Each autumn, communities across Mexico, California, and all over the world, turn their attention to the dead. Día de los Muertos or Day of the Dead, is not a single ritual but a network of gestures: an arrangement of flowers, food set out for loved ones, smoke rising from resinous inscese, candles burning late into the night. To outsiders it can appear festive, even theatrical—symbolic images of skulls and face paint, processions, parades and music—but to those who practice, it is an act of continuity, a confirmation that the dead have not vanished so much as crossed into another room.