Halloween Creeps In Where Local Tradition Ruled the Living and Dead

MEXICO CITY — It was just a few days before the annual celebration of Day of the Dead, when Mexicans decorate altars to their departed ancestors, and the Sonora Market was buzzing.

But in this always riotous scene, something was askew. Not all the stalls were hawking the traditional Day of the Dead regalia, things like giant papier-mâché skeletons, pink-and-purple tissue paper cutouts and little ceramic skulls.

Some stalls offered up grinning plastic jack-o’-lanterns jammed into enormous plastic bags. Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” throbbed from more than one, and everywhere, it seemed, there were buckets filled with child-size witches’ brooms and rubber masks oozing blood.

As Day of the Dead approaches on Sunday, it is hard to tell what Mexicans are celebrating. Is it reverence for the relatives who have passed on, their sepia photos to be placed on home altars sprinkled with yellow marigold petals and framed by their favorite food? Or is it Halloween, imported with a recorded witch’s cackle and puffy pumpkin costumes?

“Our tradition is Day of the Dead; it’s not Halloween,” Montserrat Hernández, 27, said firmly. Ms. Hernández, who makes and sells cut paper, believes there is a backlash against Halloween. “Now people are asking more for Day of the Dead. We are going back to it.”

Not so, said Daniela Torres, 21, tending a nearby stall. “The kids follow Halloween more,” she said, bemoaning low sales of her paper decorations. “Maybe they prefer to dress up and dance than set up an altar.”

Many Mexicans straddle the line, indiscriminately blending elements of Halloween into their Day of the Dead celebrations, creating a fluid mix of tradition that is as old as the holiday itself.

Scholars disagree on the origins of Day of the Dead. Some say it lies in pre-Columbian commemorations that were later overlaid with elements of Roman Catholicism. Others have it originating with the Roman Catholic Church and then being reshaped by indigenous practice and belief.

“My take is that there is a characteristically Mexican development,” said Claudio Lomnitz, an anthropologist at Columbia University. Under the religious syncretism that emerged from the Spanish Conquest, “it is a new process that is unleashed.”

Dr. Lomnitz traces the celebration to All Souls’ Day, when the living pray for the dead to shorten their time in purgatory and hasten their ascent to heaven. “The whole thing is a kind of reciprocity between the living and the dead,” he said.

In this view, 16th-century Mexico quickly embraced the medieval Catholic festival. The Franciscan missionary known as Friar Motolinía described how “almost all the Indian villages give many offerings for their deceased; some offer maize, others cloth, others food, bread and hens, and in place of wine they give cacao.”

Many of the traditions that exist today — the marigolds, the special prayers for dead children on Nov. 1, the masked dances — have deep indigenous roots.

Halloween, which originally celebrated the eve of All Saints’ Day on Nov. 1, has its own ancient origin, from a Celtic festival when the spirits of the dead were believed to be able to mingle with the living.

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By the 1920s, Mexican modernists — led by the muralist Diego Rivera — seeking to create a new identity out of the carnage of the Mexican Revolution adopted Day of the Dead as a symbol of the nation’s racial and cultural mix and its popular culture.

“Mexico developed, over the centuries, a way of not marginalizing death, of not making death a taboo subject,” Dr. Lomnitz said.

In the 1970s, the Day of the Dead celebration was reinvigorated, as governments and public institutions turned it into a communal spectacle, its tourist potential grew, schools built bigger altars and corporations joined in. There may even have been a nationalist backlash to Halloween, which had begun to creep in.

At home, families prepare altars designed to attract the spirits of the dead with incense, brightly colored decorations, flowers and food, said Andrés Medina Hernández, an anthropologist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

“The whole family gets together, the living and the dead,” he said.

But each social group reshapes the holiday in its own way, adding new influences, he said.

Urban Mexicans incorporate some features of Halloween while rural families emphasize preparing food to share with relatives at home or in a celebration at the cemetery.

That constant flux is on display in Tepito, the rough neighborhood in Mexico City’s ancient core. Eliott Miranda, 43, sells Halloween costumes along with his regular nutritional supplements.

“Dressing up for Halloween came back with people who went to the United States,” he said. “It’s just joking around.”

The first of his costumes to sell out is La Catrina, an elegant skeleton figure clothed in a purple and black dress and hat that was created by the 19th-century illustrator José Guadalupe Posada and has become emblematic of Day of the Dead.

“Day of the Dead is not lost at all,” Mr. Miranda said.

The howling ghosts and clattering skeletons on Gisela González’s stand are made in China, but they are all for Day of the Dead altars.

“We’re adapting; we’re not losing anything,” she said. Instead, “it’s been improving because they keep bringing new things.”

Francisca Reyes Razo, 70, views the festival’s shifting character with dismay. The working families who send their children to her day care center in Tepito are forgetting their roots, she fears.

“We do an altar here so the children can learn,” Ms. Reyes said. “The dead have their day to be celebrated. They are ahead of us on the path. But we’re all going there.”

But that is not what is on the minds of her 3- and 4-year-old charges. Many are planning to dress up. One of them, Milton, jumps when he is asked what his disguise is. “Captain America,” he shouts.