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The History of Day of the Dead Social Protest, Explained

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The History of Day of the Dead Social Protest, Explained

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On Saturday, halfway up the Rio Grande, two groups of 10-foot-tall skeletal dolls from opposite sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, and Juarez, Mexico, will approach each other and symbolically embrace in honor of families whose loved ones are at who lost their lives trying to get to America.

The giant Día de Los Muertos paper mache figures, called mojigangas, will unite as part of a Day of the Dead vigil conducted by the Border Network for Human Rights, an immigration reform and human rights organization in El Paso.

“We want to remember the families who did not have the opportunity to see their loved ones,” said Fernando Garcia, founder and executive director of the group. “It’s a disaster for us.”

More: Day of the Dead: A Visual Guide to This Mexican Holiday

Día de Los Muertos, the holiday originally rooted in Mexico and celebrated on the first two days of November, is commonly viewed as a time when families celebrate their deceased loved ones with altars or ofrendas that carry photos, treats, etc of the things they enjoyed. But even as the tradition takes root in America, its purpose goes beyond reunification and remembrance to provide a vehicle for social commentary and disagreement on contemporary issues, from the days of the Vietnam War to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The Day of the Dead is an opportunity to think critically about whose lives we want to honor,” said Mathew Sandoval, an associate teaching professor at Arizona State University’s Barrett Honors College who teaches cultural studies and social movements. “It is a form of political protest where people are selected who stand for something we want to draw attention to.”

In addition to challenging immigration policies, activists and artists in the United States have created altars and events for Día de Los Muertos related to the Black Lives Matter movement and the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territories. At SOMArts in San Francisco, March 25thTh The annual Day of the Dead exhibition “Día de Los Muertos 2024: Bearing Witness” features altar installations dedicated to the Palestinians lost in the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, a few miles away in the city's Mission District, Mexican-American muralist and organizer Lucia Ippolito is setting up a separate public display of Día de Los Muertos altars honoring Palestinian life.

“I think the Day of the Dead is one of the most political celebrations we have,” said Ippolito, who sees connections between the plight of Mexican, Syrian and Palestinian immigrants and refugees and sees her project as a form of solidarity. “As we honor our ancestors and those who have died, it is important that we also honor families who have died in other global struggles.”

Along with grief and remembrance, a call to action

Saturday's border vigil in El Paso and Juarez will recite the names of identified people who died in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection's El Paso Sector this year. A similar recitation will take place Saturday in Tucson, Arizona, where the local group Coalición de Derechos Humanos will lead its 24th eventTh annual Día de Los Muertos procession.

Alba Jaramillo, a local organizer with Derechos Humanos, said the event not only mourns those who died crossing the Sonoran Desert, but also draws attention to policies that activists say have exacerbated the problem.

“This is an advocacy group where we demand changes in immigration policy,” Jaramillo said. “We have the deadliest land migration route in the world.”

According to the Center for Migration Studies of New York, at least 5,400 people died or went missing along the U.S.-Mexico border between August 2014 and August 2024, with the annual death toll reaching record highs in recent years.

“It's really an opportunity for the community to amplify their demands for justice in the context of this anti-migrant violence,” said Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, a professor of anthropology at Loyola University Chicago who has worked with organizations that advocate for migrants .

Garcia, of the Advocacy Network in El Paso said U.S. border policy, which aims to deter border crossings by redirecting immigration flows to risky areas, has done little to deter people from attempting to cross the border. Instead, deaths have skyrocketed. And the cultural tradition of Día de Los Muertos offers a way to simultaneously honor their memory and demand change.

“If no one talks about or remembers their family members, they will be forgotten,” he said. “That is the core of what we want to do: never forget that thousands of migrants – tios, abuelitos, brothers and sisters – have died because of immigration policies. And they will die again if we don’t remember them.”

How politics helped Day of the Dead rise and spread

In some ways, the sociopolitical currents that pervade the Day of the Dead are part of its legacy, beginning with its origins in commemorative traditions intentionally maintained by indigenous peoples who resisted the efforts of Spanish missionaries to forcibly convert them to Catholicism.

“It’s already political in that regard,” said Sandoval, a professor of cultural and political studies at Arizona State.

Regina Marchi, a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, said that indigenous people, who marked such traditions during this period with celebratory, all-night graveyard drinking, in some cases rioted and rebelled after being over had reflected on the exploitation and abuse that had led to the deaths of so many loved ones.

Ultimately, the tradition merged with Spanish Catholicism's celebrations of All Saints' Day on November 1st and All Souls' Day on November 2nd. But until the 1920s it remained primarily a rural, regional festival.

That changed when, after the Mexican Revolution, it became part of a national effort to unite the fragmented country around a common identity and culture. Día de Los Muertos and regional music forms such as mariachi came to the fore.

“These are things that we consider Mexican today,” Sandoval said. “So in that respect it was also political.”

The first public Día de Los Muertos celebrations documented in the United States were initiated in the early 1970s by Latino artists and educators in California, who embraced the tradition as an expression of Chicano-American and Mexican-American self-identity.

At the time, the Mexican American community was still seething over the disproportionate death rate of Chicanos in the Vietnam War and the death of civil rights activist and Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar, who was killed in the chaotic aftermath of a massive, Chicano-led police tear gas projectile War protest in 1970.

The events they created would transform Día de Los Muertos in the United States from a family tradition celebrated privately at home or in cemeteries to one often based on street parades, art exhibitions and other community events.

“Mexican Americans felt empowered and it was a way to show ethnic pride,” Sandoval said.

The dead memorialized by community advocates in the 1970s included family members and Mexican and Mexican-American cultural icons such as artist Frida Kahlo, revolutionary Emiliano Zapata and farm workers union leader Cesar Chavez. But it also included community members lost to social injustices: the journalist Salazar, farm workers poisoned by pesticides, youth killed in gang violence, and the disproportionate death toll among Mexican Americans serving in Vietnam.

Among the images they adopted were catrinas – clothed skeletons portrayed as living characters – and skulls created by Jose Guadalupe Posada, an early 20th-century Mexican political cartoonist who used such images to draw attention to hypocrisy to make fun of the urban upper class. But Posada's illustrations existed then separately from the altar commemorations of the dead practiced among rural indigenous populations in the country's southern and central regions.

Chicanos in Los Angeles and San Francisco brought these things together, said Marchi, author of “The Day of the Dead in the US: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon.” These communities produced Catrina-style art while also creating native-inspired multi-tiered ofrendas covered with marigolds, copal incense, and edible offerings such as chocolate and pan de muertos, a sweet bread baked for the holidays.

In subsequent decades, reformers and Latino communities across the United States have erected Day of the Dead altars to shine a spotlight on the victims of other sociopolitical ills—the U.S.-sponsored wars in Central and South America, the AIDS epidemic, the tragedy 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the hundreds of factory workers from post-NAFTA maquiladoras killed in Juarez in the 1990s and 2000s.

More recently, they have focused on victims of police brutality and the COVID-19 pandemic, who are disproportionately people of color.

As with those honoring the lives of Palestinians, the altars and commemorations do not always focus on Latinos. Sandoval said the Day of the Dead altars commemorate the victims of Russia's war with Ukraine and the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

“The tradition is really about honoring the departed and showing deep reverence for them,” said Marchi, the author of “Day of the Dead.” “If you don’t remember them, then they really are dead.”

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