Credit: Courtesy of Rutgers University Press

Regina Marchi, an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Information, has written a book that explores Day of the Dead rituals in the United States.

War ripped through Central America in the late 1980s and early 1990s, compelling Regina Marchi to see what she could do to make a difference. After finishing her MA degree, she volunteered to teach in a Guatemalan orphanage.

What was supposed to be one year of service, turned into a four-year journey, working as a journalist that would immerse Marchi in every aspect of Latin American culture. It was during this time that she was first exposed to the celebration known as “El Dia de los Muertos,” or the Day of the Dead – a time to remember and honor the lives of deceased loved ones.

“I observed the Day of the Dead celebrations every year in homes, in churches, and in cemeteries throughout Central America,” said Marchi, an assistant professor in the School of Communication and Information. “I got a deep sense of the cultural attitudes and values that people in this part of the world had regarding death and the afterlife.”

Her experience with the Day of the Dead rituals in Latin America would eventually lead the former journalist to write her first book, Day of the Dead in the USA: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomena, published this summer by Rutgers University Press.

Years after leaving Central America, Marchi would see the same holiday celebrated in California but with  a much different message. Whereas the celebration is predominantly a religious one in Latin America, it takes on artistic and political meanings in the US.  It is this contrast between the United States and Latin American Day of the Dead celebrations that not only gave Marchi insight into the differences between cultures but also showed her how rituals can be repurposed to serve a particular community’s needs.

“From the 1970s onward, from Chinese New Year to Native American festivals,  a reclaiming of cultural traditions was happening within other minority groups as well,  in reaction to decades of being ignored and very badly treated in the U.S,” said Marchi. “The Day of the Dead hadn’t been written about in this context.”

While working toward her doctoral degree in Communication at the University of California-San Diego, Marchi found that a ritual for deceased loved ones had evolved into an avenue for political activism and cultural awareness.

“In Mexico, the Day of the Dead is focused on remembering family and friends,” Marchi said, and creating family altars at home or decorating gravesites with flowers, candles and foods as “ofrendas” or offerings for the dead.  “For Latinos in the US, such altars are created as a form of art to celebrate Latino identity and honor the collective contributions of famous Latino pioneers and icons.  It is also a way to bring attention to collective groups of people who have died because of socio-political injustices, like migrants who have died while attempting to cross the US-Mexico border.”

Interested in how this ritual had transformed when it crossed the border, Marchi began working on a doctoral thesis, which would become the foundation for her book.  For years, she attended Day of the Dead events all over the US, analyzed media coverage of them, interviewed community leaders, and even traveled back to Central America to better understand the ritual’s roots.

The original Day of the Dead celebrations began in Latin America as a mix of the Catholic All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day rituals, and indigenous pre-Colombian rituals for honoring the ancestors. In the 1970s, U.S.-born Mexican-American artists and teachers, most of whom did not grow up with the tradition but learned of it when visiting southern Mexico as adults, brought the altar-making and street procession rituals to schools, art galleries, and neighborhoods of California, the Southwest, and later the rest of the United States.

Prior to the 1970s, the tradition was slowly dying out in Mexico, considered by “educated” Mexicans as a superstitious custom of  “ignorant” country folk, until the Mexican government saw it as a way to promote tourism.

The hand-crafted altars – filled with flowers, candles, fruits, and foods – fascinated tourists, and soon the custom began to be observed throughout Mexico, including in many parts of the country where it had not been celebrated previously.  Today, Day of the Dead is internationally considered to be an icon of Mexican nationalism, although it is also celebrated in differing ways in other areas of Latin America.

In 1972, the first Day of the Dead celebration was held in the United States as a way to teach the community about Mexican culture and build cross-class and cross- generational solidarity toward addressing the socio-economic problems facing Mexicans and other Latinos.

“It was still based on the traditions in Latin America, but it was changed by the Latino community in the U.S. to reflect their reality as Americans,” Marchi said.

The transformation of Day of the Dead rituals is at the heart of Marchi’s argument in the book.  She concludes The Day of the Dead in the U.S.A. with the idea that these types of cultural celebrations are “vernacular media,” meaning the media of the people.

“In this country we don’t often think of public art or ritual as media, but media is simply any format that communicates to others,” Marchi said.