From the glaring eyes of a cd skeleton blasts pop music; Halloween music- music that gets the crowd stepping in rhythm, as much as a crowd can. There are ice sculptures shaped like bones, bones shaped into full skeletons, and skeletons masquerading as people. As I look out across the crowd, my own face painted a bright bone white, I see that I (in my all-black clothes and glow-in-the-dark skeleton tights) am, if anything, under dressed. At Tucson, Arizona’s All Soul’s Processional, there is no such thing as a Halloween costume—the creations on these bodies are months in the making and worn well after the holiday.
The Procession began in 1990 when Tucson artist Susan Johnson performed a piece meant to grieve the passing of her father. As an artist, her grief was best expressed creatively and in celebration—from this performance, the All Soul’s Processional emerged as part of a larger Dia De Los Muertos event.
Now, the Processional exists as a parade of approximately 35,000 individuals and groups that travels two miles through downtown Tucson before arriving at a dark field filled with vendors, art, performers, and spectators. The event includes acrobatics, singers, writers, visual artists, etc, and ends with the ceremonial burning of an enormous urn filled to represent the desires, hopes, dreams, and lives of those who have passed.
The burning of the urn is spectacular—raised above the ground by cranes, it glows and flickers, its flames reflected in the painted faces and white eyes of the crowd. It is early November in Tucson, and so we are not cold, but huddle together in a public need for togetherness. We are not a culture that mourns together or sometimes much at all, but the Processional allows for that, requires it even. It asks that we acknowledge the universality of death through reflection and celebration.
Death appears in all of its forms at the All Soul’s Processional—as the silhouettes of hunted wolves, the Saguaro Cactus, the ghost dog. There are papier-mâché heads and children dressed as ghosts and headstones that look like kites for victims of bullying and abuse and framed photographs of the old and young who have died. There are memorials to lost peoples and tribes and species and traditions. Even though I am not mourning someone recently passed, I can feel the energy and am simultaneously sad and happy. I feel moved in the way that the parade moves—in unity, slow and steady and with purpose.
Tucson is the perfect backdrop for the event, with its picturesque downtown (when it isn’t under construction) and cotton-candy sky. Against the backdrop of a desert sunset, the march is bizarre and a bit creepy without context. And, occurring just days after the undoubtedly spooky Halloween, the Processional provides a sort of reverence that Halloween lacks, though the costumes may overlap. There’s something about being confronted with the reality of death and remembrance that All Soul’s Day provides—a becoming of the costume you’re wearing.
As we approach the first underpass, the crowd goes silent and we stomp through the closed roadways. I think about the sounds of those around me breathing—how lovely, in this moment when we’re all costumed in death. And the next bridge, when we’re all talking it is lovely too, that collaboration of sound and voices, like a church choir, always beautiful no matter how we sound alone.
To experience the event yourself, visit Tucson on November 3!
Lydia Mondy is a pizza enthusiast with a passion for cryptozoology and Halloween costumes. When she isn’t watching non-historical shows on the History channel, you can find her exploring the United States and cheering on the LA Dodgers.
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