A curated monthly dose of lifestyle, culture, and rhythm from San Miguel de Allende.
Fourteen years ago, a handful of friends got the whole world watching San Miguel on November 2. Then the party got too big.
Every November someone asks when San Miguel’s Día de Muertos got so big. Part of the answer is La Calaca. We sat down with Klaudia Oliver and spoke with Tomás Bürkey about the festival, what it set in motion, and where it stands now.
Beyond the headlines and the best-city lists, anyone who has lived here a while knows San Miguel as something quieter: a town that kept its own counsel, and has reinvented itself more than once. It has always drawn makers. Painters came first, then writers, musicians, people who wanted to build something with their hands and their friends.
After 9/11, another wave arrived. They came looking for a different quality of life, and many of them stayed long enough to want to give something back to the town that had given them so much. Ask the people who have been here twenty years and they will tell you about the old San Miguel: the dinners that ran until morning, the parties nobody photographed, the feeling that anything could happen if the right people were in the room. Those nights did as much to put the town on the map as any magazine cover.
Día de Muertos was part of that story, but for a long time it was a local one. Families cleaned the graves at Guadalupe and San Antonio, altars went up in doorways, and the season belonged mostly to the people who had always kept it. Then came La Calaca. For a few years it made San Miguel the place the world watched on November 2, and then it changed shape, smaller and closer to home, leaving the town with the Day of the Dead it knows now.
The best record of those years is archival. Lynn Rawden served as Design and Comms Director of La Calaca Festival, leading the brand’s visual evolution over nearly ten years and collaborating with agencies and designers from around the world. She opened her archive of posters and photographs for this piece, and laughed going back through it: “I am exhausted just looking at it all.”
This is the story of where it started, how big it grew, why it scaled down, and where it stands now, at a time when some of the same people say the old San Miguel might be coming back. We sat down with co-founder Klaudia Oliver, spoke with artistic director Tomás Bürkey, and went through Lynn Rawden’s archival material to tell it.
Oliver has lived in San Miguel for more than twenty years and calls herself a bridge builder. In the early 2010s she had two things on her mind. One was Burning Man, where she had seen a participatory arts festival turn spectators into owners. The other was a TEDx talk in San Miguel about how Mexico was seen abroad, which at the time meant mostly cartels and violence.
“I just got a very clear vision,” she says, “to create a participatory arts festival that would exalt and invite and sustain the traditions of Día de los Muertos.”
She took the idea to Veronique Pittman, an author and activist with a house in San Miguel. One of the first real meetings happened in New York, at 75 Rockefeller Plaza. Several of the people who would build the festival were in the room, Bürkey among them. Oliver remembers Bob Pittman at that table. He co-founded MTV, and a few years earlier he had started Casa Dragones with Bertha González Nieves, a tequila named for Ignacio Allende’s cavalry and based in the cavalry’s old stables at Recreo 16. Oliver remembers him putting it simply: “We want to do something for this little town, because this little town has done so much for us.”
It is the post-9/11 generation in a single sentence. Generous, sincere, and said in New York.
The first La Calaca ran from November 1 to 4, 2012, on about US$17,000 raised through Indiegogo, according to Fathom. There was the Earth Harp, an instrument so long you play it by walking along the strings. Andrea Brook played it, with Bürkey performing alongside her. In Oliver’s telling it ran from the Jardín up toward the Parroquia. “There were tens of thousands of people underneath the Parroquia,” she says.
That same weekend Spencer Tunick photographed volunteers as spirits on a freezing morning. Robert Bose floated a balloon chain, each balloon a soul. Android Jones projected onto the main square while a dancer moved beneath. DJs played the Instituto Allende until six in the morning. Behind all of it was Brigham Golden, whose newly formed production company, BGolden Productions, ran the AV for every La Calaca event over the years, often several at once. The festival gave the company its real start, and it is still running today. Oliver gave the DJs all the same brief. Anyone who talks about the old San Miguel parties is usually talking about nights like these.
“You’re not just playing for the living, you’re playing for the dead, and that made all the difference.” Klaudia Oliver, co-founder
It was never only imported talent. That first year Bürkey ran the program for young and emerging artists in the park, and the founders worked as one team, coordinating the whole thing together. La Calaca put Mexican graffiti crews to work in the neighborhoods through its Graffiti Arts Program, directed by artist Jesús Valenzuela, known as Juice, working alongside Frank “Nadie” Vega. Both were among the festival’s most important creative forces. The mayor laid a red carpet down a street for the crews’ first reception. Some of those murals are still up. The Calaveritas program, led by Guadalupe Trejo, brought more than 4,000 children to Parque Juárez to build altars for their own dead. Nobody was selling anything. Oliver kept brands out on principle. “You’re a calaca, we’re all calaca,” she says. “It’s a very horizontally shaped thing.”
Tomás Bürkey built the piece that traveled furthest. He introduced his Pyramid of the Dead in the festival’s second year: San Miguel’s tin artisans married to projection mapping, with faces of the dead sent in by the living. In 2017 it traveled to Burning Man as an honorarium art project. Bürkey is careful about what that means: “Día de Muertos has roots in Mexican culture, family, and community, and I think it’s important to acknowledge that context wherever the celebration travels.”
Rawden gave the festival a look nobody else had. The archival posters still hold up: skulls that are beautiful before they are frightening, color where you expect black. “We chose sensuality and ethereal interpretations of death in a rich range of colors,” she says, “showing how we can move beyond the accepted, morbid symbols as our perception of the afterlife changes.”
“We had a cool thing going on, but I never could fully enjoy the holiday with all the things we had happening.” Lynn Rawden, Design and Comms Director
From the La Calaca poster archive. Graphic design by Lynn Rawden / Myrna Camacho. Swipe to see more.
Some of the festival’s best moments were meetings. Oliver met Michael Frederickson, a technical director and artist at Pixar who worked on the City of the Dead in Coco, and invited him to DJ at La Calaca. She then walked him through the graffiti of Colonia Guadalupe herself, introducing him to some of the neighborhood’s most remarkable artists, right beneath Tomás Bürkey’s studio. She remembers it as “a magical intersection of local creativity and international imagination.”
This is where the story turns, and to Oliver’s credit, she turns it herself.
The festival’s own sponsorship deck claimed 47,000 extra visitors over four days and hotel occupancy of 95 to 99 percent in Centro. The international press followed. San Miguel was sold to the world as safe, beautiful and traditional, and the world bought, sometimes literally. “We created a destination,” she says, “that has created an overzealous development plan.”
So who did all that culture building benefit? The artists? The families who still clean the graves on November 2? Or the developers? Oliver doesn’t pretend to have a clean answer. She watched the season become one of the busiest party weekends in the country, full of costumes made for Instagram, and remembers thinking: “Oh my gosh, you’ve created a monster.” By then the festival rested on four founders who carried it through its biggest final years: Klaudia Oliver, Tomás Bürkey, Brigham Golden and Lynn Rawden. In time each of them stepped back from running it at that scale, and La Calaca let go of the four-day spectacle without ever really disappearing.
She doesn’t apologize either. “We successfully imbued true spirit, true reverence, true beauty into our celebrations.” Both things can be true at once, and in San Miguel they usually are.
Oliver’s most provocative point is about the tradition itself. Día de Muertos, she argues, has always been a hybrid: pre-Hispanic rites folded into Catholic feast days, regional customs that look nothing alike from Michoacán to the Huasteca. La Catrina began as José Guadalupe Posada’s joke about Mexicans dressing up as Europeans. In her account, an American named Peggy Zavala, who married into a local family and became a fixture of the town’s tango scene, was the first person to walk the Jardín dressed as La Catrina, decades ago. We couldn’t verify that. It fits the town, though.
“It’s all hybrid,” Oliver says. A living tradition, in her view, can always take one more conversation. A fair reader might ask whose conversation, and on whose terms. San Miguel hasn’t settled that, and probably shouldn’t pretend it has.
Search for Día de Muertos in San Miguel and La Calaca still comes up, years after its biggest weekends. Now in its fourteenth year, the festival hasn’t gone anywhere. It has simply changed size. There are no more tens of thousands under the Parroquia and no more sponsorship decks. What remains is the part that mattered to its founders from the start: the altar, the art, and a room of people remembering together.
This year that means an intimate program. Bürkey will show his Digital Altar on its own, without the pyramid, in a seventeenth-century courtyard in Centro, and anyone can submit a loved one to the rotating projection. There will be Dead Talks over Mexican cacao. Oliver plans to read Frida Kahlo’s letters in costume, with violin and piano, for her late friend Graham, who kept and documented a box of them. Dates are still to be announced. A younger generation of San Miguel entrepreneurs keeps asking her to grow it again, she says, and if she does, she wants to do it without feeding the machine: smaller rooms, fewer brands, grief held honestly.
Lately there is a line you hear on the street, often from the same people who remember La Calaca’s biggest years: the old San Miguel is coming back. Nobody means the same parties. They mean the energy, creative people deciding to make something together and build the community they want to live in. That is what made the town in the first place.
“Come ready to celebrate, but also take a moment to listen, observe, and be present. You don’t need to be in Mexico to do this. What matters most is the love and intention you bring to it.” Tomás Bürkey, co-founder and artistic director
Bürkey’s own altar this year is for Christian Baumgartner, “one of the finest actors ever to grace our stages,” he says. “He was like a brother to me.” His advice to visitors has nothing to do with parties.
The rest of the season is in our Día de Muertos guide, and there is more on Bürkey’s work in A Living Altar.
Oliver has sat at several deathbeds this past year, and she talks about grief the way she used to talk about festival lineups, as something nobody should do alone. “How are we embracing it,” she asks, “and how are we dancing with it?”
Bürkey’s word for the night of November 2 is connection. The town, he says, smells of copal. Whatever San Miguel becomes next, that part has never left.
A curated monthly dose of lifestyle, culture, and rhythm from San Miguel.
