To celebrate Dia de (los) Muertos at Delta, the La Raza Club hosted a mask-making workshop on Oct. 31, in partnership with the Dreamers’ Success Center.
“Dia de los Muertos which comes around Nov. 2, in which our tradition and our culture, we celebrate. I think that in other cultures they think of it as All Saints’ Day, we think of it as Dia de los Muertos – a day in which our ancestors, we celebrate them and the contributions that they made to our lives. It has a deep, resonant understanding with our culture and many of the students understand that, and those that didn’t get exposed to what the culture’s all about,” said Mario Moreno, an art professor at Delta.
The event was overseen by Moreno and Ricardo Aguilar Rodriguez, a Spanish professor at Delta.
“Art is part of what they do, that comes natural to them … most of them wanted to show up because they wanted to do art and none of them really asked me for extra credit, they were just there doing art making their masks and having a good time,” said Moreno.
The workshop also featured Jesus Barela as a guest artist. Barela is a professor at American River College and Sierra College, who has previously worked with Delta as a guest painter at the Oct. 10 Indigenous Celebration. Barela is experienced with making calaveras of papier-mâché for Dia de Muertos, a skill he learned from the Posada family, descendants of José Guadalupe Posada who popularized the tradition of making paper calaveras for the holiday.
“It’s a cultural thing that we do, but it is a culture from the indigenous past … for 400 years, the Spanish tried to push down the culture … To bring it back is to bring back history,” said Barela. “So it makes sense that when you celebrate, it’s not that you’re celebrating death. You’re celebrating life. You’re celebrating someone that was alive and also the history that goes with it.”
To start the event, Barela gave a live demonstration of how to create a mask from scratch, using Aguilar as a model to mold cloth off of. The process requires vaseline, rigid wrap and plaster.
“I knew that I wanted to be the model because I want students to experience how you make a mask from your own face. So maybe in the future, some of them could make it and be part of that as well,” said Aguilar.
For the workshop, tables were set up with face and skull masks for guests to take and decorate. Guests could draw using palettes, bottles of paint and markers. Fake flowers, gems, feathers and more were also available for guests to decorate with. Glue sticks and a hot glue gun station allowed guests to attach things to their masks, while string was threaded through the masks in order to be hung up and worn.
“If you look at the masks, you’ll see that the students came from a wide variety of experiences, and it resonated in the differences in the colors that they used and the designs that they put on their masks. The blues, the orange ones, the purple ones and you see the flowers, and the feathers and the sparkles that they put on it,” said Moreno. “So that creativity is inherent in our students and we try to create a platform … and it celebrates who we really are instead of subverting who we really are.”
Guests sat down at various tables across the Dreamers’ Success Center to decorate their masks, as well as talk among each other. After guests were finished with their masks, the hosts also called for them to take pictures with their masks. At the workshop, bowls of candy were offered for guests to take from, while Halloween and Dia de Muertos-themed Mexican music was played throughout the event.
“What’s important is that … once you no longer remember the departed person, that’s the true death. As long as you keep remembering that person who passed away … in your heart, or in your mind or in your spirit, that person is with you. But once you forget about that person, that’s when they’re gone forever,” said Aguilar.
