Every year on Nov. 2, Día de los Muertos is celebrated across Mexico and the United States. And the Mission District in San Francisco is no exception.
The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts hosted its 37th annual Día de los Muertos community celebration, where hundreds of locals and tourists alike stopped by to enjoy the music, fashion, art and food representing Mexican culture.
Thursday’s event at MCCLA has been in the works for six months. Seeing the planning and hard work come to fruition was a joy for Martina Ayala, Executive Director of MCCLA.
“When we see the happiness that it brings people, the healing that takes place through the arts, it makes it all worth it,” Ayala said.
Throughout the night, attendees got to experience music, personalized altars, and art exhibits by local artists with many people in attendance dressed up in face paint and vibrant floral outfits.
For Gwen Penalber, the music is what she enjoyed the most about the event.
“Mariachi, I can feel that music in my heart. Being able to feel the vibration of it going through my body, it’s an amazing experience,” she said.
Keila Lopez did not grow up in a household that celebrated Dia De los Muertos. So to Lopez, events like this connect her to her roots in a way she hadn’t experienced in the past.
“It makes me really happy to see communities and events such as these where the community can get involved and see all these amazing altars and enjoy time with the community,” Lopez said.
Aung Totoe is a Burmese Buddhist, so he was able to learn a lot about Mexican culture that he didn’t know before. Thursday was his first time experiencing Día De los Muertos, and he felt like this event was a “great introduction to the culture.”
Totoe observed the stark differences in honoring loved ones between Burmese and Mexican cultures. There are aspects of both that he prefers. While he believes in having a day to celebrate loved ones, which Buddhism does not, he also feels as though it’s important to have a day of mourning.
“This is a remembrance and celebration of their life. I think there should be a day to celebrate it,” Totoe said. “On the other spectrum, some people want things to be more solemn, more private, so it depends where you’re at [with] your journey of grief.”
Evelyn Orantes is grateful for the opportunities the community gets to be together.
“It’s a community event. It belongs to all of us,” Orantes said. “It doesn’t belong to Disney, it doesn’t belong to Pixar, it belongs to us. And so, by coming out, it’s us expressing our culture and expressing our solidarity as a community.”
MCCLA, which opened in 1977, is preparing to temporarily relocate amidst renovation plans which include seismic retrofitting and heating, ventilating, and air conditioning repairs by the city, a process expected to last between 2 to 3 years. Ayala knows what the center means to the community and is figuring out how to still continue to enhance the community during the relocation.
“Cultural centers were built because of inequity,” Ayala said. “Even though we were taxpayers, our art was not being shown in the museums, our music wasn’t being played at the symphony. And cultural centers were a space where people of color could promote, preserve, and develop their cultural arts traditions. And many artists have been nurtured through community cultural centers such as ours.”
