec drums. Marigolds, faces painted with skulls and flowing skirts will fill the city center from the main square of the Zócalo to Bellas Artes, the Palace of Fine Arts.

This vibrant scene reflects the mix of indigenous, European and especially Mexican customs that characterize Day of the Dead celebrations today.

As an expert on colonial Mexico, I examine how indigenous peoples maintained their traditions despite Spanish invasion. While scientists once believed that these cultures simply mixed together—a phenomenon called syncretism—researchers now understand more about how indigenous peoples intentionally thought about which of their own traditions they should carry on and how.

Celebrations for the dead had an important place in indigenous cultures before the arrival of the Spanish. But as historian James Lockhart explained, in their attempts to impose their religion and customs, the Spanish often failed to recognize what was most important to local cultures. As long as indigenous celebrations of the dead did not conflict with Spanish preaching, they could go unnoticed.

Indigenous decisions

The immediate impact of the Spanish invasion presented the indigenous population with difficult decisions. Most indigenous deaths during the conquest were caused not by the sword but by epidemic diseases such as smallpox and salmonella, to which the native population had no natural immunity. In the 16th century, entire cities were depopulated and people had to decide where to go for the best opportunities.

After the Spanish arrived, displaced families, suffering from the effects of European diseases and the deaths of family members, moved into towns and cities around Lake Pátzcuaro. On the shores of the lake and on the island of Janitzio they continued their custom of sharing crops with the dead.

During the colonial period, it became an annual custom to take time to tend the graves of the dead. After independence from Spain in 1821, a series of state decrees in Michoacán even called on residents to honor the war heroes buried on Janitzio.

Since the island had already been sacred for hundreds of years, it was a logical place to venerate the new heroes of Mexican independence. Patriotism thus strengthened the already existing indigenous tradition of honoring the dead.

How Indigenous Practices Survived

Ironically, in Mexico City, colonial policies also enabled the survival of indigenous practices. Before the Spanish came, the Aztecs displayed thousands of skulls of sacrificed victims on a skull stand called the tzompantli.

In their view, the life energy released from sacrificed bodies fed the sun and ensured that the universe continued to exist.

The Aztecs honored many of their victims before these rituals with feasts, fine clothing, luxury accommodations, and other entertainments. Every year at the festival of Miccailhuitontli, the “little festival of the dead” in the ninth month of the Aztec calendar, children were ritually killed. In the tenth month, it was the adults who were sacrificed during the festival of Huey Miccailhuitl, the “Great Feast of the Dead.”

Although Spanish military invaders suppressed these celebrations, they also inadvertently gave the newly colonized Aztecs opportunities to combine their faith with Christian celebrations.

Franciscans and other religious orders that followed them brought with them the medieval rituals of religious theater and processions as part of their efforts to convert the local population. Both of these highly public medieval customs attracted large numbers of spectators, as did the pre-invasion Aztec rituals.

The indigenous actors in these plays, who were themselves recent converts, performed pageants for Christmas, Holy Week, and other holidays.

Although the monks did not intend to draw on indigenous beliefs, these religious pieces showed parallels to the pre-Conquest Aztec practice of imitating deities. For example, before the Spanish came, the Aztecs dressed a specially selected prisoner at the Toxcatl festival as their divination deity Tezcatlipoca. The impersonator danced and paraded through the city on his way to the sacrifice at the main temple.

When Catholic religious theater came to town, local actors continued to take on the roles they were portraying, so much so that one local actor even hanged himself after portraying Judas in a passion play.

During the long colonial period, from the 16th to 18th centuries, religious processions became an integral part of the city. Historian Susan Schroeder recounts Indigenous writer Domingo Chimalpahin's chronicles of several processions as a source of civic pride for Indigenous communities.

Over time, on the Day of the Dead, giant, colorful skulls modeled on the “mascaradas” – the large papier-mâché heads of Spanish processions and festivals – were paraded through the streets, just meters from where the Aztecs displayed human skulls.

Beyond graves

In addition to the commonly cited holidays of All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day on November 1st and 2nd, hidden European elements have also influenced Day of the Dead practices. One of them is belief in the soul and life after death. Historian Jill McKeever Furst explains that in the Aztec view, only death in battle or during birth achieved immortality.

Most people went to Mictlan, the land of the dead, gave up their life energy into the universe and ceased to exist as individuals. Today, depictions of the living interacting with, singing to, or talking to the dead, as in the film “Coco,” likely reflect adapted ideas about the afterlife from Christianity, as cultural critic Anise Strong has noted.

European influences have also shaped domestic altars, with their seven or nine tiers representing layers of the underworld, earth and paradise. Research has shown that many indigenous communities in modern-day Mexico viewed the universe as flat and placed Mictlan far away from the living rather than underground.

Historians Jesper Nielsen and Toke Reunert have noted that it is likely that indigenous images of the universe consisting of three realms, with a reward in heaven, earth in the middle and the world of the dead below, from Dante's “Divine Comedy “originate”. Dante's literature depicts the universe vertically – from the heights of heaven through purgatory and earth to the abyssal hell at ground level.

As the local people converted, they left a horizontal view of the universe, moving towards a positive upside and a negative downside scenario. The vertical cosmos contrasts with the indigenous ideas of the ancestors, who saw the universe as a plane on which humans and supernatural beings interacted.

The celebrations continue

Janitzio Island on Lake Pátzcuaro and Mexico City show how indigenous decisions helped their traditions survive despite Spanish influence. In the city of Pátzcuaro, in addition to All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, sharing food with the dead continued during the harvest. Meanwhile, in Mexico City, the history of public ritual sacrifice gave way to the religious pageantry of the Spanish Renaissance.

Today, individuals and groups still decide how to celebrate the Day of the Dead. Whether it is about communicating with the dead, letting go, or believing that they remain among the living, the holiday's strength lies in its ability to have many meanings.

As long as indigenous, Spanish and modern Mexican customs persist in domestic rituals and public celebrations of past, present lives and cultural heritage, the Day of the Dead will remain alive and well.