The Tacoma Art Museum kicks off its Dia de los Muertos celebration Saturday, Oct. 20, when a tapete, or sand carpet, will be installed in TAM’s lobby beginning at 10 a.m.  TAM’s celebration ends Sunday, Nov. 4 with a free Dia de los Muertos community festival beginning at noon.

Dia de los Muertos?  Well pull up a skull and read on.

“In Mexico, el Dia de los Muertos is a private family event,” explains Cynthia Duncan, associate professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Washington-Tacoma.

She describes how, typically, there is a mass for the dead and then a visit to the church graveyard.  The procession following the observance might evolve into a community party, but Duncan says, “It’s more of a religious event.”

She warns that community events such as the Sixth Avenue procession held Nov. 2 at 7 p.m., which she considers unauthentic, may be leading Anglos to misunderstand the traditional cultural forms in place for thousands of years.

“Americans are attracted as an artistic concept, but I really don’t know how much they really understand,” she says.

She describes a community festival in Chicago’s Museum Of Mexican Culture & History, not unlike the Dia de los Muertos event held in the Tacoma Art Museum as well as the one presented by the Latin Student Organization at the University of Washington, Tacoma, where folk art and traditions are presented to the public to promote understanding.

“It’s not completely authentic,” she reiterated. But the key difference Duncan points to is that the festival at the Museum of Mexican Culture & History was presented by Mexicans.

She says there’s nothing wrong with community festivals that inform the public about traditions, but she says she has mixed feelings.

“I think it’s really in a period of transition,” she says.

“El dia de los Muertos really belongs to Mexico,” explains Duncan.  “It goes back to pre-Columbian times.”  She continues, explaining how as Catholicism spread through Mexico pre-Hispanic belief was blended with Catholicism and how “Dia de los Santos,” as celebrated by other Catholics, became “Dia de los Muertos.”

“(It was) a symbolic way of remembering, respecting, acknowledging they’re still a part of us,” Duncan says.

She describes altars and the symbolism of the items placed on them. A cigarette and ashtray are items she places on her alter for her mother, who liked to smoke.  Her father gets apples. The marigold, the flower of the dead, the sugar skulls, bread with bones â€" all are traditional Aztec elements, not Spanish, she says. 

For the Aztecs, the dead weren’t in a completely separate and different place than the living. Duncan explains the concept as “just because I don’t see them doesn’t mean their spirits aren’t with us.”

When Duncan was faculty advisor for the University of Washington, Tacoma’s Latin Student Organization, the group put out Tacoma’s first Dia de los Muertos public altar display at the university.

“A lot of people at the university didn’t know what el Dia was. They were skeptical,” Duncan says.

But she recalls that the event offered those involved a chance to learn a cultural tradition, and there was another benefit: “It was really healing for people who had lost husbands, fathers … . Dia is a chance to talk about the person that you lost and love.”

But she allows that even in Mexico the lure of Halloween may be competing with the pure Mexican tradition of Dia de los Muertos.

“In Mexico, it’s becoming difficult to avoid contamination,” she says.  For example, supermarkets there sell Halloween items. 

Even still, those experiences that are not authentic can foster conversations and education.

Even in her own experience with the Latin Student Organization, Duncan saw friction over the decision to present a Dia de los Muertos event with the mixed group of students with Puerto Rican, Columbian, Peruvian, and Central American backgrounds.

“But in the end, the group thought it was important to educate,” Duncan says. â€" Jessica Corey Butler