Photo of the Week

La Ofrenda

To celebrate this year’s Day of the Dead, a holiday celebrated in Mexico during which friends and family members honor loved ones who have passed away, Centre’s Spanish professors and their students created an ofrenda in Crounse Hall (above). Ofrendas, or altars, are often built during the Day of the Dead and piled high with foods, drinks, candles, flowers and other objects that the deceased had loved.

For the Centre ofrenda, Maria Galvan, visiting instructor of Spanish, and Phyllis Bellver, associate professor of Spanish, asked their students to write calavera poems to display. “In Mexico, on every Day of the Dead, most newspapers put out special issues of papers with calavera poems, making fun of politicians and other people in the spotlight,” Galvan says. “So our students wrote calavera poems about celebrities, whether they’re still living or have died.”

Galvan, who organized this year’s ofrenda, added the literary aspect to the project. Although in the past Spanish students usually constructed an ofrenda for the holiday, they simply created the altar and filled it with treats. This year, the poems decorate the altar, as does a loaf of bread (pan de muertos) and flowers, including paper blooms that represent the yellow chrysanthemums that people in Mexico drop in a path from the graveyards where their loved ones are buried to their homes. “The flowers are used to attract the dead to the altars their families have set up. It’s all about honoring and remembering them,” Bellver says.

Photo by Chris Floyd