A documentary that details how Día de los Muertos was captured in the late 1980s will screen on Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the UNAM campus on the grounds of Hemisfair.
Sarah Zenaida Gould with the Mexican American Civil Rights Institute said the documentary will show a Day of the Dead that’s steeped in Mexican tradition.
“We have partnered with Día de los Muertos at Hemisfair for a special film screening tonight at UNAM,” Gould said. “We're going to be screening Lourdes Portillo's documentary La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead. This is a 1988 documentary by the late Lourdes Portillo. Lourdes Portillo was perhaps the most important Chicana filmmaker of the 20th and 21st century.”
The footage was recorded all before the documentary’s 1988 release, and so Gould said the Día de Los Muertos it shows may be quite different than the Day of the Dead people today know and love.
“She made the film in 1988 which was long before Día de los Muertos became commercially well known in the United States. It was something that was practiced in Mexico and in pockets of Mexican American communities in the United States,” she said.
Día de los Muertos has exploded in popularity over the last decade, but this 1988 film is more roots oriented.
The event doesn't end with the screening. “The film is only about an hour long," Gould explained, "and when the film ends, we will have a post film discussion with Tomás Ibarra Frausto, one of our leading scholars of all things Mexican and Mexican American culture here in San Antonio, along with Marian Navarro of Texas Public Radio.”
Navarro is a morning news anchor, reporter and producer of TPR's "Fronteras." The post-film panel will shed more light on Day of the Dead tradition, as well as to bring it into the modern era.
Gould said that people unfamiliar with the Día de los Muertos tradition may find it quirky, but they shouldn’t. “While it is painful to lose someone, being fearful, being in a state of dread around death doesn't really do us any good. And another aspect of it is that one of the ways that we kind of poke fun is by saying, at the end of the day, 'when we pass, we're all equal, whether you are rich or poor in life,' ” Gould said.
“We're all equal in death. So it is almost an equalizing force and but also it's this idea that through our memories, through our stories, people who pass to the next realm are always still with us,” she added.
Some worry that the growing recent popularity of the event might cause it to morph into something that distant relatives in the past might not recognize. That did not seem to worry Gould.
“I would just say that this is one way that generally, culture works," she said. "Culture spreads, culture evolves — and I think that you do see a lot of people who are buying into the real roots of Día de los Muertos who have never practiced it before.”
She said that death touches us all, and we all have the right to grieve as we see fit. “The reality is we all, we all have loved ones who have passed away. It doesn't matter what your culture is, right?” Gould said.
The film starts at 7 p.m. and is free and open to the public.
