Your first choice, The Skeleton at the Feast by Elizabeth Carmichael and Chloë Sayer, is a good introductory book about how Mexicans celebrate this festival.

For people who don’t know much about the holiday, this is one of my favourite books. It is a wonderful way to get acquainted with it. The book is written in a very accessible way, which makes it good for both high-school students and adults. It goes through the holiday, and discusses the ancient celebrations that took place in Mexico with the Aztecs and other indigenous groups. From there it goes on to show how it has been observed historically throughout Mexico. The celebrations do vary regionally.

People today make offerings that include mixtures of both Catholic and ancient symbols. For example, on altars you will find pictures of Jesus or Mary or various saints. You will see religious candles and crosses and other Catholic iconology mixed with images of skulls and a special flower, the marigold, which in Spanish is called flor de muerto or “flower of death.” Throughout Central America and Mexico, this flower has been used for thousands of years to honour the dead, and is still found on Day of the Dead altars today. Another thing you see on altars today is an incense called copal, which is made of pine resin. This incense was also used in Mesoamerica many hundreds of years before the arrival of Christians to the Americas, as a way to communicate with the dead. The book has beautiful pictures which describe these ancient rituals and how they still happen today.

It also has very interesting interviews with people in Mexico, including those who grew up at a time where their culture was looked down on and they were told to stop doing these rituals. This holiday wasn’t always appreciated in Mexico. In the 1930s, 40s and 50s, when the government of Mexico was trying to modernise and westernise the country, it actually encouraged indigenous populations to stop performing what urban elites considered to be superstitious and pagan rites of making altars for the dead. These altars were made almost exclusively by indigenous peoples in rural areas of Mexico, so the people of Mexico City and other urban centres frowned on it, considering it backwards. But the book also shows how views in Mexico have changed since then. In the 1970s the government did an about-turn, and realised that they should promote their native cultures and that it was good for tourism and for national pride.

That change of heart is celebrated in the wonderful photos of your next choice, John Greenleigh and Rosalind Beimler’s The Days of the Dead.

This book has some really beautiful photos, and is less text-heavy than my first choice. It has lots of photos of contemporary Day of the Dead altars in rural villages. It also has scenes of the market place where people go to buy their items for the altar, as well as of cemeteries and of people going to church. It shows a lot more of the day-to-day activities of celebrating the holiday, and is another very good background book. It also goes through the pre-Columbian rituals and discusses the way altars are done in various regions of Mexico. I like the way it is written bilingually. Every page is half Spanish and half English.

Take me through a typical celebration of the Day of the Dead in Mexico.

People who celebrate this holiday are generally Catholic, so they go to a Catholic mass on November 1st and then they go to the cemeteries, decorate family graves and leave offerings for their deceased relatives. Those offerings will be things like flowers, candles, incense and special foods. They may leave tamales [a Mexican dish] or fruits, or whatever the typical food of that region might be. It could be chicken with mole sauce.

It’s the same in other countries of Latin America. In Guatemala, for example, they prepare a dish called el fiambre – chopped and pickled meats and veggies – which is only cooked for this holiday. In the Andean region of South America they have special breads they make only for the Days of the Dead, which they leave on tombs for the deceased. Those breads are called gua guas, which in the Quechua language means “babies”. They shape these breads like babies to signify the connection between life and death. Where there is death, some people are dying but new people are being born, so there is a cycle between life and death. This is a very important philosophy among many indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Your own book looks at how the festival is celebrated in different parts of Latin America, yet most books concentrate on how it is done in Mexico – why?

Most books on the topic focus on Mexico because it has the most well-known and elaborate celebrations. The southern regions of Mexico, which have the country’s heaviest concentration of indigenous peoples, have extremely elaborate altar-making traditions that really grab you when you see them. Also, a lot of the researchers who have written on the topic are from the US and Mexico is our closest neighbour, so it makes sense to go there for research instead of all the way down to South America. And a lot of the books have been written by Mexican Americans, who naturally are most interested in Mexico’s celebrations.