victory day ( may 9 ) and the 10 days that shook the world ( first week of november)
i always felt like dia de los muertos was the most "the people's" like holiday on several levels:
i stared celebrating it as a adult because i LOVE halloween and can use it an excuse to extend the macabre nature of halloween for 3 more days.
like most people who do observe the days of the dead; i've personalized it to suit my own world with a shrine with pictures of deceased loved ones and trinkets that were once theirs. at the top where most people put the christian crucifix, i put the star trek delta or idic; instead of prayer candles with saints, i put up prayer candles of known lgbt & civil rights leaders like devine, mlk jr, baldwin, milk, etc.; and the only thing in my shrine that's still common to most others is the mini-statuette of the virgin of guadalupe.
some strange part of me takes comfort in that the fact that this indigenous tradition dates back to before the colonial powers tried to kill it and then switched to co-opting it when they realized that they couldn't kill it. thanks to dna testing, i learned that the heritage i grew up with was just as false as the "lessons" or "stories" that traditionally come along when you do los dias and seeing mexican political activists leverage that falseness to make public displays of politically themed shrines that address the nation's current set of problems every year helps drive home how enduring this holiday is in the face of things that have tried to kill or co-opt it over the millennia like manufactured consent; religious hopium; wars; capitalists; & social conservative movements.
