![]() ![]() The altar for her actually stays up almost a month, and I feel her presence the most during this season,” Valladolid said of her mother, Maria de la Luz Rodriguez de Valladolid, whose photo as a young girl graces the altar. “Little by little, the tradition has now become one of the most important days of the year for me. I felt disconnected from that part of my culture and those opportunities felt opportunistic and inauthentic, so I began to really study and understand what Dia de Muertos truly is about. side of the border to use this holiday to promote products or services. “Oddly enough, because I am a Mexican chef, I kept being asked to participate in events and press on the U.S. ![]() #Dia de los muertos altar oaxaca tv“I grew up with strict Catholic parents, so building an altar rooted in pre-Hispanic Aztec tradition wasn’t a part of our traditions,” recalled the Chula Vista-based chef, author and TV personality whose mother passed away 12 years ago. Listen: those merengue lessons are a rite of passage! Maybe you can relate.When she began building a Day of the Dead altar for her mother about seven years ago, Marcela Valladolid didn’t immediately have a connection - emotional or otherwise - with the annual tradition. “They are as central to growing up Hispano as receiving your first merengue lessons on New Year’s Eve from a drunk tío or tía who insists your life depends on your ability to sway your hips with swing,” writes Rojas Contreras. The candy factory of your dreams is in Colombiaįor a candy fiend like me, it doesn’t get much better than this story by the novelist Ingrid Rojas Contreras about the Colombina factory where sweet Bon Bon Bum lollipops (and dreams!) are made. It seems the more basic the process, the more magic the object can hold. Yet each is slightly different in shape and texture, owing to the hand that formed it, and distinct in its random markings, with traces of smoke and soot from the firing. After all, it’s not the object that matters - those comales are made of just earth, water and sand. No one wants an ancient tradition to vanish, but most do and more will. It’s also just a really lovely look into how the people of San Marcos make their red-colored ceramic cookware from mountain earth, over enormous fire mounds. Separately, but on the topic of Oaxaca, this is a quick and fascinating history of how artisans in one village expanded their pottery offerings beyond the practical. In Dallas, for example, where about a third of the population is Hispanic and primarily of Mexican descent, Maroches Bakery, in the Bishops Arts District neighborhood, has become known for its Day of the Dead community altar. In many cities, especially those with large Chicano populations like Houston and Los Angeles, altars honoring deceased ancestors and loved ones with food and mementos have popped up on street corners and in shops in advance of the holiday on Nov. But Mexican-Americans (and Pixar) have taken the Day of the Dead and made it a distinct part of American culture too. Inevitably, we leave parts of ourselves behind when we emigrate - traditions that are too hard to keep up foods for which the right sazón is nearly impossible to find. ![]() But even if it shouldn’t be a thing, it still is.) I envied the shared communion of this small gesture, which I’d never witnessed growing up in New York: their jalones had historia. They’d inherited this bedtime ritual from my grandmother, who died in the early ’90s and whose long mane of pelo bueno was legend in my family. ![]() Every night at my tía’s home in Santo Domingo, I watched her and the other women and girls on my dad’s side of the family brush out their curls, braid their hair and wrap it into the same Princess Leia-style buns to sleep. ¿Lo mejor? It’ll be in Spanish and English, so you can forward it to your tía, your primo Lalo or anyone else (read: everyone).Īt the end of 2016, in between jobs and ready for a change, I moved back to the Dominican Republic for a few months. Expect politics, arts, analysis, personal essays and more. El Espace is a column dedicated to news and culture relevant to Latinx communities. ![]()
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