How Old Is the Ofrenda?

The Day of the Dead altar is often presented as an unbroken Aztec inheritance, and that story is itself part of the festival's modern life. The scholarly picture is more contested. Claudio Lomnitz has traced how death and its imagery became central to Mexican national identity through a long colonial and postcolonial history, with the Catholic feasts of All Saints and All Souls providing the calendar and much of the ritual grammar of offerings for the dead.

Stanley Brandes has pressed the skeptical case harder, arguing that key elements of the familiar celebration are more recent than their pre-Hispanic image suggests, and that the festival's indigenous framing owes much to twentieth-century cultural nationalism and, later, to tourism. No one doubts that pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica made elaborate offerings to its dead; the debate is about continuity, about how much of today's altar descends from those rites rather than from Spanish Catholic practice or modern invention. The truth is unlikely to be single: copal, marigolds and the hosting of returning souls have deep American roots, while the November dates, the vigil structure and much else are Catholic inheritances. UNESCO's recognition of the indigenous festivity dedicated to the dead as intangible cultural heritage sealed the festival's international standing, and the ofrenda, whatever its exact pedigree, is now among the most recognizable domestic altars in the world.