Community Ofrenda Takes Time To Remember

Top: Sheri Richards and Sarahi Zacatelco. Bottom: Lauren Anderson with Monique Flores Ulysees and her daughter, Layla. Lucy Gellman Photos.

Monique Flores Ulysees cradled a portrait of her grandfather Pedro Antonio, his smile feather-light in her hand. Behind him, photographed buildings rose up from the street, the day cast in greyscale. On each side of him, Ulysees’ Tía Alecia and Abuela Tina beckoned. 

Resting on her right hip, her daughter Layla leaned forward, and found a home for the image among thick, not-yet-lit candles, marigold-orange gourds and bright strings of paper flowers. 

Friday night, those ancestors came to Edgewood Avenue, as artist Sarahi Zacatelco teamed up with Possible Futures to commemorate Día de Muertos or Day of the Dead. As people painted cardboard skulls and nibbled on sweet, seed-flecked pan de muerto, the evening doubled as a chance to remember beloved friends, family members and New Haveners gone too soon. 

By the end of the night, a ceremonial ofrenda, or altar, had gone up outside the bookspace. It is the third year that Possible Futures has hosted such a gathering to observe the holiday, which this year ran from Friday Nov. 1 to Saturday Nov. 2.

“I wanted to celebrate more in the community, to explain it [Día de Muertos] to the community this year,” said Zacatelco, a Oaxacan artist who now lives in the city’s Fair Haven neighborhood. “I want to teach people about it.”

Gabriela: “It’s like, giving thanks to older people who are alive and older people who have passed on."

Celebrated at the beginning of November each year, Día de Muertos welcomes spirits of the departed temporarily back into the world of the living. Observers decorate ofrendas, or altars, with their favorite foods, including the traditional pan de muerto, glasses of water, bottles of alcohol and orange marigolds, which go back to the day’s Indigenous Aztec roots. 

It is thought that those foods and the sweet and musky flowers, which give off scents rooted so firmly in the act and world of the living, help them find their way on the journey back to this realm. Friday, a box of sweet pan de muerto waited inside the storefront, the neat, braided mounds brushed with egg and topped with sesame seeds. 

Even before Zacatelco arrived, her vision was coming to life inside the bookspace, as conversation flowed around a table in the back of the storefront. Seated among huge paper flowers and flat, bone-white cardboard skulls, 8-year-old Gabriela Diaz pulled out an unadorned skull and began to paint. This year, they are remembering their maternal great-grandmother, Mi-Ja, whose memory they carry as a middle name. 

“It’s like, giving thanks to older people who are alive and older people who have passed on,” Gabriela said as they painted two beady black eyes, leaving circles of white that made it look like the skull was staring out into the room.  

Across the table, their mom, Jenny Heikkila Diaz, smiled as she painted a small skull with black eyes and dancing green and purple flourishes. As she painted, she too remembered Mi-Ja, who began her life in what is now North Korea, and fled South before there was a border. After Diaz’ mom settled in California, her grandmother joined her, helping raise Diaz and her brother. 

“She was the one that everyone really loved. Like, she kept the family together,” Diaz remembered. “She took really good care of me.”

In the U.S., Mi-Ja contained multitudes. She was a brilliant cook, keeping her Korean culture alive through food, but would also bring her grandchildren out on trips to McDonald’s because it seemed like the culturally appropriate thing to do in America. She loved fiercely and deeply, including Diaz’ father, who was not always accepted in the family. When she died, some of the harmony family members had been able to keep between each other died with her. 

The concept of an ofrenda crosses cultural barriers, Heikkila Diaz added: Koreans honor the dead with a similar ritual and shrine or altar, with photos, food, candles, notes, and incense to help guide their spirits. For the first time this year, Gabriela has been asking about having one at home. “We can just do it in front of the fireplace,” they said as they painted. 

Artist Jisu Sheen, who works at the bookspace part time, said that she is holding space this year for victims of femicide in Connecticut and across the country—a subject she was thinking about as Vivan las Autónomas held its own observance of Day of the Dead across town in Fair Haven. Since 2017, 39 women have been lost to femicide in 21 cities and towns across Connecticut. 

“I think a lot of the way I see the world is shaped by a lot of the ways I’ve seen or experienced death,” she said. In ceremonies like Friday’s, she sees the potential for joy, for humor, for celebration—for remembrance of the dead to also hold close the living. “I think any tradition around death helps us promise that we won’t forget.”     

That resonated for Flores Ulysees and Layla, who came with several freshly printed family photos for the ofrenda. While Layla covered a skull with thick coats of blue and green paint, Flores Ulysees said that the celebration is important to her—she is both Mexican and Cypriot, and it gives her time to reflect on those she has loved and lost. Now that she has a daughter of her own, it’s doubly important to carry on the tradition. 

“I feel like the dead are always with me,” she said. For instance, it was from her aunt, who helped raise her, that she learned her love of cooking and food. Her grandmother, who lived in Mexico City, was her home away from home, with a house that became “my favorite place” on visits. She still thinks a lot about her grandparents, who both died before she was 18. 

Outside the bookspace, Zacatelco was assembling the community ofrenda, with help from Anderson, who hung garlands of paper flowers over the bookstore’s ceiling-high windows. As she set out candles and small, bright pumpkins, she explained that she wanted it to be a teaching opportunity for all who walked past it, from friends and neighbors of the bookspace to those who happened to be in the neighborhood and spotted the altar on the sidewalk. 

For her, it is a ritual that ties her to her Mexican roots. At her home in the city’s Fair Haven neighborhood, she builds her own ofrenda every year, with thick, fragrant mole and hand-ground red chiles, cans of beer and bottles of mezcal, candles and sugar skulls. This year, she is thinking of her cousin, a trans rights activist with whom she grew up in Oaxaca. 

This year, she was killed in an act of gender-based violence. Members of Zacatelco’s family found the body. It is always painful to be so far away from home, she said, but especially painful right now.  

“We grew up together,” she said. “It’s sad for me, because she didn’t deserve that.”

Across the glass, Anderson had already begun to put up photos: there was a funeral announcement for the late Ather Ali, his eyes dancing even on the flattened page. There was an illustrated homage to Maia Leonardo, and closeby, a portrait of 21-year-old Niygere Wicker, who was shot and killed while riding his dirtbike in Fair Haven in October. By a hanging basket of flowers, a silver-haired grandfather kissed a young child. His smile was radiant.  

At a table on the sidewalk, 11-year-old bookspace apprentice Anyla Whyte and her mom, Akeba Walters, held a portrait of her Aunt Sylvie, the first in the family to come to the U.S. from Jamaica. During her life, she raised Walters’ mom (Anyla’s grandmother), ultimately migrating to New York and then Hartford in search of a more stable and prosperous life for her family. In the portrait, she turned out toward the camera, her face framed by a large, blooming sunflower.  

Back at the window, Layla leaned forward, figuring out spots to place the photos of her ancestors. A few neighborhood kids stopped to study the dozens of faces on the window before turning onto Hotchkiss Street. Gabriela, flowers in one hand, bounded from the front door, then stopped before the window with a sense of wonder. Even Sugar, the trusty bookstore pup, seemed to sense a shift in the air. 

Zacatelco, in the center of it all, made sure that candles were lit, their small orange flames dancing over the sidewalk. This year, she said, she’s trying to spread both literacy and joy around the holiday, which is often (and horrifically) misunderstood and misappropriated as a kind of Mexican Halloween. It’s not that at all, she explained: it’s a chance to pause and remember in a world that does not always make time. “It’s happy.”