“Specters of Race at Day of the Dead.” A reflection by Daisy Vargas.

As gentrification and economic development threaten immigrant spaces and histories in Santa Ana, activists have engaged local community to claim their place in the city by contesting governmental policies through performances of Mexican cultural identity, which invoke spirits of dead ancestors. Spirit work at Noche de Altares contests the politics of belonging and citizenship, and points to the historical and material conditions of Mexicans while also playing with spatial and temporal boundaries.?á The invocation of spirits as participants in Dia de los Muertos celebrations points to social injustices, providing alternative frameworks for contesting racial inequality. As Jacques Derrida writes, engagement with specters is political and an act of justice, as it implies a sense of respect for those who are not present, and marks the importance of those outside of our temporal understandings. In their absence, the dead continue to effect the present by illuminating present conditions.

Participants in Day of the Dead festivals contest dominant paradigms through the use of rituals and altars to call spirits of the dead back to the present to effect political change, and to question the limits of citizenship. In much the same way border memorials contest the state’s exclusion of undocumented migrants from citizenship, memorialization of the dead along Fourth Street in Santa Ana calls attention to individuals otherwise left outside the official archives of statehood and memory.

Further, because they exist in a public and political environment that is still racially and economically stratified, the reluctance of Santaneros to allow outsiders to appropriate Day of the Dead ensures that the celebration retains its political and cultural significance. In refusing to open up Noche de Altares to corporate and capitalist interests, organizers and participants refuse absorption into a multiculturalist framework that commodifies culture and assimilates ethnic identity in the name of democracy. Santaneros distinguish themselves from participants in other Day of the Dead festivals, locating themselves firmly within a community that measures commitment to Mexican cultural and spiritual traditions against others who appear to aid in the commodification of their own culture.