Yolanda Garfias Woo

The dead have given us life and do not want to be forgotten. To remember them gives our lives meaning.  

The Mexican Days of the Dead are magical, holy days when the spirits of the dead return to visit their families.  The families in turn welcome their arrival by preparing a great feast, offering toys and sweets to the spirits of children, favorite meals and offerings for adults, and in some cases, even laying out new clothes for the spirits to use when they return to Mìctlan, or the region of the dead.  

This festival offers us a way to connect once again with our loved ones who have died.  It is an act of memory that helps us to remember them as well as understand ourselves a little better.

from ¡Que Viva la Muerte! Long Life to Death!
Celebrating Mexico's Feast for the Ancestors, Past and Present

 by Yolanda Garfias Woo

192 pages full color illustrated hardback with over 200 original illustrations by artist, educator, and ethnographer Yolanda Garfias Woo

(coming Fall 2012) 
San Francisco and Oakland: Chervona Ruta Publishing with La Tehuana Multicultural Prouducts
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Known as “The Godmother of the Day of the Dead in the US,” Yolanda Garfias Woo has been making ofrendas and teaching others for more than half a century. 

“My father, who was a Zapotec from the State of Oaxaca, instilled in me an appreciation of the Mexican culture. Perhaps this led me to the field of anthropology, where I have studied Maya textiles, which is still my first love. In 1957, as a way of expressing the loss I felt when my father died, I began making ofrendas for the dead. At that time, it was a little known celebration in the US, even among people of La Raza. Often my work was not too well met since it was thought to be some sort of witchcraft.” She encouraged the then-reticent Latino community in San Francisco’s Mission District to begin making the Bread of the Dead.

“By the 1960s, I was making public ofrendas in schools and universities. I began giving workshops on Días de los Muertos as a means of explaining what this was all about.  Its popularity grew especially among young Chicanos searching for cultural identity.” Yolanda Garfias Woo’s Muertos Folk Art Collection and her ofrendas have been exhibited at many museums and galleries, including the Smithsonian Institution, and even at Mission San Juan Bautista.  In 1975 the de Young Museum of Fine Arts featured her work in a solo exhibition.   

About the Author 

Yolanda Garfias Woo was born in San Francisco September 11, 1935 to parents who had both immigrated from different regions of Mexico.  She and her husband, the groundbreaking abstract expressionist painter Gary Woo, first shared an apartment and studio at Grant and Green in 1950s North Beach, forming part of the vibrant creative experimentation of the Beat scene. (Upstairs was neighbor Shigeyoshi “Shig” Murao; across the street the Old Spaghetti Factory.)

Most widely known for her role in bringing the Day of the Dead tradition back into the US, this is only a fraction of her work. 

Her expertise and wisdom have been drawn on by countless institutions, from universities to galleries and museums and schools to National Geographic, the Chinese Culture Foundation of San Francisco, and other organizations. She served on advisory committees and on the Board of Directors of KQED (Public Television, San Francisco), and served as the chair of the FM radio station from 1978-1981.  She was appointed to the San Francisco Unified School District task force to develop implementation of the landmark Lau v. Nichols Supreme Court decision for bilingual education as part of equal protection under the law.

Yolanda Garfias Woo launched a generation of teachers through the National Teacher Corps Program of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and at least one MacArthur Genius. Yolanda Garfias Woo’s art has been exhibited throughout North America, including at the Smithsonian and the de Young Museum of Fine Art. 

Independently, and studying with anthropologists including Robert Shenk, A. E. Treganza, and, in Mexico, Irmgard Weitlaner-Johnson, Yolanda Garfias Woo developed an approach to fieldwork in Mayan textiles which yields a rich and near-encyclopedic knowledge of the people, their work, and the relations with each other, the world, and the cosmos which they record and make manifest in their creation and use of textiles. 

Yolanda Garfias Woo's fieldwork in Mayan textiles and natural dyeing techniques and technologies has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Her own weaving and embroidery have been exhibited in the US and in Paris.  

Yolanda Garfias Woo is currently continuing her fieldwork in these amazing constellations of human achievement. 

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