This Saturday, Nov. 1, the cultural heart of downtown Santa Ana will come alive for a vibrant Día de los Muertos celebration, with colorful altars, flowers, music and food filling the street as the community honors ancestors and lost loved ones.
Two co-occurring events, Noche de Altares and Viva La Vida, will be held alongside the city’s monthly Downtown Santa Ana Art Walk.
El Centro Cultural’s Noche de Altares will be held on 4th Street between Ross and Broadway Street from noon to 9 p.m.
Viva La Vida’s Dia de Los Muertos festival will run on Sycamore Street and the 2nd Street Promenade from 2 to 10 p.m.
Councilmember Benjamin Vasquez, who views the events as one unified celebration, said the festivities have been part of Santa Ana for more than two decades. Before joining the City Council, he helped organize Noche de Altares, which he noted was built entirely by unpaid volunteers. Over the years, he watched attendance grow from roughly 3,000 visitors to about 40,000, he said.
“It’s about community. And it’s about passing down traditions and creating a sense of identity and purpose here,” said Vasquez.
This year, volunteers from the Orange County Rapid Response Network will also be on-site monitoring for potential immigration enforcement activity. Event organizers have secured a safe indoor space for attendees if needed.
Now in its 11th year, Viva La Vida’s festival carries a more Chicano feel compared with El Centro’s Mexican-rooted celebration. Luis Lucero, a bartender at downtown’s Mission Bar, said he loves admiring the personalized altars that often feature the deceased’s favorite foods, including arroz con pollo, tamales and other Mexican pastries.
Lucero said, according to folklore, you knew a spirit had come to enjoy the food when its aroma disappeared. Alongside the food, personal items are found, such as lowriders, bikes, skateboards or even a luchador mask from a favorite wrestler.
“That’s the best thing about our culture. When we celebrate them every year, we let them know in the afterlife that we never forgot about them,” he said.
Ehecayollotl Malinalmiqui, a traditional Mexican medicine practitioner who runs Teopahtcalli in Santa Ana, described Día de los Muertos as a complex tradition of resistance, resilience and ancestral memory. She said the celebration is rooted in pre-Hispanic times and was originally observed between July and August. The modern November observance came after it was adapted to the Gregorian calendar.
Malinalmiqui described that shift as an act of survival, a way for Indigenous communities to preserve ancestral practices under Spanish colonization by blending them with Catholic observances.
“Dia de Los Muertos has become a tradition that’s more for the living,” she said. “It’s like the human part of us that wants to hold on to those that we love so much. To remember them, and to again feel connected.”
She views the act of Dia de Los Muertos as a reminder of the ancestral healing that needs to happen, a personal journey that encourages people to explore and be better than those who came before them.