Dia de los Muertos

The Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos, kept on 1-2 November across the feasts of All Saints and All Souls, is the Mexican observance in which the dead are believed to return briefly to visit the living. Families build home altars (ofrendas) laden with photographs, marigolds (cempasuchil), candles, water, the favourite foods of the departed and sugar skulls, and gather at cemeteries to clean and decorate graves and keep vigil, in a spirit that is affectionate and festive rather than mournful.

Its character is a genuine fusion. Scholars debate the balance, but the observance clearly weds indigenous Mesoamerican attitudes to death and the ancestors with the Catholic calendar of All Saints and All Souls brought by the Spanish, the two settling onto the same early-November days. Much of the now-iconic imagery is more recent still: the elegant skeleton La Catrina derives from an early-twentieth-century print by the engraver Jose Guadalupe Posada, and the observance's global visibility owes much to twentieth-century muralism and to film. UNESCO inscribed the indigenous festivity on its Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2008. It is a national holiday in Mexico and widely kept across the Mexican diaspora.

Mexico City did not traditionally hold a large civic Day of the Dead parade through its streets; the elaborate procession featuring giant skeleton figures and floats that opens the 2015 James Bond film Spectre was an invention created specifically for the film, filmed with the cooperation of Mexican authorities. The scene attracted such strong public interest, including from tourists who arrived expecting to see the fictional parade in person, that Mexico City's government began organising an actual annual Day of the Dead parade starting in 2016, closely modelled on the film's invented version, drawing large crowds and now an established fixture of the city's own real November calendar.

The episode is now regularly cited by scholars of festival and tourism studies as an unusually direct example of a popular film generating a genuinely new civic tradition rather than merely depicting or dramatising an existing one, a reversal of the usual direction in which real festivals inspire fictional depictions, and it illustrates how quickly a globally visible piece of media can reshape the public face of a centuries-old observance even in the city most associated with keeping it.

Among the foods placed on the ofrenda and eaten by the family, pan de muerto, a sweetened egg bread often shaped with bone-like strips of dough across the top and dusted with sugar, is baked specifically for the season in bakeries across Mexico each autumn, a custom distinct from the sugar skulls and marigolds already described and one of the few Day of the Dead foods eaten by the living as much as offered to the departed.