Viva la Vida

At noon on Saturday, October 24, the 43rd annual Viva la Vida procession stepped off in downtown Austin. Organized by the Mexic-Arte Museum, it wound along historic Sixth Street toward the festival grounds at Fourth Street and Congress Avenue. Along the way came painted Catrinas, giant puppets, folklórico dancers, masked marchers, and danza groups in towering feathered headdresses. The museum calls it Austin's largest and longest-running Día de los Muertos event. It also turns out to be older than the famous parade in Mexico City.

The holidayA visit, not a mourning

Día de los Muertos isn't Mexican Halloween. It runs from the end of October into the first days of November, overlapping the Catholic All Saints' and All Souls' days on November 1 and 2. Its center is a homecoming. UNESCO, which recognized the tradition as part of humanity's intangible cultural heritage, describes it this way:

“The transitory return to Earth of deceased relatives and loved ones.”UNESCO, Indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead

Families prepare for the visit with great care. They lay flower petals, candles and offerings along the path from the cemetery to the house, and set the dead's favorite dishes on a home altar, the ofrenda, among flowers and paper cut-outs. UNESCO notes that the season also marks the end of the annual maize harvest. It proclaimed the celebration a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2003 and moved it onto its Representative List in 2008.

The iconHow a joke became La Catrina

The elegant skeleton lady you see everywhere on Día de los Muertos started as satire. In 1912 the Mexico City engraver José Guadalupe Posada printed a skull in an elaborate hat on a penny broadside and called her the Calavera Garbancera. The name mocked the women who sold garbanzo beans in the street markets and powdered their faces and wore French fashions to pass as upper class. Posada died the next year, largely unknown.

She got her better-known name in 1930, when Frances Toor and Diego Rivera published the first book of Posada's engravings and renamed her the Calavera Catrina. In 1947 Rivera put her at the center of his mural Dream of a Sunday Afternoon in Alameda Park, holding hands with Posada on one side and a young Rivera on the other. Folk artists turned her into ceramic and papier-mâché figures. Chicano Movement artists in the 1960s and '70s painted her into murals and posters, and that part of the story leads straight to Austin.

Austin, 1984Three artists and a warehouse

Viva la Vida comes out of a museum, and the museum comes out of the Chicano art movement. Sylvia Orozco and Sam Coronado met as students at the University of Texas in the 1970s, where they pushed for more Chicano art and literature in the curriculum. In 1978 Orozco went to study at the San Carlos art academy in Mexico City and met the artist Pio Pulido. The two opened an art school there in 1980 before coming back to Austin.

In 1984 the three of them founded Mexic-Arte in the Arts Warehouse downtown, a cheap-studio building where the museum ran on a do-it-yourself budget. That same year they held their first Día de los Muertos celebration, and Pulido painted a lowrider hearse for it. In 1988 the museum moved into a 19th-century building on Congress Avenue, its home address ever since. In 2003 the Texas Legislature named it the official Mexican American fine art museum of Texas.

Forty-three yearsOlder than the parade it's often compared to

From that first celebration, the event grew into a full street festival and grand procession. In recent years it has included giant puppets called mojigangas, large moving sculptures, community altars, a lowrider exhibition and live music. It kept going through the pandemic, as an online festival in 2020 and a partly virtual one in 2021. The museum estimates the 2024 edition drew about 20,000 people. Last year's parade was called off for bad weather, and the festival moved to November 1 at Republic Square.

Many visitors picture Mexico City's huge Día de Muertos parade, with its floats and costumed dancers. That parade only began in 2016. The opening scene of the 2015 James Bond film Spectre invented a Day of the Dead procession, and the city decided to stage a real one. By then, Mexic-Arte's celebration in Austin was in its 33rd year.

This yearThe ofrenda, in pieces

This year's procession was built around the ofrenda. The museum commissioned artists to make altar components that were carried along the parade route and then assembled on an altar-like stage at the festival. Behind the parade came the rest of the day: a Muertos Mercado of local artists and vendors, an education pavilion with hands-on art activities, live music and dance, and lowriders. Back at the museum, the exhibition Día de los Muertos: Coleccionando Memorias runs through January 3, 2027.

The danza groups were impossible to miss. These dancers wear great fans of feathers and dance in the tradition often called danza azteca. They never stop moving, and nearly every frame is half feathers.

Who marchesAnyone who applies

Part of why the procession feels like the whole city is that the whole city can join it. Community members, nonprofits and the public can apply to march at no charge, with the museum's approval. Businesses are asked for a donation instead. So the line runs from folklórico dancers spinning their skirts to a children's guitar group in skull face paint, a cheer squad with pom-poms, a saxophone section, and a skeleton on a bicycle.