In Mexico and across much of Latin America, 1-2 November are kept as Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead, when families build altars (ofrendas), visit graves and welcome the returning dead with food, flowers and remembrance. The occasion sits squarely on All Saints and All Souls, and Catholic commemoration of the faithful departed is genuinely part of it. How much of the surrounding practice descends from pre-Hispanic commemorations of the dead is a real scholarly question: the indigenous inheritance is present but was heavily reshaped by the Catholic calendar and by later, partly national, elaboration, so the festival is best described as a fusion rather than a clean survival of an Aztec feast. Similar blends of All Souls with local customs of feeding and honoring the dead appear across the Catholic world.
The anthropologist Stanley Brandes has argued that much of the festival's now-iconic imagery, decorated sugar skulls, marigolds, the skeletal calavera figures popularized by the illustrator Jose Guadalupe Posada in the early twentieth century, owes more to modern Mexican nationalism and tourism promotion than to unbroken descent from the Aztec festival honoring Mictecacihuatl, the goddess of the underworld, that colonial missionaries are sometimes said to have simply relabeled; Brandes and other scholars read the holiday's present shape as a twentieth-century reinvention built on a genuine but much older Catholic and indigenous base, rather than a direct survival of pre-Hispanic ritual.