At the age of 35, I decided to build my first ofrenda, to invite the spirit of my older brother Thomas, whom I lost to suicide, into my home. It was a ceremony I hoped would help me heal from the trauma of his death.
One problem: I had no idea how to do it. I opened my laptop and typed “how to build an ofrenda for Día de los Muertos” into Google, with clammy hands. I might as well have asked the all-knowing search engine to explain the impossible: “how to be me.”
Ofrendas are altars for Día de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, a popular Mexican holiday when families invite back the souls of our deceased loved ones to reunite with us over an evening of imbibement and celebration.
To build an ofrenda, I learned online, first I had to choose a location. I found a spot by a living room window with great sightlines and light. It seemed like an obvious access point for any souls I could hope to reconnect with.
Next: I was to build the ofrenda on an elevated surface and add levels to represent the heavens and earth. I found a large plastic storage box, added a plastic shoe box on top of that, and a smaller box of quinoa on top of that. Boom. Levels.
Now I had to cover the ofrenda with fabric. Hell, yeah. I knew I’d eventually find a reason to celebrate the brightly colored textiles I brought back from Costa Rica in 2016. My friend and I spent an hour picking them out, imagining the backyard gatherings we’d host — until my friend’s Puerto Rican mom saw them and sneered, “They look Mexican.”
The textiles remained untouched in my linen cabinet for years. This was the moment they had been waiting for. Come to mama. But as I dusted them off and arranged them on the ofrenda, a funny thing happened. I burst into tears.
I had expected a wave of emotion at the end of the ceremony, when I dutifully placed Thomas’ image and a glass paperweight with his ashes blown into it onto the ofrenda, but here I was, weeping at step three. I realized then that building this ofrenda was about more than remembering and honoring Thomas and his impact on my life. It was also a long overdue reclaiming of my Mexican soul.
I grew up proudly identifying as a Mexican, Irish, Italian and Czechoslovakian “mutt,” even though I am 50% Mexican — far more Mexican than anything else. It might have made more sense to describe myself simply as Mexican American, but I grew up removed from Mexican culture. Because of pressures to assimilate, when my first-generation mom and her nuclear family moved to Austin, Texas, in the 1960s, they stopped speaking Spanish in and outside the home. My mother maintained this practice when she raised us. It wasn’t that she wasn’t incredibly proud of being Mexican — she was. And her daily demonstrations of cultural pride— pushing back when a store owner tried to kick us out of her shop, assuming we couldn’t afford to shop there; writing letters to the editor when a local tour guide insisted on mispronouncing the Spanish name of a local park — have held strong throughout my life. It took a long time for me to be ready to embody her strength.
I was a child actor, and my family moved to Los Angeles for my career. It was in L.A. that I first encountered anti-Mexican prejudice. My agent and manager strongly advised me not to use my grandmother’s maiden name, Flores, as a stage name. Everyone who knew “what was what” agreed it would pigeonhole me as a Latina actress, which in the early aughts meant I’d have few opportunities to book the meatier roles offered to white-passing actors like me.
The subliminal message was, “Don’t be you if you want to be a success.” Yet, even with my Irish last name, I was still and often cast as the perfunctory “any ethnicity” sidekick (back then, that translated to the best friend, mean girl, young mom or sex-crazed co-star; the wild brunette yang to a blonde star’s yin).
These are my traditions. These are my people. I do belong. It is my birthright to participate in these ceremonies.
Lead roles eventually opened up for Latinas, but the parts usually required fluency in Spanish. I was embarrassed by my rudimentary command of the language, and I began declining auditions for roles I had waited my whole life for. I had been so brainwashed to not be myself that I felt I couldn’t authentically embody the roles that were perfect for me.
All of this, combined with rampant xenophobia and “build the wall” border rhetoric, discouraged me from exploring my Mexican heritage too closely. I saw people who looked like my family suffering. I began to associate being Mexican with being oppressed. It hurt, and I wanted to push the feeling as far away as I could.
It was different for Thomas. My brother was 10 years older than I was and spent good time in Texas with Mom before I was born, so he had Tex-Mex culture baked into him in a way I did not. He never shied away from our shared heritage. Instead, he proudly, and unironically, wore cowboy boots, big belt buckles and cowboy hats to everyday functions. He loved line dancing, Spanish music and practicing his Spanglish.
His cultural enthusiasm confused, irritated and embarrassed me when I was a tween and teen. In hindsight, I understand that what I felt was envy. Thomas seemed, somehow, to be more authentically Mexican than I was. More connected with my mom’s family than I was. More connected with himself.
As we grew into adults, we became estranged. He and my mother eventually moved back to Texas.
Then Thomas died.
I was left with the trauma and regret that so many people affected by suicide experience, as they process their grief as self-blame. It would be years before I could see through the dissociation and understand the ways his death changed me forever.
Día de los Muertos offered a connection to him and to my long-lost culture.
I had never witnessed my family celebrate the holiday, and I learned about it gradually. Popular culture helped. In 2017, I sobbed when the characters in Pixar’s animated feature “Coco” could not cross into the land of the living because their families hadn’t put their images up on their altars. I couldn’t stop thinking about my brother as well as my maternal grandfather, whom my Catholic family likes to imagine are in heaven together. They had not appeared on any familial ofrendas, as far as I knew.
I learned more about the holiday at a museum where I worked, when the pandemic forced our annual Día de los Muertos celebrations online, and we pulled together a virtual audience to make calacas cartonería (papier-mâché skeletons) — a staple of Mexico’s tradition of paper-based handcrafts. And I began to see a slew of influencers, many of whom weren’t even Mexican, post their celebrations of the holiday in Oaxaca, the Día de los Muertos mecca. This irritated me, but also inspired me to reclaim the holiday and the pueblo magico for myself. My mom and I traveled to Oaxaca the next year.
It was a piecemeal sense of self that I assembled through exposures such as these that helped me begin to finally believe: These are my traditions. These are my people. I do belong. It is my birthright to participate in these ceremonies.
Fast forward to 2023. In front of my half-built ofrenda, I added decorations. Abundant bright orange marigolds to entice my familial spirits, candles and incense to guide them, a glass of water ready for their arrival, poured into a glass I bought on my way back from wine tasting in Valle de Guadalupe in 2019. I didn’t yet have traditional elements like sugar skulls or papel picado. I did have a terracotta Colima Dog from a 2022 visit to Teotihuacán, who seemed like he really deserved to be part of the welcoming party.
Finally, I reached the most important part. I placed an image of my brother and of my grandfather on the top level. Together, in the heavens. On the earth level, I placed the blown glass weight with Thomas’ ashes incorporated into it.
“I love you, Thomas,” I whispered, “you’ll never be forgotten.” Pieces of me that had felt empty for so long felt somehow more whole. Every year, my ofrenda will call Thomas back to me; a symbol of the love I know he knows I never lost for him, and an honoring of our shared Mexican blood.
Bianca Collins is the director of public programs at Zócalo Public Square.
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