Reflections on The Halloween/Dia de los Muertos Community Event

In October 2025, I helped plan a Halloween / Dia de los Muertos community event with the Dallas chapter of Community Movement Builders (CMB), a group of which I am a member, and which has been organizing in a predominantly black and brown working-class neighborhood. This report was inspired in part by recent discussions within the Campaign and by earlier reports in the Sublation Magazine Substack page, including “An Interview on Immigration Defense” and “On the Drawing Circle in Darmstadt, Germany.”

Community Conditions

The headquarters of the CMB is based in a housing community, where we have been organizing for about nine months, but we do most of our mutual-aid work in an apartment complex across the street from the housing community. Our chapter has been organizing in this apartment complex for years (I believe six to eight years to be exact), prior to my membership in 2024. The forms of this organization have been the continuance of mutual-aid drives and community patrols to reduce the violence in the complex.

The conditions of the apartment complex consist of gangs, violence, heavy surveillance (either by security cars and SUVs that circle around the complex or by newly installed security cameras), as well as poor tenant conditions, including infestations caused by overflowing trash, severe mold damage, and long-overdue repairs. If you were to drive through the complex, you would see a predominantly black population outside, albeit there are other nationalities, like Hispanics and Arabs, though few in number, that live in the area as well. 

We haven’t had much interaction with the latter Hispanic and Arab demographics in the apartments so our focus has been on the black community members. The majority that are outdoors consist of kids ranging from two to maybe twelve years of age (usually the first ones to come to our mutual-aid events, along with their mothers) then you have a thirteen to thirty-five age range either on the sides or middle of the street, and then the older demographic is usually sitting at the bottom of their stairway talking with others — and then, every couple weeks or so, there’s us, with our Pamper, contraceptive, or drug-awareness drives. 

The conditions of the housing community also consist of a lot of surveillance, as each house has a ring camera as a response to — as what neighbors have told us — cars being broken into. The housing community is older in age, with some residents dating back to the 80’s. If there are kids outside, it’s either on our immediate street or towards the front entrance where the apartment kids hang out or get dropped off from school. 

In contrast to the apartments, the housing community has a larger Hispanic demographic that we had to account for in our organizing efforts. For example, last month during a Pamper drive, our Hispanic neighbors from across the street let us borrow their canopy to provide us shade from a mid-afternoon Texas sun that was beaming directly on us. They even made us homemade lemonade. I bring this up not to be sentimental per se but just to say that, despite the language barrier between us and our Spanish-speaking neighbors, this act of kindness and exchange happened all the same. This has raised questions in our attempts to organize not only the black community but the remaining working-class communities in the area. 

Planning the Event

October provided us at the CMB the opportunity to help organize a combined Halloween and Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) community event, and the two articles in the Sublation Magazine Substack page provided the concepts for our project (“An Interview on Immigration Defense” and “On the Drawing Circle in Darmstadt, Germany” reports, which involved an art circle and immigration rights work being done through a church respectively). Timing was everything in regard to this project. Between our chapter leads having a baby, myself getting a second job and being without the convenience of my car (and therefore relying on Uber burning my mere part-time wages each trip) there were many forces at hand in trying to realize this project within a month. However, under these circumstances, I forgot to involve my comrades more than I should have due to attempting to compensate while our chapter leads took care of their new child.

 Days were spent putting together the plan after discovering there was a local Catholic church that did immigration rights work. The idea was to ally ourselves with this church and find out which part of the congregation celebrated Dia de los Muertos. To find this out, me and the chapter lead visited the church. We arrived maybe 20-30 minutes before service was about to end. I was in the waiting room of the church until the pastor came out from the double doors of the chapel where I greeted him and told him about our organization and the community event we were trying to do. He told me that he had members that celebrated Dia de los Muertos and to email him for more details. The manner of this exchange was brief, as he had just got done preaching, but it confirmed what was needed to move forward. 

From this group of congregants, the plan was to ask if they knew any bilingual face-painters (as this is an important aspect of Dia de los Muertos) and if they would help us with the community event. During small talk at the Halloween / Dia de los Muertos event, we would tell the painters what we do and that, if they were interested, we would like them to assist us with future events. From there, we would stay in contact, build rapport, and, over time, our relationship with the painters would naturally bring us to the point of asking whether they could lead a more permanent art circle. 

Because the painters came from the church, I figured the church could serve as the setting for the circle. The church not only provides a space for the circle and is a resource for immigrants' rights (they do food pantries as well), but also contains an established social group of working-class people that share everyday working-class issues with the rest of the community regardless of their immigration status, such as needing help to move or getting their car repaired or finding a new job, and so on. 

Flyers about the art circle were to be spread to the housing and apartment communities, as this would be a way to connect both with the church and broaden the social network of the three together. This would also bring awareness to our community work and, in the process, possibly gain us potential comrades for future tenant organizing efforts in the apartment complexes. The latter would come because of the relationships built within the circle and discussions about the material conditions of the members. 

We discussed this idea with other comrades and the chapter leads agreed that the idea was good and added other elements such as doing a “trunk-or-treat” at the community house and that we should include a petition for street lights because there are no functional street lights on our street, leaving the community pitch-black at night. We reached an agreement and then it was only a matter of implementation. 

As experience teaches us, things do not always go according to plan. The night resulted in a night with the comrades. The pitfalls were the following:

Pitfall One: Miscommunication with the Pastor

After we left the church, I emailed the pastor’s personal email that he gave me. In the subject line, I wrote “Halloween/Day of the dead community event,” thinking he would remember our conversation. I’m not sure if this postponed the response from him, but I sent out another email a couple days later with the subject line “Community event” and got a response the next day. He replied that they didn’t have painters for the event. I attribute this to my own lack of thoroughness regarding researching Dia de los Muertos. I had assumed the painters were a specialized entity based on the beautiful designs of the face-paintings I had seen before. As one of my Mexican coworkers informed me, it's usually the family that does the painting. 

I thanked the pastor for checking and quickly tried to find an alternative source for the painters. I turned to my coworkers. My mistake was not informing my comrades of the changes that were going on, as they might’ve known someone that could’ve helped us put the event together. I also missed inviting the church to the event regardless of their response. 

Pitfall Two: Last-Minute Search for Painters

One of my coworkers said they celebrated Dia de los Muertos (this is the same coworker that said that painting was done by the family) and I asked for their help, letting them know I would cover any costs for what they needed to celebrate the holiday. She seemed interested and said she had to check her schedule and that she would get back to me. At this point, it was the week of Halloween and it was between them doing it or paying for painters myself. Needless to say, I didn’t get a response, but I didn’t press the issue — I just had to pay. 

Our organization has paid for painters before via this app called Thumbtack. But when I inquired about the painters I needed for the event, they wouldn’t disclose information about whether the painters celebrated Dia de los Muertos or the nationality of the painters. This left me in the dark about who I might be hiring. I paid either way. 

The result was that one black painter came to the event. She was great (and I think she’s interested in joining the CMB) but she admitted that it would be a challenge to paint Day of the Dead style art. I think she ended up painting a few of the comrades’ kids' faces and I let her paint my hand. 

Pitfall Three: Miscommunication with Neighbors 

Not only did I reach out to my coworkers for assistance, but I also reached out to our kind neighbors mentioned earlier. Fortunately, their son served as an interpreter for me. They celebrated Dia de los Muertos and were glad to help with decorations. Around two days before the event, they provided us with decorations. However, on the night of Halloween, they were dressed in costumes as if they were going to another Halloween party somewhere else. All that we could do at that point was give them some food that we had left over — at least as a sign of appreciation for their contributions.  

Looking Ahead

The night didn’t end how I wanted but the day went well. Our chapter lead told me two or three days before the community event that we were doing a food drive with some organizations that we have collaborated with before. This was in response to what is going on with SNAP benefits and the precarity of the lives affected. I missed a majority of this event due to work, but we had two U-Haul trucks full of food set up in the apartment complex, and we passed out food there. 

 I am open to suggestions on how to better unite and organize the working-class for their own independent political interests towards achieving socialism. I’ve seen other local organizations like the chapters of Venceremos and the Brown Berets partner and do a Day of the Dead event. I’m considering reaching out to them and learning from them in the meantime. 

This article was contributed by Campaign Reporter Quenton (submitted November 11, 2025) 

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