Dear White People/Queridos Gringos: You Want Our Culture But You Don’t Want Us – Stop Colonizing The Day Of The Dead
Posted: October 31, 2014 Filed under: Uncategorized 11 CommentsOriginal photo Hipsters de los Muertos by Erik Estrada from an LA Weekly Article on Disney’s attempt to own The Day Of The Dead
Dear White People (or should I say Queridos Gringos/Gabachos),
Let me begin by saying it is completely natural that you would find yourself attracted to The Day of The Dead. This indigenous holiday from Mexico celebrates the loving connection between the living and our departed loved ones that is so deeply missing in Western culture. Who wouldn’t feel moved by intricately and lovingly built altars, beautifully painted skull faces, waterfalls of marigold flowers, fragrant sweet breads and delicious meals for those whom we miss sharing our earthly lives. I understand. Many cultures from around the world celebrate these things, and many of them at this time of year. As a woman whose Latin@ heritage is Puerto Rican, I have grown up in California, seeing this ritual all my life and feeling the ancestral kinship to this reverent, prayerful honoring of the departed.
Let me continue by saying that it is completely natural that you would want to participate in celebrating The Day of The Dead. You, like all human beings, have lineage, ancestors, departed family members. You have skulls under the skin of your own faces, bones beneath your flesh. Like all mortals, you seek ways to understand death, to befriend it, and celebrate it in the context of celebrating life and love.
I understand.
And in the tradition of indigenous peoples, Chican@ and Mexican-American communities have not told you not to come, not to join, not to celebrate your dead alongside them. In the tradition of indigenous peoples and of ceremony, you, in your own grief and missing your loved ones have not been turned away. You arrived at the Dia De Los Muertos ceremony shipwrecked, a refugee from a culture that suppresses grief, hides death, banishes it, celebrates it only in the most morbid ways—horror movies, violent television—death is dehumanized, without loving connection, without ceremony. You arrived at El Dia De Los Muertos like a Pilgrim, starving, unequal to survival in the land of grief, and the indigenous ceremonies fed you and took you in and revived you and made a place for you at the table.
And what have you done?
Like the Pilgrims, you have begun to take over, to gentrify and colonize this holiday for yourselves. I was shocked this year to find Day of the Dead events in my native Oakland Bay Area not only that were not organized by Chican@s or Mexican@s or Latin@s, but events with zero Latin@ artists participating, involved, consulted, paid, recognized, acknowledged, prayed with.
Certain announcements of some of this year’s celebrations conjured visions of hipsters drinking special holiday microbrews and listening to live music by white bands and eating white food in calavera facepaint and broken trails of marigolds. Don’t bother to build an altar because your celebration is an altar of death, a ceremony of killing culture by appropriation. Do you really not know how to sit at the table? To say thank you? To be a gracious guest?
This year, as midterm elections near and “immigration reform” gets bandied about on the lips of politicians, urban young white voters will wear skull faces and watch puppets with dancing skeleton bones, and party and drink and celebrate. But those same revelers will not think for a single second of deaths of Latin@s trying to cross a militarized border to escape from the deaths caused by NAFTA and CAFTA and US foreign policy and drug policies and dirty wars in Mexico and Central America. Amidst the celebration, there will be no thought for femicide in Juarez, for murdered and missing Indigenous women in North America. As they drink and dance in white-organized and dominated Dia De Los Muertos celebrations without a thought for us, except perhaps the cleaning or custodial staff that will clean up after them, we Latin@s learn what we learned in 1492 about the invaders: you want the golden treasures of our culture, but you don’t want us. Since then, white people have shown that they don’t value indigenous life, but are fascinated by indigenous spirituality.
Not all white people feel this way. Thank you to those of you who speak up against this. Thank you to all who boycott these events, support Latin@/Chican@/Mexican@-led events, hire our community’s artists, and hold the tradition with reverence. For those of you who haven’t been doing so, it’s not too late to start. Challenge white people who attempt to appropriate. Boycott their events and be noisy about it. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to participate in this deeply human holiday, there’s something wrong with wanting to colonize.
And the urge to colonization is born when your own land and resources have been taken over by the greedy and your cultures have been bankrupted. Halloween has a rich history as an indigenous European holiday that celebrated many of the same themes as Day of the Dead, but you have let it be taken over by Wal-Mart. Now it’s about plastic decorations and cheap polyester costumes and young women having permission to wear sexy clothes without being slut-shamed and kids bingeing on candy. November first finds piles of plastic and synthetic junk headed to the landfill to litter the earth. You have abandoned Halloween, left it laying in the street like a trampled fright wig from the dollar store. Take back your holiday. Take back your own indigenous culture. Fight to reclaim your own spirituality.
Please. Stop colonizing ours.
Thank you for your very well articulated statement of historical background and reflections…
thank you for this article. i now see this occasion in a different light, thanks to you and your honesty and openness
I wish this headline was a little different. Peoples ignorance and privilege blinds them to the way their actions offend others and this needs to be flagged and addressed. But by saying “you” don’t want “us” gives folks an easy out- if confronted they just say “Yes we do! I support immigration reform” or some such thing. This well written and insightful piece flags a critical issue to take into consideration when celebrating a holiday that is not ones own. And I think that systemicly encoded race politics will not be corrected by white people deciding that it is ‘colonizing’ to have a Day of the Dead party and just getting drunk without face paint instead. I, for one, will be at the Day of the Dead in San Francisco, as I have been for 27 years, and this year we will be mourning the slow decimation of a vibrant Latino community in the hands of real estate speculators. There will be an alter for “Lost San Francisco”. And there will be many people there who are instrumental in the decimation of these communities just because they rented an apartment at market rate. I wonder how we can reach people and ask them to help, not just tell them to go re animate their own murdered traditions? We have an election this week too. Maybe we can get enough voters engaged at Day of the Dead for Prop G to make it pass? I am a descendant of Europeans whose rich pagan culture was systematically wiped out in the crusades. And I will be attending the Day of the Dead fully aware of the same system being perpetrated today via deaths on the border as well as the Latino man recently shot by the SFPD and many other race related deaths in and around San Francisco. I will honor our beloved dead and our beloved city with reverence. I look forward to it. I have friends who left the SF celebration because it was too much of a party. My answer is to try to keep it reverent. I hope it goes well! We are swimming against a strong tide here. Wish us luck.
Beautifully sharp critique of what has happened to Dia de Los Muertos. Thank you for your graceful understanding of why non-latino people truly want to attend the ceremony, looking for public spirituality and a place to share grief and joy. I was touched that you saw the connection with the death of All Hallows Eve and the rise of walmart’s Halloween — something I have talked and taught about for a long time. You remind us, strongly but kindly, that many people are spiritual refugees coming to a house with an open door and should consider how we act in that light.
You call for us to boycott, and that brought up a contradiction I have felt growing for years. I have thought about boycotting because of the gentrification of the Mission makes it feel wrong. Yet it is also, still, for many people a ceremony of collective grief and connection with the ancestors. Do I walk away from collective recognition of our ancestors because of the politics of this time? I am sad when I am surrounded by partiers and the spectacle, but I have had so many powerful moments standing next to a stranger at an altar, looking at the pictures of ancestors that are not “mine”, feeling deeply connected to the stranger next to me, the grieving artist who made the altar, the ancestor in the picture, and the loved ones I have lost. I have done a lot of crying and smiling at the altars that has helped me accept death more. I have prayed deeply for ancestors I never knew. I have been deeply humbled by the wisdom of the cultures that created Dia de Los Muertos. Do we boycott or hold reverence at the ceremony? The ceremony has been gentrified, but do the ancestors want us to go home or to come together in complexity? For all of its contradictions, Dia de los Muertos is one of the only large public ceremonies left in the Bay Area that ties us to our ancestors. Walking away also feels like giving in to the tides of materialism, spiritual degeneration, and community deterioration.
I also hear that your other call is to speak about this. We cannot ride on the tradition of Dia de los Muertos. We have to act to keep indigenous cultures alive. We need to talk with people who participate about the importance of lineage and cultural identity when we syncretize traditions. We have to Reclaim our own indigenous ceremonies. Not just one day a year, but as a way we live. It is a push that I felt. I know some of the organizers of the North Oakland ceremony and I will talk with them.
Thank you for your thoughtful and caring piece.
Thank you for your statements.
Here is another perspective: there are those who need day of the dead.
I am white elementary school teacher who has a nearly white classroom who has hosted a day of the dead celebration for four years now. Every year I see articles like this and I question whether I have the right to borrow these traditions and every year I am thankful that I did.
You are correct. People of every culture experience death. You are also correct that we have a culture that handles death in a damaging way. Is that our fault?
My second week of teaching I was faced with one of the weightiest conversations a teacher can have. I had to sit my class of nineteen first through fourth graders down and tell them that that one of their friends had died that morning.
Before I went in I was told not give them details. Not to dwell on it. To refer students who had too many questions to speak privately with a counselor. Only a few weeks later all the adults were hoping that it had been forgotten.
By the time November rolled around I had a new student in the mix; a five year old who had lost his mother only a year before. At home he wasn’t allowed to ask about her, to talk about her.
Many of our preparations for day of the dead were art projects. Paper mache boxes to honor individuals, paper flowers, decorated skulls. While we worked we talked. I talked, but mostly the students talked. In bits and pieces, blasts of honesty strung between comments about how the art was coming along in the way that children speak. The students talked about people who had died, their own reactions, what they thought about an afterlife, what they had heard, what they weren’t sure about, and what they were sure about.
The students all embraced the holiday as a celebration.
More than one student made an alter for the child who had passed. Two made one for cousins they had lost.
I was able to get a photo of the boy’s mother from another family member. All week he checked in with her and left her presents in her alter box. He brought her crayons that he had used in class, rocks that he found outside, candies that he stole from my desk, toys that he brought from home, and flowers that he picked from roadside. He struggled in school and when he was worn from an activity he would wander back to stare at her picture. When he was done with a drawing and I asked him to turn it in he looked at me as seriously as a five year old can. “I’m going to give it to my mom,” he told me before rolling it up and placing it in the box.
I didn’t regret the holiday that year.
My second year of teaching I had another new student, from Nicaragua. His language skills were poor in his own language let alone English and for a time he struggled to find his place in our small community. When we set up our alter that year he was excited to tell the class how it was different from the way it was done in his country, and how it was the same. When parents came his mother thanked me in earnest and she too told me about the traditions in her culture. I could see how important it was to both of them to see something familiar.
I didn’t regret the celebration that year either.
Fate had it that I moved to older grades and my students with me. As we began our preparations for the third year my students jumped into the activities eagerly, reflecting on past years, remarking on changes to the present. I did less telling of the traditions of the holiday because those who remained from former years were eager to tell the new students what it was about. They were clear and excited to let them know that it was a celebration, a “happy thing,” even though it was about death. One student told me they like it better than Halloween.
When we presented stories of those past to parents I watched a mother as her daughter spoke about their recently passed uncle who was close to the family as she took in a new appreciation for the holiday.
I didn’t regret that year either.
We are celebrating this year’s day of the dead on Monday, but we began our preparations last week. We have another new student in the group of third through eighth graders, a seventh grader who lost his mother very young. When we announced that we would be going to the graveyard to clean it and prepare he requested that we go to a different one, only a little bit further away, so that we could visit where his mother was buried.
Another student in the class had a close family friend in the same graveyard who had passed only that year.
We haven’t finished our celebration yet, but already I know that this activity is again one of the most important things that I do all year.
And I get it. I get the frustration with the hipster parties and the craft beers. Believe it or not that appropriate my childhood as well, even though I am white. It is frustrating. I am sorry. Not everyone relates to it that way though.
For my part, this very white gringo school teacher is going to continue to colonize your holiday because the kids need it. We all do.
I am saddened to read your post. I too want to yell out, I have good reasons to celebrate Dias de los Muertos!! I don’t care where the holiday came from! I lost both my parents and grieve my babies and grieve, STUDENTS that grieve and don’t have voice….but no, that does not make it okay to ‘colonize’ or use another’s culture for my own convenience when I want to because capitalism and greed has killed mine. This thinking is EXACTLY the ignorance and arrogance and whit privilidge being addressed. To go an as you do with a pitty story (and yes, I was glad your students had an outlet) to win over sympathies, just misses the whole point. Start teaching the history of All Hallows’ Eve, or invite indigenous peoples to come into your classroom to share their traditions, or at least teach some culturally sensitive awareness and history with it. In other words, we as white people have responsibility to not just take from other cultures, not when we come from a history of such perpetual systematic epic racial/ethnic bigotry,discriminatory overtaking…it’s just simple denial to say ‘but your tradition is so beautiful, I want it, therefor I’m going to take it, and it’s okay because I think it is beautiful’.
Reblogged this on nochipsnopeace.
Dear oh-so American Latina Lady,
As a gringa currently living in Oaxaca Mexico which can rightfully be called the heart of this holiday I’m both frustrated and bemused by your colonizing the outrage around Dia de Los Muertos. With all due respect ma’am this is not your holiday to be ouraged about. By your own admission you are a Puerto Rican American who has lived her whole life in California and frankly you clearly need an education on what the holiday means to mi amigos y vesinos here in Oaxaca who will tell you that, first and foremost, and in no un-certain terms that Dia de Los Muertos is a Christian holiday (regardless of the conflicting historical evidence to the contrary) and not “indigenous”. They will also tell you, as they have told me repeatedly in the form of actual words, invitations and gifts of pan de yema and chocolate delivered to my door, that it it a holiday for everyone. Everyone is welcome as everyone has dead to mourn and celebrate. And while no one appreciates the commercialization of this holiday either in Oakland or at the Pitico near my house or at the bars near the zocalo who are offering drink specials this weekend because everyone feels that this is the most sacred of holidays, no one that I have met here thinks that this is due to some sort of continuing colonization but rather they rather realistically lay it at the feet of globalization and the shifting priorities of global corporate interest. And so, with the encouragement of my actually indigenous Mexican beloved friends and relations (mostly Zapotec, BTW b/c native folks aren’t a single easily collapsed group called “indigenous” they are complex groups with long histories and often deep tensions who often tremendously resent being lumped in together as a single entity) I will go about putting up my alter, eating my pan, drinking my chocolate and honoring my dead here in el corazón de Día de Los Muertos without the approval of outraged American Puerto Rican-Californians. Then I’ll go to a rally next week for the biggest story in Mexico which is currently the 43 disappeared student teachers from Guerrero and not the tragedy of disappeared aboriginal women 3,000 miles away in Canada.
Thank you for articulating this. I couldn’t quite find what was angering me. My husband is Pilipino and has celebrated this holiday in his mostly catholic county all his life. They call it ‘All Saint’s Day’. My family spent the day at the cemetery at a celebration that WAS representative of other cultures that celebrate this holiday, it wasn’t a whitewashed commercialized version, we then took our six year old daughter to see “Book of life”. … It was a heart warming day, so when I posted my alter for my parents and my dear Latina friend posted this article in return I was secretly hurting until I read your post, thank you.
^I too found the piece to be lacking…(and I loved, passed on and so appreciated the last one on the white lesbian mom’s lawsuit)…it was my understanding that it was Christian (ie Catholic) with over and underlay of particular native folks additions,esthetic and otherwise, so, diversely -ie differently according to region, celebrated in Mexico and elsewhere, depending on where/by whom. Because of its Christian roots, and, indigenous Irish spirituality its also intimately connected to Halloween, not someone in an either/or relationship with it.
I live in San Francisco and absolutely love a lot of things about the Mission’s Dia de los Muertos. As much as I love it, the attitude of many of the spectators makes me uncomfortable, and this article excellently paints the behavior of many attendees who are unfamiliar with this holiday.
In spirit, I agree with this article. I am amused, though, that the author appropriates the culture of Mexico herself. Dia de los Muertos is a Mexican holiday. It isn’t celebrated in Puerto Rico, so I don’t see how the author (whose ancestors are Puerto Rican) has “ancestral kinship to this reverent, prayerful honoring of the departed.” Is it just because the author grew up in California? I have lived my entire life in California. I was in a mariachi band in college. My family eats tamales on Christmas Eve. I play soccer and have been to quinceneras. And I’m white. But I don’t claim ownership of a Mexican holiday like the author does. So to the author, I tell her to let me begin by saying it is completely natural that you would find yourself attracted to The Day of The Dead. I understand.
I strongly agree with the the gist of this article, but the author is an embodiment of a double standard.