Mexico resumes Day of the Dead celebrations
COVID-19 limited traditions last year
MEXICO CITY — Mexico returned Sunday to mass commemorations of the Day of the Dead, after traditional visits to graveyards were prohibited last year because of the pandemic.
But the one-year hiatus showed how the tradition itself refuses to die: Most families still celebrated with home altars to deceased loved ones, and some sneaked into cemeteries anyway.
Gerardo Tapia Guadarrama on Sunday joined many others at the cemetery as he visited the grave of his father Juan Ignacio Tapia, who died in 2020 of a thrombosis.
Even though cemeteries in
Mexico were closed to visitors last year to avoid spreading the virus, so strong is the tradition that his son still slipped into the cemetery in the eastern Mexico City suburb of Valle de Chalco to visit him.
“Last year it was prohibited, but we found a way,” Tapia Guadarrama said slyly. Much of the graveyard has low walls.
“To live is to remember,” he said. “What they (the dead) most want is a visit from those they were close to in life.”
The holiday begins Oct. 31, remembering those who died in accidents; it continues Nov. 1 to mark those who died in childhood, and then those who died as adults on Nov. 2.
Observances include entire families cleaning and decorating graves, which are covered with orange marigolds. At both cemeteries and at home altars, relatives light candles, put out offerings of the favorite foods and beverages of their deceased relatives.
There was a special altar in downtown Mexico City dedicated to those who died of COVID-19. Relatives were allowed into a fenced-off plaza and offered equipment to print out photos of their loved ones, which they could then pin, along with handwritten, messages on a black wall.
It was a quiet, solemn remembrance in a country where coronavirus deaths touched almost all extended families.
For a country where people usually die surrounded by relatives, COVID-19 was particularly cruel, as loved ones were taken off alone in plastic tents, to die alone in isolation.
Mexico has over 288,000 testconfirmed deaths, but probable coronavirus mortalities as listed on death certificates suggest a toll closer to 440,000, by some counts the fourth-highest in the world.
Tens of thousands in Mexico City gathered along the city’s main boulevard Sunday to watch the parade of dancing skeletons, dancers and floats.