The Meaning Behind the Altars: Why Ofrendas Matter at Noche de Altares

Every year at the Noche de Altares, people go by lines of the most gorgeous, hand-made, altars, some rather slight, others magnificent and excessively abundant. Ofrendas, as these altars are called are the emotional and spiritual heart of the whole thing. And what are they anyway, and why are they so crucially essential?

Altars In More Than Decoration: The Altars as Acts of Love

Essentially, ofrendas are constructed to receive the soul of the deceased loved person. They have their grounds in ancient traditions of Mesoamerica and Catholicism, being packed with the things that were significant to the dead person tools and toys they used, the food they liked, the photos. Each of them is deliberate in each candle, flower, and framed portrait. When you are standing before an altar at the festival, what you are here beholding is a rite of memory and worship.

Alters are not farewells to the dead only. They are places in which the living relate to the dead. They tell us that love does not stop the moment a person takes his or her last breath, but instead it becomes memory, ritual, and legacy.

Place to Have Personal and Shared Narratives

The fact that the Noche de Altares festival involves people sharing stories may be viewed as one of the strongest features that this festival has to offer. Other alters are small family, or personal, made by a person to remember a relative, such as a parent, a sibling, or a child. Others are established within community groups to promote more general social injustices – migration, injustice, or the loss of the environment. These altars are turned into educational and empathetic platforms, arousing the conversation in the lives of strangers who might be sharing the loss or hope stories.

Ofrenda Components

Altars differ but most of them have traditional contents which have a symbolic value. The great marigold flowers (cempasuchil) lead the spirits back using bright color and smell. Candles are used as a source of light. Offerings placed during the remembrance are pan de muerto (bread of the dead), sugar skulls, and drinks, to feed the visiting souls. Papel picado symbolises precariousness of life, and incense is burned to purify space.

Within the festival, the traditions are not just maintained, but reissue creatively and purposefully by each builder. There might also be contemporary photography, computer art, protest banners, bi-lingual poem, on some of the altars. Convention and creativity come together in all deliverables.

The Reason Visitors Come Back Again

To most of the participants, the altars are the core of the event of Noche de Altares. The visitors do not just arrive to view, they arrive to experience sensations of relatedness, recovering, or aspiration. This process of walking between the altars turns into a pilgrimage not only on a personal level but also within memory of the collective. The invitation in the each ofrenda seems to be the same: to think, to feel, and to remember.

Until the moment, when people stop constructing and sharing these sacral areas, the sense of these places will live on — generation after generation.