Category: Religion & Belief Systems

Photo: Día de Muertos documentary project, Querétaro, October 28, 2026

Overview: This week in Querétaro, I am filming a short documentary about Día de Muertos and the ways memory stays alive. As I stand before the city’s ofrenda, I keep thinking about Haiti’s Fèt Gede, a different tradition that also meets the dead around November 1 and 2. Their rituals are not the same, but both hold a question worth sitting with: what meaning can people keep when someone else tries to replace it?

In Querétaro, I think of Haiti

The municipal ofrenda rises in front of me. Marigolds and copal meet in the air. Papel picado shifts in the wind. I pause, camera in hand, and take in the care behind each small detail.

Then my mind travels to a courtyard in Haiti. I hear drums. I think of peppers in rum. I think of the same two days marked on the calendar.

Mexico and Haiti do not share one tradition. Their histories, faiths, and rituals are distinct. But their observances ask us to consider what happens when a people’s way of honoring the dead is judged, pushed aside, or called wrong.

I see a shared story of negotiation. The dates were shaped by the Catholic calendar. The meanings people carried did not simply disappear.

Mexico: making a place for the dead

In many Mexican communities, families build ofrendas. Offerings that welcome and remember the dead. They may use cempasúchil, or marigold petals, along with copal incense, water, salt, pan de muerto, papel picado, and photographs. These are not props for a display. They are part of a practice of care. UNESCO describes families placing flowers, candles, food, and other offerings to welcome deceased relatives; Smithsonian Folklife discusses how altars and their forms change across communities.

Photo: Día de Muertos documentary project, Querétaro, October 28, 2026

The dates fall near All Saints’ Day on November 1 and All Souls’ Day on November 2 in the Catholic calendar. The Vatican describes November 2 as the commemoration of all the faithful departed. For many people, Catholic belief and practice are not an empty layer imposed over older customs. Faith in the afterlife has been real. Prayer has offered comfort. The chance to remember the dead within a religious community can matter deeply.

Día de Muertos also has roots in Indigenous traditions that predate the Spanish conquest. The exact history is not a simple story of one ancient festival becoming today’s celebration. Historians continue to debate which Indigenous practices met and changed alongside the Catholic calendar, and how those changes took place. A historian writing for The Conversation describes Indigenous people making choices about which traditions to continue under colonial rule. UNESCO added Mexico’s Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008. Its account recognizes both pre-Hispanic rites and Catholic feasts in the tradition.

That history is layered, not settled into a single neat answer. The ofrenda carries memory through objects, food, and attention. It says that love can still have a place to land.

Haiti: the Gede are more than death

Gede altar, Petwo/Rada/Gede spirits, November 5, 2010. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

In Haiti, Fèt Gede honors the Gede, a family of spirits in Haitian Vodou associated with death and fertility. The observance is centered on cemeteries and is celebrated mainly around November 1 and 2. Visit Haiti describes the festival and its place in Haitian practice.

Baron Samedi, also called Bawon Samdi, is known as master of the cemetery. Maman Brigitte is associated with the protection of gravestones. Offerings may include kleren piman, rum steeped with hot peppers, and the music may carry banda rhythms. Reporting by The New York Times describes Fèt Gede gatherings and the role of the Gede; Visit Haiti also describes offerings and music.

Baron Samedi cross, cemetery in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, November 2, 2010. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Gede are also known for irreverent humor. Their jokes can mock the powerful and make room for truth that is hard to speak in a more formal setting. That humor is not a sign that the faith is foolish, or that its rituals are a spectacle. It belongs to a living religious tradition with its own care, meaning, and ways of holding life and death together.

Two paths, one refusal

I do not want to flatten these traditions into one story. Mexican Indigenous communities and Haitian Vodou practitioners come from different histories. Their beliefs are not interchangeable. But both observances meet the Catholic calendar on November 1 and 2, and both hold on to relationships that cannot be reduced to a date on a page.

My interpretation is that both peoples were told, in different ways, that their ways of honoring the dead were wrong. The colonial encounter brought pressure to change belief, practice, and the language used to describe the sacred. Yet people did not only receive what was imposed. They made choices. They adapted, preserved, and gave familiar dates meanings rooted in their own worlds. The Conversation examines Indigenous choices in Mexico’s colonial history; Visit Haiti places Fèt Gede in its Haitian religious and cultural setting.

The ofrenda kept its marigolds. The Gede kept their names.

Colonisation changed the calendar, not the covenant.

That is one way I understand decolonisation of the mind: learning to notice when we have mistaken a powerful voice for the only voice. We can respect Catholic faith and its comfort while also asking what happened to local beliefs under colonial rule. We can learn about Vodou without turning it into a mystery for outsiders to stare at. We can read history with care, and leave room for what scholars continue to debate.

The work is not to choose one people’s memory over another’s. It is to stop treating memory as something the powerful alone get to define.

Back to the ofrenda

Back in Querétaro, the two days return to view. The marigolds, the copal, the photographs. I think of the courtyard in Haiti, too. Different sounds. Different ways of speaking with the dead. A shared insistence that those who came before us still matter.

Photo: Día de Muertos documentary project, Querétaro, October 28, 2026

The dead are not a problem to solve or a past to outgrow. They are part of how we understand who we are. What we remember shapes the stories we tell ourselves, and the futures we can imagine.

The dead are not gone. They are owed.

We owe them more than a name spoken once a year. We owe them truth about the histories they lived through. We owe them respect for the faith that gave comfort and the customs that carried love forward. And we owe ourselves the freedom to question inherited stories without losing the people inside them.

Reclaim the mind. Rewrite the future.

That work of examination is what I write about, and what the documentary holds up to the light.

Further reading: UNESCO, Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead; The Conversation, on how Mexico's Day of the Dead blends Indigenous and European traditions; Smithsonian Folklife, on the changing traditions of Día de los Muertos; Visit Haiti, on Fèt Gede; The New York Times, 'Voodoo Is Part of Us'.

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