Celebrating life in the afterlife
UNM-Gallup students to mark El Dia de los Muertos Friday

By Bill Donovan
Staff writer

GALLUP — Local community college officials are hoping that celebration of a Mexican holiday will promote their efforts to get more Hispanics to take classes on the northside campus.

On Friday — All Souls Day — officials of the University of New Mexico-Gallup campus will be celebrating El Dia de los Muertos — The Day of the Dead — with music, food and a chance to honor local residents who have died.

This marks the first time the college is celebrating the event and Christine Abassary, who is coordinating it, said college officials are hoping to provide information to people who come to the celebration about some of the classes the college is offering to this area’s Hispanic community.

The event will be from 3 to 7 p.m. at the college’s northside campus on 7th Street, just off Maloney Avenue.
Live Spanish music will be provided by “Illusion,” and various Mexican dishes will be also be served. Admission is free.

Some of the dishes that will be provided at the event, said Abassary, include chicken mole, Spanish rice and pan de los muerto, or bread of the dead.

The college will also be providing an altar where attendees can place photos of the dead so they can be honored.

Like the holiday that is celebrated either on Nov. 1 or Nov. 2 in Mexico and many Central American countries, the Gallup event is planned as a joyous occasion, a chance for local residents to celebrate the life of their ancestors and friends as part of the belief that “death is not the end but rather the beginning of the next step in life.”

Mexican celebrations end with a visit to a local graveyard but Abassary said that part of the ceremony won’t be done here.

While this is an Hispanic celebration, “everybody is invited to attend,” Abassary said.

The event is being held in the hopes of promoting the fact that the northside campus offers classes for Hispanics in English as a second language, GED and citizenship.

The northside center was developed several years ago after UNM officials realized that while Hispanics make up one-third the population of Gallup, only a handful were enrolled at UNM-Gallup.

While the percentage is better today — some 400 attend classes on the Northside — Abassary said college officials think there are still a lot of people in this area who aren’t aware of the classes that are offered by UNM-G, especially for those seeking to be a citizen.

The citizenship classes deal with everything from the types of questions prospective citizens may be asked to the oral exam.

“We concentrate more on the oral exam, which stresses the need to be able to communicate,” she said, adding that what the testers look for is whether the person has the ability to construct a sentence.