Monica Perez: “It’s a tradition around death, which we all will eventually experience." Lucy Gellman Photos.
On Blatchley Avenue, the catrinas were coming out one by one. One, depicting mother earth, sported a crown of ivy and flowers that sprouted where the eyes would otherwise be. Another, purple feathers sprouting from her skull, wore a bright sash and patterned pink skirt at the waist. Atop a car, a green hummingbird glowed, its delicate wings adorned with white lights. Around it, a skeleton’s papier-mâché ribs gleamed under the night sky.
A voice, almost spectral, soared over the street, wrapping every house in its sound. Ay, de mí/Llorona, llorona, llorona/De un campo lirio, it sang, swooping between octaves from a loudspeaker. At the very front of the line, Monica Perez lifted a skirt embroidered with tiny skeletons, paper plates and fabric flowers, and began to move forward, swaying to the words.
That connection to culture—and a call to resistance—propelled Unidad Latina en Acción’s (ULA) “quinceañera” observance of Día de Muertos, held at Fair Haven’s Bregamos Community Theater on Saturday night. As families across a diaspora welcomed ancestors into their homes, hundreds of attendees gathered to remember the lives lost to state violence, particularly immigrants who have died in federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention in the past year.
At least 20 people have died in ICE custody this year, according to reporting from NPR and data from the American Immigration Lawyers Association released last month. That number is the highest it’s been since 2004, due in part to a system that has entirely bypassed due process and focused on the sheer number of people that it can arrest, lock up, and deport.
“Today is about community, not fear, bringing everybody together to confront this administration,” said John Jairo Lugo, who founded ULA in 2002, amidst rising anti-immigrant sentiment in the region, and folded in the parade eight years later. He looked around, marveling at the number of American citizens who had come out as solidarity volunteers.
“We need to start telling this government that the community is coming together,” he continued. “Community is the most important thing these days, because I think the situation is going to get worse.”
The parade has always married activism and tradition: past processions have honored immigrants who died trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, women soldiers in the Mexican Revolution, early victims of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the 43 students disappeared from Ayotzinapa, Mexico in 2014. While Lugo is himself Colombian, he recognizes the weight of the day, in part because he sees its importance in the lives of immigrants he works with every day.
If he kept an ofrenda, it would include his brother, who was killed by the police in Colombia years ago, and his father, who died “of a broken heart” shortly afterwards, he said. It would make space for the late Dean Peckham, an ULA volunteer who passed in 2023, for activist Art Perlo, who passed four years ago, and for an ULA member who died suddenly in a car accident in Middletown earlier this year. “There are so many people to remember,” he said.
Celebrated at the beginning of November each year, Dia de Muertos welcomes spirits of the departed temporarily back into the world of the living, for just a single night together. Ofrendas, decorated with their favorite foods, wait eagerly for the spirits to arrive. In addition to the traditional, sweet and eggy pan de muerto, people may put out glasses of water, bottles of alcohol and orange marigolds, which go back to the day’s Indigenous Aztec roots.
Even before the festivities took to the streets, the air in and outside the theater was thick with memory, from soaring, vibrant catrinas to bike-propelled carts covered in the fire-toned marigolds, or cempasúchil, without which the day is not complete. Among attendees, conversation rose and fell in English and Spanish, with half a dozen different dialects between ULA members in any given spot. The parking lot, which earlier had been a quiet staging ground with a few volunteers, was soon full of cars.
In the center of it all, ULA member Monica Perez stood outside, framed in an artwork that denounced Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric with a cartoon image of him beside a skeleton on one side, and the flags of a dozen Latin American countries on another. Around it, text read: Ni El Presidente / Trump /Se salva de la Muerte (Not even the president is safe from death). Beneath the words, even skulls seemed to open their mouths, teeth chattering. There were black, sunken caves where their eyes should have been.
Perez, who hails originally from Chiapas, Mexico, said that it was important to her to dress as La Catrina—with some additional artwork—to pay homage to her own roots. As a girl, she grew up observing Día de los Muertos, which recognizes that our ancestors are always with us, even after they are no longer in their physical bodies. For the past four years, she’s come out to the parade to feel closer to home, and to the family she left behind in Chiapas.
“It’s a tradition around death, which we all will eventually experience,” she said in Spanish. This year, she is remembering her grandfather Samuel, who passed away four years ago. At home, she keeps an ofrenda covered in flowers, chocolate, pan de muerto, and atole, a sweet, comforting drink that is usually made with masa, milk and panela.
Nearby, Texas transplant Larry Ortiz soaked it all in for the first time. A graduate student in lighting design at the David Geffen School of Drama, Ortiz grew up in El Paso, Texas, surrounded by a vibrant Mexican-American community and the traditions that his elders had brought from Juarez and Chihuahua, Mexico. When he heard about ULA’s parade from a member of the school’s faculty, he was intrigued. As he chatted, the number of skeletons in the parking lot seemed to multiply, teens gliding past in their voluminous, gem-colored quinceañera dresses and catrina makeup.
“We didn’t have an ofrenda, but we had a shrine” at home year round, covered in photographs of people the family loved and lost, Ortiz remembered. In the past year, he’s thought more often about his grandparents, who passed away in 2023 and 2024. Before they died, “they were big in my life,” he said. Before heading to the parade, he’s donned a poncho that his mother had bought on a trip to Guanajuato, and headed to the event. By the time the parade rolled around, he had added a long, stitched black design to stand in for a skeletal mouth.
Inside, attendees added photos to a community ofrenda draped inorange fabric and already heavy with dozens of painted skulls and votive candles. On the far corner, a squash curled halfway around a sepia-toned photograph of a woman no older than 20, a design blooming on the corner of her shirt as she smiled to herself. Across the altar, a larger-than-life skeleton looked out onto the crowd, holding a sign that read People and Planet over Profits.
Drifting towards it, Bregamos founder Rafael Ramos took a moment to look up at a mural of his son, Satchel, a sweet-faced 22 year old who was killed 11 years ago, when he tried to break up a fight on a weekend away in Providence. This time of year, Ramos later said, he makes time to think about the life he lived, and the way he lives on in his siblings and family members.
As he reached the altar, he set down a photo of Frances “Bitsie” Clark, who died last month at the age of 93. He took a minute to think about how often their paths crossed—frequently enough that Clark is depicted on a mural outside of the theater—and smiled to himself. Since meeting Lugo years ago through immigrant rights advocacy, he’s made sure that Bregamos is a second home to ULA whenever the group needs it. He loves being part of the parade each year.
“It is a beautiful way to think about death,” he said. “It’s like, don’t be so afraid. It’s our reality. We’re born, we live, and we die. Nothing is more beautiful than that journey.”
During the time that they knew each other, “he was the most amazing partner to my sister,” and became something of a mentor and godfather to Curiel, too. As he spoke, he sported a t-shirt emblazoned with the Cuban flag, a reminder of both his roots and of the damage that Hurricane Melissa brought with her when she ripped through the island last week.
“He taught me how to work, how to believe, just how to grind, you know?” Curiel said, smiling through the tears that had inevitably come, as they so often do. “This is a day of remembrance
If a quinceañera is a kind of coming out, Saturday’s celebration was also a reminder of the life-saving work ULA does in the community, which has become both more urgent and more difficult since President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January. In the past eight and a half months, Connecticut has seen a dramatic rise in the number of ICE arrests and detentions of residents, from mothers dropping their children off at school to people arrested outside courthouses after immigration check-ins.
In Fair Haven and the Hill, some of New Haven’s most densely populated immigrant communities, some families are no longer leaving their homes, or keeping all their documents close when they must go out for errands as small as grocery shopping. Loaves & Fishes, one of the city’s beloved and strained food pantries, has reported dropping food off each week to over 120 families, many of whom are afraid to leave their homes.
And yet, it was not fear, but a belief in community, that was palpable as people filled the parking lot, ready to make the mile-plus loop towards and up Grand Avenue, past Ferry, and back around to Peck Street that has become a well-loved route over the years (some years, the parade has started at a Mill Street warehouse; that was not part of the route this year).
Among immigrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, El Salvador, Ecuador, and Venezuela—among many other countries—over 100 solidarity volunteers showed up, from silver-haired members of Westville Indivisible to Yalies who had never been that far from campus. Among them, city and state officials including Mayor Justin Elicker, Alder Caroline Tanbee Smith, State Sen. Gary Winfield milled about, keeping an eye on the crowd.
Dressed as a skeletal bride and her ancestral groom, longtime ULA supporters Roberto and Christine said that they were thrilled to be back in New Haven for the event after years away. While the two now live in Texas, the Elm City was once their home for 15 years—and it always feels natural coming back. For Roberto, who grew up in Veracruz, Mexico, observing the day feels natural and necessary.
When he remembers his parents, or mourns his recently dead dog Chichi, he’s connecting to a tradition that his ancestors observed long before him, and the next generations will observe long after. “It’s so embedded in our culture,” Christine added.
As the parade lurched to life, spilling out onto Blatchley Avenue with bright lights and blaring music, the two made their way to the front of the line, just a few feet behind Perez and a knot of high schoolers dressed in clouds of silk and taffeta that have become part of quinceañera fashion. By the end of the night, the students would be shivering and smiling at the same time, chilly in the falling fall temperatures and full of warm laughter nonetheless.
As hundreds filled the streets, it became not just a procession, but a display of the diverse and polyphonic community that calls the city home. As different languages wove through the crowd, attendees nearly shouting over the music, red-shirted volunteers from ULA directed traffic, holding up their hands in the universal symbol of Please slow down. By the time they had reached Grand Avenue, volunteer Bella Vasquez looked seasoned enough to land a plane.
“I always support ULA because they always show up for me,” said Vasquez, an immigrant from Ecuador who has been with the group for the better part of a decade. When she heard that ULA was moving ahead with the celebration, there wasn’t a doubt in her mind that she’d be there to support the community.
As she shepherded marchers along, dozens of families emerged from storefronts, porches, parked cars and doorframes to watch, until it felt like the whole neighborhood was celebrating at once. On Clay Street, a group of teenage boys stopped their bikes at the corner, watching with child-like delight as a row of jeeps trundled down the road, lights installed to look like eyeballs had appeared on the dashboard.
On Grand, the scene pulled Miguel Xicohtencatl out of his shop, Cositas Deliciosas, to serve ice cold cups of agua de sandía that became a hit, despite the chill in the air. Next door, bouquets of fresh marigolds glowed orange beneath an old awning, and music boomed over the street, still a mix of mariachi and rap blasting Trump’s presidency.
Towards the end of the route, it was enough to pull Liz Ayala and her granddaughter from inside the house, Ayala holding up her phone for a livestream. “I see it every year. It’s just culture, you know?” she said, keeping her phone pulled up and steady to capture the whole thing.
As she walked through the crowd, longtime community organizer Kica Matos took a moment to take it all in. A fierce immigrant rights activist who now leads the National Immigration Law Center (and is a founding member of the bomba group Proyecto Cimarron), Matos has spent the last months feeling fired up and emotionally exhausted all at the same time. For her, Saturday was about remembering that no one could take away her joy.
“This is a beautiful act of resistance and defiance, and celebration of community all at the same time,” she said. “Nationally, what we are seeing is the militarization of communities, the brutalization of immigrants, and the demise of our democracy. Authoritarianism has arrived in this country.”
To that reality, displays of solidarity like Saturday’s are a balm, and a reminder of how many people are innately good. For months, she’s been trying to convey the sheer urgency of the moment, in which marginalized communities—immigrants, and also increasingly trans people—have been stripped of their humanity, and become test cases for authoritarian policy.
“Even if Americans haven’t thought about immigration or don’t care about immigration, they should, because eventually this authoritarian regime is gonna come after everybody,” she said.
That’s not just anecdotal: ProPublica reported last month that over 170 American citizens have been arrested and held in ICE custody, often the subjects of racial profiling, gaslighting, and total impunity from federal immigration officials.
“To me, I was just reflecting, walking with this beautiful community of people who live in my neighborhood, who work hard, who are such a fabric of this community, and I don’t understand why these people are being demonized by this administration.”
“Today is about commemorating and celebrating,” she said. “I think this is a wonderful thing where, like, the whole community gathers together and helps make this happen. Everybody pitches in.”