Unidad Latina en Acción hosts annual Día de los Muertos celebration ULA — a New Haven organization that supports Latine immigrants — dedicated their parade to community members who have recently passed. Words by Maia Nehme and Laura Ospina. Photos by and courtesy of Maia Nehme, Laura Ospina, Erik Villalobos and Eino Sierpe.

New Haven’s annual Día de los Muertos celebrations included a parade to celebrate the city’s Latine community and a vigil to mourn essential migrant workers who died during the COVID-19 pandemic.

At Saturday’s parade, a skeleton — crowned with red and yellow flowers and cocooned in a homemade corn husk — towered over attendees, propelled forward by a bicycle. Other marionettes perched on the sides of grocery carts as attendees with skeleton paint on their faces chatted and danced, waiting for the parade to begin.

“[The parade] is absolutely original,” Genoveva Trujillo Palmieri, who is originally from Colombia and has been attending the Día de los Muertos event for years, said in Spanish. “It’s a very Latin American thing to host parades. It’s truly of our people and culture.”

For 13 years, the Día de los Muertos celebration — hosted by Unidad Latina en Acción — has invited immigrant families and the New Haven community to remember loved ones by placing framed photographs on an altar, puppeteering colorful skeleton marionettes in the parade and dancing until evening. Around 500 people attended this year’s celebration at the Bregamos Community Theater, according to John Jairo Lugo, ULA’s community organizing director.

With marionettes draped in shirts with phrases like “People and planet before profits” and “No home is illegal,” ULA members link the celebration to their advocacy for the rights of immigrant workers and families. This year’s parade was dedicated to the lives of Dean Peckham, a former attorney and ULA member who passed away in August, and Daniel Ramirez, an immigrant worker who lived in Norwalk and died from a workplace injury in September.

ULA collaborated with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which ULA is a part of, to build an altar and hold a vigil during the pandemic in front of City Hall on Saturday evening.

The New Haven vigil is part of a nationwide movement by the NDLON, which supported vigils in Trenton, N.J., Oakland, Calif. and New York City. The network is pushing for a federal investigation into the migrant workers who died during the pandemic and for President Joe Biden to enforce protections for migrant workers.

“We want to remind President Biden of the historic phrase: We mourn the dead. And we fight for the living,” Erik Villalobos, spokesperson for NDLON, wrote to the News in Spanish. “President Biden, fight for the living. Because today there are many working amid the same abuses, the same unsafe working locations, the same exploitation.”

At the Día de los Muertos celebration, giggling children danced with their parents, volunteers set up decorations to the sounds of “La Llorona” and “Encontré la Cadenita” and waves of attendees adorned themselves with lights, florals and bright colors.

Silvana Deigan — who is originally from Perú and has been collaborating with ULA since 2019 — was one of several attendees wearing an elaborate costume. She donned a skeleton bodysuit, a glow-in-the-dark beak and iridescent wings, representing a hummingbird.

“The hummingbird is sacred and divine,” she said in Spanish. “It’s a messenger of the gods.”

For Juana Islas, who is originally from Mexico and has been a ULA member for 10 years, the teamwork of ULA members is what made the celebration possible, especially given the workload of their day jobs.

During the last five years, ULA members have worked with a Guatemalan artist to create the marionettes used in the annual parade.

Islas, Deigan and other members began working with the artist two months before the parade. Deigan said they repaired the marionettes used in previous years’ celebrations and created four new puppets, one of which was modeled after Peckham.

“[Peckham] would accompany members of the community when they needed to go to court,” Islas said in Spanish. “When there was a protest for wage theft, he was there. In every moment, he was helping us.”

According to Lugo, ULA also hoped to honor and preserve the memory of Ramirez, who has no family members in Connecticut.

Some ULA members brought trays of rice, carnitas and pan de muerto, which were distributed to attendees after the parade. As the night continued, attendees danced to live cumbia and salsa music.

Sergio Infante GRD ’27, who is Colombian, and Jordan Foster GRD ’27 were two of the event’s attendees. Infante had attended the event while he was an undergraduate student at Yale until six years ago, whereas Foster was a newcomer.

“I’m looking forward to stepping out of the Yale bubble for a little while and talking to new people,” Foster said.

Looking to the future, Lugo said that ULA plans to expand its Día de los Muertos programming by both securing a larger venue and collaborating with organizations based in Guatemala and Colombia to create parallel parades. Lugo said that many of the family members of Connecticut’s migrant community still live in Latin America, so in order to fully highlight the lives of migrants, ULA hopes to expand their “desfile de muertos con carácter social” to occur in other countries on the same day as the New Haven celebration.

Karen Escalera, who is Mexican, helped her mom and other ULA members set up the food station a few hours before the parade. Escalera emphasized how the event brings together New Haven’s Latine community and allows them to embrace their cultures.

“For us younger kids [and the] younger generation, we can continue on with these traditions as we get older so we don’t forget where we come from,” she said.

ULA was founded in 2002.

Contact Maia Nehme at maia.nehme@yale.edu and Laura Ospina at laura.ospina@yale.edu.