Honoring Dia de Muertos Traditions is Both Healing and Cultural Reclamation

I learned early on that spirituality wraps itself around us in many forms. Over time, we move through chapters in life of loss and reclaim. Each chapter teaches us how to return to ourselves. For me, as a little niña, I would play alongside my abuela’s garden and to always find her on the deck my tíos built for her, a rosary in hand, lips moving in a rhythm that felt like her own silent meditation. Or the time another grandma took me to the botánica to get a psychic reading like it was no big deal at 16 years old. These memories followed me through school, through my teenage years, and through the grief of losing both grandmas. I learned so much from my grandmas especially when it comes to loss and honoring those who have crossed over. Their connection became the roots of reclaiming and building on my own spiritual journey. As we prepare to return to the altar for Día de los Muertos or whenever your own season of remembering arrives, this is an invitation for Latinas who are finding their way back to spirituality. How do we return to what once felt ordinary but is actually calling us into our healing era?

What We Lost To Belong: Recognize The Cost of Assimilation

Assimilation runs deep. In childhood, I was surrounded by my abuelas’ rituals without realizing they were acts of spiritual connection: the smell of ruda, Walter Mercado at 5 p.m. and reading my family’s tarot cards felt very “normal” to me. But over time, assimilation crept in. These rituals I witnessed faded as I grew older. Halloween became the holiday of focus, while Día de los Muertos quietly lingered in the background, waiting for remembrance.

As a first gen eldest daughter I balanced demands in between worlds. To be culturally connected through food and family customs, but disconnected from language and spirituality is to live with fragments and inner knowing. What I now call diasporic hunger is the longing for something I couldn’t name but could feel simmering in my soul due to the cost of assimilation and proximity to whiteness.

The Exile: The Goddess They Tried to Erase

Religion can both nurture and exile us. For some, faith offers comfort, structure, and belonging. For others, it became the system that severed our connection to spirituality. As a queer Latina therapist, I sit with this exile walking alongside those finding their way back to spirituality after religion made a profound impact on their sense of self. In my therapeutic work, I often draw from Internal Family Systems, a framework that sees our inner world as made up of many parts. Within it, an exile holds intense pain, shame, abandonment, and fear from an overwhelming experience. Our inner psyche has a way of protecting us with order and survival strategies. The feeling of excommunication creates many experiences of forgetting what once brought us connection is now forbidden or rejected to practice moving forward.

It is common that queerness has felt incompatible with spirituality. For years, queerness was treated as a sin and something to be cured rather than accepted. The persistence of conversion therapy is a painful reminder of this violence. What I’ve come to know is considering the source. History affirms, knowing the origins and tracing back to the roots is that queerness, non-judgement, and protection has always existed.

Long before Western religion arrived, divinity was fluid and connected to death and transformation. In Aztec tradition, Mictēcacihuātl, the Aztec goddess of death and Queen of the underworld, protected the souls of those who had passed. When colonization arrived, her worship was forbidden with the push of Catholicism. Over centuries, her energy re-emerged through Santa Muerte, a figure both feared and beloved, carrying the same wisdom that death is not an ending, but a continuation of spirit without moral judgement. The catholic church denounced Santa Muerte, sensationalizing her connection with criminals. Yet among those she protects those of lower social classes, queer and trans people, sex workers as she remains a patron of unconditional acceptance.

At the start of the Mexican revolution, artist José Guadalupe Posada brought this reverence into public consciousness through La Catrina. She began as a social satire of Mexicans forgetting their Indigenous roots at the cost of assimilating to Eurocentric ideals. Over time La Calavera Catrina became a public icon of celebration of life and death thanks to the artwork of Mexican artist, Diego Rivera, in his piece “Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central”. We now see La Catrina in Día de los Muertos and an integral piece of adopting this memory of celebration and memories.

The European dress and skeletal form symbolize the history of Indigenous roots. It reminds us that the celebration of death, protection, and remembrance traces back to Mictēcacihuātl, the goddess of death and to Santa Muerte, whose histories were nearly erased for welcoming death as protection and a natural continuation of life.

It was colonization and religion that tried to sever that truth into good and evil. When we begin to reclaim our spiritual practices we also learn ancestral wisdom that was never truly lost, just repackaged into something a bit more palatable.

The Ritual of Remembering

It wasn’t until my twenties that I began to piece together my truth: my grandmother’s daily rituals were not just habits but they were sacred rituals into the spiritual world.. The return felt both natural and complicated. Natural, because these practices were already in my bones. Complicated, because returning raised questions:

What am I ready to remember? What is mine to reclaim?

What within me is asking to be reclaimed or reimagined in my spiritual practice?

And how do I honor traditions erased by colonization while still honoring my own process?

Some of us may carry a fear when reconnecting with ancestors. Sometimes it’s the discomfort of confronting our own conditioning of mortality and grief. Other times, it’s the projection of unresolved family dynamics, or the legacy burden of religious psychological trauma and messaging. Western traditions have often portrayed the afterlife through fear, while Indigenous and Latin American cultures honored ancestors through celebration and continuity.

Ancestral Connection Begins Where You Are

To speak with our ancestors is to say their names and feel their presence. You don’t have to know your entire lineage to begin. You don’t need elaborate rituals, special tools, or fluent Spanish. Start with what calls you. If you’re new to building an altar, start small. Think of the people, pets, who you are going to dedicate your altar to (remember it does not have to be your blood family either). Find a sacred space like a shelf, a corner, a table. Give yourself a loving affirmation there is no right way to build an altar. It’s important to remind yourself that altars are living spaces for memory, offerings, and connection. Invite yourself to light candles in remembrance, offer cempasúchil (marigolds, or another flower), favorite foods of those who have departed to light the way. As you build your altar, can you give yourself permission to feel into your experience. This connection is as tender as it is an act of connection and remembering. They live in our bodies as embodied memory. Witness their loving memory fill your space. We often imagine ancestral connection as something mystical or distant, when it’s actually woven into our daily lives.

Ask yourself:
What was my family’s relationship to spirituality or ritual?
What compassion can I extend to the generations before me who were just trying to survive?
Where do I already feel a connection through nature, art, prayer, movement or intuition?
What offerings feel accessible and exciting to place on my altar?

Returning to the Altar

Returning to the altar is about remembering ourselves and our roots. Bringing back the forgotten parts of us that were separated by time, silence, and assimilation. For some, that might look like prayer. For others, community gatherings, dance, or tending to a garden or building an altar for the first time. What matters is the intention and to live in connection.

The altar is wide enough to hold it all: grief and joy, queerness and faith, ancestors, and our body, heart, mind and spirit. As we approach Día de los Muertos, may this be a time not only to honor those who came before us, but to honor the versions of ourselves that are returning to something our bones feel familiar to, or the excitement of what it feels like to reclaim.

This is for the niña tracing plantitas, the adult lighting a candle, the ancestor in training remembering that a physical body may be gone, but a spirit is never forgotten.