page_title: All Soul's Weekend
section_title: Controversy
hierarchical_section_title: All Soul's Weekend / Controversy
caption_attribution_description: English: All Souls Procession in Tucson, Arizona.
context_page_description: All Souls Weekend is an event in Tucson, Arizona. It draws on Mesoamerican, Spanish Roman Catholic, and Mexican rituals, incorporating many diverse cultural traditions with the common goal of honoring and remembering the deceased.
context_section_description: Organizers of All Souls Weekend have made explicit efforts to present the All Souls Procession and associated events as inclusive of but distinct in origin from Día de los Muertos, partly in response to charges of cultural appropriation by academic critics who have charged that its organizers and participants have primarily been Anglo-Americans. Similar charges have been directed at the Day of the Dead parade in the Mission District in San Francisco. However, with All Souls Weekend events now bringing together over 100,000 people of varying backgrounds in a public celebration in downtown Tucson, the organizers influence but do not control the traditions participants choose to represent and honor in the event. Each year thousands of participants in All Souls Weekend activities choose to wear calavera-style makeup and objects, familiar to many in Tucson due to the city's location 50 miles from the US-Mexico border. After the Spanish conquest of middle America, ancient Mesoamerican rituals merged with Roman Catholic tradition along with modern cultural interests in the Americas, yielding the holiday known today as Día de los Muertos in Spanish or Day of the Dead in English. At least one writer has argued that All Soul’s Weekend in Tucson represents a further step in the evolution of precolonial Mesoamerican rituals and Day of the Dead.  Though there is evidence the All Souls Procession was directly inspired by the history of Day of the Dead, the organizers of the All Soul’s Weekend emphasize that the event includes and encourages all forms of individual expression, drawing from many cultures, religions, and rituals. The mission of the weekend’s primary organizing body, Many Mouths One Stomach (MMOS), includes the perspective that death is a universal experience, uniting deceased loved ones with the living. MMOS intends All Soul’s Weekend to serve as an opportunity to approach death in a safe social setting.
caption: A puppet, by artist Sarah Cotten representing her grandmother and mother, in the All Souls Procession.
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