Festival to honor dead, and traditions

By Kristen Peterson

Friday, Oct. 30, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Amid the paintings of skeletons and flowers in this year’s Day of the Dead community art exhibit is a strikingly peculiar sculpture by artist Julie Mahorney-Saenz, a composition as wild as it is contained.

It consists of a Styrofoam mannequin head topped with a headdress of painted palm fronds, dried bean pods, grape stems and rosemary branches. Small black-and-white portraits of deceased friends and family dot the ornamental hat. Its wearer has hair made of brass wool.

Mahorney-Saenz has worked since summer on “Por Memoria Rosmarinus” for the exhibit at the Winchester Cultural Center that celebrates Day of the Dead, or El Día de los Muertos, every year with traditional altars, Mexican music, food and crafts. The photos capture her deceased loved ones, including a dog named Bandit, when they were young.

She is in good company this weekend. Death, joy and reflection abound at the two-day “Life in Death: Day of the Dead” festival. The 9-year-old festival is the largest Day of the Dead celebration in town and is deeply rooted in the community.

This year 21 altars, some as large as 16 square feet, will welcome home the souls of loved ones who return to eat their favorite foods and be among living friends and family during the holiday.

Irma Wynants began the local festival in 2001 at Prince of Peace Catholic Church with only eight ofrendas (altars) and a few performers. It doubled in size the following year and was moved to Winchester for the third year so it could be shared with the entire community.

Offerings are left on altars decorated with flowers, candles and incense. The dead are publicly remembered and shared. Mexican music and dance are celebrated, along with satirical poems (cavaleras) that are read aloud from stage.

Workshops on how to make sugar skulls, flowers and baskets are always popular, as are the vendors selling traditional food and arts and crafts — but the elaborate, candlelit ofrendas are the main attraction. Made mostly by Mexican immigrants, they represent traditions held in the cities and states from which they came — Hidalgo (where they build little houses as altars), Mexico City, Michoacan and even Chihuahua, where families typically bring food and friendship to cemeteries on the holiday rather than build altars.

Ofrendas at past Winchester festivals have included the depiction of a Mayan pyramid and a traditional American Indian burial made by a mother in memory of her son. One group’s ofrenda reached out to immigrants who died attempting to cross the border. Another reached out to people who have drowned in Lake Mead. This year Southern Nevada Agency Partnership is building an ofrenda dedicated to people who commit suicide on public land in the Mojave area. Another group plans to create a Michael Jackson ofrenda.

Wynants says the event, from the beginning to the end of the second day when altars are taken down, is both lively and contemplative.

Similar to the thousands who attend the Winchester event, Mahorney-Saenz welcomes the holiday for all its comforts and openness.

“I love the sadness and the humor and the friendly face of something we’re usually afraid of,” she says.