'El Día de los Muertos' - Day of the Dead Comes to Life for The American Retailers
About this time of the year, Chucho Rodriguez is working his fingers to the bone. His business as a tattoo artist in Lockport, Illinois, picks up in October.
Folks Want skulls. Lots of skulls.
Increasingly, though, they want tats of the decorated sugar skulls adorned with flowers rather than those associated with pirates, haunting and Halloween.
That’s because of growing interest in Day of the Dead – or Dia de los Muertos – the Mexican holiday that celebrates the lives of deceased friends and family. These distinctive sugar skulls play a prominent role in the celebration.
“The skull with all of the decorations; you can almost consider it to be pop culture now,” said Rodriguez, a Mexican immigrant who has been commissioned to produce murals and sculptures throughout the Midwest.
Celebrated in the U.S. from Oct. 31 to Nov. 2, the holiday tradition calls for the creation of altars to deceased loved ones, decorated with photos, meaningful objects and their favorite foods said to attract their souls. Petals of bright yellow-orange marigold flowers are used to guide them from the cemetery, according to tradition.
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Over the past few years, companies and retailers have made it easier to get into the spirit of the holiday, offering themed apparel to a family gathering, home decor and containers in which to tote goodies.
With 57 million Hispanics in the U.S. alone, this demographic represents almost 18 percent of the country’s population and significant spending power, according to Nielsen. In fact, the data analytics company expects their buying power to grow from $1.4 trillion in 2016 to $1.8 trillion by 2021. And that dollar strength isn't lost on retailers.
• Target’s Day of the Dead collection of items is available in all its stores and online.
• Swarovski company Chamiliathis season launched a sugar skull charm.
• With sales of its marshmallow skull lollipops up 30 percent this year, Los Angeles-based candy brand Treat Street has added a skull candy dispenser.
• Pyrex in September introduced a Day of the Dead Mariachi food storage container.
Greater interest around the celebration led 1-800-FLOWERS to create more themed gifts, including an update to its 2017 top-selling skull flower arrangement, a special The Popcorn Factory tin and Simply Chocolate skull truffles and Day of the Dead Oreo cookies.
And seeing the observance move from regional recognition into the mainstream, extending beyond Hispanic communities, has Walgreens providing new items – an LED figurine and wooden table decor among them – in most of its stores.
Another Mexican tradition goes mainstream
Even more awareness is anticipated with this being the first Day of the Dead since Disney’s November 2017 U.S. release of the animated film “Coco” that centered on the holiday and brought in more than $800 million worldwide.
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That’s good news for people such as Rodriguez – artists and entrepreneurs to whom brands and organizations turn to lend authenticity to products and events.
The National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago each year hosts a family from Toluca Mexico that over a six-week period makes about 20,000 sugar skulls that are sold to museum visitors.
Houston-based craft brewery Saint Arnold Brewing Co. in 2011 tapped local artist Carlos Hernandez to design the label that appears on the 250,000 bottles and cans of Santo sold year-round. And Bacardi brand Tequila Cazadores last year began offering a limited-edition Day of the Dead bottle; Mexican street artist Saner created the 2018 edition.
October and November are busy months at UNO Branding, a Minneapolis-based visual communication agency that works with Fortune 500 companies targeting U.S. Hispanic markets. Day of the Dead-related projects account for about 20 percent of the business in those months, co-founder Luis Fitch said.
Fitch, a Mexican artist who licenses holiday designs to numerous businesses including a cake decorating company, likes seeing the symbols adopted more broadly.
“It is kind of cool to see it all over the place. It’s being merchandised with T-shirts and stickers and candy and dancing skulls. It’s just nuts.”
The most wonderful time of the year
For Lucy Rendler-Kaplan, this is the most wonderful time of the year.
The offerings are welcome for the founder of Arky Marketing & PR, perpetually on the hunt for themed decor for her Skokie, Illinois, home.
The start of October sends her to the Cost Plus World Market website and then to physical stores to find items with Day of the Dead merchandise to go along with the shadowboxes and planters and potholders and salt and pepper shakers she already owns.
“I’m a huge collector. I love the vibrant colors,” said Rendler-Kaplan, who has three sugar skull tattoos on her arms. “I love the community around Day of the Dead. I feel like there’s a real sense of community around the event. There are always these big Mexican families celebrating.”
It's not just about the items. She’ll be at the Dia de los Muertos celebration at Chicago’s Maxwell Street Market on Sunday.
Next month, she’ll host two sip-and-paint events featuring Day of the Dead themes – including a Nov. 15 party to paint a sugar skull-stylized Chicago Blackhawks logo.
“Mainly because I wanted to hang it in my house,” she said.
Appreciation versus appropriation
Interest in the holiday is welcome for some – it keeps Chicago artist Caesar Perez busy. Next week, he is unveiling a giant skull installation commissioned by Modelo and furniture painted in Day of the Dead themes for a Pink Taco restaurant next week.
He’s done about eight such commissioned holiday projects over the past four years.
“For me, it’s cool because it’s finally showing another form of pop culture that’s still very American, but it’s also very old and unique and special as well,” said Perez, who goes by CZR PRZ. “There are companies that are very aware of what this is about and don’t want to be disrespectful, and they appreciate the culture.”
“There’s appropriation, and then there’s appreciation,” Caesar Perez says.
Along those lines, while welcoming acknowledgment of the holiday, Mexican and Mexican-American creatives say they don’t want Day of the Dead to go the way of Cinco de Mayo, the celebration of a Mexican military victory over the French now looked upon by many as a U.S. drinking holiday.
“It happens with everything in this country. Other holidays have become an excuse to sell mattresses and furniture and cars,” said Cesareo Moreno, chief curator of the National Museum of Mexican Art.
Last year, Netflix erected altars for deceased characters from some of its shows. Disney faced backlash in 2013 for trying to trademark the term “Dia de los Muertos.”
“Our mission is to try to keep the true meaning of the Day of the Dead something that doesn’t get commercialized or watered down too much," Moreno said. 'The true meaning is memory and memorialization of those that have gone on. It’s such a great way to approach death and to grieve.”
Besides an exhibit that runs through Dec. 9, the museum hosts a free outdoor festival at which community members erect hundreds of altars and submit photos of their loved ones to be included in a memorial projected onto the building. They are planning a touring exhibit.
In terms of appropriation, Fitch said, the likes of a microbrewery opening using Day of the Dead themes aren’t an issue if handled with an appreciation for the culture. UNO has worked on such projects.
“It is very commercial on that end,” he said. But if I don't do it, who else is going to do it? It’s going to be somebody who doesn't understand the culture and will rip it off like Cinco de Mayo.”
To celebrate El Día de los Muertos Twitter and Facebook share your family traditions with us, pls!?WHEN THE DEAD COME HOME IN MEXICO
THERE’S MORE TO THE DAY OF THE DEAD FESTIVAL THAN COLOURFUL MASKS.
There is a better way to experience the Day of the Dead festival in Oaxaca, Mexico, and that is to take part.
It’s the wedding party from hell. The bride’s make-up is ruined and there’s blood on her dress. The pasty-faced groom is wielding an axe and the flower girl looks like Linda Blair in a scene from The Exorcist. Even the priest could pass for an undertaker. Yet here I am, an outsider, dancing with the family and sharing tequila shots with the bridesmaids.
Mexico’s El Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is everything you want a festival to be, and then some – colourful, mystical, joyous, inclusive, satirical, political, contradictory and totally life-affirming. And instead of watching the parade from the sidelines, I’m in the thick of it.
We’d gathered in Etla Valley, a largely indigenous community on the outskirts of Oaxaca (pronounced ‘Wa-haaka’) in Southeast Mexico, just as the setting sun was casting its golden rays across the fields. With our garish costumes and painted faces, we’d fallen into step behind the brass band, cavorting with corpses, gamboling with ghouls and shaking our maracas with enough force to awaken the dead.
Just don’t go calling The Day of the Dead a Mexican version of Halloween, as the tradition originated several thousand years ago with the Aztecs as a way to celebrate and honour passed loved ones. Today, the departed are still considered members of the community, with their souls returning to Earth temporarily between 31 October and 2 November when the veil between the living and dead is the thinnest.
Since the journey from the underworld is long and arduous, a week of rituals is needed to help guide the spirits back: elaborate altars are built, pan de muertos (Bread of the Dead) is baked and all-night cemetery vigils held. On the final evening everyone breaks into party mode, acknowledging that death is part of life, love is eternal and that the gift of life must be celebrated.
My own journey had begun a week earlier when I’d flown from Mexico City to Oaxaca, a city where traditions are still intact and unexploited by commercialism. By heading to a remote region, travelling slowly and joining G Adventures on “The shamans of Capulalpam are known as curandero, a line of female only healers whose customs stretch back 1200 years.”
A National Geographic Journey seven-day Mexico’s Day of the Dead in Oaxaca tour I was hoping to learn more about the tradition than a whistle-stop visit would afford. But first I must be cleansed.
A two-hour drive brings us to Capulalpam de Méndez, one of Mexico’s designated Pueblos Magicos (magical towns) high in the Sierra Madre Oriental. Cloaked in lush forests and stippled with misty mountains, the region is the perfect hiding spot for rare birds, jaguars, white-tailed deer and shamans.
The shamans of Capulalpam are known as curandero, a line of female-only healers whose customs stretch back 1200 years. “The people of this village still abide by traditional Zapotec laws and continue to speak the ancient language,” explains our guide Andrea Betanzos. “They believe that women hold the healing powers, and that it is passed from mother to daughter.”
Judging by the scowl on the curandero’s face I’m in serious need of some spiritual healing. The first ‘tut-tut’ comes when the chicken egg she is rubbing across my skull cracks in two. For this travesty I’m smoked with charcoal, spat on with sugarcane rum and rubbed within an inch of my life with a second egg.
The next ‘tut-tut’ comes when she breaks the egg into a glass of water and the yolk sinks like a stone. Through the interpreter I learn that this means someone is holding dark thoughts against me but, thankfully, the fresh egg has removed the negative energy. After stomping on some herbs (to crush the evil forces) I’m free to go, with a newfound spring in my step.
Clockwise from above: Parade through the streets in the Mexican City of Oxaca during El Día de los Muertos - Day of the Dead celebrations; Graves are festooned, with flowers and candles; A friend (at left) with her new found-friends.
I meet the Zapotecs again the next morning at the Monte Albán ruins, the ancient city founded in 500BC by the indigenous pre-Columbian civilisation that once flourished in these hilly parts. Situated on a flattened mountaintop, the UNESCO World Heritage-listed site is dotted with the remains of altars, temples, palaces, patios and platforms. With legs and lungs on fire we scramble amid the ruins, learning how the Zapotecs buried loved ones under their houses, a precursor for the modern-day equivalent of keeping decorative altars in the family home.
Back in Oaxaca we are invited to watch families constructing oversized altars as part of the preparations for El Día de los Muertos. Photos of the deceased are displayed alongside candles, marigolds, favourite foods and drinking water (the spiritual journey is a thirsty one). The customs are so multi-layered that, in 2008, UNESCO inscribed the festival on its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
Daily parades burst forth like exploding piñata – one afternoon the children dress as devils and she-wolves and, on another, clans from various indigenous groups take to the streets. There’s even a parade for pets, their wagging tails and goofy grins adding to the carnival atmosphere.
With our local guide acting as a conduit, we connect even more deeply with the culture – making guacamole in a family home, joining artisans in their workshops and buying sugar skulls from the markets. My sense of privilege at being here is compounded when we are invited to visit not one, but two village cemeteries on the eve of the main parade.
While celebrations vary from place to place, 31 October is recognized as the night when angelitos or ‘little angels’ return to Earth and stay throughout the day visiting their families. The spirits of adults visit the following day.
It is near midnight when we enter the small cemetery in the indigenous village of Atzompa. The people are humble and most of the graves are simple earthen mounds with wooden crosses, yet on this night they are resplendent in the glow of a thousand flickering candles. “Families have been saving all year to buy these candles,” says Andrea, pointing to an elderly lady burdened by an armful of branch-sized candles.
Families sit on stools, gathered in knots around each grave. Many are laughing and sharing jokes, others are cooking on open stoves and drinking tequila, and some are weeping, silhouetted in the dark like marble statues. We don’t intrude; rather we maunder on the fringe, adding candles and flowers to those graves without visitors, each of us adrift in our own thoughts about the people we have loved and lost. People once here as vitally alive as we are.
The next day, 1 November, is the time for costumes and masks. Under the hands of a skilled artist I’m transformed into a two-faced corpse bride while others emerge as La Catrina, a skeleton form of an upper-class woman and one of the most prominent figures in the Day of the Dead celebrations.
Joining demons and devils, vampires and wolves, we take to the streets, spinning under a van Gogh sky, each of us part of a constellation of gypsy souls burning brightly for this brief moment in time.
It may be the Day of the Dead, but I have never felt more alive. •
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