Mexico’s Day of the Dead: A Celebration of Life Through Stories and Photos

Navarro, a first-generation Mexican American who owns a shop in Brooklyn that sells Mexican crafts, opens this lovely illustrated guide to the Day of the Dead with a letter to her future descendants. That’s typical of the personal touch she employs throughout this paean to the “playful, celebratory, and very colorful” memorial holiday. Navarro artfully combines family history—including personal snapshots and bittersweet memories of a cousin who died suddenly of a stroke in her 20s—with deep dives into subjects such as the Aztec goddess of death and failed attempts to obliterate Indigenous cultures. She explains how to handmake or procure the holiday’s essentials: an altar crowned by an arch—representing “the passageway between the world of the living and that of the dead”—and decorated with flowers and photographs; pan de muerto, “the bread of the dead” (she describes the various versions she encounters across Mexico); and papel picado, an intricately cut and colorful paper decoration. Equal parts moving and educational, the book works as ethnographic study, as Navarro travels to different regions to observe variations in their holidaymaking, but it also succeeds on an even larger scale, as she writes sensitively about death and acceptance. This bright and tender book gives readers heartfelt encouragement that “there is no wrong way to honor the ones you love.” (Sept.)