Día de los Muertos gets its day in the mainstream

This "Book of LIfe" lunchbox is $9.99 at World Market. Thursday, Oct. 9, 2014. This "Book of LIfe" lunchbox is $9.99 at World Market. Thursday, Oct. 9, 2014. Photo: BILLY CALZADA, STAFF / SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS Photo: BILLY CALZADA, STAFF / SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS Image 1 of / 23 Caption Close Día de los Muertos gets its day in the mainstream 1 / 23 Back to Gallery

SAN ANTONIO — Maybe it’s the sweet skull-faced goddess called La Muerte, brought to life on the big screen in 3-D. Or the smiling skeletal Capt. Kirk figure with a phaser in his bony little hand. Or the afterlife rubber ducky.

You know Día de los Muertos has gone mainstream when the Mexican celebration of the dead gets a whole new life in pop culture and retail.

“It’s like a Christmas thing now,” said Scott Roberts, director of the Hispanic Marketing Institute at the University of the Incarnate Word. “We’re moving into Christmas with it.”

Día de los Muertos is traditionally celebrated Nov. 2, but already its colorful tropes like sugar skulls called calaveras and dapper-dressed skeletons called catrins and catrinas are charming the masses with their bright marigold oranges, ruby reds and other radiant hues.

Consider the vibrant lead-up to Friday’s release of “The Book of Life,” the new animated film from producer Guillermo del Toro and director Jorge R. Gutierrez. The movie follows Manolo (Diego Luna) as he journeys through fantastic realms to tackle his innermost fears and what lies deep within his heart, not to mention under his own skin judging by his transformation into a colorful Day of the Dead skeleton.

In addition to “Book of Life” ads on local buses and bus stops, “Book of Life” merchandising includes movie-inspired dresses and jewelry at Hot Topic and kitschy rubber duckies and lunchboxes at World Market, plus cutesy Funko POP! vinyl figures.

But that’s just the tip of the catrin’s top hat. Major retailers such as H-E-B and Target offer various Día de los Muertos-themed wares from skull candles to platters to satisfy Halloween and Day of the Dead celebrators alike, while World Market also hawks Día de los Muertos nutcrackers and energy drinks and Spencer’s sells Muertos skull flasks and incense burners.

Even the sci-fi crowd is in on the fun with goodies such as the “Star Trek” Skele-Treks figure mentioned above and the skeletal “Star Wars” work of California artist José Pulido.

Roberts pegs this rise of the Day of the Dead to a confluence of factors.

You have lighthearted ghoulish movies like “Beetlejuice” and “The Nightmare Before Christmas” with their continued cult following. Then there’s the latest spike in vampire and zombie fiction with the “Twilight” novels and movies and “The Walking Dead” comic book and TV series, respectively. Throw in the growth of skull imagery in everything from tattoos to kids clothing, and it’s no wonder Día de los Muertos has become much more commercialized.

“To me all of this has. . . sort of been leading us to an overall acceptance of these images,” Roberts said. “They’re not so freaky and scary as they used to be.”

Roberts also notes marketers are running out of new ways to scare up profits from Halloween. With Day of the Dead so close to Halloween in both its imagery and calendar placement, “maybe this is a way to extend Halloween into a three-day holiday,” Roberts said.

Sarah Gould, lead curatorial researcher at the Institute of Texan Cultures, sees such mainstreaming of Día de los Muertos as part of the holiday’s charm.

“It makes sense that the calavera is responding to the present moment — it is a commentary on life,” she said via email.

Gould notes Day of the Dead imagery has long been associated with social commentary, from as far back as the early-20th century calaveras art of José Guadalupe Posada to the recent 21st century work “Mickey Muerto” by Artemio Rodriguez, which was exhibited at the McNay Art Museum just a few years ago.

Gould also sees such mainstreaming of the holiday going on in San Antonio.

She points out that for many years, local Día de los Muertos events were primarily hosted by Mexican-American community arts organizations, mostly on the city’s West Side, with a focus on traditions such as a procession, folklorico dances and ofrendas or altars to honor deceased loved ones. Now the city has a downtown event at La Villita that includes substantial cash prizes for the best altars.

“The trajectory from a family-focused holiday to a commercialized one is a pattern we’re all familiar with,” Gould said, then adds that familiar holiday, “think Christmas.”

San Antonio artist Erik Pinto has transformed the likes of Wonder Woman, Princess Leia and Elsa from “Frozen” into photo-realistic Day of the Dead sirens with skull-painted faces. As someone who’s also tattooed for more than 15 years, Pinto has seen skull imagery in general become much more conventional, with Day of the Dead skulls an extension of that popularity on the body and just about any other canvas.

He hopes that what many people still see as just beautiful art also will entice them to learn more about the true meaning of Día de los Muertos: honoring lost loved ones.

“I think unfortunately that it’s just seen as cool imagery,” Pinto said. “But I really do spend a lot of time answering that question of what it really is and stuff like that. And I love talking about it because I think everyone should know about it.”

Roberts said, so far, Day of the Dead still seems pretty pure to him in its wider depiction. At least marketers haven’t co-opted it to the point of sexy costumes in beer commercials, he said, though he does point out many craft beers do offer Day of the Dead ales for the season.

In any case, Pinto doesn’t see Día de los Muertos dying out in the public eye anytime soon.

“We’re going to be seeing a whole lot more of it before the quote-unquote fad of it goes away,” he said.

rguzman@express-news.net

Twitter: @reneguz