Spring 2005 Scholar-in-Residence:

	Dr. Joyce Bishop Assistant Professor, Anthropology Sacramento's Day of the Dead: A History of Art and Politics
Read Dr. Bishop's Report

Description of Project

In what was apparently a self-conscious political act, founders of Sacramento's Chicano Movement in the early 1970's instituted an annual observance of Mexican Day of the Dead through the creation of public offerings designed to honor the dead and to promote a distinctive cultural identity. Closely linked to the farm worker struggle and at least partly influenced by the Civil Rights Movement and the larger world-wide student movement of the time, these young students and teachers chose to use a traditional Mexican folk religious observance, with its attendant art forms, in a manner parallel but in some ways more subtle than their other signature artistic vehicle, the silk-screen poster. Three decades later, the observance continues, changed, as the founders' lives have changed, but still a vehicle for vigorous political as well as personal statement.

The scholar's objective is to reconstruct the process whereby this activity was added to the cultural arsenal of young Chicano activists. The scholar proposes to document (1) the disparate influences the founders recognize in having chosen to make this particular custom a part of their personal and public lives, (2) the manner in which they planned and organized the early observances, and (3) the problems they encountered in attempting to introduce this admittedly foreign set of behaviors to the public life of a city dominated by the Anglo upper middle class. The research will be based on detailed interviews with approximately one dozen early participants, as well as examination of documentary materials. The oral history is the core piece of an ongoing student-faculty ethnographic research project concerning place of this observance within and beyond Sacramento's Mexican community today.

For more information Dr. Bishop recommends:

Museum Catalogues for General Interest:

• “Vive tu Recuerdo,” Museum of Cultural History , UCLA, 1982
• “El Dia de los Muertos,” The Fort Worth Art Museum, 1987
• “El Dia de los Muertos, “ Chicago Fine Arts Center Museum , 1990
• “The Skeleton at the Feast,” The British Museum , 1991

Academic Studies:

• “Todos Santos in Rural Tlaxcala,” by Hugo Nutini. Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1988.
• “Power and Persuasion, Fiestas and Social Control in Rural Mexico ,” by Stanley Brandes. Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998.
• “Digging the Days of the Dead,” by Juanita Garciagodoy. Boulder : University Press of Colorado , 1998.

Recommended Film:

• “La Ofrenda,” by Susana Munoz and Lourdes Portillo, San Francisco, 1989.