08 Dec Dia de Los Muertos

Now that Dia de Los Muertos – a very interesting celebration of the Dead that is practised by a lot of Latinos and Chicanos and Halloween are over, it’s time to kill some joy and look at the various ways in which these holidays are appropriating other cultures, or problematic in some other sense, and the ways in which celebrating these holidays can actually be empowering.

Have you seen the last James Bond movie? It starts with a scene that shows you what’s Dia de Los Muertos.

Creating altars for public spaces breaks down a high culture vs. popular culture binary, and makes the altar into a space where awareness can be raised about issues. Secondly, it is a site where women can enact their agency. In discussing the ‘culture not a costume’ campaign, the dangers and limits of cultural politics of both Dia de Los Muertos and Halloween will be shown.
Celebrating the Dia de Los Muertos in the USA can be seen “ seen as a strategic retort to the marginalization of People of Color”, a place where “Latino artists, community activists, and everyday citizens exercise cultural autonomy and transmit their perspectives on contemporary issues affecting their lives” (Marchi, 71). Celebrating Dia de Los Muertos is showing the valuable, interesting and beautiful culture of the Latina community, it thus enables them to counter historically negative media images (Marchi, 71). Furthermore, because it has become a more and more public event, it is a good way to draw attention to the way policies and events affect lives of the community (Marchi, 71). Attention to their issues might not be given in the normal context, but Dia de Los Muertos provides a platform to raise certain issues that otherwise would get less attention.

The altar is a place for women to enact agency. Perez writes: “domestic or “folk” artistic and religious cultures have traditionally been a terrain of female agency for indigenous, mestiza women” (93), and “the domestic altar has embodied a space of some religious and gender freedom, as well as creativity, for the socially marginalized and oppressed” (93). Because ‘folk art’ isn’t associated with (and thus not as highly policed) as high culture, it is a space where marginalized or oppressed groups have a fairer chance to express themselves and create something artistically. Amelia Mesa-Bains’ desk and mirror in the Venus Trilogy show this: the typical female space is also the place where transformation takes place.

Furthermore, Amelia Mesa- Bains “brought the women’s altar into public settings for consideration of its history, aesthetic attributes, and political force” (Perez, 97). By bringing it to the museum and calling it art, it questions our conceptions of what we call high and low art, and questions who is to assign what is art and what is not. Placing something in a museum, is a form of affirmation and validation. Marchi describes this dynamic of validating cultural expressions that are normally overlooked, when she writes that “the promotion (and affirmation) of ethnic cultural events by dominant institutions (museums, universities, businesses, or municipal governments) can have powerful educational and social effects that serve to strengthen, rather than weaken, ethnic traditions by providing economic support for endangered practices and helping to counter assimilationist pressures and stigmas attached to being an ethnic minority” (122). By bringing something into the open that is normally private, you challenge status quo. Challenging and destabilizing what we think are stable and unquestionable facts, the act of opposing and questioning binaries, is already a feminist politics. “To combine the visual language of high and popular arts constituted a de facto critical reappraisal of both, rethinking the formers exclusive claims based on class privilege and reevaluating the aesthetic and historical significance of the so-called folk-style of self-taught artists” (Perez, 104). But in the case of bringing altars to the museum, it is also bringing the feminine to a masculine place, thereby questioning both. “By adapting a practice that is normally found in the home to the museum context, Mesa-Bains evokes a domestic- and by extension, feminine – space within the public, male dominated sphere of fine art production and exhibition, a mode of art making that Mesa-Bains refers to as Domesticana” (4, SPARKed). Context is critical in establishing meaning, and rituals can make something valuable that wasn’t worthy before. For example, the dust that was left after 9/11 has been considered dangerous for the lungs, a hassle, and later sacred (Sturken, 415). In the same ways cultures and people might be viewed different if presented in a new light.

However, taking cultural practices out of its normal context, should be guarded carefully. The Culture not a Costume campaigns warns us for appropriating cultures as a Halloween costume: “You wear the costume for one night, I wear the Stigma for life”. Also Aya de Leon is skeptical of people who don’t belong to a certain culture and are not invested into finding out more about it, celebrating Dia de Los Muertos: “you want the golden treasures of our culture but you don’t want us” (website). While “culture cures” (Perez, 106), Sturken cites Harris in her discussion of the tourism around ground zero: “Kitsch can smooth over violence and tragedy” (422). There should always be a careful balance between appropriating and praising, and who the agent is matters a lot for something to be appropriate or appropriating.

Thus, as a feminist cultural politics of Dia de Los Muertos, altars can be a place for the ‘alter’, the other, to raise awareness about issues and to enact agency. When we continue to be on guard not to turn a culture into kitsch or a costume, on either the Day of the Dead or Halloween, the public events around celebrating the dead can be a site for female agency and awareness raising.