Toward the end of October, homes and cemeteries begin to change. Cempasúchil appears in bright orange, photographs are brought out, and families prepare foods attached to particular people. Día de los Muertos is often recognized first by its color, but within the tradition the details are specific: a photograph chosen for one person, a dish made the way they liked it, flowers laid along the path to an altar.
The celebration practiced today took centuries to form. Its history reaches into Indigenous Mesoamerican relationships with the dead, while the familiar November dates arrived with Catholicism. Rather than belonging to one moment in Mexican history, Día de los Muertos carries several of them at once.
Before November 1 and 2
There was no single pre-Hispanic holiday identical to the Día de los Muertos celebrated today. Across Mesoamerica, different peoples developed their own funeral rites, offerings, ideas about the afterlife, and ways of maintaining relationships with the dead. Among Nahua peoples of Central Mexico, the circumstances of a person’s death could affect where the dead were believed to go and how they were remembered.
The Mexica solar calendar divided the year into 18 periods of 20 days, with five additional days completing the 365-day cycle. At least four of those twenty-day periods included funerary observances. Among them were Miccailhuitontli, the “small feast of the dead,” and Huey Miccailhuitl, the “great feast of the dead.” They belonged to a calendar very different from the one used today and were not simply early versions of Día de los Muertos.
Food, flowers, incense, crafted objects, and ritual offerings already had places within Indigenous relationships with death. Copal smoke was part of ceremonial life, and cempasúchil was known and cultivated long before colonization. Other communities across what is now Mexico had their own practices, so even before the Spanish arrived there was never one universal Mesoamerican way of honoring the dead.
How November 1 and 2 Entered the Tradition
Catholic Europe observed All Saints’ Day on November 1 and the commemoration of the Faithful Departed, or All Souls’ Day, on November 2. The Spanish also brought their own funeral customs, devotional candles, wheat breads, prayers for souls in Purgatory, and traditions surrounding graves and church observances.
By the late 16th century, Dominican friar Diego Durán was already writing about Indigenous people making different offerings during Todos Santos and the days dedicated to the dead. He believed that older ceremonies for the dead were continuing beneath the Catholic observances.
His account offers an early glimpse of a process already underway. The November dates were Catholic, while many of the practices and understandings brought into those dates came from older Indigenous life. Catholic belief, Indigenous ritual, regional custom, and family practice continued to develop alongside one another throughout the colonial period.
Día de los Angelitos
Within many Día de los Muertos traditions, children who have died are received separately from adults. They are often called angelitos, or “little angels,” and their arrival may be observed beginning October 31 or on November 1, depending on the community.
Their ofrendas can reflect childhood in small, personal ways. INPI records traditions that include sweets, toys, miniature breads, and other foods prepared especially for children. In some communities, white flowers and candles are used for the angelitos before the altar is changed to receive adult relatives.
La Ofrenda
Family altars became an important part of domestic remembrance, and today they vary enormously from one household and region to another. A photograph may identify the person being received, while the food placed beside it often has less to do with a fixed rule than with the person themselves: what they ate, drank, or enjoyed while alive.
Some of the older elements have deep Indigenous histories. Copal was burned ceremonially in Mesoamerica centuries before Spanish contact, and its resinous smoke still appears on altars and in cemetery observances.
Cempasúchil carries a similarly old connection to Mexico. The flower was known in the pre-Hispanic world, and its Nahuatl name survives in Spanish. During Día de los Muertos, its strong scent and brilliant color are used to mark altars and paths for the returning dead. The familiar trails of loose petals belong to living practice rather than to one fixed ancient formula, and communities have continued to shape the ways the flower is used.
Other parts of the altar came later. Wax candles entered through European religious practice and became inseparable from the warm, flickering appearance of many contemporary ofrendas. Photographs, now so personal to family altars, are necessarily much newer, adding another way of giving a remembered person a visible place within the home.
Papel picado has an equally layered history. Indigenous communities made ceremonial paper from amate bark before colonization, sometimes cutting or shaping it for ritual use. The delicate tissue paper associated with modern papel picado belongs to a later period. Papel de china became available in Mexico through overseas trade, and by the 19th century artisans were adapting the material for decoration.
San Salvador Huixcolotla, Puebla, became especially associated with the craft. Traditional makers stack sheets of tissue paper and work through them with chisels and punches, allowing one design to appear across many sheets at once. The papel picado now hung over altars, streets, and celebrations is connected to an older Mexican relationship with ceremonial paper without being identical to pre-Hispanic amate work.
Sugar skulls carry another history shaped by colonial Mexico. Skull imagery long predates Spanish rule, but the familiar calaverita de azúcar depends upon sugar and alfeñique, a moldable sugar craft introduced by the Spanish. Records from Toluca document the production and sale of alfeñique during the colonial period, and by the 19th century sugar skulls and other molded sweets were familiar parts of the Todos Santos season.
Their decoration grew increasingly elaborate. Bright icing, metallic papers, flowers, and names transformed the skull into something immediately recognizable within Día de los Muertos. Older traditions of skull imagery and the newer material of molded sugar came together within Mexican popular culture rather than arriving from the same historical source.
Pan de muerto has a similarly mixed ancestry. Indigenous offerings included foods made from maize and amaranth, some formed into ritual shapes. Wheat arrived after the conquest, along with European breads associated with Catholic observances for the dead. The breads now grouped under the name pan de muerto developed through those later exchanges and remain highly regional. The round, sugar-dusted loaf familiar across much of Mexico today is only one version among many.
There is no single historical altar from which every contemporary ofrenda descends intact. What appears on one today may carry Indigenous ritual history, Catholic devotion, colonial foodways, later folk art, and a family’s own habits within the same space.
Calaveras and the Arrival of La Catrina
Not all of the imagery now associated with Día de los Muertos developed around the altar. By the 19th century, calaveras had become an important part of Mexican popular print culture. Newspapers and broadsheets published humorous verses imagining living people as already dead, while illustrators used skeletons to comment on politics, class, vanity, and everyday life.
José Guadalupe Posada worked within that world of graphic satire around the turn of the 20th century. His skeletons drank, danced, argued, worked, and dressed like the living. Among them was the image later known as La Calavera Garbancera, which eventually became La Catrina. Posada depicted her as a skull beneath an extravagant European-style hat, within a broader tradition of satire surrounding fashion, status, and social pretension. She did not yet have the elegant full body now associated with the character.
That form came later, when Diego Rivera placed her at the center of his 1947 mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central. Rivera dressed the skeletal figure as an elegant society woman and positioned her beside Posada. In Rivera’s mural, the figure took the form and name of La Catrina familiar today.
Her association with Día de los Muertos grew afterward. Catrinas appeared in sculpture, ceramics, paper, costume, and other forms of popular art until the figure became closely tied to the modern visual language of the holiday.
Día de los Muertos and Halloween
Día de los Muertos and Halloween fall close together and share some imagery, particularly skeletons, costumes, and themes of death, but their histories and purposes are different.
Halloween developed from European and Christian seasonal traditions and is now closely associated with costumes, fright, fantasy, and trick-or-treating. Día de los Muertos developed in Mexico through Indigenous practices for honoring the dead combined with Catholic observances in early November.
Many families celebrate both, but the traditions are not interchangeable. Día de los Muertos remains centered on remembrance, offerings, and maintaining a relationship with loved ones who have died.
Día de los Muertos Today
The Día de los Muertos observed today brings together practices that entered its history at very different times. Older Indigenous traditions remained alongside customs introduced during the colonial period, while later generations added materials, foods, art, and ways of remembering that belonged to their own time.
In one home, an ofrenda may fill a room; in another, remembrance may take the form of a photograph, a candle, and a familiar dish. The tradition can look different across regions, generations, and even two homes on the same street.
