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Struggles over Sacred Space
in the Oaxacan Day of the Dead

Kristin Norget
McGill University

Paper Abstract

The Mexican popular Catholic festival of the Day of the Dead is an important repository of traditional Mexican identity, judging by its continued revitalization in locales as far from Mexico as Los Angeles and San Francisco. In the southern Mexican city of Oaxaca, the Church and State attempt to neutralize the popular sacred significance of the festival and to maintain their use of the Day of the Dead as a symbol of national identity and tool of social and political control. Such attempts by agents of 'official' culture to monopolize popular sacred space, to decontextualize and resignify the Day of the Dead, work to disrupt traditional (indigenous) Oaxacan social practices and relations. Despite some overlap with 'official' Catholic space and discourse, the texture of the Day of the Dead as a popular Catholic fiesta reveals a distinct 'structure of feeling' and engagement with the sacred: ritual performances like the Day of the Dead are material practices which recreate sacred space in the everyday public realm, reconstituting local discourses of shared memory and senses of community. This paper examines the festival in the context of tensions between salient Mexican conceptual and actual sociocultural spaces organized by politically resonant dichotomies of urban/rural and 'modern'/traditional. I argue that the Day of the Dead gives voice to popular experience, and enables the reproduction of a moral economy which stands at odds with the logic and interests of official Church discourse and of 'official' cultural memory, working against a neutralization of the past.

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