Maia Nehme, Contributing Photographer

A puppet, draped in a keffiyeh and two Palestinian flags, towered over attendees at Unidad Latina en Acción’s Día de los Muertos celebration on Saturday afternoon.

At ULA’s annual event, participants served themselves home-cooked Latine fare, painted their faces and joined in on a parade of massive puppets. The celebration, held at Bregamos Community Theater, also featured a live band that performed salsa and cumbia music.

Organizers dedicated this year’s event to the Palestinian lives lost in the Israel-Hamas war. At least 43,000 Palestinians have been killed since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack, which prompted Israel’s war in Gaza.

“It doesn’t matter [to the Israeli government] that boys and girls are being killed, it doesn’t matter that there are pregnant women, it doesn’t matter to them to give food to the people they’re killing,” Jenny Cornejo, a ULA community organizer, said in Spanish. “We honor all of the dead there, who have fought for their ideas and continue fighting.”

Pablo Lopez, one of two craftsmen who built the puppets, said the event’s main aim is to spotlight New Haven’s immigrant community, particularly Latine immigrants.

Lopez emphasized the importance of Day of the Dead celebrations in many Latin American countries, including Mexico, Guatemala and Ecuador.

“In many of our towns, we commemorate, we celebrate and we remember our dead,” Lopez said in Spanish. “We know where we’re going, but many times we are scared to talk about death. So even though it is a bitter reality, we play with death, we joke with death, we speak with it, we embrace it.”

Lopez worked with fellow craftsman Héctor Hernández and several ULA volunteers to repair puppets from last year’s celebration and build new ones, including the puppet honoring Palestinians killed in the past year. The new puppets took over two months to build, according to Lopez.

Attendee Dunia Domínguez has been an ULA member for over a decade. Originally from Honduras, she has lived in New Haven for about 18 years.

“It’s important to celebrate Día de los Muertos because it’s something traditional from all of our home countries,” Domínguez said in Spanish. “If we don’t continue with this, our kids will forget their culture, so I think it’s very important to continue with the tradition.”

Luz Ramos, who is the secretary of Bregamos Community Theater, said she has attended ULA’s Día de los Muertos celebration for several years. She moved from Mexico to New Haven in 1997.

Ramos emphasized that ULA’s celebration is entirely volunteer-run, with participants devoting hours to cooking food, constructing puppets and putting up decorations. She also noted that the celebration is a hodgepodge of multiple Latine cultures, as volunteers bring dishes and traditions from each of their home countries.

“We’re all looking for a little place for ourselves here in the world, here in America,” Ramos said. “And at this celebration, for a moment, we’re all together and reunited and it’s like we’re at home.”

Bregamos Community Theater is located at 491 Blatchley Ave.