Day of the Dead, Five Years In: What We Got Wrong, What We Got Right

Our first Día de los Muertos in San Miguel de Allende, in 2020, I built an ofrenda on the dining table that was approximately the height and shape of a wedding cake, and I put a photograph of my late father-in-law on the top tier, and I lit twelve candles, and I felt, briefly, like I had nailed it.

Then our housekeeper Lupita came in to do the floors and gently, kindly, the way she did everything, told me that I had put marigold petals on the floor leading away from the door instead of toward the ofrenda, which is the opposite of what you want, because the petals are a path for the souls to find their way home. I had built, accidentally, a path for them to leave.

This was the first of many gringa mistakes. Five years in, I have made enough of them that I can sort them into categories.

2020: The wedding-cake ofrenda

I had read three books and watched four documentaries. I thought I was prepared. What I was, in retrospect, was over-prepared in the wrong direction — I had absorbed the visual vocabulary of Día de los Muertos (marigolds, sugar skulls, papel picado, candles) without absorbing the underlying logic, which is that the ofrenda is functional, not decorative. It is a path home. It is a meal. It is a conversation. It is not a centerpiece.

The mistakes of 2020: petals going the wrong way. Too many candles (Lupita: "You only need one per soul you are inviting."). Pan de muerto from the wrong bakery. Photo of my own grandfather, who never visited Mexico, on the same ofrenda as Eddie's dad, who did — Lupita didn't correct this one but I now think it was a category error. The dead come to the place they know.

2021: The deepening

By 2021 we had been in SMA for a year and I had stopped trying to perform Día de los Muertos and started, slowly, to live in it. We went to the cemetery in the afternoon on November 1 with Don Luis and his daughter, and we sat by his late wife's grave for a long time, and his daughter brought a thermos of chocolate caliente and a stack of pan de muerto and we ate and didn't talk much.

That was the year I started to understand that the holiday is not, primarily, a party. The party part — the catrina parades, the painted faces on Hidalgo, the run of tourists on the jardín — is real but it is downstream of the actual practice, which happens in cemeteries and at kitchen tables, between people who lost people. I had been to the parade in 2020 and thought this is the holiday. The parade is not the holiday. The grave is the holiday.

I picked up Pati Jinich's cookbook that fall and started making mole the slow way for the November 1 dinner, which is a project that takes most of a day and which I now consider non-negotiable, the way some people consider Thanksgiving turkey non-negotiable. It is the dish that fills the house.

2022 and 2023: Settling

By 2022 we had a routine. Bella, who was three, helped me set the ofrenda. She placed the photo of Eddie's dad. She placed a small toy car for him, because Eddie remembered his dad fixing cars, and Bella decided he should have one. She placed a glass of water and a small dish of salt. She lit (with help) the candle.

2023 was the same routine, deeper. We had it down to a small choreography. We went to the cemetery. We ate the mole. We sat on the rooftop and watched the catrina parade from a distance because we had already decided that the actual procession of decorated catrinas going down Aldama was not where our family belonged on that night. We belonged at the kitchen table.

This is, I think, the gringa-bridge work — figuring out which parts of a holiday you are invited into and which parts you are watching. Both are honorable. They are not the same thing.

2024: Colorado, and the question of portability

Last year, our first November back in Colorado, I set up the ofrenda on the same dining table — different table, same dining table, if you know what I mean. I put Eddie's dad's photo on it. I put the marigolds going the right direction. I made the mole. I lit one candle.

It was not the same. It will never be the same. We were not in a town where everyone else was doing it too. There was no procession at the end of the block. There was no Don Luis bringing pan de muerto. There was a six-year-old in Colorado in a snowstorm asking why we were eating spicy chocolate sauce on chicken.

What worked: the mole. The photo. Bella placing the toy car. The conversation about Eddie's dad. The candle.

What didn't: trying to recreate the cemetery visit. We don't have a grave to visit here. Eddie's dad is buried in Pennsylvania. We are not driving to Pennsylvania every November 1. The lesson here, which I am still absorbing, is that the holiday adapts but it doesn't transport whole. You take what you can carry.

What I would tell a 2020-me

Slow down. Watch first. Ask. The visual vocabulary of Día de los Muertos is the easy part to import. The actual practice — sitting in a cemetery in the afternoon with the people who lost the person you are remembering — is the hard part, and it cannot be Googled.

If you are planning to be in SMA for Día de los Muertos as a visitor, stay at Hotel Matilda if you can swing it, or Rosewood SMA for the rooftop view of the catrina parade. Book a small-group walking tour with a local guide on Viator — and pick one that explicitly visits a cemetery with a local family, not one that just walks you past altars in shop windows. The cemetery is the holiday.

Buy a small picture frame before you go and bring a photo of someone you have lost. You will use it. Whether you are at an altar in a hotel lobby or at a kitchen table or in your own home back in Colorado a year later, you will use it.

Five years in, I am no expert. I am a gringa with a kid and a slow-mole recipe and a habit of setting a table for one extra person every November 1. That is, it turns out, most of the holiday. The rest is showing up.