By Linda Taaffe

While Americans traditionally celebrate Halloween collecting candy door-to-door and dressing up to scare away ghosts and goblins, the Latin American celebration requires that families prepare a feast with a variety of lavish dishes and decorations to call on the dead.

Mexican and Latin American cultures honor the dead during Dia de Los Muertos or The Day of the Dead every Nov. 1-2. The first day honors Angelitos (little angels) or deceased children.. The second day of the celebration honors adult family members who are deceased. According to custom, the celebration gives the honored dead permission to visit family and friends during this time and share in the pleasures of the living.

Honoring the dead means setting up an altar in one’s home, decorated with the deceased person’s photo, favorite food and drink, candles, incense, Marigolds and carved figurines of skeletons engaged everyday-life activities, including playing pool, skiing or getting married.

“We joke about death. We don’t take it as seriously as European-Americans do,” Charraga said. “We see death as part of life.”

In Latin American culture, death was considered heroic. The Indians would sacrifice the winning team in ancient ball games as an honor to the players, Charraga said. Catholic and Indian beliefs fused with the arrival of the Spanish, with death seen as a journey to the place of the dead.

At her family’s Los Altos restaurant, La Estrellita, Charraga set up an altar to honor her ancestors. Her grandmother’s favorite foods, pastries and mole, sat among skeleton figurines, candles and a family portrait. Families typically set up the altar a week before the celebration and take it down a couple day after the event, Carla said.

“The dead don’t eat the food, but take in the essence from the smell,” Charraga said.

Charraga has set up an altar at the restaurant on San Antonio Road for the past five years to both honor her family and to teach others about her culture’s customs. A native of Chiapas, Mexico, and an anthropology major, Charraga has transformed the restaurant into somewhat of a cultural center filled with Mexican artifacts, antiques and crafts.

For this particular celebration, Charraga invited local elementary schools to tour the restaurant and brought an artisan from Puebla, Mexico, to make calveritas, or sugar skulls, a hard candy that friends traditionally give to one another during the holiday. The restaurant also serves special tamales, which are considered festive.

Although each village in Mexico celebrates the holiday with customs characteristic to that region, the sugar skulls are found in all celebrations.

Charraga said trained artisans make the sugar skulls, which stores sell during the holiday. The father typically passes down the tradition to the sons in the family, she said.

Quintana said he learned to make calveritas from his father when he was 6 years old. Using clay molds that have been in his family for generations, Quintana cooks and pours a mostly sugar mixture into the molds. The face of the skeleton is on the inside of the mold. He puts the molds in cold water to cool the hot sugar before opening the mold and taking the hallow candy skull out to dry. Even though the candy has cooled, the sugar is still hot to touch, and Quintana’s expertise becomes key.

After the skulls cool, Quintana or another family member use brightly-colored sugar to decorate the skulls’ faces.

Charraga said each family has its own, distinctive way to decorate the skulls.

Quintana said he begins making skulls for the holiday in June. Families buy the skulls, write a friend’s name on it and give it to that person as a gift during the holiday, Charraga said.

The candy skulls are another symbol of life’s impermanence, she said.