Deconstructing Dia de los Muertos
Lara Medina, an expert on Chicano and indigenous American religious practices and spirituality, explains the history of Mesoamerica’s Dia de los Muertos and talks about living the nepantla life and the creativity that blurry boundaries produce.
By Sharon Simonson
Don’t call Dia de los Muertos the Mexican Halloween, begs Lara Medina.
The 62-year-old autora y professora of Chicano and Chicana religious history at California State University, Northridge, has watched and studied the holiday and its U.S. incarnation since the early 1970s when visiting Mexican artists traveling in Los Angeles and San Francisco staged small-scale celebrations as a solace to the deaths of the Vietnam War.
What began as a sacred pre-Colombian familial observance by Mesoamericans has evolved into its c...