Day of the Dead is back in the US, and joy is the protest

What do you do with a holiday about death when the living are afraid to leave the house? Last year, plenty of US organizers answered by canceling. This year, some are answering by turning the lights back on.

The Guardian reports that after canceling events in 2025, US cities including Henderson, Kentucky, are reviving public Day of the Dead celebrations even as ICE arrests continue. The story follows Julia, a 19-year-old born in the US whose parents are undocumented immigrants from Mexico. Her family enjoyed attending the Henderson celebration each year and selling aguas frescas, horchatas and sweet bread there. Last year they built an ofrenda, with flowers and a violin, for her grandfather, who played the instrument and died in 2023 in Mexico.

The fear behind the cancellations is easy to understand. Uno TV reported that in San Antonio, Planet K suspended a festival it had run for two decades because it didn't want to gather the community amid fear of immigration operations. And Telemundo quoted a woman named Diana in Texas who sets out offerings for her parents and brother, but only at home, because of the fear of immigration detentions.

Canceling was prudence; reviving is the real tradition

We won't pretend to judge anyone who stayed home. Protecting people is a perfectly good reason to skip a festival. But it's worth noticing what the cancellations quietly conceded: that a celebration of memory could be shut down by fear alone.

The holiday itself points the other way. As Mexican outlet Abriendo Brecha puts it, Mexico doesn't celebrate death; it celebrates memory, love and remembrance, and it treats death with irony, music and color. Humor as a way of keeping a cultural identity alive is part of the tradition. A Día de los Muertos that only whispers is a Día de los Muertos missing its own grammar.

So when a Kentucky town brings the party back, we don't read it as defiance bolted onto a folk festival. We read it as the festival working as designed. Our view: joy here isn't a distraction from the dark times; it's the argument against them.

Resistance doesn't need a megaphone

The word "resistance" gets overused, so let's be careful. A table of marigolds and a plate of pan de muerto is not a protest march, and families setting one out are mostly just honoring their dead. But the two things overlap. According to the Spanish-language LA Times, more than 60 actions across the US are planned this year to honor people who died in immigration custody or in incidents involving federal immigration agents, with altars, candles and vigils demanding answers. In Washington, DC, advocacy groups have gathered with mariachi music, altars and flowers to pay tribute to the so-called "disappeared by ICE," as Quadratín describes it.

Notice the format. Mariachi at a tribute. Flowers beside a demand for accountability. We don't think that's a tonal accident. It looks like a culture that learned long ago that grief and festivity can share a table, and that a mourning people who refuse to stop singing are harder to dismiss than a silent one.

What this says about the rest of us

There's an uncomfortable mirror here. El Universal calls the holiday, as reinterpreted by migrants, a mirror in which the US sees itself, reflecting both its diversity and its internal borders. We'd add that the holiday has also become a stress test of who gets to gather in public without calculating the risk.

The cynical take is that this is just another commodified autumn aesthetic, skulls next to the Halloween candy. The same weekend, plenty of outlets are listing picnics, choir concerts and park gatherings, and mainstreaming has its flaws. But we'd argue that wide visibility is protective: the more neighbors who show up at a Día de los Muertos event, the harder it is to treat the people who built it as invisible.

Our verdict

If there's a Día de los Muertos event near you, go, and go as a guest rather than a spectator: buy the aguas frescas, read the names on the altar, stay for the music. Cities and organizers that brought events back deserve credit, and so do those who made the hard call to stay home last year. But the lesson of 2026 is simple. The dead are not afraid, and a holiday built on laughing in their company shouldn't be either.