Field Notes from the Graveyard: Unearthing the Aztec Roots of Día de los Muertos
Field Notes, as part of my ongoing research on folklore and storytelling across the South Texas Border.
I attended my first Día de los Muertos celebration, “Fiesta de Vida” this past weekend in Brownsville, Texas, and I am still haunted, in the most beautiful way possible. Hosted by the Mitte Cultural District and ROCA (Revival of Cultural Arts Brownsville), the event took place in the city’s old cemetery, where Brownsville’s founders and early families are buried beneath weather-tilted stones. The evening began with an opening ceremony and the lighting of copal, that resinous incense burned by Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica to purify and call in spirits. The smoke curled upward, blue and sweet, carrying whispers of pre-Columbian memory.
Smoke, Song, and the Shape of Memory
As the copal thickened in the air, the first strains of La Llorona rose from the makeshift stage, a stone walkway in the center of the cemetery. Sung slow, it carried with it a weight that felt ancestral. If you’ve never heard it live, it’s the sound of longing distilled: sweetness hovering over grief, floating lightly over water, tugging you toward the story you didn’t know you needed to hear. Standing among headstones, I could feel the song vibrate in my very being - something older than music. Around me, attendees in bright embroidered dresses were frozen in time, captivated by the woman singing, a siren in her own right.
Children painted as calaveras darted between graves, their laughter mingling with the refrain of ay de mí, Llorona. Later, historian Gilbert Hernandez, owner Buho (local bookstore in downtown Brownsville) led a tour through the cemetery, pointing out the resting places of Brownsville’s founding families, smugglers, and soldiers. Among the crowd was actor RJ Mitte (Walt, Jr. from Breaking Bad), now president of the Mitte Foundation, and local legends like vlogger Craig (“The Brownsville Guy”) who’s been documenting the city’s soul for fifteen years.
Historian Eugene Fernandez shared that his great-grandfather once ran guns across the Rio Grande and built his fortune on rebellion. As Eugene spoke, lightning flashed behind him, brief, silver veins across a sky the color of wet ash. A severe storm was rolling toward the Valley, and we could see it advancing in the distance, clouds piling like dark mountains. The wind picked up, scattering marigold petals and tugging at the paper banners until they snapped like small bones. Yet none of us moved. The storm, if anything, deepened the mood, made the air electric, alive, the way it feels right before the veil thins. Somehow, it felt fitting: the living and dead conspiring in the same story.
The Aztec Heart Still Beating Beneath the Marigolds
What struck me most was how Día de los Muertos felt both Catholic and cosmic, something that scholars like Stanley Brandes insist we’ve oversimplified for too long. In Sugar, Colonialism, and Death, Brandes reminds us that the modern festival isn’t a direct Aztec survival, but rather “a pan-Roman Catholic observance refashioned through colonial encounter” (Brandes 1997). The sugar skulls, for instance, owe less to pre-Columbian tzompantlis (skull racks) than to seventeenth-century Spanish confectionery guilds that brought sugar art to the New World (Brandes 1997). Death became edible…sweetened by empire.
Yet the deeper roots still pulse below. As anthropologist Susan James notes, Aztec ceremonies dedicated to Tlaloc and Chalchiuhtlicue involved offerings of children, whose tears were believed to bring rain, a grim but vital exchange in a cosmos where life demanded life (James 2002).
Death wasn’t final; it was reciprocal.
The goddess Mictecacihuatl, Lady of the Dead, ruled Mictlán not as a punisher but as a keeper of balance. That cyclical worldview (death feeding fertility) survived colonization not through doctrine but through gesture: the lighting of copal, the feeding of spirits, the return to the soil.
Brandes calls this persistence “the cultural continuity model”, where Indigenous concepts of regeneration merged with Catholic ideas of resurrection (Brandes 1998). The result is not a simple syncretism but something trickier: a ritual that resists neat ownership. When we kneel to arrange marigolds, are we praying or remembering? Maybe both.
Pan de Muerto and the Politics of Sweetness
At one vendor’s stall, I grabbed some pan de muerto, soft, sugar-dusted bread shaped like crossed bones. I bit into it and thought about how Brandes connects these foods to colonial economies: sugar plantations, Indigenous labor, and the “commodification of death” that followed conquest (Brandes 1997). The irony of celebrating ancestors with the very product that enslaved them is not lost on me.
Still, there’s rebellion in that sweetness. The bread, the candy skulls, the laughter, they mock death’s seriousness. As Brandes writes, the holiday’s humor “turns mortality into play” and transforms terror into appetite (Brandes 1998). That night in Brownsville, surrounded by candlelight and cumbia, I realized: maybe laughter is the truest form of remembrance.
A Graveyard of Meaning
In his later work Skulls to the Living, Bread to the Dead, Brandes argues that Día de los Muertos gained its modern shape during the colonial and post-Revolutionary periods, not the Aztec empire (Brandes 2006). The skeleton imagery (the beloved calaveras) rose alongside print caricature and political satire in nineteenth-century Mexico, not ancient temples (Brandes 2006). José Guadalupe Posada’s famous dancing skeletons weren’t tributes to Aztec deities but commentaries on corruption and mortality: democracy in bone form.
Even so, their popularity endures because they speak to something older: the Indigenous comfort with porous boundaries between the living and the dead.
“We do not invite death,” said Mexican scholar Miguel Limón Rojas, “but perhaps because of our Indigenous origin, we accept it as an unavoidable companion” (Brandes 1997).
Brandes would agree, but he’d also remind us to follow the money: death, too, became an industry of remembrance, art, and identity (Brandes 1997).
Field Reflection: The Living Archive
By the time I left the cemetery, the candles had burned low and the mariachis were packing up. The bottom of my pants, too long, were wet as the rain began to move in, and streaked with dirt from walking among the graves. I felt as if I was taking a piece of them with me. Brownsville’s night felt thin: like the border between worlds had briefly dissolved.
That’s what the Aztecs knew all along, that grief, like rain, is a kind of offering. That when we sing La Llorona, we are crying for them, and for ourselves. And that sometimes, under the Texas stars, history feels less like something past and more like something still breathing beside us.
Afterword: From the Field to the Page
When I write field notes, I try to capture that thin electric line between observation and belonging: the way your skin hums when you realize you’re standing in someone else’s story, but it’s also somehow your own. That night in the Brownsville cemetery, I wasn’t just watching a ritual; I was inside a dialogue between worlds. The smell of copal, the sound of La Llorona, the soft crumble of pan de muerto…they weren’t performances. They were reminders that remembrance itself is an act of resistance. Because for all the ways colonialism reshaped death into something sweet and exportable, the heartbeat underneath still belongs to the soil.
And the soil, stubborn as ever, keeps telling the truth: nothing stays buried for long.
That’s the work - mine, yours, ours. To listen. To write it down …before the smoke disappears.
AGM, Field notes, Brownsville, TX, November 2025
Follow me on Instagram: @folklore_rgv
References
Barakat, Robert A. “Wailing Women of Folklore.” The Journal of American Folklore 82, no. 325 (1969): 270–72. https://doi.org/10.2307/538716.
Brandes, Stanley. “Iconography in Mexico’s Day of the Dead: Origins and Meaning.” Ethnohistory 45, no. 2 (1998): 181–218. https://doi.org/10.2307/483058.
Brandes, Stanley. “Sugar, Colonialism, and Death: On the Origins of Mexico’s Day of the Dead.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 39, no. 2 (1997): 270–99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/179316.
James, Susan E. “Mimetic Rituals of Child Sacrifice in the Hopi Kachina Cult.” Journal of the Southwest 44, no. 3 (2002): 337–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40170187.
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