If you are here at the beginning of November you will see marigolds, altars and a lot of families doing something that is clearly important. A short note, because visitors get this wrong with the best intentions.
What it is
Two days at the start of November when families remember their dead. Altars are built at home and in public, with photographs, food the person liked, marigolds and candles. Graves are cleaned and visited.
It is warm rather than sombre. There is food and music and children running about, and it is also completely sincere. Both of those things are true at once and holding them together is the whole character of it.
What it is not
It is not Halloween with different decoration, and the costume version that gets exported does not represent what most families are doing. The skull imagery is real and old, and it is not the point.
If you are here as a visitor
Look properly. Public altars are public and you are welcome to see them.
Ask before photographing people, and do not photograph families at graves. That one gets broken constantly and it is the equivalent of walking into a funeral with a camera.
If someone explains their altar to you, that is a generous thing to receive. Take the time.
The connection to a practice, since this is a studio blog
I do not have a tidy one, and inventing one would be exactly the sort of borrowing this observance gets subjected to constantly.
The nearest honest thing: it is a culture with a well-worked-out relationship to death, in which remembering people is scheduled, communal and unembarrassed. Most visitors come from cultures that handle this badly. Watching a better version of it happen around you is worth more than a themed class.
Practical
Check my timetable rather than assuming anything about these two days, and ask me if you cannot tell.