How the commercialization of Día de Muertos impacts Indigenous communities

What does the growth of tourism and commercialization around Día de los Muertos mean for Santiago Matatlán and how it celebrates the holiday?

Todos Santos (also known as Día de Muerto or Día de Todos los Muertos), is my favorite tradition. I’m proud to integrate Indigenous elements in my practice today, even when I’m far away from my motherland. Increasingly, I also feel dread. 

In recent years, Oaxaca has been named as a top travel destination, especially for Día de Muertos. These trends have two components that are unexamined. First, traveling is overlooked as a privilege, especially for those whose bodies have never been policed or controlled by institutions. This type of privilege exempts people from reflection and contextualization. They don’t need to reflect on how their actions can lead to unintended consequences and they don’t need to understand the social and historical context of local communities in order to have access to those cultures. Second, and in parallel, there’s the tourism economy. The purpose in this economy is to uphold classism and sell experience for profit, not to create a culture of appreciation and connection.

The ethnocentric and individualist culture in the U.S. has commercialized every holiday, which makes it challenging for individuals to contextualize or understand the deeper meaning of other’s traditions. That’s why this piece aims to visibilize the labor and Indigenous practices that go into creating this special celebration.

Because while Todos Santos will remain my favorite celebration, there is an increasing dread that this intimate and sacred family and community affair will become just another day of work for less economically stable communities. I am concerned that the increased commercialization will weaken the principles of this tradition. So here’s a glimpse of how I, someone of this culture, experiences and understands Día de Muertos differently.

Last year, I was in my pueblo of Santiago Matatlan in Oaxaca for Todos Santos. I was excited to go to the panteón and re-experience the closeness to our loved ones who transitioned. But my parents informed me that the cemetery was closed due to the pandemic. They were only open a couple hours in the morning and no children or elders were allowed, which meant my son wouldn’t be allowed in. 

My heart sank upon learning this. The last time I fully experienced Todos Santos was so long ago that I don’t have any memories. Those memories are buried somewhere between ages 4.5 months and 5 years and I haven’t been able to access them to relive and then grieve them. Yes, grief. Grief because when things change, they’re rarely ever the same and not expecting or mentally preparing for drastic changes can make grief a much lengthier process.

I shared my sentiments with my mom. Ironically, she felt relieved that we wouldn’t have to go to the cemetery. She said that she was tired and that the cemetery practice is exhausting, and that the other preparations are already a lot of work. 

She’s right. It was a commitment to continue our traditions. It took us days, almost a week, to do all the preparation. Our practices are involved. Here are just a few examples:

Chocolate: I toasted the cacao then peeled each seed individually, took it to the molino, molded them, and let dry. We make chocolate from scratch for out altar and our visitors.

Flowers: We went to the campo to harvest our flowers. A truck load of three different flowers: cempasúchil del campo (heirloom marigolds, the emblematic Día de Muertos flower), and two types of white flowers that my dad and tío know the names of, but only in Zapoteco. Those white flowers only bloom around Todos Santos. We did end up buying some cempasúchil (marigolds) and other flowers, but most came from our labor of picking them ourselves. 

Bread: We bought our pan de muerto from my parents’ compadres and from a señora that still makes her breads by hand and bakes them in a wood fire oven. We only buy from people in our pueblo, because as my parents say, “hay que apoyar a nuestros paisanos.” (Let’s support our fellow townspeople). 

Fruits and nuts: My parents have a couple pomegranate trees, other neighbors and family have different fruit trees. Amongst ourselves, we trade to have variety. And we also went to the Tlacolula market on Sunday where we’re certain we’ll find heirloom fruits from surrounding pueblos. We don’t have nut trees, so we purchase them at the mercado too. 

Food: My mom’s exhaustion is real because we negotiated on the food. We agreed to make a small amount of higaditos–a fluffy egg and chicken soup dish traditionally eaten for breakfast at large celebrations in Valles Centrales (Central Valley of Oaxaca)–one of my favorites!

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After all the harvesting, shopping, and preparing, we began our practice on November 1st. Actually, some pueblos start on October 30th, but my family didn’t start our ofrenda visits until the 1st. 

In many Indigenous pueblos in Valles Centrales (Central Valley region), we also take ofrendas to our families, neighbors, comadres/compadres, and those who’ve had a family member transition out of the physical realm within the last year. The way we practice ofrendas in our pueblos is something I’ve never seen in the U.S. among non-Oaxacans or Latinx people. At least not yet. 

So when I say that the pueblo I come from has its own culture, I really mean it. It’s a different worldview, different values, and practices. There’s no scheduling visits, no calendar invites or texts to confirm; we trust in the process, in the most effortless way. As someone who has some type A tendencies–I was raised in the US after all–I felt a bit confused but down to go with the flow. 

My mom organized us. She sent me and my dad to do the visits the first half of the day while she stayed home and received visitors. 

Each visit goes like this: 

We arrive and go straight to the room with the altar. In our pueblo, the room with the altar is the family/community space. Every home has one. 

The ofrenda is placed on the floor: a bed of flowers, pad de muerto (Oaxaca has incredible pan de muerto diversity), fruits and nuts from the fall harvest, chocolate, a veladora, and since we are in the world capital of mezcal, a bottle of mezcal! We kneel, pray and show our respects to all the elements on the altar. 

We give the hosting family a bucket of the food we made. They take it and ask us to take a seat at their dining table, sometimes joining others who are also there to drop off their ofrenda. 

They serve us mezcal, just enough for a swig. Anyone reading this and feeling appalled, yes to the besos de mezcal and we also take swigs. It’s our culture and we get to decide how we drink.

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Then the hosting family brings out a plate with a small cup of hot chocolate and a few pieces of pan de muerto. Our food portions are plentiful. They always are because they’re meant to be shared with our other family members who couldn’t join us for the visit. After the chocolate, we get a plate of food. Whatever we don’t finish, we pack in the same container we brought our food in. Zero waste is an Indigenous practice, after all.  

We do this almost all day, taking short breaks in between visits. I don’t remember how many ofrenda visits we made that first day, but I was exhausted, full, and a little tipsy by the end of the first day.

Back home, relatives also visited and placed their ofrendas in our altar room. One of our neighbors lost a family member a month earlier so my parents spent some time with them in the evening. My tia also lost her husband so we also went and spent time with them on the 2nd. 

We didn’t stay up too late that first night, though traditionally, we do.

At around 11pm on the 1st, I found it hard to sleep because there was banda that I could hear playing. It was a large gathering. Odd given that there was a mandate by the pueblo to not have large gatherings. I asked my parents about it the next day, and they (and my tio) confirmed that it was a festivity with tourists. Social media also confirmed this.

I thought that given the pandemic I wouldn’t see tourists, but I reminded myself that my pueblo is the nominal world capital of mezcal, so the tourists are definitely there.

I get it. How could people not want to experience it for themselves. Especially when movies like Coco, travel magazines and blogs, and social media market it as a vibrant spiritual experience. It’s an invitation to understand death differently. But what most tourists don’t understand is that the amount of labor and work that goes into creating these experiences for them consequently pushes the people at the center of the culture to the sidelines. 

That’s why I feel grief around these sacred days. It puts many Indigenous pueblo people in a position to choose between servicing tourists or fully immersing in our ancestral traditions. For native people and locals, tourism season is synonymous with work, and it’s turning our homelands and places of worship, celebration, and grief into places of performance. A performance for tourists.

Some people welcome and serve tourists of necessity, others do it for the foreigner/white access to proximity, some do it for greed, and sometimes a mix of these or other reasons not listed. The bottom line is that the sanctity of these days is not centered, nor is it being transferred. Because if people really understood the teachings of Día de Muertos, then I would expect a culture that values transitions like birth and death. But in the U.S, birth and death are a big business. And if people actually appreciated the culture, they would appreciate the people. And throughout Turtle Island (North, Central, and South America), Indigenous people and our ways of life continue to be threatened. 

But I still dream of a future where Oaxaca’s cultural wealth and economic wellbeing reflect each other. A future where we have agency, where we get to decide when we want visitors in our homes, our communities, and our lands.