Combining a U.S. tradition with a Mexican one, Village School students had an opportunity to learn about El Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) on October 30 and then celebrate Halloween the next day.
El Día is a 3,000-year-old tradition and was summarized by Frances Ann Day in “Latina and Latino Voices”:
“On October 31, All Hallows Eve, the children make a children’s altar to invite the angelitos (spirits of dead children) to come back for a visit. November 1 is All Saints Day, and the adult spirits will come to visit. November 2 is All Souls Day, when families go to the cemetery to decorate the graves and tombs of their relatives.”
This year, Village School students presented their orendas (“offerings”) at a celebratory altar, sang, danced and paid homage to Costa Rica’s Clodomiro Picado Twight, who invented some of the first snake antivenoms. His work on molds was also the precursor to the formal discovery of penicillin.
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