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A Celebration of Life and Memory

Brain Trust Lecture Series: Dia de Los Muertos: The History and Symbols

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    Summary

    The Texas Historical Commission hosted a lecture on the history and symbolism of Dia de Los Muertos at the Mofen Home State Historic Site. This cultural event, deeply rooted in Aztec traditions, is a way to honor deceased ancestors, celebrating their spirits as still present among us. Transitioned through Spanish colonial influence, the observance has evolved but retains its core as an expression of love and memory, distinct from Halloween's themes of fear and protection. The lecture also shared insights into creating traditional ofrendas, emphasizing personalization and remembering the dead through stories and shared family moments. The event highlighted how Dia de Los Muertos fosters community spirit and personal connection to heritage, serving as a comforting ritual for dealing with loss.

      Highlights

      • Dia de Los Muertos is a vibrant celebration rooted in Aztec traditions. 🗿
      • This Mexican holiday signifies remembering and inviting ancestral spirits. 👻
      • Unlike Halloween, which is about fear, Dia de Los Muertos is about love and memory. ❤️
      • Ofrendas, or altars, are crucial for inviting the spirits, using items like marigolds and sugar skulls. 💀
      • Despite commercialization, traditional elements of the festival are being preserved, thanks to cultural efforts. 🌼

      Key Takeaways

      • Dia de Los Muertos is not about mourning; it's a joyous celebration of life and memory. 🎉
      • It's an ancient tradition originating from Aztec culture, symbolizing the continuous presence of spirits. 👻
      • The holiday was adapted by Spanish colonists, blending with Catholic traditions. ✝️
      • Creating an ofrenda is a personalized invitation to the spirits of loved ones. 🌺
      • The festival encourages community participation and preserves cultural heritage beautifully. 🏵️

      Overview

      Dia de Los Muertos, depicted beautifully in this lecture, is an age-old Mexican celebration with deep Aztec roots. Unlike the fear-based celebration of Halloween, Dia de Los Muertos is about love and remembrance. It embraces the belief that though loved ones may have passed on, their spirits remain with us. 💀

        The transition from indigenous traditions to what it is today was influenced by Spanish colonialism, which merged it with All Saints and All Souls days. Despite these changes, the heart of the festival—expressed through colorful ofrendas, sugar skulls, and marigolds—remains unaltered. 🏵️

          The festival fosters a sense of community and offers a therapeutic way for people to honor their dead, uniting families and friends to share stories and memories. It is not just a celebration but a respectful ritual of continuity and connection, blending past and present seamlessly. 🌺

            Brain Trust Lecture Series: Dia de Los Muertos: The History and Symbols Transcription

            • 00:00 - 00:30 thank you all so much for joining us this afternoon it's October 16th 20124 and you have come to the mofen home state historic site to have a presentation on Vios muos the history and symbols of the holiday I wanted to provide a little bit of an introduction and greet you guys here my name is Danielle brette and I'm the site director uh I take care of this beautiful historic site for the Texas historical commission there's over 40 of
            • 00:30 - 01:00 sites now scatter throughout the state and we are the only aob mansion that gets to talk about the wonderful Multicultural history of El Paso we're the Western most site of the Texas historical commission and I think that makes us the best but there are 39 other sites who would disagree before we get going deeply into the history of this holiday which is a holiday that spreads throughout the Americas encompasses many cultures and many countries not just this one or the one closest to where we're standing
            • 01:00 - 01:30 today uh but um this neighborhood also has some a little bit of interesting hidden death history and I've got some chairs up front if y'all don't mind we can also pull up some ones from the back if we need to may eat the bread though yes please that's what it's there for a couple of fun facts since you're in the mofen historic district which was one of the first residential districts planned in the city uh right down the street from us if you go one block down pass Noble past the Emanuel Methodist
            • 01:30 - 02:00 Church you'll have the home of the first Undertaker in El Paso uh the Bine family I for his first name was Vincent or something like that uh verine had the first funeral home and also ran a cabinet shop often times Cabinetry and undertaking went together because when one builds a coffin it's very similar to a bookcase or something like that is what I'm told I'm am not one of those individuals uh but that home is still standing and is part of our beautiful walking we've got a great brochure you
            • 02:00 - 02:30 can take on the way out if you'd like and I also wanted to point out the street behind us at my back today there's a street called Myrtle uh which is one of the main thorough fars uh here in El Paso or it certainly used to be uh and now maybe I 10 has surpassed it uh but initially the street was called ceros because it connected Immaculate Conception Church down at one end and the center of town with the cemeteries conord cemetery and Evergreen Cemetery
            • 02:30 - 03:00 which are our two greatest historic cemeteries in town still existing today uh and over time GTO smle it got anglicized and given this name uh but as we talk about this holiday and we remember the people who have passed this has always been a corridor for that conversation in the city um and I would like to take a moment now to introduce Michelle W who is the mofen home educator she's going to be taking us on this journey I can't
            • 03:00 - 03:30 wait to take it hi so first of all I just want to thank my co- educator Martin for actually putting together a lot of this decoration um you know I I I wanted it to feel like like um the other moros and he made it happen so thank you thank you thank you so as Daniel said we're going to start off today talking about the
            • 03:30 - 04:00 history a little bit of of History to establish the original version of Theos moros and kind of discuss a little bit what it's become so as you can see uh The fesal Roots back goes back thousands of years pre Spanish colonialism in Mexico and uh it actually originates uh particularly from from Aztec culture uh where there was the belief that someone
            • 04:00 - 04:30 may die but they're not gone their spirit is there with you always and so it was a way to commemorate that only they had an interesting way of commemorating it it wasn't just one day out of the year or a couple days out of the Year each month you would take a group of people who let's say drowned they would celebrate in the month of like let's say may for all the people who drowned who died drowning and then maybe in June you would celebrate those who who died from fire so each
            • 04:30 - 05:00 month kind of had its own way of dying being commemorated it was a little strange um but that went on basically the whole year so really Theos for for the azte culture was basically year round just depending on who how your family members had died when um the Spanish arrived in Mexico uh the festivals were quickly Consolidated to All Saints and All Souls days and it was through a policy of
            • 05:00 - 05:30 syncretism where they basically would look and say well you know we have a holiday very much like this and we celebrate on these days why don't you move your holiday to these days when we can all celebrate together and it was kind of the beginning of trying to um um convert uh the indigenous tribes into Christianity it made it a little easier now all this between the Spanish
            • 05:30 - 06:00 Colonial period and the 1970s basically uh deos moros was growing deos moros really was remaining within the indigenous tribal Village Villages throughout Mexico it was not necessarily a grand scale industrialized sort of Celebration it was very um personal it was very connected to uh again that original uh indigenous culture of of commemorating
            • 06:00 - 06:30 your past on relatives uh all year round and then it by the 1970s really that changed now I will tell you that somewhere between the 1850s and the 1900s actually a person one person who really helped bring about the introduction of it was um pada a artist uh Jose gu pada they often call
            • 06:30 - 07:00 B and uh he originally started off as a printer and he ended up doing some drawings it became originally see I pull some of the more famous ones I'm sure you all are familiar with the image of La Katrina with the hat and everything he he actually drew the original La krina he was the one who gave us that all the way back before the turn of the century and his
            • 07:00 - 07:30 uh drawings they were beautiful but they also sent a message and the message for him was that you know everyone I hate to be the one to break this but everyone dies and um such a bu right um but it didn't matter your station in life right it didn't matter how much money you had or didn't have we were all going the same place
            • 07:30 - 08:00 and so he drew these skeletons in in in different situations where they could be at very very fancy parties but also juxtaposed against people who might be walking in the street and very poor it was the idea of it didn't matter they were both dead so it was death was kind of the great equalizer for B but it ended up becoming this this statement of of uh C system of
            • 08:00 - 08:30 economic uh inequity so by the 1970s what you see is the tradition of deel SMA spread from tribal villages to industrialized cities in a big way it was really starting to take hold and the problem was it holiday had begun to change so when it was in indigenous Villages where people were keeping the old traditions they were making things by hand there was nothing
            • 08:30 - 09:00 store bought but when you get into an industrialized Society where people have to work 40 plus hours a week at a job you may not have all the time in the world to make your own sugar skulls you may not have all the time in the world to create your own paper flowers so you start buying them right maybe there's an artist in town who's more than happy and has all the skill in the world to create these things so maybe they make extra money by producing these and selling them to people who want to use them for
            • 09:00 - 09:30 their ofendas but they don't have the time to produce them so uh quickly though it becomes things more like this instead of just Artisans creating it it's becoming machine made right and then something else starts to happen I don't know if you can see these are by the way are called B pigos uh cut paper and if you'll notice the colors on those don't make me think they make me think
            • 09:30 - 10:00 Halloween because Halloween was now starting to meld with deos because they're right back to back um there started to be be an issue within Mexico there started to be debate because Theos moros is a cultural event it was born out of the indigenous tribes of Mexico so you know should it be allowed to be modernized within industrial society should they try to work hard to preserve
            • 10:00 - 10:30 the tradition um much like we do uh with any protected group that may not um be able to protect themselves from a larger society with lots of money and lots of power within the community to just kind of um ignore them and so that's kind of where we are today so obviously it's not the same as Halloween but I
            • 10:30 - 11:00 kind of want to describe maybe the big difference where these holidays are coming from so Halloween actually originates from from Ireland actually Celtic tribes throughout um Northwestern Europe and it was really from an agrarian society October 31st was kind of the last day on the calendar where most farmers will harvest the last of their crops even if fruits or vegetables maybe are not quite ripe and ready to be
            • 11:00 - 11:30 picked they'll still be picked because every last thing freezing on the vine it won't be edible you wanted to take those items and find a way to use them and preserve them but the problem is what happens if something goes wrong this is your food that you're preserving to get you all through winter and if you are unable for whatever reason to be able to get that harvested and preserved properly if something goes wrong that means your your community has less food
            • 11:30 - 12:00 for the rest of the year or for the rest of the winter so what ends up happening is Halloween or or um actually S I know it looks like Sam hanne but it's it's a gaic word and Gaelic words are very weird and wonderful and uh so it's pronounced Sal or suen is another way to pronounce it and so that was that point at the time of year when they were going
            • 12:00 - 12:30 to be harvesting that last crop and they wanted to protect themselves for maybe bad spirits who might destroy the crops at the same time they wanted to invite their ancestors to come in and protect them so there is a little bit of overlap with dilis merus right that idea of inviting your ancestors in um but that kind of gets lost by the wayside because what eventually ends upen happening is um all
            • 12:30 - 13:00 the farmers of course in this group of course they're busy trying to get the Harvest done and then the women you know or other men are trying to help them get that preserved quick enough before it has to be stored for the the holiday so the only ones left who could actually watch the neighborhoods were the kids and the kids would dress up to look scary to scare away the bad spirits because they believe that the good Spirits family and sisters would
            • 13:00 - 13:30 recognize the kids no matter what they were wearing but the bad spirits those with ill intent would not and so kids were running around the neighborhoods in costumes protecting the Harvest only thing is uh you know kids will only do that for so long unless you pay them right yes so you bribe them with the treats right maybe a few baked goods maybe an apple app things that
            • 13:30 - 14:00 that you had to to uh help sweeten the deal if you will and so sound familiar to what we do today kids wandering our neighborhoods in costumes going door too getting treats and we give them treats without any expectation of repayments um and we don't often think about that but yeah it's because of that old tradition of their wandering the neighborhoods protecting us from the bad spirits so really Halloween is about about fear and protection that's really
            • 14:00 - 14:30 what survived all these hundreds of years from from the time when it was originally conceived right uh even though there was that slight overlap with uh relatives that kind of gets lost over time and then in comes deos moros and deos moros really honestly the base of it is love and invitation you're inviting your anest s in you are celebrating them they're not
            • 14:30 - 15:00 gone they're there you just can't see them all the time but this is the time of year where if you create the proper ofenda uh they might find you they can they can find their way to you and again I bring up you know obviously that's changed over time um and you know just like we buy Halloween costumes and Spirit Halloween or our decorations where once they were handmade um we're now starting to buy
            • 15:00 - 15:30 stuff with the other SMS so of course what what makes the more of those special and like Halloween it is the basis um of the or the basis of the smos only needs the connection of family and ofas can be made from common items in the home and they do not need to be mass produced even celebrating as a community can be something handmade
            • 15:30 - 16:00 and personal if you miss your family member and want to invite them into your home then create an ala for that is the invitation so what makes an alenda there are certain elements that are absolutely necessary and there are others that are not but this invitation is meant to be readable by your specific family members so those personal touches you're putting in there is supposed to help hone in on on your
            • 16:00 - 16:30 family member so as you can see these are the necessary things to be on Ana to be understood as an invitation by your ancestor into your home they give it that way it's like imagine uh you have a party and your invitations are in comic sands on maybe like neon papers not saying that there aren't uh events that call for for that but I'm just saying maybe this is a
            • 16:30 - 17:00 family get together for the holiday of course my batteries are l so if it's a family event you uh you might want to take a little more time with that invitation because you never know Aunt Helen might get a little offended if it isn't like in in a certain tyght face um thank you and so uh goodness there it
            • 17:00 - 17:30 is and so think of it like getting it just right okay of course you got the poel Picos the sugar skulls uh the uh sasi or Mar Golds uh do recommend you can have like we've got the handmade paper wounds laying around uh but even if you can get just maybe two or three of the real ones it's not just the color which is supposed to be a reminder of the Sun and
            • 17:30 - 18:00 be warm and drawing to the spirits to your ofenda it's also the smell the smell is supposed to help draw them as well uh water is necessary uh they have it in a glass to be drunk but actually the way I remember it years ago and yes I've been looking at this for years now you had the water in a bowl with a bar soap and a towel so that they could wash their hands when when they arrived uh
            • 18:00 - 18:30 you probably for drinking had something a little stronger than water um in fact you can see there's bottles of wine and stuff on the on the that uh salt salt being a representation of Earth uh the B bicos are representations of air because they blow in the breeze in fact there's one flying around back there in the window right now uh but the Simba is supposed to be apparently it had the ache tradition of being related to the
            • 18:30 - 19:00 sun they tied marigolds to the sun one thing that's not on here because obviously it's not necessarily an element of the of the OFA but it is something that is tied to Theos moros and that is um the the monarch butterflies because it just so happens that around this time November 1st and second is when they return to Mexico to Winter and uh in the nice warm climate right and so everyone thought because it
            • 19:00 - 19:30 was happening of course right there near the holiday that those are the souls returning to Mexico so whenever you see mon butterfli I know I'm choking myself it is it's very sweet so if you see a moner butterfly say hi because you never know it might be Aunt Sally now uh I do want to mention that one of the things you'll notice in this drawing is that there's three levels to this
            • 19:30 - 20:00 of uh there can either be two three or seven those are kind of the most traditional amount of levels on your ofrenda two represented Earth and Sky Three represents either hell Earth and Heaven or the F Father Son and Holy Spirit the Holy Trinity uh there's the seven level ones kind of interesting it actually is meant to represent the journey to M and if you're asking what that is well
            • 20:00 - 20:30 so much like you know we hear about an Egyptian tradition The Book of the Dead and the journey of a soul into the the afterlife same thing that you see in in Aztec culture so there were seven trials if you will or levels that you had to pass through to get to your final um uh resting place in Mikan so you started off with two mountains crashing into each
            • 20:30 - 21:00 other uh the obsidian mountain is the second one bitter winds is the third banners is the fourth arrows the jaguar and the narrow place or the place of nine Rivers was the last one and then at the end if you made it through all those you made it to make and yeah I know right um so that actually each of these would have been represented by a separate layer on not that now one of my favorite parts to the I see a few loaves of it out uh is
            • 21:00 - 21:30 actually and uh I had the champ last year I actually had my first Bond the moro and it was delicious cannot recommend enough but make sure you leave one for the ofenda it's going to be very hard when you bite into it you're going to it's going to be hard to save it but um do uh put it on the alenda and that is a special note by the way any food that you place on your
            • 21:30 - 22:00 altar you do not eat it at the end of the festival because hopefully the spirits came by and nibbled and took all their nutritive value out of it right that is the belief even the even the drinks I know a shame right yes even the drinks
            • 22:00 - 22:30 yeah lucky Spirits I know right so the question now you know if we're talking about trying to preserve a cultural event or trying to celebrate it the way we see around us all the time is there any you know how can we celebrate I think there are many ways one is represented by this first picture here is putting an ofrenda in your own home make that one be the personal one the
            • 22:30 - 23:00 one that you spend you know your time putting together you might even consider having a family get together and have everyone bring a dish maybe a favorite dish of someone that they've lost within their branch of the family and bring it all together and celebrate everyone and maybe even build a family OFA where you invite them to bring pictures of your family to be place on on the AA in your home of course another one another fine one that I've taken part in few times is maybe paint up your face and do a little
            • 23:00 - 23:30 dress up and go out and uh enjoy your community um I can't tell you how many times I've hung out in Concordia uh Dressed just like this and then of course uh you do have parades and believe it or not there's even music specifically written foros moros uh you can find it all over YouTube t out of 10 recommends uh hunted down and it it's absolutely beautiful
            • 23:30 - 24:00 so while Theos may have the appeal of Halloween really it shouldn't be confused instead of using the holiday to remember those you've lost and invite them to join you for a feast okay today grief counseling is considerable a considerable discipline within the mental health industry and imagine if the attitude that they were not gone and just needed a reason to come visit was a common one the burden of loss would be lessened greatly mayor orenda be pleasing to your
            • 24:00 - 24:30 ancestors any questions I was wondering if you could touch on the connection with sugar because it seems to be such an delicious part of that it and also Halloween and also a lot of the good autal festivals it is I'm sure um I don't know specifically that minutia I don't know if maybe that's the time of year that you would traditionally harvest the sugar can and reduce it down to produce the sugar I
            • 24:30 - 25:00 definitely know that white sugar for a long long time is considered usually a thing of wealth and it would have been a very very special treat because it would have been a very expensive and time consuming thing to harvest and um reduce down to a perfect white sugar form and of course making skulls of that I think would have
            • 25:00 - 25:30 been kind of the highest honor that you're not going to eat too yeah exactly that something that you you would place on the ofenda just for that family member you again everything about the ofenda is supposed to be the most impressive um uh invitation you could possibly imagine for your relative for whoever you're inviting from your family and one of the things I noticed on the diagram that didn't didn't get mentioned but is
            • 25:30 - 26:00 an element that is frequently used uh in very traditional ofendas sometimes you'll notice there's a big arch of maragold or suu at the back and sometimes they even have like spokes coming down like this so the article is considered the sky uh Sun's path in the sky but it also that Archway creates what's called a Ventana window and those spokes are kind of the the
            • 26:00 - 26:30 spokes holding up the Ventana they don't really do that but and it this by doing it with the sasu it's supposed to not only do you have the smell and the warmth but you have the window right to the other side so the idea was that your the spirits of your loved ones came up to that of course looking at the warmth coming through the window and would come through
            • 26:30 - 27:00 any other questions I just think it was a beautiful I was not familiar with all that you're saying but seems like something like that makes before grief counseling came in as we know it that was a way of dealing with grief it's beautiful because you're it's not that they're God that's it it's there're somewhere and I don't know about you had someone pass away there's sometimes you
            • 27:00 - 27:30 just get that feeling that they're with you and that can be or not be but you feel that and it makes I would think it would make the people feel like absolutely they still with us it a good way it was therapy before therapy right absolutely and also I did want to mention thank you for bringing that up El Paso's just got go to the fourth best city to celebrate deos what did what did the people do with the
            • 27:30 - 28:00 stuff that was to what do you do with all that Stu it's done so respect to be respectful you would throw away the food okay the food the food stuff should go by by however there are a lot of items on the Enda you do not throw away you do save those for the next year um it's not necessarily it's and I and I
            • 28:00 - 28:30 know because there's part of my in my head that's going God that's so wasteful to throw away all that food however it's not wasted your family member ate it all the nutritive value is gone it wasn't wasted they enjoyed it and that's it they're done okay so don't think of it any other way um now having said that if you can compost some a bit like please yeah any other questions yeah which are
            • 28:30 - 29:00 the top three cities for you know that's a great question I only saw the headline that we were for I was like heck meic City isn't no and I think for number three for Halloween so yeah yeah so basically El Paso owns this time of year why the bright colors beautiful colors you know uh I I did not see
            • 29:00 - 29:30 anything speaking to the exact colors however I suspect uh it is again remember it's an invitation you're trying to get their attention and they're on another side so you have to be really bright and really big and kind of over the top right and I think maybe those bright colors are to get the attention of your loved ones yeah cuz I mean it's very attention getting is it not any other
            • 29:30 - 30:00 questions I just wanted to say thank you for the great introduction to it we've been talking about it just the my family's history with it is that we never really celebrated you know and it kind of felt embar in the sense because it's I feel like it's my Heritage but at the same time um it goes back to the whole reading process in my family that's always been that you know you don't really talk much about feelings of someone pass you do your religous trial
            • 30:00 - 30:30 and that's it and hopefully you know heal from within but now as the first parent I realized that you know I would have enjoyed to have this celebration growing up because you know it seems lovely it seems Lively as well so it's certainly something that U you know as first time parents we're going from forward from it and definitely my wife just is finishing setting up our first friend ever at the home with the with the T as well and I see it
            • 30:30 - 31:00 as well as generational like you mentioned it's becoming heavly popular as you can see it by the all the decorations that we here right you mentioned I had never seen a MCE like this before and it's something like wow you know some people might have against it because the more you can get to our culture the better and people can adopt it as well so there is that to be said but actually right now in Mexico there is a heavy debate going on because one
            • 31:00 - 31:30 of the things that was happening is there's a very famous uh uh Cemetery where a lot of former presidents are buried and apparently the cemetery is very very popular uh around this time of year used to be just Halloween but they extended it to dios moros and even on deos maros stay are showing movies like Night of the Living Dead and things that are yeah not quite the right Vibe and
            • 31:30 - 32:00 that people are wearing kind of like Halloween costumes during deos maros and so there was this big move in fact um let me go back to that one slide and I do want to point out one thing on that drawing of Thea you'll see at the bottom um it says here vmx and that's because it there was a lot of um funding provided to a lot of cultural heritage groups to preserve the
            • 32:00 - 32:30 more traditional things because that is the big debate now right we do I mean I enjoy this I absolutely do but then again I'm an ugly American so you know there is that so I I you know try to Tamper that by learning a little bit more about it it it's absolutely beautiful beautiful I mean I know for me you know I lost my mom and and my nephew was only he wasn't even quite two when
            • 32:30 - 33:00 she died he still remembers her but he didn't really get to spend a lot of time with her so maybe in Enda especially for him where we can kind of share the memories and talk more about her with him would help him because I'm I'm not going to lie I mean my 12-year-old nephew he asks about her all the time he's curious so things like this are definitely generationally very helpful to small
            • 33:00 - 33:30 children who may hear stories about people or may have memories when they were very young that those people are gone as they gotten older yeah and just you get close to home because um my dad passed away in December we figured out we found out that we were expected in January now my son is too he you know he's all excited he has a friend and his broken language and he which is NE because his memory will live
            • 33:30 - 34:00 on forever so absolutely beautiful tradition absolutely I think that part of that too from what you're saying is it makes people of this generation or this time to remind and tell the stories of those that came before and that's how we preserve our families because sometimes you know and sometimes you I waited till I was God knows how old before I was growing up and I
            • 34:00 - 34:30 [Music] remember goodness but at the same time it is preserving those people who came before whatever they did you know about your family it's kind of like going be not Beyond but a a preface to our ancestry.com we know some of these things we know where to look for them which we don't seem to do anym maybe we're kind of getting back to that but
            • 34:30 - 35:00 this because storytellers used to be the only ones that knew about people in cultures just that exactly yeah some people do the memorials on their death date yes I think we should just combine or celebrate both for Pete's sakes be like the Aztecs too right they there wasn't a month out of the year they didn't exclude from this you know whole months were dedicated of course it was weird that it was kind of subdivided by how
            • 35:00 - 35:30 you died little bizarre but they did have the whole year preserved for remembering ancestors to it wasn't just a day or two so yeah absolutely feel free to both on Memorial days and and birthdays theyed right big what you call Church they yeah absolutely ni they all do they able to do right absolutely well
            • 35:30 - 36:00 you could do that one too do like I said do it both more more parties I don't I don't hear a problem with this thought yeah it's like my father going to be a year on the 19th passed away October and we're having a mask for him and then afterwards we're having my you know stuff but I never knew about this one of Myers when she was the one who introduced like
            • 36:00 - 36:30 okay so because with my mom she never and she's from Mexico but she she kind of grew up here you know but uh yeah know and it's so wonderful and this year we first off up my dad and my my in-laws so we're getting very
            • 36:30 - 37:00 [Music] nice but places of of people have been consecrated it's a place to go visit and in some places it is like you say the party get to Cate Mir gold pedal and Flow full flowers everywhere with candles and big
            • 37:00 - 37:30 tables set up for Community dinners um yeah absolutely absolutely and people coming by and and you know checking out your frienda talking about their frienda and like everyone's you know kind of combined celebrating yes would you tell us about our festival and the ofrendas we will have on display good seg good seg um yes absolutely so November 1st and
            • 37:30 - 38:00 2nd we are actually taking the traditional days for celebrating Theos it didn't hurt that it was a Friday and a Saturday but on Friday November 1st the first day of the is typically [Music] uh the day of the children and so that's for children who have died and so you typically um you do more children activities right viatas and um
            • 38:00 - 38:30 you know games and just all sorts of stuff like that so on that first day uh from 3: to 6:00 p.m. not only will we have our community of OFA in the hall which we invite everyone to bring a copy of a photo don't bring the original the copy of the photos of maybe a loved one you wish to include on the community of frienda and um and come enjoy UTEP uh their Cho studies class
            • 38:30 - 39:00 one of their Cho Studies classes the students are actually producing their own afas each their own AA and they will be displaying those in the courtyard and explaining um about their Offa the people who come by uh they're going to get judged uh now that's on Saturday sorry I'm jumping ahead and getting all excited about their Offa too but really it is about thees I don't I don't care what anyone else says um but we're going to have music we're going to have activities for kids so there's going to
            • 39:00 - 39:30 be sugar skull making in fact you know this sugar skull was made last year by us here um and our we are asking our volunteers to make sugar spells we're going to do the decorating here pretty soon um we're just trying to make a bunch um to let people decorate their own that day as well we also uh we'll have simp making simple suuchi with the paper and uh
            • 39:30 - 40:00 rados and my repad have all this we tidied them up oh yeah so uh basically there will be a lot of different activities for kiddos there's also going to be um some that you can take home with you for coloring and things like that uh but there'll be music and food trucks the next day Saturday it's going to be more about the adults but that doesn't change much anyway I'm not going to lie it's still going to be sugar spells and
            • 40:00 - 40:30 uhas and inviting our community to come in and and listen to some music uh we'll have a few vendors there that day oh there's the yeah I there's a monarch butterfly one and it's just by the way from a can aluminum can ni and colored with Sharpie but yeah so um I'm not kidding when I say say you can you can make your own I promise I promise um so
            • 40:30 - 41:00 yeah we'll be doing a lot of those things over the the two days and really just coming together celebrating um those who have gone in our community and uh celebrating the culture that you know really gave us this wonderful day to remember everyone [Applause]