Humberto Beck writes for Public Books on the changing face of death in modern Mexico:
After the Mexican Revolution ended in 1920, the country began the construction of one of its founding myths: an ideology of death, exemplified in Día de los Muertos, “the day of the dead.” The idea of Mexican death fulfilled a particular function within the framework of the new regime’s official ideology: hiding, through a process of sublimation, the real collective trauma provoked by that mass experience of revolutionary violence.
In recent years, however, two substantial phenomena have opened a deep gap between this official mythology and the concrete reality of death as a collective experience for Mexicans.
I can’t help wondering whether, if the Día de Muertos became twentieth-century Mexico’s great national mythology of death, the rapid rise of the Santa Muerte cult since the 1990s may represent one of twenty-first-century Mexico’s most revealing vernacular responses to mortality.