Teri Maldonado Parker celebrates Day of the Dead for deeply personal reasons.
Though she is Mexican American, her husband was not. A Vietnam veteran, he committed suicide after suffering post-traumatic stress syndrome. And she lost their 3-month-old son on Nov. 2, 1972, to crib death.
Four years ago, she decided to make an ofrenda, a personalized altar, for them both in her Santa Ana home.
"Losing my son so close to the Day of the Dead really stuck with me," Parker said. "I heard about the Day of the Dead, but I never practiced it. It wasn't passed on in my family. But I researched it and made an altar for them both. I put their pictures on it, and personal items from both. It helped so much."
Parker is one of an increasing number of people in Southern California and across the United States who have discovered solace and comfort in the Mexican holiday's ritualized acceptance of mortality.
"I found it to be very therapeutic, all of a sudden, to be able to share my loss with other people," said Parker, who now volunteers at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art celebration of the holiday.
"It's remembering what they were to you in a very positive way that is not morbid at all."
As part of its growing popularity, the holiday also is becoming a crossover occasion appropriated by those who have transformed Halloween from a children's trick-or-treat to an adult costume ball.
This year, U.S. tourists are making the pilgrimage to the world-famous Day of the Dead epicenter, Oaxaca, Mexico. Families in Palm Springs can head to the local museum Sunday to view altars to the dead. In Los Angeles, revelers can choose between Halloween and Dia de los Muertos parties, and some fetes are mixing Mexican altars with American masquerade.
Rooted in pre-Columbian Mexico, the Day of the Dead is a time when families honor deceased loved ones. Cemeteries fill with candles, marigolds and relatives who picnic by tombstones, setting a place for the deceased or even speaking to them. Home altars display photos of those who have died. Special poems are written, often about the imagined death of someone still living.
The holiday's growing popularity in the United States is a "cultural crisscross, like the American taco," said Tomas Benitez, the director of Self-Help Graphics in East Los Angeles, which will host one of the city's biggest celebrations Sunday. "The Day of the Dead is becoming more and more widespread. It's not just something for Latinos anymore.
