The Return of the Dead: Traditions and Beliefs of the Mexican Day of the Dead

Record summary

A late-twentieth-century body of Mexican folklore research on the Day of the Dead documents beliefs that deceased relatives return during designated feast days. As a research lead, the tradition is valuable because it presents boundary crossing as periodic, reciprocal and domestically organized rather than as permanent descent into an underworld. The exact monograph or article should be established through library catalogues before use, since English summaries sometimes give similar titles to different works. Regional ethnographies are essential for avoiding a nationalized account of local practice.