Mexico's Hanal Pixán is Not the Day of the Dead
While Día de los Muertos is known for its vibrant parades and painted faces, the Hanal Pixán offers a deeper, older connection to the dead. Dating 1,500 years earlier, Hanal Pixán is a spiritual duty that can last weeks or months.
It is night, deep in the jungle of Quintana Roo, Mexico. The yellow candle in my hands is melting fast, wax dripping down my fingers and onto the damp soil between my feet. I’m one of nearly a hundred people gathered in this cenote, a sinkhole that yawns deep into the earth. We’re in a tiny Maya village called Tres Reyes, just 65 miles west of Cancún. Together, our flickering candles illuminate the still water in front of us as the local shaman ignites copal, a fragrant sap from the sacred Ceiba tree. Its sweet, white smoke billows through the damp air with mystery and importance.
It is November 2, a date when many cultures believe the veil between the living and the dead is at its thinnest. It’s All Souls’ Day for Roman Catholics. It’s the third night of Día de los Muertos (The Day of the Dead), an Aztec celebration once observed in central and southern Mexico that has recently boomed into a global pop-culture phenomenon – due, in no small part, to the 2015 James Bond movie “Spectre” and the 2017 Disney movie “Coco.”
But we’re here for Hanal Pixán (“ha-nal, pee-shan”), a millennia-old Maya celebration of life and death that literally means “food for the souls.” As the shaman begins his prayer in the ancient but enduring Mayan language, he beckons the dead back to this realm, to this very cenote.
We’ll have dinner in a bit.
Many Days for the Dead
El Día de los Muertos is broadly known as a three-day celebration of painted faces and parades. Mexico City dives into full revelry, luring nearly a million people to its streets for a massive party. But in more traditional Mexican villages, families prepare for a somber, if joyful, celebration. For a few nights, they sleep in the cemeteries where their loved ones are buried. Bright orange cempasúchil (marigolds) abound, along with prayers, songs, and memories.

Loes Kieboom
The Maya’s Hanal Pixán pre-dates the Aztecs’ Día de los Muertos by about 1,500 years. “It’s a bit more complex than just an homage to the dead,” Dr. Olivier Le Guen tells me. He’s an anthropologist and linguist from CIESAS, Mexico’s Center for Research and Advanced Studies in Social Anthropology. “It’s something deeper and more powerful.” And it’s not a 72-hour event. It can last for days, weeks — even months.
The Maya believe that the living have a responsibility to return the dead safely to the earthly realm each year by guiding them back with food they enjoyed in life. “You give the essence of food to the spirits, and you share the food among humans,” says Le Guen. The first night, October 31, is in remembrance of children who have passed. November 1 is dedicated to deceased adults, and November 2 is reserved for all the dead, usually with a public ceremony at a local cemetery. After a while – sometimes eight days, sometimes longer – a rite called bix (“beesh”) ushers the spirits back to their world. If any of this is mismanaged, the dead may punish the living with bad luck or sickness. And if you don’t properly execute the bix, they simply might not leave. Le Guen says that sometimes the spirits can linger until Christmas.
Rebeca Petatillo, 32, is Maya and has lived in Quintana Roo her entire life. She usually celebrates Hanal Pixán with her husband’s family. “You decide who you are going to remember, to call back. You make tamalitos — or ‘chachakwaaj’ in Mayan — and cook them in the píib [underground oven]. You offer it up, and pray for the dead, and share the food,” she explains. “This moment is beautiful because the entire family comes together — aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews. That’s the happy part. You remember the dead, the times that you had with him or her.
Worldly Things
An altar, or ofrenda, is another core element of the celebration. It’s traditionally constructed in three tiers, representing the sky, the earth, and the underworld, and displays food and drink that the dead enjoyed in life. “The idea is that the soul comes back directly to where it’s given the food,” Le Guen explains.
Most altars are arranged in people’s homes. “Everything is in the house. People were buried below the floor of the house until recently — I mean very recently, maybe even 10 years ago.” It’s true that Hanal Pixán is often celebrated in the home. The first night, October 31, is dedicated to children who have passed; November 1 is for adults, and November 2 is for the larger community or those who may not have families anymore. But as the Day of the Dead has gained broader interest, some elements of Hanal Pixán have become more public.
The day before I went to Tres Reyes, I walked through Cancún’s Parque de las Palapas, a town square just a few blocks — but a world away — from the touristy Hotel Zone.

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Dozens of Hanal Pixán altars were arranged around the park’s perimeter. None of them looked like the grand exhibitions I’ve seen elsewhere for the Day of the Dead. These ofrendas were more homegrown and handcrafted.
Families buzzed around their offerings of grapes, bananas, lollipops, marigolds, ceramics, framed photos of saints, glasses of water, chocolate, corn, palm fronds, hollowed gourds, tortillas, conch shells, maracas and mezcal.
What I’d see the next day, deep in the jungle, would be even more humble.
Journey Into the Selva Maya
I left Cancún in the late afternoon of November 2 to arrive in Tres Reyes by dusk. Fewer than 500 people live in this Indigenous community tucked deep into the rainforest known as the Selva Maya (Mayan Jungle). Dirt streets are dotted with one-story cement homes. Here, only about 15 percent of residents finish high school, and the average household income is less than $3,600 a year. The majority of villagers identify as Christian and Mexican, but still connect deeply to their Maya beliefs, language, and celebrations.

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I hopped off the bus and walked along a rickety suspension bridge over the cenote I’d descend into later. Along the streets and in a yard behind the village grammar school, residents had created a string of altars that were even humbler than those in Parque de las Palapas. A gaggle of adorable children bounced around, unfazed by mortality or the change of seasons.
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Most were barefoot on this warm November night, dressed in white cotton outfits for Hanal Pixán. Boys wore button-down shirts and linen pants, and a few of them wore white cowboy hats, too. Girls donned white dresses with colorful embroidery around the neck or hem. They seemed excited and proud to have visitors see the ofrendas they most certainly helped create. After passing by the many iterations, chatting with the children and their families, we processed to the cemetery.
From the Graveyard into the Earth
Because of the limestone in the soil, the village cemetery is above ground. Vaults are painted in pastel pink, yellow, green, blue, and white, adorned with crosses reaching to the clouds. Flowers sit in makeshift vases made from plastic Coke bottles that have been cut in half, labels left on.
From the graveyard, we walk to the ridge of the cenote and precariously descend along a cascade of candlelit limestone steps. We light our candles and sit around the groundwater in the center of the ceremonial space. On a thatched-roof pulpit — some 25 feet above the ground — the shaman begins to intone a prayer in Mayan.
A conch shell is blown, drums thump, and copal is ignited. There is singing and guitar playing. Meditation and silence. We hold our candles tightly as the night grows darker in this hole in the middle of the jungle, where it’s hard not to contemplate your own time here on earth: precious, fleeting, largely inscrutable.

Mari Tere
After the ceremony concludes, we, the living and dead, ascend above ground to feast. The star dish is mucbipollo, a tamale made from chicken, cornflour, and pig butter, wrapped in banana leaves and cooked in an earthen oven underground. There’s xec, a salad of oranges, papaya, coconut, jícama, and ground chili. Sweet bread is served with a mug of atole, a warm brew made of masa, water, cinnamon, sugar, and vanilla.
This is no Halloween party, no Day of the Dead parade. This is something different and wonderful.
“We try to conserve the Mayan lifestyle,” Rebeca Petatillo explains. “The culture, the foods, the language. But, like any other culture, you have to adapt to the passage of time. You adapt to survive. Maybe it’s not exactly like it was in the past, but it’s still there.”