Paper short abstract:

The Meso-American Day of the Dead (November 2) has become increasingly popular in California. Celebrations include altar displays, educational events, and processions, using spaces ranging from city streets and parks to college campuses and museums to create an ephemeral, yet embodied play-world.

Paper long abstract:

In the greater San Francisco Bay Area of northern California, the Meso-American Day of the Dead (el Día de los Muertos, November 2) has become increasingly popular. In practice sometimes spanning October 31 to November 2, this festival has partially fused with the American Halloween (October 31), a secular holiday marked by costumed revelry and candy-gathering. Halloween emphasizes the horrific and grotesque rather than honoring the dead, but shares with the Day of the Dead a playful, carnivalesque spirit in which humor, inversions, parody and costumed role-play permit participants to tread (or even reset) the boundaries between fear and laughter, transgression and respect, the sacred and the profane.

The Day of the Dead, which emphasizes community participation and inclusivity, is a multivocal festival, and as such there are multiple uses of (and claims upon) public spaces in evidence. In addition to private family ofrendas (offerings), the Day of the Dead is celebrated with public altar exhibits, child-friendly educational events, lecture-demonstrations of traditional crafts, and theatrical processions. These constitute temporary 'sacred spaces' where public areas ranging from city streets and parks to college campuses and museums are appropriated to create an liminal play-world which is ephemeral, yet embodied. Examination of these uses of indoor and outdoor spaces reveals the ways in which this calendar-custom complex facilitates symbolic integration of the private and public, individual and collective, culturally-specific and universal.