Dia de los Muertos at Hollywood Forever Cemetery
by chris cunningham
How’d a cemetery become the cool place to hang out in L.A. They’re reinventing the cemetery experience over there at Hollywood Forever. Movies, festivals, actual burials. It’s crazy! Anyway, the Day of the Dead Festival the weekend before the actual event is totally amazing! And really beautiful when the sun goes down. Alters, skeletons, arts and crafts, food, dancers… it’s total Mexican mayhem. It wasn’t overly crowded where it would be a pain to see everything. I did look at the map later and realized I missed a whole section of alters. I’m all about it next year and Hollywood Forever has only been hosting it for 7 years. They always do a good job hosting events there. Kudos to them for using the cemetery in new ways!
Go next year you stay at home on a Saturday night kinda kids. A little background…
“The historical roots of this celebration date back to the pre-Hispanic cultures of Meso-America of the indigenous people, Aztecs, Mayans, Toltecas, Tlaxcaltec, Chichimec, Tecpanec, and others native to Mexico more than 3,000 years. When the Spaniards conquered the country, this indigenous custom was rooted so deeply that, after five centuries of colonization, it has continued to survive and remain as celebrated as in its first days.
Throughout each period in Mexican culture, death seems to hold no terror. In Mexican art, legends, and religion, death has not been a mysterious and fearful presence but a realistic recognizable character as much a part of life as life itself. Dia De Los Muertos expresses this perspective: it is not a mournful commemoration but a happy and colorful celebration where Death takes a lively, friendly expression and is not frightening or strange. There is no place for sorrow or weeping for this could be interpreted as a discourteous to the dead relatives who are visiting gladly.
Indigenous people believed that souls did not die, that they continued living in Mictl?ɬ°n (Place of Death) a special place for them to finally rest. On Dia De Los Muertos, tradition holds that the dead return to earth to visit their living relatives. It is believed that although these relatives can’t see them, they can surely feel them.”
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