The All Souls Procession: Grief Made Public

In the fall of nineteen ninety, a Tucson artist named Susan Kay Johnson was grieving her father. She had studied art therapy, and she believed that grief was not meant to be private, that it was something communities could hold together. She organized a small procession through the streets of downtown Tucson. People carried photographs of the dead. They wore paint on their faces. They walked together in the desert November air.

The next year it was bigger. The year after that, bigger still. Within a few years, thousands of people were marching through downtown Tucson each November in what had become the All Souls Procession, one of the most distinctive community rituals in the American Southwest.

The procession draws on multiple traditions without being wholly any of them. Its timing and its focus on the dead connect it to Dia de los Muertos. Spanish Catholic All Souls' Day, the November second feast day for prayers for the dead, provides another thread. The result is something Tucson has produced that belongs to Tucson.

The event's centerpiece is a giant urn carried through the streets in which participants deposit written messages to their dead. At the end of the procession, the urn is burned, and the messages rise as smoke.

Susan Johnson ran the procession for several years, then passed direction to the performance troupe Flam Chen. The procession happens each November in downtown Tucson. Participation is free. The instruction to participants is simple: bring something to remember someone by.