The pandemic has, without a doubt, been the most life-changing event I’ve experienced, and will probably experience, in my entire life. In a matter of days in mid-March, my whole life was turned around, and everything as I knew it, all the plans I had made, suddenly changed. This is not to say that everything it brought was bad- I was lucky enough to be able to partake in an internship during this time, and I think that throughout the year I was living out of state, and with my Spanish-speaking family, I learned a lot, and that, in itself, was an integrative experience.

However, this doesn’t take away from the fact that one of my favorite yearly excursions was taken from me: the ability to go home to Mexico and visit my grandparents and cousins. It’s been almost 3 years now that I haven’t been able to go back, and my connection to them, and most importantly, myself, feels like it’s dwindling more and more. I, like many other immigrants I know, already have that weird disconnect to their culture- living on the borderlands, as Gloria Anzaldua so famously says. It’s not an easy experience to have, and can cause a lot of internal hurt and conflict.

Día de los muertos is one of the most important Mexican holidays, and this year, I decided to make the most of it. I sent my mom a text on whatsapp asking her for a recipe (linked here!), got the ingredients from big y, and got to work. I played music in Spanish while preparing everything (switching between this and this playlist) and thought about my family. I was unable to make an altar, but I had bought cempasuchitl, mexican marigolds, from trader joe’s, and cleaned my whole apartment. While the bread was baking, my whole apartment was warm, and smelled sweet, and I sat on my couch and basked in it all.

I haven’t been able to experience día de los muertos in Mexico for a long time, and my mom was always the one who made the bread and the altar, so my version of this celebration isn’t the most accurate, but it’s still something I hold dear to my heart, and something I want to keep doing in future years. My pan de muerto tasted really good, and I was proud of that, and although I wasn’t able to be with family, I keep them in my heart. Hopefully soon I will be able to go back and have other celebrations with them.