Ritual of Gratitude

Published November 1st, 2024 at 1:00 pm

Chances are most people in Albuquerque have seen sugar skulls adorning the walls of a building or restaurant or have encountered images of women with skeleton paint on their face or body. They may even recognize the traditional Mexican imagery, but they might not fully understand their complex spiritual meanings. 

 “It’s like a spiritual billboard for your ancestors,”  Xavier Avila, project director of Albuquerque’s annual Muertos y Marigolds celebration says. “This really beautiful flower that’s sort of rare in nature and doesn’t smell very good, so the dead will connect with it.”

Avila has been project director of Muertos y Marigolds for the past three years and has been on the committee since 2011. This year’s celebration at Rio Bravo Park in the South Valley marks the 32nd anniversary of the event. He says the celebration is about showing gratitude and reverence for the dead, especially lost loved ones who have guided us through difficult journeys when they were still alive.

“We spend all year praying to our ancestors and asking them for help and for advice,” Avila says. “But on Dia de Los Muertos, we can give back and they can come and join us and we can celebrate them and thank them for all of their prayers and blessings.”

Avila says that there are many reasons why the marigolds might be used in ceremonies honoring the dead. The Aztecs were known for their large flower gardens and were able to cultivate Santa Maria marigolds — which have fewer petals — by preventing cross-pollinating, and the same flowers have been mixed with herbs and used in smoking rituals for centuries. In many cultures, the marigolds symbolize the cycle of life and death.

Avila says many believe that warriors and children who died in childbirth are reincarnated as hummingbirds and butterflies, and since those pollinators are attracted to flowers, the marigolds in the Dia de los Muertos celebrations are meant to attract the dead.

“Marigolds today are used almost the way Catholics would use farolitos or luminarias for Christmas: a way to guide souls,” he says. “They’re so beautiful and something about having them around is really levitating. It’s comforting to have them around, but they don’t smell good.”

Avila says he is a bit selective these days when it comes to doing interviews about the event, partly because he wants to keep the event from getting too big, or becoming confused with a holiday-like celebration.

“The primary difference between this year and and the previous decades is that we aren’t doing a parade on the street,” he says. “We’re becoming concerned that we were turning the event into something that we didn’t want it to be, and it was becoming sort of sensational and it was becoming too popular.”

Avila says it’s important for participants to be respectful in the ways they choose to participate. He says El Dia de los Muertos is very different from Halloween, and shouldn’t be celebrated in the same way. For example, Avila says it is not appropriate to dress up on Halloween as a sugar skull or Calavera Catrina — the skeletal-faced woman who is one of the most iconic symbols of Dia de los Muertos — and vice versa; it isn’t appropriate to wear a Halloween costume to a Dia de Los Muertos celebration. 

Avila says he and other organizers want their celebration to remain authentic and separate from other autumnal rituals revering the dead. That is not to say that the South Valley Marigold Procession won’t involve art, food, music, and dance.

Fernando Ortega is a community member who leads local dance group Circulo Solar Ollin Xochipilli who will be performing at the event.  Originally from Mexico City, Ortega says the Dia de los Muertos holiday has roots that predate Spanish colonization. 

“This is coming from way, way, way before the Europeans came to this land. And I wanna say ‘this land’ and not just the United States or Mexico,” he says. “Canada, Alaska to Argentina, Peru, all Latino America before they came. And many of these old cultures were already doing that celebration, that ceremony.”

He says just as enchiladas are made differently in New Mexico than they are in Mexico City, Oaxaca or Chihuahua, Dia de los Muertos is celebrated differently in different places, especially on different sides of the border. 

“The [Albuquerque] Dia de los Muertos celebration is doing essentially what the enchiladas are doing: adding the particularly special local detail or component,” he says.

Avila says Muertos y Marigolds is organized by community members and sponsored by Bernalillo County. The event is MC’d by local poet, professor of Chicano Studies, and 2021 Rudolfo Anaya Fellowship recipient Mario Montoya and the official 2024 Muertos y Marigolds graphic which reads, “La cholla knows where water’s found: dejar en paz nuestra tierra ancestral” was created by contest winner Lillian Estes. In addition to dance, poetry and art, the event will have a food truck and various vendors and mutual aid groups tabling the event.

“This time of year, we get to be proud of our ancestors,” Avila says. “Dia de los Muertos is not just a celebration of the lives of our ancestors, but also a ritual of gratitude.”