For two days at the start of November, homes and cemeteries across Mexico fill with marigolds, candlelight, pan de muerto, and the photographs and favorite foods of people who have died. The ofrenda, the offering, is an altar built to welcome the dead back for a night. Its roots run through Nahua and other Mesoamerican traditions, braided over centuries with the Catholic observance of All Saints and All Souls. It is not a Mexican Halloween. It is a way of keeping a relationship with the people you have lost.
That relationship is the whole point, and the keepers of the tradition say so plainly.
"The remembrance of our ancestors, of our family members, is what matters. We are here on their shoulders, on their resistance, their resilience, their survival, their love."
Ofelia Esparza, East Los Angeles altar-maker and National Heritage Fellow
Like most living traditions, the ofrenda has a harm in its record, and in this case the harm arrived as a trademark application. In 2013 the Walt Disney Company filed to trademark the phrase "Día de los Muertos", to hold the name of a communal act of remembrance as intellectual property for a movie's merchandising. The response was immediate. The cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz drew a "Muerto Mouse," a corporate skeleton looming over the culture, and as he put it, "when we all found out, all the rabble, all the Raza, we went crazy." Disney withdrew the application within days.
The trademark is worth remembering because it names the exact thing this tradition resists: the urge to fence off what belongs to a whole people and sell it back to them. Día de los Muertos is not owned, and that is its strength. It belongs to the families who set the table, and to the wisdom keepers, like the altar-makers of East Los Angeles, who teach each new generation how.
You do not have to be Mexican to learn from this season, only to come to it as a guest and not a costume. Notice whose photograph you would set down. Notice what you would cook. The ofrenda's teaching carries even when the ritual is not yours. Fall is the time to make grief hospitable, to lay a place for what you have lost instead of pretending it left.
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