KELLY AMTOWER
NE student Gabe Tinajero and NW student Sydney Castillo discuss the student-made altars on display in the NW art gallery.
The NW Campus Spanish program had to take a few extra steps to continue to celebrate Día de los Muertos Oct. 30.
NW Spanish associate professor Alejandro Garza said event organizers had to dive into the faculty handbook for the event to be approved by the campus and district. The handbook has rules that adhere to Senate Bill 17, the state law that bans diversity, equity and inclusion offices on college campuses and dictates how cultural events can be held.
On the events poster there is a circle emblem saying “Welcome” and “All are welcome and encouraged to attend.” This is required to allow cultural events to take place.
“We always follow the policy, and we have a policy for the faculty members and administrators that every event that we have must be open to all, and that’s what we did with this,” Garza said. “Even our flyer has a logo that it has been approved by our campus and the district, and this logo says it’s open to everybody.”
Another piece of the policy for cultural events to be held is that students who attend the event must do so voluntarily.
“We do not enforce the students to come,” Garza said. “At the presentation, we have students from many different backgrounds, but they all came to be a part of this, and they all came because they wanted to learn and it was voluntary and it was open to everybody.”
NW’s Día de los Muertos celebration started with cultural presentations by other Spanish instructors including Garza, who presented information varying from the importance of the way tombs are decorated to how Frida Kahlo memorialized the day in her artwork.
The event headed afterward to the third-floor art exhibit, where the altar contest winner was announced.
Students made and entered their own altars, which were judged the week before the event.
After the winners were announced, Garza presented his photography from his visits to Mexico during Día de los Muertos in an artist talk for an exhibit currently at NW.
Alongside Garza, South visual arts adjunct instructor Brenda Melgoza Ciardiello presented her take on the exhibit titled “Raíces y Recuerdos,” meaning “Roots and Memories,” with clay, succulents and plywood.
“This work, which has the family archive and remembrance at its core, was arranged to mirror traditional Catholic Day of the Dead altars in which I treat literal and metaphorical place as material, the female body as an ambivalent sacrifice, and the photograph as a site of resurrection,” Ciardiello wrote in a social media post.
NW arts and humanities dean Lisa Benedetti said that cultural events such as the Dia de los Muertos celebration bring language learning to life in powerful and memorable ways.
“When we observe cultural events like Día de los Muertos, participants don’t just read about Spanish-speaking communities, they experience the stories, create the art and connect with the history that makes language meaningful,” she said in an email. “This hands-on learning transforms abstract vocabulary into lived understanding, showing how language carries culture, memory and human connection.”
Students from all walks of life joined in the celebrations including the NW senior learning program and Spanish student Carol Beard. She said it has been hard to build connections outside of the three other students from her class, so she enjoyed interacting with the attendees.
“I love it,” she said. “Just seeing all the young folk enjoy it, I think it’s been cool.”
Other students like NW student Noemi Flores expressed how attending this event allowed Flores to find community and understanding within the art.
“It feels really great to be able to relate to some of the artworks and some of the artists, like their cultural background and their ideas. It helps to find someone to relate to,” Flores said. “I think more people need to find someone to ground them and help them express themselves further, find themselves.”