On Saturday, midway above the Rio Grande, two groups of 10-foot-high skeleton puppets will approach each other from opposite sides of the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas and Juarez, Mexico and meet in a symbolic embrace in honor of families whose loved ones have lost their lives in their attempt to reach America.

The giant Día de Los Muertos papier-mâché figures, called mojigangas, will unite as part of a Day of the Dead vigil conducted by the Border Network for Human Rights, an immigration reform and human rights advocacy organization in El Paso.

“We want to remember the families who didn’t have a chance to see their loved ones,” said Fernando Garcia, the group’s founder and executive director. “For us, it is a catastrophe.”

Día de Los Muertos, the indigenously rooted, primarily Mexican holiday marked on the first two days of November, is commonly thought of as a time for families to celebrate loved ones who’ve passed on with altars, or ofrendas, bearing photos, treats and other reminders of the things they enjoyed. But even as the tradition has rooted itself in America, its purpose has eclipsed reunion and remembrance, providing a vehicle for social commentary and dissent on issues of the moment, from the days of the Vietnam War to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Day of the Dead is a way to think critically about whose lives we’re choosing to honor,” said Mathew Sandoval, an associate teaching professor at Barrett, the Honors College, at Arizona State University who teaches about cultural studies and social movements. “It’s a form of political protest, choosing people who stand for something we want to draw attention to.”

In addition to challenging immigration policy, activists and artists around the U.S. have created Día de Los Muertos altars and events in connection with the Black Lives Matter movement and the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian territory. At SOMArts in San Francisco, the cultural center’s 25^th annual Day of the Dead exhibition, “Día de Los Muertos 2024: Bearing Witness,” features altar installations dedicated to Palestinian lives lost in Gaza.

Meanwhile, a few miles away in the city’s Mission District, Mexican American muralist and organizer Lucia Ippolito is assembling a separate public display of Día de Los Muertos altars honoring Palestinian lives.

“I think Day of the Dead is one of the most political celebrations we have,” said Ippolito, who sees connections between the plights of Mexican, Syrian and Palestinian immigrants and refugees and considers her project a form of solidarity. “While we’re honoring our ancestors and our deceased, it’s important that we also recognize families who have passed away in other global struggles.”

Along with grief and remembrance, a call to action

Saturday’s border vigil in El Paso and Juarez will feature a recitation of the names of people identified who have died this year in the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s El Paso sector. A similar recitation will happen Saturday in Tucson, Arizona, where the local group Coalición de Derechos Humanos will lead its 24^th annual Día de Los Muertos procession.

Alba Jaramillo, a local organizer for Derechos Humanos, said the event not only grieves those who have died crossing the Sonoran Desert but calls attention to policies that activists say have exacerbated the issue.

“This is an advocacy event, where we call for changes in immigration policy,” Jaramillo said. “We have the deadliest land migration route in the world.”

According to the Center for Migration Studies of New York, at least 5,400 people have died or gone missing along the length of the U.S.-Mexico border between August 2014 and August 2024, with yearly death tolls reaching record highs in the past several years.

“It’s really a way for the community to amplify their calls for justice in the context of that anti-migrant violence,” said Ruth Gomberg-Muñoz, a professor of anthropology at Loyola University Chicago who has worked with migrant advocacy organizations.

Garcia, from the advocacy network in El Paso, said U.S. border policies meant to deter crossings by diverting immigration flows to risky areas have done little to stop people from trying to cross. Instead, deaths have skyrocketed. And the cultural tradition of Día de Los Muertos offers a way to simultaneously honor their memory and demand change.

“If nobody talks about or does anything to remember their family members, they are forgotten,” he said. “That is the essence of what we’re trying to do: to never forget that thousands of migrants – tios, abuelitos, brothers and sisters – have died due to immigration policy. And they will die again if we don’t remember them.”

How politics helped Day of the Dead rise and spread

In some ways, the sociopolitical currents running through Day of the Dead are part of its heritage, starting with its origins in memorial traditions willfully maintained by indigenous peoples resisting efforts of Spanish missionaries to forcefully convert them to Catholicism.

“In that regard, it’s already political,” said Sandoval, the cultural and political studies professor at Arizona State.

Regina Marchi, a professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, said in some instances, the indigenous populations who marked such traditions with festive, nightlong cemetery drinking in that era rioted and rebelled after reflecting on the exploitation and mistreatment that had led to so many loved ones’ demise.

Ultimately, the tradition would merge with Spanish Catholicism’s celebrations of All Saints’ Day Nov. 1 and All Souls’ Day Nov. 2. But until the 1920s, it remained primarily a rural, regional celebration.

That changed when, on the heels of the Mexican revolution, it became part of national efforts to unify the fractured country around a shared identity and culture. Día de Los Muertos and regional music forms such as mariachi were pushed front and center.

“Those are things we now think of as Mexican,” Sandoval said. “So it was political in that way as well.”

The first public Día de Los Muertos celebrations documented in the U.S. were launched in the early 1970s by Latino artists and educators in California who embraced the tradition as a statement of Chicano and Mexican American self-identity.

At the time, the Mexican American community was still seething over disproportionate death rates of Chicanos in the Vietnam War and the death of civil rights activist and Los Angeles Times columnist Ruben Salazar, killed by a police tear-gas projectile in the chaotic aftermath of a massive Chicano-led war protest in 1970.

The events they launched would transform Día de Los Muertos in the U.S. from a family tradition marked privately at home or cemeteries to one often built around street processions, art exhibits and other community events.

“Mexican Americans felt empowered, and it was a way of exhibiting ethnic pride,” Sandoval said.

The dead memorialized by 1970s community advocates included family members and Mexican and Mexican American cultural icons like artist Frida Kahlo, revolutionary figure Emiliano Zapata and farmworkers union leader Cesar Chavez. But they also included community members lost to social injustices: journalist Salazar, farmworkers poisoned by pesticides, teens killed in gang violence and the disproportionate death toll among Mexican Americans serving in Vietnam.

Among the imagery they adopted were Catrinas – clothed skeletons depicted as living characters – and skulls, created by Jose Guadalupe Posada, an early 20th-century Mexican political cartoonist who used such images to mock the hypocrisies of urban upper-class society. But Posada’s illustrations at the time existed separately from the altar remembrances of the dead practiced among rural indigenous populations in the country’s southern and central regions.

Chicanos in Los Angeles and San Francisco brought those things together, said Marchi, author of “The Day of the Dead in the U.S.: The Migration and Transformation of a Cultural Phenomenon.” Those communities produced Catrina-style art while creating indigenously inspired multitiered ofrendas covered in marigolds, copal incense and edible offerings such as chocolate and pan de muertos, a sweet bread baked for the holiday.

In the decades since, reformers and Latino communities around the U.S. have produced Day of the Dead altars spotlighting victims of other sociopolitical ills – the American-sponsored wars in Central and South America, the AIDS epidemic, the tragedy of 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the hundreds of female factory workers from post-NAFTA maquiladoras, killed in Juarez in the 1990s and 2000s.

More recently, they’ve focused on victims of police brutality and the COVID-19 pandemic, who are disproportionately people of color.

As with those honoring Palestinian lives, the altars and commemorations don’t always focus on Latinos. According to Sandoval, Day of the Dead altars have memorialized victims of Russia’s war with Ukraine and the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

“The tradition is really about honoring and having a deep reverence for the departed,” said Marchi, who authored the Day of the Dead book. “If you don’t remember them, then they’re truly dead.”