Dias de los Muertos
She lived much of the year in Old Acapulco, and organized artist trips to San Miguel de Allende, Pátzcuaro, Tzintzuntzan, Oaxaca. She knew many locals. Her villa was a magical place, a time out of time—Hemingway would have been comfortable there.
It’s a photojournalists feast. Markets catering to the Day of the Dead festival abound, particularly in all of Michoacán and Guerrero states, with artists’ offerings, pageantry, music, and intense preparations for welcoming the dead for a short period back to the world of the living. Preparations include major cleaning and repair of the local cemeteries and family graves, and the creation of flowered arches for gates of the atriums of local churches. Graves are widely decorated with cempasúchil marigolds and purply-red cock’s comb, and at night for the all night vigils with hundreds of candles.
The early morning of November 1, the "velación de los angelitos" (wake for the little angels) , is the time reserved to welcome back and honor the souls of children who have died. Both day and night, children run around cemeteries or in town "stealing" ears of corn, and chayote squash, and now often with hollowed out gourds to ask for American style “halloween” treats. Sugar skulls decorated with icing and sequins grin on all sides, as do pottery and papier-maché skeletons, sweet bread in the shape of bones and death’s heads, braziers burning heady copal incense to signal the dead, and “Catrinas,” the death figures of all sizes in fine clothes and hats.
Festivities during the day are a blaze of color and music of mariachis as people gather and feast in cemeteries, visiting and remembering. A happy time of communal celebration. Special home altars are set out with photographs, flowers, foods, and drink that deceased relatives enjoyed in life.“We welcome you and love you, though we cannot actually see you.” Continue to midnight on November 2, which begins the "velación de los difuntos" (wake for the deceased) when again the towns gather in local cemeteries to celebrate the souls of adults.