Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) is a Mexican festival largely unknown to nearby Americans, except as a folk art tradition represented by grinning skeletons and sugar skull candies. This is a shame, because the tradition embraces a much healthier attitude toward mortality than Americans’ odd mix of denial, fascination and abject fear, which drives everything from gun culture to our highly distorted health care system.<\/p>\n
Professor Stephen Andes has written a fascinating account of one manifestation of this festival, the feminine incarnation of death known as “La Santa Muerte,” and her interaction with the narco-trafficking culture of contemporary Mexico. La Santa Muerte emerged from the Tepito neighborhood of Mexico City and has spread to other parts of Mexico. It’s well worth a read; find it at Religion Dispatches.org.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Dia de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) is a Mexican festival largely unknown<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":54,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49,29],"tags":[35,38,30,37,34,33,32,31,36],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":125,"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44\/revisions\/125"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realchange.org\/taoish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}