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"We all suffer three deaths."
Ofelia Esparza, the East L.A. altarista, or altar maker, was remembering her mother's words.
"The first death is the day that we give our last breath, the day that we die," said Esparza one recent evening in Boyle Heights, as she and her daughters prepared for Day of the Dead. They were making orange paper flowers, the blooms crinkling loudly, taking shape in their hands. "Our second death is the day that we're buried, never to be seen on the face of the Earth again, which sounds very final.
"But the most final, the most dreaded, terrible death of all," she said, "is to be forgotten."
It was as if Esparza were hearing it once more now, this maxim that was repeated around her as she was growing up.
The phrases, like her traditions around Dia de los Muertos, echo across decades of building offerings for departed souls, at home and in public.
"And for her, it was an obligation to remember," Esparza said of her mother, Guadalupe Salazar Aviles. "That's why we need to keep doing this and pass it on to our children."
Sprightly and small-figured, speaking with an elder's even command at 89 years old, Esparza is one of the most revered visual folk artists in California, if not the country. She is credited with helping to expand appreciation of Day of the Dead, a once-intimate observance with Indigenous roots that now transcends cultural boundaries and faces growing commodification in U.S. popular culture.
For her decades spent preserving the observance's meaning through practice and oral tradition, Esparza in 2018 was awarded the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Arts. She has been called a "treasure" whose altars seemingly channel the sentiments of an entire community.
As Los Angeles prepares to observe Day of the Dead on Monday and Tuesday -- the second commemoration under the somber fog of the pandemic -- time spent with Esparza as she built the city's main public altar was a reminder. At its core, the tradition is a pitched battle.
Forgetting, Esparza said, is what Day of the Dead is fighting.
"Otherwise, it becomes Mexican Halloween or another holiday, another firework holiday -- I mean, that doesn't mean...