I’ve tried to translate what Elena wrote to me (with the photos — thanks, Elena) about this important day in Jujuy in the north of Argentina; this is the gist, anyway, of the bits I could manage:

… people don’t go to work because their dead are expecting them. As I live near a cemetery park, I find myself in the middle of the fiesta … The night before, in their houses, they set up a table with bread for an offering — bread that substitutes for whatever the dead loved in life; also they prepare their favourite food and drink. They leave the table set up when they go to sleep so that the souls can come at sit down at their leisure, eat and drink with gusto and without frightening anyone …

Although I live in the country, in a very peaceful place, today the house is surrounded by cars, people have been coming to the cemetery since morning … to share lunch with their loved ones … They put coloured paper flowers on the graves and have a kind of picnic, they drink chicha and dance until they ‘drop dead’.

The dead are allowed until midnight.