When I arrived in Moab, Utah, in mid- December, people were talking not about the upcoming Christmas holidays, but about the Day of the Dead festival that had happened six weeks earlier. The event is an annual fund-raiser for the Moab Valley Multicultural Center, a nonprofit formed to serve minority populations in Moab, especially the region’s Latino immigrants.
The Day of the Dead is a traditional Mexican holiday, celebrated on November 1 and 2, when families gather to remember loved ones. But the occasion is far from somber. In the yard of the multicultural center, volunteers and staff created a celebratory graveyard, with altars on the graves, and even a small pet cemetery. A band played, a brightly festooned skull hung above the crowd, and there was traditional food and a children’s dance performance.
“It was amazing,” Rhiana Medina, executive director of the center, told me. “The people we have helped through all sorts of difficult situations helped us put on this event, and it always takes me aback how much they are willing to do.”
The event was launched as a fund-raiser, but it does much more than raise money. People from south of the border celebrate and share their culture and keep their traditions alive. And, amid the grinning skeletons and bright colors, the festival serves as a reminder of something profound and universal—the preciousness and finiteness of life.
“We do everything we can to keep [the celebration] connected to the indigenous roots—the circle of life; how life comes up out of the ground, and then as it dies it goes back into the ground,” Medina explained. “We bless the earth before we build altars on the tombs, and all of the components of a traditional indigenous altar are very carefully placed on every tomb.” This celebration, with its embrace of life and the inevitability of death, is one of the gifts the multicultural center offers the larger community.
Rhiana Medina at the Moab Valley Multicultural Center.
Death is taboo in American culture. Many of us have never seen someone die, except in the sanitized versions shown in the movies. Perhaps that’s why we fear death.
I had seen the smiling skeletons in shops and in the art of Mexico and Central America, and at first I found the imagery unpleasant and macabre. But over time, I came to appreciate the little figurines riding a motorcycle or dancing in front of an orchestra of skeletons. Life is ephemeral, they seem to say. Enjoy it while you still have flesh on those bones!
Rhiana Medina has a lot of experience connecting across cultures. She grew up in northern Minnesota. Her father is part Native and part Mexican; her mother is Scandinavian. She inherited dark hair, olive skin, and an easy laugh. “My sisters, because we’re all mixed, look different,” she said. “A lot of people would ask, ‘Is that your mom?’ ”
To further confuse things, her dad didn’t want his children to speak Spanish. “He thought it would make us sound uneducated.
“I have a foot in two cultures,” she said. The mission of the center is likewise to build bridges between cultures. This is a tough challenge in a place like Moab. Many Anglo residents are leery of the Spanish-speaking immigrants. And many, although not all, are wealthy. Moab is within a few miles of Arches and Canyonlands National Parks and on the Colorado River. A large number of the white people who come to the area are there to enjoy the spectacular scenery and outdoor activities. Most of the immigrants came for jobs at hotels and restaurants.
“If you’re a refugee because of violence, or economic reasons, or climate change, you didn’t want to move. It wasn’t like you wanted to uproot and leave your family, and your home, and your lifestyle, and your culture and move thousands of miles away,” Medina said. “You did it because you were forced to.
“It does cause stresses on the places that receive the migrants,” she acknowledged. “It’s stressful in the schools and on the economy. But not blaming the people is a good place to start.”
So how do you build bridges between people whose life experiences are so different?
“To have other people trust you, you have to let people know you,” Medina said. “We’re out in the community, we are good neighbors, we volunteer at other people’s organizations. If you want friends, you have to be a friend.”
The center’s other big event is “Dancing with the Moab Stars,” a performance and fund-raiser featuring prominent community leaders.
“We start by asking local leaders and celebrities to risk making fools of themselves by getting up onstage and dancing in front of the whole community,” she laughed. “This is asking a lot!”
Mural at the Moab Valley Multicultural Center.
The first year, the mayor and the sheriff danced. The next year, the CEO of the hospital and local business owners got up onstage.
“This was during the height of the tourist season, and they are probably working 12 hours a day. And we’re saying, ‘Hey, want to be in a dance show when you have three months to learn a routine with this person you don’t know, and you probably have no dance experience, and you’ll perform it as a public dance competition for a good cause?’ ”
The Moab stars are not all local celebrities. They could include a Hispanic couple who have been in Moab for a long time but are not known outside their immediate circle. “The audience reads their bio in the program and learns who these wonderful people are.
“I have seen, in six years, a transformation of this place from being leery of the multicultural center helping ‘those’ people,” Medina said, “to getting more community support.”
In 2015, the center took a leap of faith and moved the fund-raiser into the largest indoor venue in town, the 700-seat high school auditorium. And they filled it. That turnout is pretty good for an event where the monologue goes back and forth between English and Spanish, and there are no big outside celebrities—just the people of the community in costume, doing dance routines they recently learned, willing to compete, laugh, and possibly look foolish.
• • •
More people are displaced than have been at any time in human history—some 60 million are fleeing violent conflict alone, according to the United Nations.1. Additional millions are on the move for economic reasons or, increasingly, because of climate change.
At a time when so many people are forced to relocate, it may seem odd to celebrate place-based community. But reconnecting to a place, and to the other people who comprise it, gives us power whether we (or they) have just arrived or have lived there a lifetime.
I think about the immigrants I met in Detroit, Cincinnati, Prospect, Kentucky, and Moab, and the vitality, work ethic, pageantry, and warmth they brought with them. And I think about how many more of us will likely be displaced in the future, whether because a rising sea inundates our freshwater supply or because of drought, heat, or flooding—or because we lose a job or a home. We don’t know if we will be the ones displaced, or if our community will be taking in those who are displaced. But with the amount of carbon already in the atmosphere, we can be pretty sure that people will continue to be moving.
How well will we as a society cope with that much disruption? The kind of world we inhabit in the coming years—whether it’s one of resilience or a dystopian game of survival—may depend more than anything on how well we welcome the stranger.
A Culture of Connection |
An Economy of Extraction |
Align head, hands, and heart. |
Yearn for more stuff. |
Fulfill your potential. |
Fit into the economy as a worker, consumer, and taxpayer. |
Take responsibility for family, the larger community, and future generations. |
Be responsible to myself and my family. |
Health and development are primary. |
Financial wealth is primary. |
Each life (human and otherwise) is sacred. |
Nothing is sacred. |
