In partnership with Self-Help Graphics & Art and Lore Media & Art, Grand Park celebrates the traditions of Día de los Muertos and presents 50 altars and art installations created by local artists and community groups that reflect the theme “Looking to the Past to Build the Future.”Īt Grand Park’s Día de los Muertos celebration, you’ll find an altar for many causes dear to Angelenos, as well as for individuals. Beyond celebrating your loved ones or paying homage to your ancestors, altars are also being used as social commentary and political resistance during our current, dark and grotesque, political climate. “But it was very rewarding that the people who had been working on that project wanted to be authentic, they really wanted to get it right,” Esparza said.Īltars and Ofrendas as Social Commentary and Political ResistanceĪltars for Day of the Dead have also taken new meanings over the years. Esparza, who also served as a cultural consultant for Pixar’s Coco had felt apprehensive about having her name attached to the project. “It’s like charging to go to your own family’s funeral.”įlores isn’t the only one critical of the way others come to perceive the holiday. Hollywood Forever cemetery holds a Día de los Muertos celebration, which Flores is critical of, particularly since they charge $25 per person to enter. “The thing that I’m resistant to is the commercialization of it, the thing that I do not like is the appropriation of it.” The beauty of the celebration of your ancestors is the “fluid nature of it,” Flores says. A celebration sacred to many, becomes an excuse to drink and slap on skull paint to others. Now you can go anywhere and see that Day of the Dead, as Consuelo Flores puts it, has “hit the zeitgeist.” From Day of the Dead lottery tickets, to bars, brands, and many other companies giving it the American holiday treatment, and even treating it as “Mexican Halloween.” “The ofrenda bridges the living and the dead, it brings them together by bridging generations and that of course, to my life,” Esparza says.īut with awareness comes appropriation and commercialization. Through her altars, Esparza believes she’s also capable of bridging cultures and even countries as more people are becoming aware of this tradition. The third, most dreaded death of all, is to be forgotten.” The second death is the day that we’re buried, never to be seen on the face of the Earth again. “The first death is the day we give our last breath or the day that we die. “We all suffer three deaths,” Esparza recalls her mother telling her. It’s become a part of the fabric of her life to remember and honor her ancestors. “It’s an obligation,” recipient of a 2018 NEA National Heritage Fellowship (considered the nation’s highest honor in folk and traditional arts) says. Self Help Graphics played an integral role in the holiday’s revival in California and, at 45 years and counting, it is now the longest running annual Day of the Dead celebration.įor nearly 40 years, too, Chicana altarista Ofelia Esparza has shared her knowledge and art about Day of the Dead with not only Self Help Graphics but people in schools, museums, community centers, prisons and parks throughout the Los Angeles region. Around the same time, Flores would meet Sister Karen and ask her about the history of Day of the Dead and what it meant to her, and participate in her first celebration of Day of the Dead in the U.S. staging public celebrations.īy 1979, Esparza was working with Self Help Graphics and building community altars for them for Day of the Dead. Back then, Self Help Graphics & Art and Galería de la Raza in San Francisco, were the only organizations in the U.S. Self Help Graphics founder Sister Karen Boccalero introduced the celebration in 1972. “Before, there were probably other Day of the Dead celebrations but they were never done in public,” Flores said. Altaristas (altar-makers) Ofelia Esparza and Consuelo Flores, were instrumental in helping this tradition establish new roots in the city. The History of Day of the Dead in Los Angelesĭay of the Dead wasn’t really adopted in Los Angeles until the 1970s. Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead (celebrated on November 1 and 2), is about inviting the souls of the dead back to the world of the living through the placement of altares de muertos or ofrendas. It’s not a day of mourning, but rather celebration and remembrance.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |