Mexico's Bread of the Dead Kneads Together Indigenous and Catholic Traditions

Mexico’s Bread of the Dead Kneads Together Indigenous and Catholic Traditions

Pan de Muerto, a Mexican sweet bread eaten for Día de los Muertos, is more than just a festive treat. Its history mirrors the holiday itself, a combination of cultures that breathes life back into the dead

Gabby Shell | Editorial intern

October 30, 2026 8:00 a.m.

It’s autumn in Mexico City, and baker Elena Reygadas and her team at Panadería Rosetta are hard at work in the kitchen. Deftly, they shape mounds of soft, elastic dough into perfect rounds. Then, with two fingers, they gingerly form the huesitos, or little bones, laying the thin strips in a cross over the buns.

A tray full of rolls slides into the bakery rack, resting alongside dozens of other matching loaves waiting for their turn in the oven. The bakers are making pan de muerto, an orange-scented sweet bread traditionally prepared and eaten during Día de los Muertos, Day of the Dead, a Mexican holiday celebrated each year from October 31 to November 2.

For three days, legend decrees, the border between the mortal and spirit realms disappears. Families prepare ofrendas, colorful altars filled with candles, marigolds, sugar skulls, dishes piled with fresh food and water, and, of course, pan de muerto. As the souls of the dead wake and return to the mortal world, living and dead alike feast, dance and play music in a tradition that’s celebratory, not somber or mournful.

“There’s a kind of humor by some people in Mexico that’s a part of Día de los Muertos—this idea that the holiday isn’t just meant for honoring and remembering the dead, but it also has this festival component,” says Mathew Sandoval, a cultural historian at Arizona State University who specializes in Mexican and Chicano art and culture. “Mexico has that unique phenomenon of the ability to laugh at death.”

Historically reserved for the days leading up to the holiday, pan de muerto now lines bakery counters starting as early as August, according to Odette Olavarri, pastry chef and founder of Odette Cuisine, another Mexico City bakery. These days, aficionados can scour Mexico City for varieties with such flavors as Biscoff, arroz con leche or limoncello. But the traditional sugar-covered buns offered to the dead on ofrendas remain the treasured standard, representative of the history of Día de los Muertos as a whole.

The history of the holiday and its yeasty offering

Both Día de los Muertos and pan de muerto are “colonial inventions,” according to Sandoval. “There wasn’t something like a ‘day of the dead’ in either Europe or Mexico” before the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521, he says. “It’s created only by virtue of these two cultures co-mingling.”

Did you know? Five other objects in Day of the Dead altars

• Besides pan de muerto, sugar skulls, photographs, marigolds, perforated paper and salt can be found in ofrendas. The brightly colored calaveras (skulls) symbolize loved ones who have died; they are sweet, because life is sweet. Photographs of these ancestors are also placed on the altars. The scent of marigolds is thought to attact souls, which pass through the tissue-paper decorations. Salt crosses are meant to purify the souls.

In Europe, Catholics have celebrated All Saints’ Day, a day of venerating Catholic saints, on November 1 since at least the eighth century, during the papacy of Gregory III. In the following centuries, the celebration expanded to include All Hallows’ Eve, or Halloween, on October 31, and All Souls’ Day, a day of mourning and remembering the dead, on November 2. By the 1300s, Spanish mourners placed ceremonial breads on the tombstones of the dead during All Saints’ and All Souls’ Day, Sandoval explains.

On All Souls’ Day, Catholics are encouraged to pray for the dead, assisting their deceased loved ones to proceed through purgatory, a process of purification souls must endure before entering heaven. Candi Cann, a death and religious studies scholar at Baylor University, says these ceremonial breads were likely meant to nourish souls as they made their way through purgatory.

The Indigenous populations in Mesoamerica, including the Aztec, Mixtec, Zapotec and Nahua people, had similar practices honoring the dead, Sandoval says. Many of these groups had a dedicated time of year when they would honor the dead, giving them offerings—precursors to the modern ofrenda—in exchange for good luck and plentiful harvests in the year to come. These offerings included papalotlaxcalli, or butterfly-shaped tortillas, and amaranth breads.

Cann says it’s no surprise both the Indigenous and Spanish people honored their dead with these breads.

“It goes from this bag of grains you’re carrying around, and then you mix it with other things and then, all of a sudden, you bake it and it turns into this really yummy sustenance,” she says. “It becomes this symbol of resurrection, that life goes on.”

In the centuries following the Spanish colonization of Mesoamerica, the cultures, and their practices of honoring the dead, combined. The Catholic holiday stuck, but it adopted the Indigenous traditions of resurrection and celebration, turning the somber All Saints’ and All Souls’ days into Día de los Muertos, a colorful three-day festival filled with music, food and plenty of calaveras, or skeletons.

“The Spanish were fascinated by [the Indigenous traditions] and tried to figure out ways to incorporate them,” says Tey Marianna Nunn, the associate director of content and interpretation at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Latino. “Over the centuries, [the two cultures] blended and blended and blended.”

Records of the modern-day pan de muerto—leavened brioche buns rolled in sugar and topped with a cross evocative of bones—date back to the 18th century, Sandoval says. Bakers began incorporating orange into the dough around the same time, an addition Cann says is symbolic. “Because of the bitterness of death, the sweetness [of the orange] is supposed to remind you in the midst of the bitterness that life goes on,” she says.

Reygadas agrees the orange flavor is symbolic but offers a different explanation. “By tradition, the scent of orange blossom guides the souls on their way back,” she says.

Practically, the flavor differentiated pan de muerto from traditional sweet breads. As more bakeries opened in Mexico City and across central Mexico throughout the 20th century, the bread—only available for Día de los Muertos—became synonymous with the three-day holiday.

The sweet bread evolves

These days, Día de los Muertos marks the busiest time of the year for Mexico City bakeries. By the time doors open in the morning, practically every bakery selling pan de muerto has a line out the door, according to Olavarri. Patrons buy several for the dead—and more to share among the living. “It’s chaos in the city,” she says.

But it wasn’t always that way. In the early 20th century, Sandoval says, the Mexican government looked to revive the economy in the wake of the Mexican Revolution. It promoted Día de los Muertos as a Mexican cultural tradition, marketing it to the national public and tourists alike as a consumerist holiday.

As more American tourists encountered Día de los Muertos—and more Mexican immigrants moved to the United States—the celebration became transnational. Nunn traces its American beginnings to Los Angeles and San Francisco in the late 1970s and early 1980s, where Chicano artists grappling with the AIDS epidemic used the imagery of ofrendas to create community and celebrate their dead.

By the early 2000s, many communities adopted Día de los Muertos—and the holiday made its way into American pop culture as well. In 2015, the James Bond film Spectre featured a massive Día de los Muertos parade in Mexico City in its opening scene. In reality, the city had no such commemorative parade, but, inspired by the movie, it started hosting an official parade the following year.

“It’s this constant back and forth of the U.S. and Mexico influencing each other,” Nunn says.

These days, Americans looking to celebrate the holiday don’t have to travel across the border—or settle for a 007 movie night. The two days following Halloween are marked by colorful parades, rich artwork and lively festivities in major cities like Los Angeles, Chicago and San Antonio.

As Día de los Muertos has evolved and expanded from a regional holiday celebrated primarily in central Mexico to an international, UNESCO-recognized festivity, the culture surrounding pan de muerto has risen in tandem. Where the buns were previously only available in the week leading up to the holiday, as people prepared their ofrendas, they now mark the arrival of autumn, flying off bakery shelves all season long. “Mexicans and non-Mexicans alike are obsessed, and they can’t get enough,” Olavarri says.

Other regions outside of central Mexico have put their own spin on the sweet bread. In Oaxaca, bakers add hand-painted caritas, or little faces, to the traditional pan de yema, an egg yolk bread popular in the region year-round. In Acámbaro, the bread is flavored with anise and shaped into human figures.

Bakeries in the United States have increasingly offered versions of pan de muerto, particularly in communities with strong ties to Mexico. Nunn says she’s seen bakeries in Illinois, California, New Mexico and Arizona offer the sweet bread, alongside their own adaptations, like colorful conchas, a shell-shaped sweet bread, covered in brightly colored sugar and decorated with skeletons.

“Wherever there is a panadería, I am sure they’re making a special bread for Día los Muertos,” she says. “If they’re serving the Mexican community, they are going to have it.”

Even in Mexico City, pan de muerto continues to evolve. Many bakeries now offer several variations of the sweet bread alongside the original, incorporating popular flavors, like Odette’s Ferrero Rocher-inspired pan de muerto. At Rosetta, Reygadas offers multiple flavors that celebrate the origins of the bread: a totomoxtle ash-covered version evocative of both Catholic and pre-Hispanic traditions, and an amaranth-based bread that recalls Indigenous amaranth-and-honey offerings to the gods.

Still, you can’t beat the classics, Reygadas says. “The sugar-coated [pan de muerto] remains the heart of the season.”

Odette Olavarri’s Pan de Muerto Recipe

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup (100 grams) sugar
• Zest of 1 orange
• 2/3 cup (168 grams) milk, warmed to about 86°F
• 3 teaspoons (10 grams) active dry yeast
• 4 1/3 cups (560 grams) bread flour, may substitute all-purpose flour
• 1 teaspoon (6 grams) salt
• 4 large eggs
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1/2 teaspoon orange extract
• 1/2 cup (113 grams; 1 stick) butter, cut into small cubes and chilled; plus more for greasing the bowl

Preparation

1. In a bowl, rub 12 tablespoons of the sugar with the orange zest until fragrant.
2. In a separate bowl, combine the milk, yeast and the remaining 4 tablespoons of sugar; whisk until the sugar dissolves, then let stand until foamy, about 10 minutes.
3. In a stand mixer with a hook attachment, add the flour, milk mixture, infused sugar, salt, eggs, vanilla extract and orange extract. Mix at medium speed for 4 minutes until everything is incorporated.
4. Continue mixing for 7 more minutes, gradually adding the butter, until it’s all incorporated and an even, shiny and elastic dough forms. The dough should separate from the bowl, forming a ball around the hook. To test it, stretch an edge: It should stretch until it’s translucent without breaking easily.
5. Transfer the dough to a bowl greased with butter. Cover with a damp cloth and let sit in a warm spot until doubled in size, about 1 hour.
6. Lightly flour a work surface and transfer the dough to it. Use a dough scraper to separate 200 grams of dough for the bones. Portion the rest into 90-gram segments.
7. Use your fingers to flatten each piece into a disk. Flip the disk over and bring the edges into the center, pinching them together at the top. Using your fingers, shape the dough into a ball.
8. Place the small balls on a tray lined with a silicone mat or parchment paper, sufficiently separated so they don’t stick together when baking. (Keep in mind they can triple in size.)
9. Cover with a damp cloth and let the dough rest in a warm spot for 1 hour to 1 hour and 15 minutes, until doubled in size.
10. In the mixer bowl with a hook attachment, mix the reserved dough for the bones and 20 grams flour for 2 to 3 minutes until incorporated.
11. Portion that dough into 10-gram balls. Knead each ball into a tube approximately 3 inches long.
12. Let the dough rest for 10 minutes. Then, fold the edges toward the center and, using three fingers, stretch to form the bones.
13. Place on a baking sheet and refrigerate until the bread balls have finished resting.

Assembly

1. Ten minutes before the balls have doubled in size, preheat the oven to 330 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Once the dough balls are ready, flatten them and place two crossed bone strips on top.
3. Bake for 16 minutes, until golden brown.
4. Let cool. Brush with melted butter and cover with sugar.

You Might Also Like

• October 29, 2026

• October 29, 2026

• October 29, 2026

• October 29, 2026

• October 29, 2026

Planning Your Next Trip?

Explore great travel deals

A Note to our Readers Smithsonian magazine participates in affiliate link advertising programs. If you purchase an item through these links, we receive a commission.

• More about:
• Aztecs
• Baking
• Celebrations
• Colonialism
• Cultural Heritage
• Food
• Indigenous Peoples
• Mexico
• Mexico Travel
• Recipes
• Religion
• Rituals and Traditions
• Spain