ABSTRACT
Sweet smells of pan de los muertos and sugar candy skulls, vibrant pastel paper cutouts lining the streets for processions in skeleton face paint, with oversized papier-mâché figures and altars decorated with pictures of family members lead the way to the cemetery with offerings of bottles and plates of food at tombs and headstones, with golden bouquets of marigolds adorning burial plots.1 These familiar sights, smells, and tastes of Día de los Muertos pop cultural memory possess distinct layers of indigenous, colonial, and decolonial expression. The indigenous Mexican practices associated with Pre-Columbian Nahua and Mayan civilizations surviving the Conquest would be adopted by mainstream Mexican artists and intellectuals following the Revolution, translating into more current U.S. representations that gained popularity via the Chicana/o art movement. That struggle and resistance can be identified with each of these time periods when Día de los Muertos re-emerges “suggest[s] an almost irreverent, macabre confrontation with mortality” (Brandes, “Day of the Dead, Halloween” 360). Día de los Muertos expressions derive much of their rhetorical power from Pre-Columbian roots and the anti-colonial ethos of the Mexican Revolution that express not only a distinct visual aesthetic, but more importantly, symbolize the decolonial belief system that resists Western traditions. That the popularity of Día de los Muertos continues to grow demonstrates an exigency for conceptualizing death in a manner that diverges from a Western ideology of imperialism through consumption and fear of the afterlife.
