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Examines the history and culture of Mexico and its relations with its neighbors to the north and east from the Spanish Conquest to the current presidency of Vicente Fox.
Honoring relatives by tending graves, building altars, and cooking festive meals has been an honored tradition among Latin Americans for centuries. The tribute, "el Dia de los Muertos," has enjoyed renewed popularity since the 1970s when Latino activists and artists in the United States began expanding "Day of the Dead" north of the border with celebrations of performance art, Aztec danza, art exhibits, and other public expressions. Focusing on the power of ritual to serve as a communication medium, Regina M. Marchi combines a mix of ethnography, historical research, oral history, and critical cultural analysis to explore the manifold and unexpected transformations that occur when the tradition is embraced by the mainstream. A testament to the complex nature of ethnic identity, Day of the Dead in the USA provides insight into the power of ritual to create community, transmit oppositional messages, and advance educational, political, and economic goals.
The Day of the Dead, or Día de los Muertos, may sound a bit scary. However, this enlightening book explains to readers how this special holiday is actually a day of joy as well as remembrance for millions of people in Latin America and the United States. The symbols, customs, and origins of the holiday are discussed in accessible text, while vivid photographs illustrate the presented concepts.
The Days of the Dead offers a remarkable journey within Mexico's traditional holiday honoring departed ancestors, friends, and family. Each aspect of the multiday festival is carefully explored, from the journey to the cemeteries to spruce up neglected gravesites to the lively marketplace selling breads and candies in the shapes of skulls and skeletons and finally, the peaceful vigil as friends and families crowd the cemeteries to await the arrival of their loved ones through the long night. San Francisco-based photographer John Greenleigh traveled to small towns in Mexico in four different years to document this extraordinary festival. Accompanied by evocative text by cultural scholar Rosalind Rosoff Beimler, the pictures speak eloquently to a ritual that is at once mocking and respectful of death -- and ultimately affirming of human life.
Kristin Norget explores the practice and meanings of death rituals in the popular culture of poor urban neighborhoods on the outskirts of the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca. Norget's work offers an original perspective on the significance of the Day of the Dead and other Oaxacan ritual practices in shaping people's values and social identities. Drawing on her extensive fieldwork in Oaxacan neighborhoods, Norget includes vivid descriptions of Day of the Dead rituals.
In Digging the Days of the Dead, Juanita Garciagodoy depicts various aspects of the celebration - including Prehispanic and Spanish Catholic traces on its development as well as folk and popular culture versions - and describes its changing place in contemporary Mexico. Garciagodoy examines in detail differences in attitudes toward death in Mexico and the United States. In part because the living do not exclude the dead from their family circle, celebrants of Dias de muertos treat death as an intimate life companion and fear it less than their northern counterparts, who tend to view death as inimical.
