 Good afternoon, people of Longmont. My name is Lupita Ramirez, and I'm so honored to be here with you today to give you some ideas, tips, and history on the tradition of the Day of the Dead, Dia de los Muertos, and I'm a native of Oaxaca, Mexico, and in my hometown is a big deal, the celebration of the Day of the Dead, not so much as in the north of Mexico where people do not celebrate as much as we do. They only visit the graveyards on November 2nd. In Oaxaca, in the contrary, we celebrate for over a week where you can really actually see the transformation of the whole city from just being plain and beautiful to very colorful and beautiful with representations of sugar skulls, skeletons, and a lot of Sempualsuchil, which is this flower, the flower of the Day of the Dead, known as marigolds by you, and the whole town is just a spectacular scene. You can also smell a lot of different things, mainly the Sempualsuchil. They grow wild everywhere in some states of Mexico, so that gives it a very special atmosphere to the whole city and town of Oaxaca. Also Guerrero is a town where they celebrate in a big way this tradition. In the Lago de Chapala, I'm sorry, Lago de Pátzcuero, in the lake of Pátzcuero, Michoacán, is also a huge celebration in the Yucatan Peninsula, and as I said before, not so much in the north of Mexico. The Day of the Dead is the fusion of two big times in history of Mexico, which is the pre-Hispanic civilizations of the Aztecs and Zapotecs, and then with the coming of the conquistadors from Spain, they brought their beliefs and brought Catholicism with them, and the fusion of those two beliefs became what is now and how is now celebrated the Day of the Dead. As I said before, it's celebrated on November 2nd, because November 1st is El Día de los Angelitos, the Day of Little Angels, which is the celebration of the souls of the kids who died at the kids, people who died at young age. The Aztecs celebrated these around this time of the year, not necessarily in November, but with the migration of the monarch butterflies. You will see sometimes in the altars, this is a representation of an altar of one level, it actually should have seven levels, but you will see there, or in some stores, now that it's more commercialized, the monarch butterflies, and that's because it's when they migrated from Canada or Northern America to Mexico to be exact to a forest that is in Mexico City. And for the Aztecs, what it represented was the coming of the souls who were already in the other world, and is how the souls came to visit their loved ones back during that time of the year. To help the souls come back, we had different traditions that go along with the altar or ofrenda for the day of the dead. One of is to use the petals of the merry golds and put them outside of your house or in front of the altar because of the smell they will guide the souls to come back. When the souls are back visiting you, which is something that we see as a sign of love, it's not nothing spooky or gory, it is not Halloween, not at all, so it's something that we embrace with a lot of love and that we prepare for for a long time. So the way to guide the souls back to your house will be the petals of the Sempoal Sucil in front of the altar or outside of the house. In the altar, you have to have certain things, but the first thing that I want to say is the altar could have different levels, as many as seven levels, which is the different steps that the Aztecs thought the soul would take in order to get to heaven. And for the Aztecs, what was important was how you died, know how you lived in order to know where you would go in the other world. So if you were a worrier, I cannot say the other word, worrier, then you will probably be in the first level or you will reach one of the highest levels in the after world. If your death was from a sickness, from an illness, you probably will be in the lower levels, which kind of is not very good, but it's how they believed it. So the things that you can have in the altar, your altar can be one level. I always like to do three because that's another meaning that the altar has, which is heaven, earth, and the infrared world. So in the top level, because of the Catholicism in Mexico, we would use an image of a saint many times the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, which is our Virgin Queen from Catholics, which is Virgin Mary. But you can have another saint. Some people do the photograph of their loved one that the altar is offered to. You can have many pictures of all the people that you love and has passed. So the photograph will be important, and it could be in the second level or in the first level of the altar. The souls will be thirsty when they come back. So that's why you want a clear cup of water so that they can drink water and be fresh again. You want the salt because they have lost the sense of taste, so they are going to use it to make their food yummy again. We don't have any food on this altar, but usually you put the food that your loved one loved to eat. So for my father, I always put a Coca-Cola. And for my grandma, I always put mole and rice, and we do the actual food on the altar. We tell the kids to not eat it because otherwise the dead people will come and pull their feet, which is just a joke, but we play with that. We play with the idea of death. But you leave the food for as long as a week and it kind of shrinks obviously because of the dehydration that it happens, but the Aztecs believe it's because the souls actually took the scent and the inner part of those foods that were offered to them in the altar. So you want your saint or a photograph, more photographs, water and salt. You can have as many candles as you want, but the tradition is to have a purple candle because it represents the grief. A red candle that represents the passion of the blood or the blood of Christ, which again the Aztec tradition was taken and kind of tweaked by the conquistadors. So they all the time braided together. Sorry for not using proper words here. So the four candles should be white because are the four cardinal points that were important for the Aztecs, which the conquistadors took, and now you can see the four candles in the shape of a cross. So when you position them, it will be two here and two there to represent the cross. The sugar skulls, they are just a sweet way to decorate our altars and they come in all sizes. You can find them huge, you can find them little, you can find them tiny, and in Oaxaca, where I'm from, in Mexico City probably, they put a little sign with the name of the person and doesn't have to be necessarily the person who died. It can just be our friends, our family, just because again we play with this idea of death. The Sempoal Switching will be important or any flower that looks like it. I know that sometimes it's hard to find marigolds at certain times of the year, but the marigolds are the flower that we use. And another thing that I want to talk about is the doggy. If you have seen maybe Coco, the movie you have seen Dante is the name that they give him, but the real name, and it's an Owalt name, it's not Spanish. It is Solinquilte. I can't say it because it's not Spanish, it's Owalt, which is the language of the Aztecs, because they believe this dog, this particular dog, which was in fact buried with the person who passed, will guide the soul from earth to the new place heaven, in this case, or the place where they rested. So I was telling a friend that we usually don't put cats, although you are going to find in the stores here cats and dogs, and who knows which other animals, but the animal that is the traditional animal put in the altar, or related to the tradition of the dead is this doggy, which I'm going to show you a picture later. La Catrina, this is where everybody probably knows. La Catrina is a skeleton dressed pretty fancy, usually with a huge hat and flowers. La Catrina has its origins in the way the person who created this character, his name was Posadas, and Posadas was a cartoonist that mainly worked for newspapers, representing jokes that made fun of the of the political situation in Mexico back in the day, and he made this character representing Mexicans who wanted to look fancy like the Europeans that came and lived in our country, mainly from France, during that time, El Regnato francés in Mexico. Posadas created this character and is in a lot of his cartoons, or was in a lot of his cartoons back in the day, and then Diego Rivera, Frida Carlos' husband, took that image when he was also getting very political in all his paintings, you may be familiar with us, and there is a specific picture of Diego Rivera holding the arm of La Catrina and holding the arm of a politician that back in the day they were, you know, was a big false about it, and this is where La Catrina becomes pretty famous, and then at some point it just migrates, and I don't know how, to the day of the dead, which has become a great symbol of the day of the dead, and not only in our country, Mexico, but in other countries like the United States, now you see it everywhere, and it's the origin of La Catrina, which means a Mexican person dressed in a fancy way. Catrina means to be fancy or fufu. I guess I have one more thing, which will be the papel picado. The papel picado is a beautiful Mexican craft, art, art, is made by hand. Now you can find it through Amazon. Sometimes they will sell the plastic, but the original is made out of tissue paper, and it's super delicate because it symbolizes the fragility, how fragile life is, and how beautiful it is, and also represents the wind that when the souls are traveling, coming back or leaving after November 2nd, and with the wind it moves, sometimes breaks, and that has that meaning of how fragile and beautiful life is. I hope that if you need more help, you look for me. I'm Lupita, and thank you so much for today. Gracias.