Veronica Campbell

If you have ever been at a celebration — a wedding, a quinceañera, a birthday, a funeral — and heard that first trumpet call cut through the air, you know exactly what mariachi does to a room. It stops you. It pulls something up from somewhere deep. And before you even realize it, you are feeling something.

There’s a reason the heart shows up everywhere in Mexican folk art. On tin walls in San Miguel de Allende. Stitched into textiles. Painted onto retablos. Pinned with milagro charms at roadside shrines. The corazón isn’t decoration — it’s a language. And once you understand what it’s saying, making one with your own hands becomes something different entirely.

A few of our Día de los Muertos committee members were interviewed by Community Impact.