Florida Day of the Dead: A Colorful Celebration of Life (After Loss)

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This past Saturday, the 15th edition of the annual Florida Day of the Dead celebration took place in Fort Lauderdale. Attendees enjoyed traditional folk dancers on the Folklorico Stage in Esplanade Park, ate traditional Mexican food and witnessed the popular Skeleton Processional down the the city’s famed Riverwalk.

Florida Day of the Dead

The processional was considerably smaller than it was when I last attended in 2019 but that was Mother Nature’s fault. Florida Day of the Dead creator and puppeteer Jim Hammond had his Edgewood home and studio damaged back in April of last year when nearly 25 inches of rain(!) fell over a 24 hour period(!) flooding South Florida.

“I couldn’t process how it could go on without having the puppets and sugar skulls made out of papier-mâché,” says Hammond. “There was 14 years of stuff gone. How would we immerse people into this experience without all the paraphernalia?”

He adds, “I was amazed at how many people showed up (in 2023) and still celebrated even though we were missing those pieces. A lot of them showed up with their own puppets. They showed up in costumes. The park was full. The Riverwalk was full. The community needed it.”

Admission is free and it is adult, children and pet friendly. And as you can clearly see from the photographs, there were plenty of happy (and creepy!) faces at this year’s Florida Day of the Dead. As you scroll, I’ve kindly provided a bit of history (and controversy!) about the Day of the Dead. Enjoy…

The ritual of Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) dates back to the era of the Aztecs in Mexico. According to scholars, when the Spaniards arrived in the New World, they encountered the Aztecs performing pagan rituals, wearing skull masks and dancing to honor the goddess Mictecacihuatl, the Lady of the Dead.

The Aztecs believed the dead were not gone. Instead they had an intimate relationship with the living, and offerings were made to maintain a reciprocal relationship.

The Spaniards purposefully attempted to integrate the local traditions into Catholicism, after unsuccessfully trying to eradicate the festivities. They decided to move and shorten the month-long celebration from August to November 1 and November 2 (All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day), to coincide with the Catholic holidays.

The Aztecs used to offer water and food to the deceased to help them on their journey to the land of the dead. Now, Mexican families set up beautifully decorated altars (“ofrendas” in Spanish) in their homes consisting of the loved one’s favorite food and drink items, flowers, bread, and other things that celebrate the deceased person’s life.

Marigolds are also used during Día de los Muertos celebrations by being placed on the altars and on the burial sites. The Marigold flower is thought to guide the spirits back with their intense color and pungent smell.

My alter ego, Dan Perez Films, traveled to Guatemala back in 2016 and witnessed a Día de los Muertos ceremony at a public cemetery in Sumpango. Check out the video HERE

Skulls are a huge part of the holiday. Skulls were used during rituals in the Aztec era and passed on as trophies during battles. Today, small decorated sugar skulls (“calaveras” in Spanish) are placed on the altars. There is nothing grim about these skulls. They are decorated with colorful edible paint, glitter, beads, and sport huge smiles.

Then there’s the food. Pan de Muertos, or day of the dead bread, is an essential part of the festivities and is also placed on the altars. Mole, tamales, pozole, and sopa azteca are prepared by families with the recipes being passed on from generation to generation.

Day of the Dead has become a national symbol in recent decades and it is taught in the Mexico’s school system asserting a native origin. In 2008, the tradition was inscribed in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO.

However, views differ on whether the festivity has indigenous pre-Hispanic roots, whether it is a more modern adaptation of an existing European tradition, or a combination of beliefs.

Critics of the Native American origin claim that even though pre-Columbian Mexico had traditions that honored the dead, current depictions of the festivity have more in common with European traditions of Danse macabre and their allegories of life and death personified in the human skeleton to remind of the ephemeral nature of life.

Historian Elsa Malvido, researcher for the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) argues that the tradition can be fully traced to Medieval Europe. She highlights the existence of similar traditions on the same day, not just in Spain, but in the rest of Catholic Southern Europe and Latin America such as altars for the dead, sweets in the shape of skulls and bread in the shape of bones.

Malvido’s theory is that the celebration of the deceased saints, of Christian origin, was reworked by post-revolutionary intellectuals during the presidency of the left-leaning, anti-clericalism government of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) to encourage Mexican nationalism through an “Aztec” identity.

“I am not particularly interested in demystifying a false idea about Mexicans and their pathological love of death”, wrote Malvido (who died in 2011). “The key is to put the changes in funeral customs in their proper place, with serious documentary bases, in order to better understand why we have one or another attitude and not another; to know that the conception of death is the product of the manipulative imposition that the power groups have on our life cycle, and to be aware that rituals, like us, are perishable and modifiable, because otherwise anthropology and history would have nothing to do.”

I’m guessing she would have despised Disney’s “Coco”.

In any case people all over the world happily celebrate and enjoy Día de los Muertos. What matters most is what it means to those who take part in it. That it reunites the living with the dead; and exchanges mourning for celebration.