By Olivia Turner | Arts & Life Editor
Creative Waco’s annual Dia de los Muertos is back for its fifth year, this time for the biggest, most colorful celebration the city has seen yet.
The festival will run from 4-10 p.m. on Saturday at Indian Spring Park. This year’s event will debut a bright, multicolored “alebrije” theme, said Julie Cervantes, parade director for Dia de los Muertos and director of strategic development at Creative Waco. Cervantes said she expects attendees to go all out with the theme through costumes and parade floats this year.
“I’ve seen some people doing a leopard print body suit, but then they’re putting on butterfly wings with a cat mask, and then deer antler horns, and they’re using Posca paint markers or spray painting, and they’re just having fun,” Cervantes said. “The creativity is unmatched. I’ve seen some groups, even the police department … they got this papier-mache Clifford the Big Red Dog, and I can’t wait to see the final product.”
The concept of celebrating the Day of the Dead was born from the Mexican Renaissance in the early 1900s after a period of dictatorship and loss of indigenous identity, Cervantes said. “Alebrijes” followed soon after, thanks to Mexico City visual artist Pedro Linares, who dreamt up the creatures in a fever and began replicating them through the art of papier-mache.
Along with the “alebrijes” theme, Cervantes said Dia de los Muertos is partnering with several local animal shelters — the Humane Society, Pet Circle, ABC Clinic and Fuzzy Friends — to include Waco’s own animals in the celebration and even to allow locals the chance to adopt them.
The pets will be held in a fenced-in “alebrije garden,” according to Cervantes. The garden will have several five-foot-tall cardboard cutouts in the shapes of alebrijes like jaguars, eagles and cats scattered throughout. A couple animal shelters will even have their four-legged participants heading the parade to resemble the spirit animals, Cervantes said.
Baylor is involved with much of the creative process for this year’s festival, she said. Ryan Joyner, an assistant professor of sound design at Baylor, partnered with Creative Waco to create an interactive T-shirt to be sold at this year’s festival, featuring the alebrije theme. Cervantes said the shirts can also be preordered online.
Joyner is using augmented reality, a creative process that overlays digital information like images, text and 3D models onto the real world. Simply by holding up a phone camera to a QR code on the T-shirt, the woman depicted on the logo will come to life, transforming into different forms of alebrijes.
Cervantes said a small class in the philanthropy department called Creative Economies will be contributing to the parade by creating a lantern bird puppet in the Moody Makerspace, crafted out of bamboo sticks, muslin wrap and LED lights. In the class, students learn about the relationship between the arts and the economy and how they can cultivate social cohesion.
“We want just everyone to be able to appreciate just all, all of our community,” Cervantes said. “Every culture has something to be celebrated.”
Eric Linares, Events Director at Creative Waco, said hosting the event at Indian Spring Park holds more significance than just space to celebrate — it’s where the Hispanic community’s history is preserved and honored.
“Staying in that area also helps honor some of that legacy, and shows that the Hispanic culture is still alive and thriving in downtown Waco,” Linares said.
This year’s festival will feature an expansive lineup of the usual entertainment, such as musicians, dancing and parade performers. There will also be food trucks, local vendors and several zones for families and young children to play and relax, Linares said.
Preceding the first Creative Waco Dia de los Muertos festival was a traveling ofrenda started by a local, Rocio Ramirez-Landoll. Linares said he and a few other community members, including Cervantes, gathered to kickstart the first Waco Dia de los Muertos. Since then, the celebration has grown from a small-scale celebration to a citywide event sponsored by big names like Baylor and H-E-B, and partnering with Waco Restaurant Week.
A total of 60 entries will walk in this year’s parade, the most they’ve ever had, Cervantes said.
“We weren’t sure how it was going to go this year, and we’ve never had to do this, but we had to turn people away from the parade,” Cervantes said. “We exceeded our permitted spacing, and there’s a bunch more people on the wait list. But we can’t. We don’t have permitting to take up any more city street … we exceeded our limit about three weeks ago.”
Cervantes said, along with her many responsibilities like theme and logo development and communications with parade participants, there are several other behind-the-scenes factors to hosting a public festival in downtown Waco, such as security, road closure, portable toilets and hiring emcees and judges for the various competitions.
Together with her team, Cervantes is implementing several creative additions to this year’s festival, such as projection mapping onto the Waco Suspension Bridge. Another is the implementation of “sicoustics,” a sound system that will spread all throughout the festival and parade so attendees in all areas can experience the music and announcements emitting from the stage. This will also allow emcees to announce when parade participants arrive at the turnaround.
Linares said he hopes all who are interested in Dia de los Muertos, of Hispanic descent or not, will come to check out what this year’s event has to offer.
“Death is in the name — ‘Dia de los Muertos’ — but it’s really a celebration of the life we live with each other,” Linares said. “It’s a celebration of the moments that we’re sharing with each other, and it’s in that hope we can remember those moments, even pass them on.”
