Families and BYU students celebrated Día de los Muertos at the university's Museum of Peoples and Cultures on Nov. 1.
Featuring activities such as face painting, flower crowns and live music by the BYU mariachi band, the event taught participants about the holiday and Mexican culture. It also helped some families teach their children about their cultural heritage.
For Maddie Johnson, main event planner at the museum, the turnout for the event was higher than anticipated.
“The first hour we had over 900 people, which is the amount of people we planned to have in total,” Johnson said.
Johnson said this is her second year in charge of the event. She said the museum had a different focus for the event than previous years.
In the past, Johnson said the event was “more focused on just making sure people came and have a good time."
"This year we want to ... have a more reflective experience with the ofrenda and their family history," she said.
Johnson said she started planning this event at the end of July, and preparations began in September.
The museum recently hired Samantha Sotelo, a graphic designer from Mexico, to help with this year's planning.
“She's been able to give us a lot of fun tips and advice,” Addie Ressler, a BYU student and employee at the museum, said.
Sotelo helped with the ofrenda displayed at the event. She said she took inspiration from the offend altars her family decorated in the past.
“My process in this event was looking at pictures of my family and some ofrendas that I did,” Sotelo said.
Sotelo shared that one challenge with the preparations was finding enough materials in the United States.
“We can find some stuff of the ofrenda, but it’s not like home,” Sotelo said. “You need to use real flowers for the ofrenda and that kind of flowers are very expensive here.”
Despite this, Sotelo found another way to share and teach others. She used rosemary to remind people of family, going to the cemetery and decorating the grave for ancestors.
Besides Sotelo, the BYU theatre department also assisted with this event by painting faces for people of all ages.
Organizers invited families to come first at 6 p.m. followed by the general public at 7 p.m.
“I really liked that they had an earlier start time for families,” Katie Cannon, an attendee whose family lives in Provo, said. “It's kind of nice to have a moment to get to do some things before the masses arrive.”
Parents said the event was a great teaching moment for those with young children.
“It's more than just us telling them about it, but it's them actually participating and being involved,” Nadia Olson, a mother attending this event, said.
She added that it really helps having them involved in activities like the flower crowns and the ofrendas.
Students also shared that it helps those who served Spanish-speaking missions.
“I served my mission in Mexico, so I got to experience some of the culture there and I like to see a lot of the traditions that I came to love there here,” Quinn Mitchell, a BYU student, said.
For Johnson, it was exciting to see how many people turned up to experience Día de los Muertos.
“It was great to see all the different cultures and the Latino community coming in and supporting as well as students coming in and being able to experience this,” Johnson said.
It also made Sotelo feel closer to her family even though she has no family other than her husband in the United States.
