Día De Los Muertos at Hemisfair: a grand, yet very personal celebration

Día De Los Muertos at Hemisfair – formerly Muertosfest – filled downtown San Antonio with music, food and memories this weekend.

The Day of the Dead holiday, celebrated on November 1 and 2, is traditionally a quiet, personal family event, celebrated at home or at a local cemetery, communicating with memories and the spirits of loved ones who have passed away.

But over the past decade, as the nuanced cultural traits of the Southwest emerged and were captured by the ever-present cameras, observance of Día De Los Muertos has grown exponentially. Movies have been produced and citywide celebrations have been embraced as a kind of return to the roots for some, and a strange new delight for others.

In San Antonio, the city has fully embraced the Day of the Dead. The event at Hemisfair has already become a mainstay of the fall.

On Saturday and Sunday, the Hemisfair grounds were filled with festive music, smells and sights.

The sidewalks were decorated with more than 80 altars honoring those who passed, including one by Jennifer Gonzalez. Portraits of two smiling women stand on top of her altar.

“Our altar honors my abuelas, my grandmothers. We actually lost my grandma Elena in 2023 and exactly one year later we lost my grandma Lupe. They are my precious grandmothers,” Gonzalez said.

She appreciates them not just because they are good grandmothers. She said they were crucial in showing her how to become who she is.

“They are the reason I am who I am today. They were strong, hardworking women,” she said. “They raised their children. They helped raise their grandchildren. They were both great cooks, so we keep their homemade recipes alive by trying them ourselves.”

It turns out they didn’t just serve as grandparents to the Gonzalez children. They were best friends to each other.

“The great thing was that they were best friends, so we call them co-madres. So we say they are having fun in heaven, playing Loteria and watching over us,” she said with a smile.

She, together with a brother and sister, cleaned up the ofrenda and answered questions from passers-by.

Most altars were based on a table or a series of them, with pictures and candles and marigolds and elements from the lives of the people being honored. One had a noticeably different appearance.

“We have a three-sided memorial here, covered in desert camouflage, digital mesh above our heads,” said Gabe Gonzalez, the founder Operation Solace.

This booth had a ceiling of shorts with 500 dog tags hanging from it. Gonzalez said these military identification tags represented soldiers who died by suicide.

“This altar here honors those who die of suicide and lose the battle with their demons in their minds,” he said.

110 images on the left and right walls of the altar showed the smiling faces of men and women in military gear. Each of them would eventually die by their own hand.

“There’s a battle going on that you know is between our ears, that we suffer in silence, and we put on masks that say, like we’re okay,” Gonzalez said. “And you see them with their kids laughing and having fun and fishing, and sometimes we can’t escape the fights that we’ve left out.”

Operation Solace is an attempt to use psilocybin mushrooms therapeutically to help veterans with their PTSD and other psychological trauma.

“We hope to raise money and awareness to promote low-to-no cost psychedelic therapy for veterans,” he said.

Gonzalez said he’s not a doctor, but the way the therapy worked for him makes him optimistic it could work for others, too.

“You’ll be able to reset your thoughts a little bit, give you just half a second of breathing to say, ‘I don’t have to act the way I used to anymore,’ and it just gives you a path forward,” Gonzalez said.

A little further on there is a large altar dedicated to Eva Mirelesa teacher who died in the Robb Elementary School shooting in 2022. Also pictured were each of the 19 students and the other teacher who died that day.

The ofrenda was founded by Eva Mireles’ sisters, Maggie and Sandra.

“By doing this we keep her memory alive, as well as that of her fellow teacher and the children, and make them seem more real,” Sandra said.

Maggie is driven to keep what happened in Uvalde front of mind for Uvalde and for the public at large.

“We are going to keep the memory of my sister Eva alive as long as possible, and also of the children and Miss Irma and her husband,” Maggie said, fighting back tears.

Sandra is also a teacher. She seems to have a hard time finding meaning in the way it all played out in Uvalde.

“There is a reason behind all this, namely gun violence. And I know this is another topic in itself, but part of the reason why we’re here is to put it in people’s faces and to know that this didn’t just happen, there was a very specific reason. That is gun violence, and we have to keep fighting and trying to make a difference for gun reform,” she said.

As people walked past the ofrenda, many wiped away tears as they saw the children’s photos.

Día De Los Muertos has certainly evolved in recent times and San Antonio has embraced the celebration, making this one of the largest events of its kind in the country. Each ofrenda reduced that scale to a human scale, of love, loss and longing.