Frames and community in Arizona’s All Souls Procession

ABSTRACT

In the All Souls Procession, a large event in honor of the dead in Tucson in the southwestern U.S. borderlands, locals construct community through the Procession, while presenting its historic and cultural complexity through diverse collective performances. In this ethnographic work we interpret these performances through frames – genres of performance replayed as community expression – and we analyze salient Procession frames including community ritual, inclusion, Temporary Autonomous Zone, Day of the Dead fantasy, and parade. We offer our heuristic for the study of frames in participatory performances as a method to disentangle social dynamics in communities and collective identities.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance studies
• participatory events
• frames
• community
• borderlands

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Diana Daly http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9585-8258

Notes

1 From a scene in Leslie Ann Epperson’s 2015 film about the Procession, Many Bones, One Heart (Epperson).

2 Participants in this research whose names are prominent in the historical record of the Procession are identified with full names and fully cited. All other participants are identified only by a first name pseudonym.

3 Maya is Colombian-American. She and Thomas are the only organizers interviewed for this work who identify as Latinx.