Day of the dead in Mexico is celebration for the 5 senses

People hold candles over a tomb decorated with flowers at a cemetery in Atzompa, Mexico, late on Oct 31, 2023. [AP Photo]

"It's like sculpting" a work of art, said Torres, who still does the whole process by hand, eschewing stencils or laser cutters.

Some people connect Torres' art to the sheets of amate tree bark used by pre-Hispanic communities as paper, though the Indigenous precursor was not dyed. Others say the careful cuttings originated in China and were brought to Mexico by the Spaniards.

Either way, researchers agree that it symbolizes the union between life and death. Perhaps for that reason, the scenes that Torres represents are skulls or skeletons dancing or eating.

Music over the tombs

While some older Mexicans remember hearing only the murmur of prayers characterizing the Day of the Dead, today mariachi music can be heard over the decorated tombs of many cemeteries.

Jose Garcia, a 60-year-old shoe shiner from San Antonio Pueblo Nuevo, a township 140 kilometers west of Mexico City, said people with money would bring a group of musicians to the cemetery to toast with their departed loved ones and listen to their favorite songs.

But, he added, one doesn't have to have money to enjoy the music. Some people just bring "their recordings or their horns," he said.

Photos of the departed

Day of the Dead is one of Mexico's great visual spectacles - and a celebration of cultural syncretism. All the while, its fundamental purpose is to remember those who have died so their souls don't disappear forever.

Photos of the departed loved ones take the most important spot on the altar. Colors fill everything. The bright orange of the cempasuchil, the black of the underworld, the purple of the Catholic faith, red for warriors and white for children.

Remembrance is not only individual, but collective.

Some more political altars in the country's main public university, the National Autonomous University of Mexico, remembered murdered students and the Palestinian dead in the Israel-Hamas war. Elsewhere remembrance is institutional, like the offering in the capital's Zocalo in honor of the revolutionary Pancho Villa on the centenary of his death.

Beyond the visual spectacle, the important thing is to "get into" the offering, to connect with the past and go beyond the senses, insisted Ramirez.

"It's not something they explain to you," he said. "From the moment you are born and experience the celebration, it's in your DNA."