How 3 Utahns of Mexican heritage mark the Day of the Dead

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The rituals behind the tradition of Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, include creating altars that feature photographs, catrinas, food, papier-mâché and marigolds to tell the story of families, and work as a bridge between the living and the dead.

Many who celebrate the holiday — happening Monday through Wednesday, Oct. 31 to Nov. 2 — believe that as long as people are remembered, their journey on Earth is not done.

The celebration has common roots in the practices of honoring the dead among Indigenous people in pre-Hispanic times. And for Utahns of Mexican heritage, the celebration is a chance to preserve their culture. Being part of a diaspora, or living in the middle of two cultures, deepens the symbolism of helping their ancestors find their way to them and keeping them alive in their memories.

How does this tradition shape people’s outlook on death and Latin American culture? We asked three Mexicans in Utah to share their thoughts.

Reconnecting and reevaluating

Diana Martinez said she remembers her sister Florecita Martinez Torres — two years her elder — as someone who was funny, thoughtful and sweet.

As Martinez overlooks the ofrenda (the offerings placed on a custom home-built altar) she has made for Florecita in her Salt Lake City home, her words are nostalgic and reflective. As she speaks, there’s no doubt how much she loves her sister, to whom she bears a striking resemblance.

“She was my mentor and my best friend,” Martinez says. “I owe a lot of my success to her.”

The ofrenda isn’t quite completed to her liking, but she still has time to get it ready before the three-day holiday.

So far, Martinez has photos of Florecita, candles de la Virgen de Guadalupe (for guidance), cempasúchil (the Mexican marigold flower whose petals are used to guide ancestors souls to altars), pan de muerto (Mexican sweet bread) and water, plants, fruit and traditional sugar skulls.

She has yet to add Florecita’s favorite: Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Martinez said her sister used to “prepare” the snack by spinning the bowl after adding limon and Tapatío.

All of the stuff is from Oaxaca, the state in southern Mexico where their parents are from. Martinez proudly identifies as a Oaxaqueña, and the state is commonly known as the “epicenter” of Day Of the Dead.

“I know she passed away, but I want it to be the most beautiful and biggest thing in the world,” Martinez said while moving things around on the ofrenda. “Because she means that much to me. … We’ve had other family members pass away, but when it’s a younger death, it’s a lot more harder to get through.”

It’s beautiful, if not bittersweet. Florecita died by suicide in 2018. It’s something that’s been difficult for Martinez’s family to come to terms with, because of the shame and stigma surrounding mental health problems.

For example, with her nieces and nephews, the older members of the family haven’t shared how Florecita died. Instead they say she was in a car accident, which is what her parents first said to family in Mexico.

“There’s shame in that, like you weren’t a good parent and your daughter did what she did,” Martinez said. “My dad still says that to new people he meets, because he’s ashamed.”

After it happened, Martinez said she did a lot of research. “It’s unfortunate that a lot of our BIPOC communities go through this,” she said. “It’s a taboo topic, it’s a cultural thing.”

But Florecita’s death also made the family more self-aware and conscientious, Martinez said. Like when she’s driving, and wants to honk at someone, she said she second-guesses it in case that person is having a bad day. Her family checks in with each other more, having conversations about how they are feeling.

“It’s a conversation we’re more open to having as a family than we were before,” she said. “There’s still very much a fear within all of us of losing somebody else … We might have lost Florecita, but I think it’s also made us a lot closer. Without her, we wouldn’t have the unity we have now.”

Though her sister’s death is more recent, Martinez pointed to her grandfather’s passing as when she first understood death — and, especially, how Oaxaqueños celebrate the holiday.

“What my family does when somebody passes away, there’s a ceremony and we always make sure to play the song ‘Dios Nunca Muere,’ which means ‘God never dies,’” she said. It’s also Oaxaca’s state song. “We played it when it was Florecita’s funeral and every time somebody passes away,” she said.

Martinez said she’s now “comfortable” with the idea of death. “There’s a tie between death and religion,” she said, even though she doesn’t practice any particular religion. “But I believe that there is an afterlife, because I don’t think I’m comfortable with thinking that I will never see her again. That would break my heart.”

Her family, she said, is also not religious. They are, however, superstitious, and believe Florecita is always with them, even outside of Día de los Muertos.

“I don’t ever want her name and who she was to ever be lost,” Martinez said.

Navigating identity and relationships

For Ali Vallarta, host of the daily City Cast Salt Lake podcast, creating her ofrenda for Dia de los Muertos is a way to tell people she still loves them. Celebrating the holiday is also a way of honoring her fa, who died last year.

Vallarta grew up with a single Canadian mom in Sarasota, Florida, but didn’t grow up celebrating Día de los Muertos. She identifies as mixed and Latina, because her father was from Chapala and she began creating an ofrenda in 2018.

Celebrating Día de los Muertos is also a way to “reconcile spiritually” with her father, Vallarta said. Their relationship, she said, was fraught at times.

Vallarta said her father was “a real force” who had a big presence at 6-foot-3, with big shoulders and a booming voice. Even with multiple rounds of chemotherapy treatment for cirrhosis, he kept his dark, curly hair.

“He had no choice but to take up a lot of space,” Vallarta said. “It was in his physicality, and also in his personality. He was vibrant and extremely charming and charismatic. He could be so kind and generous.”

That, Vallarta added, was her father on his best days. On his worst, he was someone who struggled with addiction, anger and generational trauma.

“My relationship with Dia de los Muertos started to take its own form when I started to think about death, his passing and preparing for that,” Vallarta said. It’s something, she pointed out, that isn’t exclusive to the Mexican holiday.

“Most rituals that are embraced globally, like altars or ofrendas, are naturally occurring. We all make them, whether we mean to or not,” she said.

Everyone has spaces in their homes where they gather photos and memories, Vallarta said, whether or not you think of it as an “official” altar. “It’s kind of a naturally occurring phenomenon,” she said. “We do it as a way of conjuring fond memories and figuring out how to give ourselves closure.”

Vallarta said the process of putting together her ofrenda is different every year, which is reflective of how grief is ever-evolving.

“It’s really important to me that my relationship with death feels like my own,” she said. “That it feels like something that’s held by me, not by outside forces, not by some person I’ve never met.” (Living in Salt Lake City, she said, has made her more aware of how “justice, death and the afterlife are often leveraged by religious institutions as a means of oppressing or shaming people during their life on Earth.”)

Vallarta said she finds it “liberating” to get to decide when she wants to invite people into her life that have left this Earth. “There are a lot of children all over this world that have complicated, if not terrible, relationships with their parents or family members,” she said.

So, there’s something special, she said, about deciding when she wants to invite her dad in.

When it comes to putting her ofrenda together, Vallarta said she always misses the time for marigolds, so she chooses whatever flowers she “vibes with” in the moment. On her ofrenda, she puts some of her dad’s favorite foods and things he liked to drink.

She said she knows some people also use other people’s photos, like that of Bernardo Palacio-Carbajal, who was killed by Salt Lake City police in 2020. (His portrait is one of many victims of police violence painted on the building in the Fleet Block, at 300 West and 800 South in Salt Lake City.)

“My ofrenda is a 10th generation ofrenda,” she said. ‘It’s all mixed up, just like me. There are pieces of my ancestry from all over.”

“Latinidad in the United States can be complicated,” she added. “There are a lot of ways this country doesn’t make Latinos feel safe or protected.” When you live in a place like that, Vallarta says it’s hard to find relaxation, which is at the core of these rituals.

“We’re all just trying to be good ancestors and have as much fun as possible before we die,” she said.

“I think Dia de los Muertos allows us to do that. That’s really special and we deserve that.”

Life and legacy after death

Marisela Garcia said she still remembers the final days of October while growing up in San Andres Totoltepec, Mexico, quite vividly. Her mother, Silvia, would light incense and place water, salt and sugar to purify the space ahead of the Day of the Dead.

Though the holiday is ingrained in her culture, Garcia’s mind would flood with questions with every ofrenda. “If they already died,” she asked, “why do people put so much effort in preparing these things with such love and dedication?”

Her mother would patiently explain every step of the ritual, and with her new understanding came appreciation of this ancestral tradition. But, it wasn’t until she became a mother, and also experienced grief first-hand, that she saw beyond the reminiscence of past generations.

When her mom died in 2020, she said there was more pain added to the preparation, but also hope for her soul.

“It’s very hard to go through a loss, but we know that if we remember [our loved ones] at least in these moments,” she said in Spanish, “they will always be present in our hearts and minds.”

For Garcia, people’s paths don’t end with death. On the other side, there’s another mission for them, she said. She makes an effort not to cry and suffer for her ancestors’ deaths, because their time together is not done yet.

“We also need to transcend pain. It is painful because you’ll never see them again, they won’t be among us,” she said, “but they keep on living through us.”

Garcia brought two of her daughters to the Wasatch Community Gardens’ Grateful Tomato Garden, where some lots are simulating graves in an Artes de Mexico event. Utahns of Mexican heritage decorated the open spaces with catrinas, colorful banners and Mexican snacks.

Garcia’s mom used to burn incense and draw a path to their home in Mexico with marigold flower petals, and she’s passing on these steps to her Utah-born daughters. It’s a long way from home to the community garden, but she is certain her family members who died will find their way to their tribute.

“You don’t realize its meaning until you live it, until you become a parent and until we have to give back what we learned to our children so this never ends,” Garcia said, “because this is a cultural teaching that’s part of us.”

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