Surrounded by altars, marigolds, and candlelight, Marco Ruiz stood out from the crowd. In lieu of an elaborate memorial, Ruiz simply hugged a large framed photo of his brother Martin, who had died two days after his 19th birthday.
Ruiz was stoic, taking in the scene. When asked about his brother, however, he smiled.
“He thought he was the best dancer,” Marco grinned. In reality, “he was so bad — but he didn’t care.” After Martin was killed in a car accident years ago, 1,000 people attended the funeral, Marco added. Now, only the oldest kids remember him.
On Día de los Muertos on Saturday, the Mission, like the Ruizes, was focused on celebrating the past.
Potrero del Sol park filled with altars honoring pets, friends, teachers, children, grandparents, great-grandparents, and even strangers who have passed. Their loved ones reminisced, telling stories long past sundown to anyone who stopped by.
Martin Ruiz, according to his brothers, was the goofy, sporty middle child. He never said no to babysitting his nieces and nephews — as long as there was pizza involved. They had their own language of inside jokes.
The Ruizes once lived in the Mission. The siblings are graduates of Saint James Catholic school and, in the ’90s, their mom owned a taqueria and produce market near 22nd and Valencia streets. They moved away when the neighborhood began to gentrify, Marco said, but they returned on Saturday to celebrate Martin.
“Sitting with grief and not being sad is a beautiful thing,” said Cindy Predock from the center of a communal altar organized by The Marigold Project.
Above, notes handwritten by passersby fluttered in the breeze, clipped to string tied between three trees. The notes will later be burned in a Burning Man temple, Predock added.
For many, setting up an altar at Potrero del Sol has become an annual ritual. Artist Adrian Arias, for one, attends every year “to remember with beauty.” This year, Arias said, that means not just remembering ancestors and friends, but every Palestinian affected by war.
Others were new. Even though 24-year-old Erick Farias was raised on 24th and Mission, Saturday marked his first among the altars. It was a chance to connect to his Mexican heritage, Farias said, still giddy from dancing in the park’s marigold-strewn placita.
While most in the park traveled with family and friends, some arrived alone.
At the end of the night, one woman in an oversized black parka collected framed photographs from a communal altar. She wrapped them in plastic and slipped them into her rolling backpack, steeling herself for the trip back to Ocean Beach.
The elderly woman asked to remain anonymous, explaining that she had nearly been scammed out of her life savings over the summer and was now worried about identity theft. But she agreed to share images of her mother.
Many of her picture frames are dedicated to the family matriarch, who “worked so hard” she became skinny to the point of no longer looking “like a human being.”
This condition, the woman said, was the result of years on a factory assembly line in tropical Hong Kong. A framed scrap of paper — less than one inch wide and inscribed with Chinese characters written in soft pencil — is the last preservation of her mother’s handwriting.
Her father, she continued, had been the mayor of a small town in mainland China before escaping the communist party. There was more family memorabilia at home that did not make the trip to Potrero del Sol — this was her first time and she’d been concerned there wouldn’t be enough space for her.
On the bus ride home, the woman marveled at how receptive everyone at the festival of altars had been to questions about their loved ones. Mourning the dead, for her, had always been a private activity.
It was nice, she reflected, to share their memories.
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