preview

Dia De Los Muertios Essay

Decent Essays

Every culture has its own rituals and traditions. In North America, they celebrate Halloween where they wear costumes to scare people, and in Central America, especially in Mexico, they celebrate The Day of the Dead. According to Encyclopedia of Food and Culture, “In Mexico, the festival Dia de los Muertos embodies the greatest expression of both popular Catholicism and the national cuisine” (1:505). The long-established practice of Mesoamerica’s Todos Santos is far more involved than Catholicism's traditional observance of the feast. Important practices were incorporated in outlying towns, mestizos, where various cultural backgrounds mingle. These changes to orthodox religious rituals came from many different socioeconomic influences that …show more content…

According to Stanley Brandes in the Cambridge journals titled Ritual Power: sugar, colonialism, and Death: On the origins of Mexico’s Day of the Dead, he wrote, “Some Mexicans claim that the souls of the departed watch over their living relatives during these few days” (270). He continues, “Negligent family members await punishment, whether on earth or in the afterlife” (Brandes 299). The festivity's excitement and extravagance confuses many foreigners who have never exalted the dead in such a way. To their unaccustomed eyes such a celebration often appears to be grotesque or even frightening. To Mexicans and other Latins who have have been raised in a culture that participates in Todos Santos, it is a glorification of life; for those who have already died and the others who will someday join them (Carrasco 320). Día de los Muertos, The Day of The Dead, is a creative and lavish celebration no matter where it is performed. Because of the certainty of death for everyone, the revelers of the dead allow themselves to be solemn and joyous. Rather than fear death, they embrace it as part of life (Carrasco 320). Its observance joins pre-Columbian culture with that of Europeans in a wholly unique and lively celebration of life that chides us all with the adage, El hombre encuentra la habilidad para todo menos para la muerte, meaning 'Humans can find a way to deal with anything except death.(Brandes

Get Access