
The Day of the Dead Files: Historical Records of Religious Suppression in Colonial Mexico
In April 1539, bishops and clergy meeting in Mexico City recorded an agreement to prohibit Indigenous festivals, dances, bonfires, incense burning, ceremonies, altars, and worship places. The surviving record is important, but it does not mention Día de Muertos by name. This episode follows the documents that surround that gap. Franciscan friar Toribio de Benavente, known as Motolinía, described offerings for the dead being made during the Christian commemoration of the departed in the early colonial period. Decades later, Dominican chronicler Diego Durán suspected that older customs had been incorporated into Catholic feast days. In the mid-seventeenth century, parish priest Jacinto de la Serna reported nighttime offerings and candles in homes and places beyond regular clerical supervision. Together, these records show a colonial church attempting to regulate worship while its own writers continued to describe practices around death, offerings, and remembrance that they did not fully accept or understand. But the sources have limits. They were written mainly by churchmen, not by the Indigenous people whose actions they described. They do not prove that one unchanged pre-conquest ritual became the modern Día de Muertos. The central dispute is not whether colonial suppression occurred. The records establish that it did. The harder question is how much they can tell us about continuity, adaptation, and the meanings that Indigenous communities gave to the dead. This podcast uses artificial intelligence in its research, writing, production, and narration. Episodes are editorially reviewed before publication. #ForbiddenFiles #HiddenHistory #DADeMuertos #AllSoulsDay #ColonialMexico







