A Letter to My Central American Community for Día de los Difuntos
Updated November 2, 2023: I originally wrote this piece back in 2018–five years have gone by but it feels like twenty. The last time that I updated was in October of 2020 at the existential height of the COVID pandemic. I am saddened to say that three years later, COVID is not only very much still with us, but it has become a seasonal plague. There was so much potential in that 2020-2022 period to really take control of the pandemic and mitigate both mass sickness and death, but instead, politically-driven misinformation and first-world capitalist individualism solidified COVID’s permanence in our pantheon of common communicable diseases. Since 2018, conditions in Central America have gotten worse. In the last five years, the meteoric ascendance of Nayib Bukele to become El Salvador’s ruling monarch has left the country in a dystopian nightmare of mass arbitrary arrests and worsening poverty. In Guatemala, after the successful 2015 mass protests that resulted in the ousting of right-wing authoritarian Otto Pérez Molina, the country is now facing a potential coup by corrupt right-wing forces who want to prevent the presidency of the democratically-elected candidate. Central American history is the most un-fun carousel. And if that weren’t enough, the world is witnessing the state of Israel carry out a genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza, with the ultimate outcome of completely wiping them off the face of the earth. It is simply far too much to handle. So, today especially, we not only venerate our ancestors, but beseech them for their wisdom. How did they survive through colonization, genocide, and civil war? How did they not allow the sorrow of the world to crush them? How did they manage to preserve love in their hearts? So as you prepare your altars today and make space for your ancestors, keep that spiritual door open for our Palestinian kin. Their deceased are very much welcomed at our table.
To my dear Central Americans in the diaspora,
November 2nd is Día de los Difuntos, a day in which we remember and commemorate the lives of loved ones who have passed. For those of us who were raised with particular community and familial traditions, it’s a day to open or widen a gateway to speak with our ancestors. But for a lot of us who have grown up in a land that is not ours, today can perhaps be a sad reminder of how uprooted and displaced we are from our culture, traditions, community, and ancestors.
Those of us who grew up in the Southwest of the United States, are familiar with the Mexican Día de los Muertos, and for quite a few of us, it became our proxy holiday for remaining connected to our deceased ones. We didn’t have much of a choice, really.
But traditionally in many parts of El Salvador, Día de los Difuntos means taking our entire families to the cemeteries where our loved ones are interred. It means cleaning the tombs with lye to whiten them, to paint crosses in light blue, or any other preferred color, and rewriting the name of the deceased. It means decorating the resting place not just with flor de muerto, but with all types of colorful flora and wreaths made from cypress. It means bringing whole meals, pan dulce of all kinds, and lots of coffee–because the whole family would be there all day and night. Families reminisce, laugh, weep, and express to their ancestors just how much they are loved and missed.
My parents told me stories that in the old days, the cemeteries in San Salvador would build bonfires at the entrances. All mothers carrying babies were expected to throw in a wreathe of cypress (el sahumerio), and as the smoke would rise, the babe was held from their ankles to bathe upside down in the billowing fragrance. This was done because Día de los Difuntos is a day particularly strong with spiritual energy, and babies needed extra protection from the undue influence roaming spirits and entities in the vicinity. After the rite, the babe was ready to take part in the festivities and meet their ancestors.
Sadly, for those of us who live outside of lands of our ancestors, all these customs, rites, and traditions become lost and forgotten, and over the course of generations, we become further absorbed into the dominant culture of the places we inhabit. And yet, our connection to the ancestors is not something that needs to die, for us to mourn and long for.
My mother once told me that a home without an altar to the ancestors is like a body without a heart. Her home in El Salvador had an permanent altar, and when she migrated, every single apartment our family ever lived in in the U.S. had an altar as well. To live severed from the ancestors is to not live at all. My mother would tell me stories about how the Catholic priests, when they were not too busy taking unnatural interest in young girls, would denounce viejitas for performing rites with ruda and altamisa. Sure, the Catholic Church could claim a monopoly on spirituality and ubiquitous ownership over holy spaces in El Salvador, but our nanas and our tatas knew better. They knew that the magic of the land, which coursed through their veins, didn’t speak in Latin homilies, or manifest itself in transubstantiation during mass.
No, our magic was in the gentle tapping made by the casquitos of the cadejo as it passed in the middle of the night; in the voice of the cenzontle as she sang her song at sunrise; in the withered cinammon hands of a 96-year-old nana as she broke copal into tiny pieces; in the stern love of our mothers as they boiled epazote to cure us of lombrices; and of course, in the creation of altars, the special spaces where we prayed to the elements and spoke to our beloveds who had passed on.
No, my dear family, setting up altars to celebrate our deceased is not solely a Mexican thing. Our respective peoples have always done it as well. And so, for those of you out there who seek to honor your ancestors, I invite you to set up your own altar in whatever space you feel safest. And it’s not about the aesthetics or showiness, but about intention and intimacy.
Beloved family, on this coming Día de los Difuntos, and we invoke the names of our ancestors. To those who were taken from us unjustly, to those we left behind, to those we lost along the way, and to those who came to rest in these foreign lands. We may not know all their names, but they know ours. We may not know their stories, but the life we live is their legacy. Honor and commemorate your loved ones.
We are the fruit of resilience. We are the stone in the boot of colonization, thwarting its march. The root of our people still lives, and so it is time to cultivate it.
Archived Update from October 2020: “I wrote this piece two years ago at the peak of what felt like an ever-inclining mountain of dread and despair for our Central American community. Here we are in 2020 and that mountain turned out to be a super-volcano. The COVID-19 pandemic has particularly been devastating to Black, Latinx, and Native communities in the U.S. In California alone, of the 900,000+ cases of COVID, more than 60% are among Latinx. Of the 17,000+ deaths, 50% are from the Latinx community. My father (who thank the ancestors has been safe and isolated) reported to me last month that at least eight (8) of his Salvadoran friends and acquaintances who migrated to the Westlake-MacArthur Park area of Los Angeles in the late 1970s and early 1980s died as a result of COVID-19. It is horrifying to think that generations of our elders to fled Central America due to war, poverty, and violence, came to this country, overworked themselves and died ignobly due to a pandemic that could have been manageable, if not preventable. There is much sadness, loss, and rage in our community. Now more than ever, we need to connect with our ancestors, show them our love, and seek solace in them.“
Thank you for this. 💙💙💙 I had no idea.