How to Simple: Dia de Muertos
I was born in Utah and into the Church to Mexican immigrant parents who were converts. Growing up, we were active in all our Church activities and excitedly celebrated and embraced our Mormon traditions, including Pioneer Day. After I moved away to attend college, I visited Mexico for the first time to meet my grandpa. I was immersed into a colorful and lively culture I was only familiar with from afar, and I fell in love with Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead), a tradition in which it is believed that ancestors who have passed on return to visit their living family. When I came home, I asked my mother about it, and she explained it was a tradition deemed “demasiado católico” (too Catholic) by her and was therefore omitted from our upbringing. The plan of salvation lays out a soul's journey, all the way from pre-earth life to what happens after death, and it wasn’t clear to her where Dia de Muertos fit in, if at all. In conversations since, she has expressed she feels it was wrong to deny me and my siblings the opportunity to connect with our culture in this way, especially as we were Mexicans living outside of Mexico, feeling separated from both the culture we came from and the one we were living in. As I grew older and grew away from the Church, learning about this celebration and embracing it became a source of healing. I would frame photos of family I never got to meet; I saw them in me, and they helped me understand and process the generational trauma we had collectively suffered. I feel connected to them, especially to my maternal grandmother, who I believe had many of the same mental health struggles I face today.
In my adulthood, I am now playing the role of both parent and child, learning and teaching myself at once about the spiritual traditions that were previously unfamiliar and almost foreign to me.
In the following slide, I have compiled the basics of setting up a simple Día de Muertos ofrenda (offering) to your ancestral dead in your home, based on the knowledge I’ve gathered in my journey to reconnect with my cultural heritage.
