The proliferation of local Day of the Dead festivals in the last decade signals a profound cultural shift: the de-privatization of death through a practice of public and collective memorialization. Those who grieve their dead come out of their homes and onto the streets where they build altars and decorated them with memories. Those who are no longer strangers share their loss in public, the altar makes them intimate and familiar. At Santa Ana’s annual Day of the Dead celebration, death herself comes to gather and claim these lost and wandering souls. She is la Catrina, the Mexican skeleton woman: death personified. There are more than a hundred altars, each one mourns some loss, some of them great, none of them small. At each altar she pauses and lights a single candle, summing the spirits. The solemn and haunting lighting of the altar candles, one by one, brings each altar to life. The ritual marks downtown Santa Ana as sacred terrain and as Mexican (Latino) territory.
Californians now have a way to honor and remember their dead. We no longer have to mourn them in private. The Day of the Dead public altar creates intimacy and reverence. This is where family and community histories …
The following constitute a series of “theoretical sketches” which attempt, in a non-exhaustive manner to identify and distill some of the key nodal points of the anthropology of the Day of the Dead. For hermeneutic purposes, these sketches …
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 …
James Ault is an award-winning documentary filmmaker and author whose work often deals with religion. His first film, Born Again, about life in a fundamentalist …
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Daisy Vargas holds a Masters degree from the University of Denver in Religious Studies and is completing her doctoral studies at UC Riverside. Her expertise …
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Matthew Casey earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in Religious Studies at the College of Charleston (2009) and the University of California, Riverside (2011). At Riverside, …
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Principal InvestigatorJennifer Scheper Hughes directs (with Amanda Lucia) the ISIR festivals project funded by a grant from the Luce Foundation: Religions in Diaspora and Global Affairs …
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James Lee, Ph.D., UC Irvine Associate Professor of Asian American Studies and English, chair of the Department of Asian American Studies at UCI, and director …
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Romi Mukherjee received his PhD from the University of Chicago where his thesis, in the history of religions, examined the politics of the sacred in inter-war …
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Jeremy Guida, project curator, holds a Masters of Theological Studies from Harvard University (Divinity School) with an emphasis in religion and culture. He currently serves …
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