Phoenix couple brings Día de los Muertos back to its Indigenous roots

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“We can think of Day of the Dead or Día de los Muertos as like an Indigenous beating heart underneath the skin of Catholicism.” 

That’s how Mathew Sandoval, senior lecturer at Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University explains the colorful, annual Mexican celebration of honoring the dearly departed. 

Día de los Muertos, an ancient Mexican celebration with Indigenous Aztec roots, is typically observed on Nov. 1 and 2, on the Catholic holidays of All Saints Day and All Souls Day. During these two days, people make altars or ofrendas with images of their loved ones, paint their faces with images of the skull, visit the cemeteries with offerings of food and libations and some even host parties to honor their deceased relatives.

It’s not so much a time of mourning, but rather a time to invite the spirits of the dead back from beyond to join their families in a two-day celebration of family and life.

But Día de los Muertos as it is known today is a different holiday than what was celebrated in ancient times. What people see today is a medley of ancient traditions and those of the Spanish who, over 500 years ago, imposed their Catholic rites on the Indigenous populations of the lands they conquered.

“Mexican Indigenous people, the Zapotec, Mayan and Aztec had to convert during early colonization in the 1500s and 1600s to survive in their communities,” Sandoval said. “It was like, ‘accept Christianity or die.’ But when they adopted Christianity, they also consciously chose to infuse that Christianity with their Indigenous traditions.”

But while history cannot be erased, one Phoenix couple has spent the last three decades trying to bring Día de los Muertos back to its authentic roots, before the Spanish colonial era. Carmen and Zarco Guerrero, longtime residents and artists from the Valley, have been promoting the original ancestral lineage of Día de los Muertos with their annual Mikiztli festival.

The Mikiztli festival was held on Oct. 24 at Steele Indian School Park in Phoenix and featured music from groups like Mariachi Rubor, an all-female mariachi band, dances performed by Ballet Folklorico Quetzalli, masked performances, art activities and food. Most notably there were also ancient ceremonial practices, like the Danza Mexica which is a form of ancestral worship and ode to what the Aztecs described as the four sacred directions north, south, east and west. The event drew hundreds of people and has been Phoenix’s longest-running celebration to honor the dead. 

“Our Mexican ancestral heritage, which is so profound, you don’t learn that by going to school in this country, even in México,” Zarco said, who is an accomplished mask maker and sculptor and also co-founded the festival with his wife Carmen. “Our history tells us that our history began with the coming of the Europeans to this continent. Well, we’re changing that. We are looking beyond that. We’re opening the book that has been closed to us by history and we’re sharing ancient symbols and ceremonies to celebrate our ancestors at Mikiztli.” 

According to Zarco, the name of the festival, Mikiztli, was inspired from a word in Nahuatl, an Indigenous Mexican language, that refers to the skull or calaca in Spanish, one of the most prominent Day of the Dead symbols that dates back over 3000 years. 

“We saw the significance and the value in resurrecting and celebrating the ancient Día de los Muertos tradition here in the Valley as a community celebration,” Zarco said. “I think we are one of the first organizations in the country that started celebrating as a community as opposed to an art exhibition.”

Prior to the couple creating the Mikiztli festival 30 years ago, Día de los Muertos was not a commonly celebrated community event in Phoenix. According to Sandoval, who has been researching the tradition for over a decade, Día de los Muertos is a holiday and tradition that only arrived in the United States in the 1970s. 

“It has to do with immigration patterns,” Sandoval said. “Day of the Dead, in terms of actual lineage and tradition, is really exclusive to central México. If we look at immigration patterns into the United States, many of the Mexican immigrants coming to the U.S. weren’t coming from central México. In other words, they were never bringing Day of the Dead with them because it was never a part of their culture.

“It wasn’t until relatively recently when more people started to immigrate from places like Michoacán or Oaxaca or México City or even the Yucatán, who started to come into the United States that they would bring those traditions.”

The resurrection of Día de los Muertos in the United States, specifically in the southwest, was also born out of a search for cultural identity amongst Mexican and Mexican Americans, Sandoval noted, and he says the Guerreros were some of the main “movers and shakers” of the movement.

In the 1970s as part of the Chicano arts movement people like Cesar Chavez, Dolores Huerta, community members and activists like the Guerreros started to bring back Day of the Dead into their communities as a way of encouraging Mexican communities to recover parts of their culture that had been forgotten or lost in mainstream American culture. 

“Día de los Muertos in terms of the calendar year, becomes the one time of the year in the United States, where Mexicans and Chicanos and Latinos, I would say, more generally have the opportunity to gather as a community and really be proud of our culture, be immersed in our culture and share our culture,” Sandoval said.

Sandoval, who has observed and participated in a number of Day of the Dead festivities in the United States and overseas for his research and his own cultural practice, says that many Día de los Muertos festivals have become commercialized in the last 20 years or usually have some type of corporate sponsorship tie-in. Several examples Sandoval named included tequila companies and car companies sponsoring and branding entire events for profit. But this isn’t only happening in the United States Sandoval explained. 

According to the ASU lecturer, even many of México’s notable Day of the Dead celebrations in México city, Michoacán or in Oaxaca have attracted thousands of people from all over the world as a tourist experience rather than an authentic Indigenous Mexican tradition. The Guerreros, however, set themselves apart.

“One of the reasons why I love Carmen and Zarco’s festival so much is precisely because it’s still community-oriented, and it hasn’t necessarily sold out, so to speak,” Sandoval said. “It’s still got real soul to it.”

Many of the vendors and artists who have attended and returned to the festival time and again also agree.

“The authenticity and the multigenerational nature of this festival is really what sets this apart from other festivals,” said Gloria Martinez-Granados, a jewelry maker, designer and artist who has been attending the festival for over five years.

Martinez-Granados also told The Republic that her husband, Reggie Casillas, who is also a Phoenix-based artist, has been attending the festival since he was a kid, when his parents were vendors. The couple was hired by the Guerreros this year to host a print-making activity for kids.  

“My husband has grown up in the arts in the Valley and around this festival and our daughter will be here today too. It’s just so touching to watch people come year after year and watch them grow and connect to this.”

But while the event has been known in the community as a multigenerational event, Mikiztli has also become a gathering space for people from all walks of life. 

The festival features not only Mexican dancers or strictly Mexican music or art. The couple has emphasized their event as an inclusive space to all cultures, even to some that don’t mark their calendars for Nov 1 and 2. At the festival, there are Navajo and Apache dancers, Japanese drummers, a Brazilian dance group and even a diverse selection of cuisines. 

“It’s intergenerational and it’s cross-cultural,” Zarco said. “It’s inclusive and people are always attesting to how beautiful it is and that’s what we wanted it to be. The beauty comes not just from the color and the costumes and the masks, but really from the spirit that’s brought from all of these different aspects of the family, different cultures, countries and people represented here.”

Luis Aniceto, owner of Oaxaca Imports, a local business that specializes in selling pottery, artwork and craftsmanship from Southern Mexico, has been attending Mikiztli for 8 years. He couldn’t help but smile as he spoke of the Guerreros and his time participating in the festival. 

“They are simply great people who love Mexican culture,” Aniceto said. “This is such a family-oriented event, it’s free and every year it gets better and better.”

Carmen and Zarco have long promoted Indigenous Mexican and Native American heritage, history and culture in Phoenix and throughout the Southwest. In the 1970s the couple founded an organization called Xicanindio  with the intent of addressing social issues through art and performance. 

The group was a collective of artists and activists from all over the Valley that collaborated on various projects. One of the ways the group promoted their initiatives was by painting murals in the inner city and some reservations in Arizona. According to Zarco, every time there was a new mural painted, Xicanindio threw a small festival with local musicians and dancers to inaugurate it.

That initial grassroots movement to celebrate their culture and support local artists and communities snowballed into what is now a non-profit called the Cultural Coalition. Carmen serves as the executive director, while Zarco is the artistic director.

Today, the Cultural Coalition is responsible for hosting various events and public programming in Phoenix that use the arts as a way to preserve rich cultural traditions and share it with audiences from varying ages, cultures and backgrounds.

Some of the events that the Cultural Coalition organizes include Mask Alive in downtown Mesa, El Puente Festival at the Tempe Center for the Arts, the El Zócalo Festival at the Herberger Theater in downtown Phoenix and the Mikitzli festival.

The Mikitzli festival was originally held in Mesa at Pioneer Park for 20 years, before moving to Chandler for five years. The festival found its permanent home in Phoenix at Steele Indian School Park in 2012

To put on their events, the group gets their funding from a combination of public and private sponsorships and they also charge vendors to rent booths at their festivals. This year the Cultural Coalition got their main funding for Mikiztli from the National Endowment for the Arts, the  Arizona Commission for the Arts, the Phoenix Office of Arts and Culture. They also received additional funding from the Raza Development Fund, T-mobile and Paramount Movies. Part time volunteers assist in organizing and running the Coalition’s events.

 “Our goal is to celebrate culture and to bring people together in our city parks, to dance and to share our diverse cultural legacy,” Carmen said. “And we feel like we are accomplishing our goals of keeping the arts alive in the hearts of our community by providing access to these kinds of events.”

You can connect with Arizona Republic Culture and Outdoors Reporter Shanti Lerner through email at shanti.lerner@gannett.com  or you can also follow her on Twitter.