"Because it's your home," my friend said, turning to me, "you have to put two glasses of water on the table for the lost souls and the lonely souls."
I was standing in my own dining room in Mérida, looking at a plain white folding table that had become something else entirely. Photographs. Marigolds. Sugar skulls. A mug of hot chocolate. A glass of amber liquor set carefully in front of a photograph of a man who liked it. And now, because this was my house and not hers, two glasses of water for the dead that nobody was expecting.
That was the moment Hanal Pixán stopped being something I was observing and became something I understood. Compassion extended to a soul with no family left to remember it. I have never encountered anything quite like it anywhere else I have lived.
What Hanal Pixán actually is
Hanal Pixán is the Yucatán's observance of Día de Muertos. The name is Maya and it translates roughly as "food of the souls," which functions less as a label and more as an instruction. Once a year the dead are believed to return home, and the family cooks for them.
It is not a sad occasion and it is not a party. It sits somewhere more interesting than either, a season of respect in which the kitchen does most of the spiritual work. Día de Muertos as practiced by Mexico's Indigenous communities was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008, and the Yucatecan version is one of its most distinct regional expressions.
What goes on the table
The star is pib, also called mucbipollo: a large tamal of masa worked with achiote, stuffed with chicken or pork, wrapped in banana leaves, and buried in an earth oven to cook. It exists for a few weeks a year and then disappears until the next season. You will smell it in Mérida neighborhoods for days, and families buy the recado, the masa, and the leaves at the market well before anyone sets an altar.
Beside it goes xec (you will also see it written xek or xe'ek, from the Maya for "mixed up"). Jícama chopped into bite-size pieces, mandarina, china (what Yucatecos call the sweet orange), often toronja, dressed with sour orange or lime juice, salt, chile powder, and usually cilantro. It arrives as a salad, it arrives as a dessert, and it tastes exactly like the season it belongs to. Oxkutzcab, down in the Puuc, is one of the great citrus towns of the world, and xec is what a citrus harvest tastes like on an altar.
Then the rest: dulces de papaya and candied pumpkin seed, atole nuevo made from the new corn, tan-chucuá, balché, hot chocolate, peeled fruit set out so the souls do not have to work for it, and the specific drink or cigarette the person actually liked in life rather than the one you think they should have liked.
Pan de muerto sits on a great many Mérida altars now, including the one that went up on my table. It is worth knowing that Yucatecan purists will tell you it is a central-Mexican import and not a peninsular element at all; the Yucatán's bread, so to speak, is the pib. I include it because it was there, and because the drift is part of the story.
Three days, and then eight more
A correction worth making, because I hear it repeated by visitors constantly. Día de los Muertos in most of Mexico is not a single day. Nationally it spans two: November 1 for children who have passed, often called Día de los Angelitos, and November 2 for adults.
The Yucatán stretches it considerably further. Hanal Pixán runs across three days with distinct assignments:
October 31, U Hanal Palal
The day for children who have passed. Altars carry toys, sweets, and candles lit so the small souls can find their way.
November 1, U Hanal Nucuch Uinicoob
The day for adults, laid with the foods and drink named above.
November 2, U Hanal Pixanoob
The day for all souls, when families go to the cemetery and a mass is said for the dead.
Then, roughly eight days later, comes the Bix (also written biix, and called the octava), a quieter repetition of the whole thing. Candles go back up along doorways, the last pib comes out of the ground, and the souls are seen off. In some communities the sense is that the dead linger through the entire month of November, and families gather again at its end to pray and cook one more time.
Mérida layers a civic festival over the religious calendar: the Festival de las Ánimas, running roughly from late October through November 2, which includes the Paseo de las Ánimas, a procession from the General Cemetery toward Parque de San Juan. Altars for pets have been added in recent years as festival events. That is a modern addition rather than an inherited practice, and I note it because the distinction matters to the families who keep the older parts.
A note on the Catrina
She is not Hanal Pixán, and she is not ancient.
José Guadalupe Posada etched her around 1910 to 1913 and called her La Calavera Garbancera: a skeleton wearing an enormous feathered hat and nothing else. Garbancera was a slur for Mexicans of Indigenous ancestry who denied it, dressing European to pass as something finer. The etching was class satire aimed at pretension and self-erasure. The image appeared in print under the name Calavera Catrina in 1930, and Diego Rivera gave her a full body, an elegant Porfirian gown, and lasting fame in his mural Sueño de una tarde dominical en la Alameda Central, painted in 1946 and 1947. Catrín was slang for a dandy.
She is a central-Mexican figure who became the national face of Día de Muertos. Mérida's Desfile de Catrinas is a lovely civic event and a recent one. The Maya tradition underneath it has nothing to do with her, and neither does the face paint.
A Yucatecan friend laughed at me years ago when I asked what happens at the cemetery after the parade. Locals, she told me, do not do that. That is for visitors. She was not being unkind, just precise. The heart of this is a table, a kitchen, and a family.
The altar on my folding table
My first Hanal Pixán in Mexico, I did not want the street. I asked a friend from Mérida to teach my sons and me the way she had learned it growing up. We opened the invitation and ended up with seven families in my home, a mix of people from everywhere, nine children who found common ground despite having no shared language, and one toddler who abandoned his diaper and ran the house naked while the adults drank cold beer and stopped feeling like strangers.
I spent most of it in the kitchen. My friend's sister taught me to make pib, communicating through my imperfect Spanish and her patient hands. She charred onions and peppers. She fried achiote seeds in manteca and worked the red liquid through the masa. She laid the banana leaves into the pan. She had learned all of it standing beside her mother, who had died two years earlier.
When the pib went into the oven, my friend built the altar. She had brought her mother's remains and set them at the center of my table, beside photographs of both her parents. Her sister carried over the hot chocolate and the xec. I watched two grown women honor their parents in a borrowed dining room, and I could feel the loss and the love sitting in the same place at the same time, which is the whole architecture of this holiday.
Then came the two glasses of water, and I was undone.
Pomuch, and the bones I could not wash
A few years later I traveled to Pomuch, a Maya town in the municipality of Hecelchakán, in Campeche, for Choo Ba'ak: the ritual cleaning of the bones.
This is Pomuch's alone. It is not a Yucatán Peninsula practice, it is not part of Hanal Pixán generally, and you will not find it in Mérida. One town keeps it, and it was recognized as cultural heritage of the state of Campeche in 2017. Mexico's national anthropology institute has documented it.
I should admit that until that trip, "washing the bones" meant shuffling dominoes to me. If you know, you know.
What it means in Pomuch is this. Three years after a burial, the family exhumes the remains. The bones are cleaned, gently, with a soft brush, then laid on an embroidered cloth inside a small wooden box in an open niche where they can be seen and visited all year. Each year before the Day of the Dead the family returns, cleans the bones again, and changes the embroidered cloth. Fresh clothing for the annual visit.
I left during the ritual.
Not out of squeamishness. I left because I felt like an intruder in someone's most private act of love, and because I was fairly certain I could not have done it myself. Not with people watching. I thought about my grandfather, and whether I could have held his bones in my hands with an audience. I would have been wrecked. I would have been thinking about him picking me up at the airport in Alabama when I was thirteen and flying alone for the first time, a small girl walking off a plane into the certainty that someone was there. The candy store. John Wayne on the television constantly, because the man loved a Western the way other people love oxygen.
Grief is not a spectacle. That is the lesson I carried out of that cemetery, and it has shaped how I design travel for other people ever since.
Thinking about the Yucatán for a longer stay rather than a long weekend? Hanal Pixán is one season among many here, and the Yucatán rewards travelers who give it time. Explore our destinations.
Death as a phase, not an ending
In Mexican culture, death is not treated as the terrifying full stop that it is in much of the United States. It is a transition. The dead have an address. They get a meal, a chair, their drink of choice, and an annual visit. You speak to them. In one town, you keep their bones clean. You set out water for the ones nobody else is setting water out for.
I am not going to pretend I arrived here understanding that. I did not. I arrived carrying an American relationship to death, the one that keeps grief behind a closed door and gets uncomfortable when it stays out too long.
Travel does this to you if you let it. The first time I spent real time in Paris, I watched people buy bread and fruit and fish every single day, linger for hours over one bottle of wine, and sit in parks with nowhere to be. It made me examine my own pace and my own choices back home. Years later, when Notre Dame burned, I grieved it like a person I had known, because I had stood in it. That is what proximity does. It dissolves the distance that lets us treat places and people as abstractions.
Mexico is the most sustained version of that lesson in my life. Seven years in residence and I am still being corrected, gently, by neighbors and friends and the occasional sister in a kitchen. And I will say the obvious thing, because someone should: there is vastly more to this country than tacos, margaritas, and the stories that lead the evening news. There is a civilization here with a thousand-year conversation about memory and mortality that most visitors fly directly over on their way to a beach.
What would change for you, if death were not an ending but a phase? Who would you cook for? Whose glass would you fill?
How to experience Hanal Pixán as a guest rather than a spectator
If you are considering the Yucatán for this season, a few things I would tell a client:
Come for the week, not the night
The parades are the most photographed part and the least representative. The Festival de las Ánimas spans roughly ten days in Mérida, and the quieter edges (markets stocking banana leaves and achiote, altars going up in doorways, the smell of pib in a residential street) are where the actual culture lives.
Book early, and build in slack
Late October and early November is high season in Mérida, and the city fills. Lodging and flights tighten considerably. Leave unscheduled hours in the itinerary; this is not a holiday that rewards a packed schedule.
Eat the pib, and the xec
Order both, or better, find a cooking experience with a family. Mucbipollo appears for a few weeks a year and then vanishes. Xec you can get year-round in the markets, but it tastes like something different in November.
Treat cemeteries as what they are
If you visit a village cemetery during this period, go with a local guide, ask before photographing anything, and be willing to leave. Those are families at a graveside, not an exhibit.
Ask, then listen
The best thing I ever did was ask a friend to teach me instead of reading about it. Every family keeps the tradition slightly differently. The variations are the point.
Frequently asked questions about Hanal Pixán
What does Hanal Pixán mean?
It is Maya for "food of the souls." It is the Yucatán Peninsula's version of Día de Muertos, centered on cooking for deceased relatives who are believed to return home for an annual visit.
When is Hanal Pixán celebrated?
October 31 for deceased children, November 1 for deceased adults, and November 2 for all souls, followed by the Bix roughly eight days later. Mérida's Festival de las Ánimas runs for about ten days leading up to November 2.
What foods are served during Hanal Pixán?
Pib (mucbipollo), a large banana-leaf tamal cooked in an earth oven, is the centerpiece. Altars also hold xec, a salad of jícama with mandarina and sweet orange dressed in sour orange, salt, chile, and cilantro; dulces de papaya and pumpkin seed; atole nuevo; balché; hot chocolate; and whatever the person loved in life.
Is the Catrina part of Hanal Pixán?
No. La Catrina originates in a Posada etching from around 1910 to 1913, acquired her name in print in 1930, and became famous through Diego Rivera's 1947 mural. She is a central-Mexican figure associated with Día de Muertos. The Catrina parades in Mérida are recent civic additions, not Maya tradition.
What is the bone-washing ritual, and where does it happen?
Choo Ba'ak, and it is unique to the town of Pomuch in Campeche. Three years after burial, families exhume, clean, and re-wrap their relatives' bones in embroidered cloths, repeating the cleaning annually. It was recognized as Campeche state cultural heritage in 2017. It is not practiced elsewhere in the peninsula.
Is it disrespectful for visitors to attend?
Not inherently. Visitors are welcome at public events, markets, and the Paseo de las Ánimas. The line is private ritual: family altars, graveside cleaning, and Choo Ba'ak in Pomuch. Go with a local guide, ask before you photograph, and accept that some moments are not yours.
The table is still set
I think often about those two glasses of water. A tradition that builds in a provision for the forgotten tells you something about the people who keep it, and it asks something of the rest of us.
You do not have to move to Mérida to learn it. You do have to slow down enough to be taught, which is a different kind of travel than the one most of us are sold. Fewer sites, more time, a kitchen instead of a tour bus.
That is the kind of trip I most like to design: long enough to be changed by the place, unhurried enough that you notice what it is trying to tell you. If a longer, deeper stay in Mexico is on your mind for next year, let's talk about what that could look like. Get Started!
Jenita Lawal, MBA, VTA is the Founder and CEO of Lawal Travel Services, a boutique travel firm serving mission-driven organizations and consultants. She is a member of the American Society of Travel Advisors (ASTA) and Travel Planners International, and Signature Travel.