Students celebrate Day of the Dead


Monica David, a senior majoring in economics, poses for a photo at the Dia de los Muertos celebration hosted in front of Leavey Library Wednesday. The event will be held again Thursday.
(Andrea Diaz | Daily Trojan)

With songs like “La Llorona” and “Remember Me” blaring in front of Leavey Library, students and faculty sipped on warm champurrado and indulged in pan dulce while attending the Día de los Muertos event Wednesday.

The event — hosted in partnership with USC Libraries, the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, La CASA and Latinx Greek organizations Omega Phi Beta and Sigma Delta Alpha — featured work from Mexican printmaker Jose Guadalupe Posada who created calaveras, or illustrations of skulls and skeletons associated with Day of the Dead that influenced iconic artists like Diego Rivera. The original materials can be accessed through USC Libraries and are available to all USC students and faculty. 

Consuelo Sigüenza-Ortiz, a Spanish-language professor, explained the history of Día de los Muertos in Latin America and how Posada influenced how we know the holiday today. 

“What’s happened in Latin America, specifically Mexico, the indigenous cultural traditions and religion have carried over into Catholicism … so that both cultures — the indigenous and the European Catholicism — believed in an afterlife,” she explained. “And so this is a way of honoring the dead. Now, the tradition of the skeletons comes from the use of Posada images.” 

Karen Howell, head of Leavey Library, said that this is the fourth annual Día de los Muertos event and that each year the event seems to grow in student engagement.

“Each year I’m really excited that more and more people are actually starting to recognize … It means to me that we’re becoming a more inclusive environment on campus,” Howell said. “I’m really hoping that this is a way for people to explore more about what the libraries can do to enrich their lives and your understanding, as well as know more about their fellow students.”

Sigüenza-Ortiz said that she thinks this event created appreciation and respect for the culture and informs students who are inclined to learn more. 

“I’m very pleased with the turnout, and the USC students are so curious and intelligent in terms of their questions and wanting to get at the reasoning behind this, but also they’re getting into the spirit of it not just in an academic way, but also in a very, very human way,” she said. “They’re partaking [in] the food, the champurrado, they’re vibing it and they’re being open, open to differences in cultures.”

Omega Phi Beta had a stand for students to create a portion of a barrilete gigante, or giant kites that range from 10 to 12 feet tall, which is an indigenous practice in Guatemala to connect with ancestors during the holiday. The sorority hoped to highlight different cultural traditions besides what most people typically associate with Día de los Muertos in Mexican culture. 

“We definitely wanted to expand people’s idea of what Día de los Muertos is with the commercialization of Día de los Muertos with ‘Coco,’” said Karen Garcia, a 2019 alumna and member of Omega Phi Beta. “I think it’s really important to recognize that Día de los Muertos looks different in different countries. And it’s still important to highlight all the different practices and traditions that happen.”

“[It] puts in perspective to other students that there are other cultures, and it’s actually amazing to find out what each culture does,” added Sergio Lopez, a member of Sigma Delta Alpha. “Even though it’s one, same event … each country does it differently and that’s kind of a spectacular thing to realize.”

Howell added that as a Chinese American, she did not know anything about the cultural holiday before she started researching. Now she wishes to inform USC students and remove the stigmas associated with the holiday’s symbols.

“They think it’s scary. When they hear about skulls and altars, they just kind of think like, ‘Oh, this is kind of weird.’ And so when I learned more about I thought, ‘No, I want to bring it out to people. I don’t want them to think this is weird,’” Howell said. “When people are enlightened, they understand the richness of that — it’s not like we have to be scared about something we don’t know about.”

The Día de los Muertos event continues on Oct. 31 from 1 to 4 p.m. by the Leavey Library Reflection Pool.