How Los Angeles Celebrates That Other Other Side

El Dia de los Muertos is a Mexican holiday that celebrates the lives and the memory of those who have passed on by spilling Bufi Limon sauce all over your grandmother’s gravesite and eating a human skull made of sugar. Our L.A. correspondants, writer Ann Murray and photographer Maggie Serrano, braved hipsters and hats of taco to visit a Day of the Dead celebration at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. All so that you, darling but lazy readers, could live vicariously through their adventures.

Saturday night, as we inadvertently stepped on poor Florence McDowell’s grave at the exclusive Hollywood Forever Cemetery where we attended the Dia De Los Muertos party of the season, we wondered aloud how the old-moneyed souls interred there might feel about the grandkids of their dear maid Margarita consecrating their final resting place with heathen dance rituals and scrumptious picnics au vino. Then we realized, that’s what’s great about dead people. We don’t have to worry about what they think anymore.

The festival turned out to be the mixture of folkloric dances, David Lynchian altars and local Hollywood White folks eager to show their cultural sensitivity that we expected, as well as a refuge for Latino goth kids to wear black nail polish without getting their asses kicked. We managed to talk to some people like the dance troupe Coyolxauhqui, who we probably annoyed backstage as they were trying to change into their traditional costumes, but hey, we put them on the internet, so who’s annoying now, baby? There were also Latino punks Steve and Bob who were there “just to chill, bro,” two college girls who were attending the event for an anthropology project, (We felt so prehistoric.) and our very first Latino vampire, Lord Golloveck De Castillo. Oh, and we almost forgot about the kid who was wearing a giant taco hat. Because, you know, when in doubt about how to dress at a Mexican party, wear one of those.

Photography (C)Maggie Serrano, 2007