Thursday, November 13, 2025 (5:00-6:30 pm Boston)
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The Observatorio del Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University welcomes you to a presentation guided by Lorena Ojeda Dávila about the transformation of Día de Muertos in Michoacán: from being a sacred community ritual deeply rooted in the Purépecha worldview, to becoming a global cultural attraction influenced by tourism, the entertainment industry, and the commodification of heritage. Beginning with the UNESCO recognition and its projection in media products such as Disney’s film Coco and the movie James Bond 007: Spectre, the talk analyzes how international visibility has generated both pride and tensions regarding the authenticity and control of the cultural meanings and symbols of this celebration.
While these representations have placed Michoacán and, in particular, Purépecha culture on the international map, they have also driven processes of folklorization, in which the ritual becomes a spectacle and the collective memory and spiritual meaning of the traditions honoring the dead are put at risk. This presentation offers a critical reflection on how cultural globalization coexists with community memory, and how the Indigenous peoples of Michoacán are reconfiguring their narrative to keep their traditions alive.
Lorena Ojeda Dávila is a full-time professor and researcher at the Faculty of History at the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo. She is a member of Mexico’s National System of Researchers (Level 2) and holds the “Professor with a Desirable Profile” (Prodep) distinction awarded by the Mexican Ministry of Public Education. She holds a Ph.D. in Latin American History, Indigenous Worlds from the Universidad Pablo de Olavide in Seville, and an M.A. in Latin American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, as a Fulbright García Robles Scholar. In 2019, she held the Fulbright-García Robles Chair in Mexican Studies at the University of New Mexico, and in the spring of 2025, she held the same chair at Yale University, where she taught the seminar “Indigenous Movements and Resistance in Mexico.” In the fall of 2025, she is teaching “Introduction to Latin American Studies” as a Visiting Professor with CLAIS at Yale University.
She has published numerous individual and collaborative research works, has participated in multiple academic conferences, and has led research projects and groups funded by CONACYT (now SECIHTI), FONCA, PRODEP, and the Scientific Research Coordination Office at UMSNH in Mexico, as well as by the Ministry of Culture and Education in Argentina, Erasmus+, the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, the Embassy of Spain in Mexico, and the Spanish Agency for International Development Cooperation. Among her most notable distinctions are the Hans Christian Andersen Award in Denmark, the Santander W50: The Next Generation of Leading Women scholarship at the London School of Economics in the United Kingdom, the State Youth Merit Award in Michoacán, and the Charles Wilson Hackett Memorial Scholarship for an Outstanding Leader and Scholar from the Austin Pan American Round Table in Texas. Her research lines are framed within an interdisciplinary approach to the Humanities, focusing primarily on the history of Indigenous peoples, the history of anthropology, critical heritage studies, and subaltern religious practices.