Changing Configurations of Día de Muertos during the COVID-19 Pandemic

This pioneering book offers insights into new configurations of Día de Muertos (Day of the Dead) during the COVID-19 pandemic within wider considerations of how the pandemic has shaped ideas about death and dying differently. It explores how commemorative and mourning practices changed during the turbulent years of 2020–21 and asks how the festival contributed to conversations on global issues such as grief, mental health, exhaustion, and gender-based violence in Mexico and through its transnational case studies in the UK and Ireland. Based on original textual and visual analysis alongside the authors' close collaboration with Mexican communities in Ireland and the UK, the book engages with a range of Día de Muertos expressions including  film,  masks, marches, altar-building, dance performance, calavera (skull) poetry production and online community and home-based creative gestures. Through this analysis,  we investigate how Mexicans and Mexicans abroad engaged with the rich compendium of Día de Muertos symbolic and narrative systems in order to discuss how the pandemic has framed ideas around loss and renewal more widely.

 Jane E. Lavery is Associate Professor in Latin American Studies in the Department of Languages, Cultures and Linguistics at the University of Southampton, UK. She has published extensively in contemporary Mexican and Latin American visual, cultural and literary studies with a focus on gender, the Día de Muertos , multimedia production and digital humanities.

 Nuala Finnegan is Professor in the Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at University College Cork, Ireland.  Director of the Centre for Mexican Studies until 2023, she has published widely in contemporary Mexican literary and visual studies with a particular focus on gender, gender-based violence and cultural production.