In Mexico, a vibrant celebration of life and death will soon take place. On Nov. 1 and Nov. 2, families will flood cemeteries to share meals, tell stories and keep company with their departed loved ones. After writing two columns about a crisis of meaning for Gen Z, I thought the diagnosis demanded a prescription. And in Día de los Muertos, we find compelling clues to reaching our answer.
When I observe discourses about Indigenous rituals, I often feel that they misunderstand their function. Día de los Muertos isn’t merely an aesthetic to be adapted or a celebration of identity, although both are certainly part of its function. Nor is it even strictly Indigenous in origin, as the Catholic sensibilities that pervade Mexico have significantly influenced the holiday.
It holds a metaphysical power to its observers. And with metaphysical power comes metaphysical obligation: the spiritual kind, the kind that isn’t optional. Face-painting is part of how people observe, but so is the necessary visit to the cemetery or the construction of the altar each year.
Americans, generally, hate obligation to anything. Some of us maintain important forms — church, synagogue or mosque attendance, volunteer work and familial duties — but these are primarily understood in public discourse as individual choices rather than duties we’re bound by, analogous to self-expression. To the average city-dweller, the most pressing obligation you have is to pay the landlord for your overpriced studio every month. We’re also chronically unhappy, profoundly alienated and cynical about the world. The state of affairs for Gen Z is by no means “good” and is certainly not “great.” To find answers to the questions that plague modernity, we may need to look to Mexico.
As I walked through one of Oaxaca’s main cemeteries last November, many families that had gathered offered me Mezcal and showed me their altars. The mood was celebratory, not somber. They may have been at the cemetery out of obligation, but they understood it as liberatory rather than oppressive. Marigold flowers lined the paths that guided the dead home — an aesthetic detail to most Americans, but one that embodies the metaphysical reality these families inhabited.
While cemetery visits like those I witnessed in Oaxaca are one form of observance, most Mexicans honor their departed through home altars and family gatherings. But whether at the cemetery or at home, these practices create structures of commitment to the dead.
Dan Ramírez, associate professor and religion chair at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, Calif., now participates in Día de los Muertos after having not grown up with the ritual. He spoke with me on the phone about how the Catholic imagination of modern Mexico informs how the ritual is understood.
“Catholics put greater weight on obligation because they have a tradition called the manda, where in communicating with a saint or virgin, bargain is struck,” Ramírez said. “In the moment of calamity from which the saint or virgin saved you, upon invoking their help, you feel obligated to go visit their tomb.”
This structure of reciprocal obligation, informed in part by the Catholic construction of the “manda,” shapes how Día de los Muertos functions. The dead gave you life, therefore you owe them remembrance as a recognition of debt.
But for a country shaped by what German sociologist Max Weber called the “Protestant ethic,” which enabled the growth of industrial capitalism, Catholic sensibilities aren’t easily translated into American contexts. America’s intellectual inheritance stems largely from the Protestant Reformation, which introduced utilitarian logics relating to death that informed the way physical spaces were constructed. This inheritance shapes Gen Z’s instinctive rejection of obligation: We’ve internalized centuries of Protestant logic that equates binding with oppression. For immigrant communities that keep reciprocal obligation, this presents challenges.
“It’s been difficult to replicate what goes on in the Mexican village, because the Mexican village places the graveyards next to the church, and so that’s where you go to spend your day,” Ramírez said. “Whereas in the United States, we place death outside of the city outskirts, and it’s very segregated. Death is segregated.”
In the U.S., many members of Gen Z have rejected the premise of a metaphysics on its face. We embrace astrology and manifestation — belief systems we have sovereignty over — while rejecting obligations that demand binding to others. But when we reject anything that makes claims on us beyond individual choice, what we gain in autonomy, we lose in binding. Rituals that involve reciprocal obligation, like Día de los Muertos, take us out of our prisons of constant performance.
There is no shortage of rights discourses, but very few about responsibility. The Mexican village shows us that while liberation is essential to the human condition, so is obligation. To be truly free is to be profoundly bound. Indeed, Mexico recently rose to 10th place in the 2025 World Happiness Report. Perhaps the prescription isn’t necessarily to book a flight to Oaxaca next year, but to challenge ourselves to find our own forms of obligation.
