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Giant Kites for the Dead in Guatemala

By Weird Burial Stories Editorial Desk · 2026-10-25

On 1 November two Kaqchikel Maya towns in Guatemala raise giant paper kites for the Day of the Saints and the Dead. UNESCO dates the tradition to the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, and in 2024 it inscribed the technique of making them.

By C. V. Wooster

On 1 November, in the Kaqchikel Maya towns of Santiago Sacatepéquez and Sumpango, in the department of Sacatepéquez, the fair of the Day of the Saints and the Dead is a field of kites. Guatemala's Ministry of Culture and Sports says the ceremony of flight is held each 1 November, All Saints' Day, and that the kites rise as homage to the ancestors, a tie between the living and the dead, and a way of keeping the communities' identity. UNESCO's description of the same technique says the kites are made over several months and exhibited during those fairs "with the aim to communicate with the ancestors." The tradition, both UNESCO and the ministry's nomination record say, dates to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is a modern grave custom with a spectacular object. It is not an ancient one, and the inscription says so.

What the makers do

UNESCO's file, element 01991 on the Representative List, names five steps: design; preparing the canvas, which is the face of the kite; decorating that canvas with multicolored tissue paper; making the lining, the reverse; and assembling canvas, lining, fringes, and tail. The designs often carry messages about the environment, the fight against violence, and human rights. The kites are then exhibited in public or flown. People of all ages take part. Craftspeople belong to committees whose boards organize the fairs, set the rules, and award prizes, with help from the municipalities and from private sponsors. The skill is passed on by doing the work, not by a school. UNESCO's phrase for what the makers believe they are doing is precise: connecting with ancestors, warding off negative spirits, and promoting renewal. The fairs also make a public space for argument. A kite that says something about violence is a message to the living as well as to the dead.

The ministry's note of 4 December 2024 adds the calendar day the UNESCO summary leaves inside the name of the fair. The recognized technique includes the whole process, from design and construction to the flight ceremony each 1 November. Minister Liwy Grazioso said the making is collaborative and can take months, involving families and neighbors. That is the same "several months" UNESCO records. A kite built from tissue paper on a frame, by a committee, over a season, is a communal offering in the sense that it is made for the dead and shown to the town. It is not an ofrenda on a household table. The Mexican grave visit, with food and marigolds, is a different room. Yucatán's version, with the buried tamal and, in Pomuch, the cleaning of bones, is another: Hanal Pixán.

A recent inscription, and a recent origin

The Intergovernmental Committee inscribed the technique in December 2024, decision 19.COM 7.B.41. The decision text repeats the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century date, the months of making, the fairs, and the aim of speaking to ancestors. Guatemala's ministry says the country had already declared the technique national cultural heritage in 2022, before the UNESCO list. A heritage label in 2022 and an international list in 2024 are facts about governments. They are not facts about the sixteenth century. The date UNESCO is willing to give for the kites themselves is the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. That is living memory's grandfather, not the pre-Columbian calendar.

The popular claim that Day of the Dead imagery is simply Aztec is the one Stanley Brandes disputed for Mexico, tracing skulls to colonial religion and to nineteenth-century journalism. The Guatemalan file does not need that fight in order to stay honest. UNESCO already refused the word ancient for this particular object. The ministry's Spanish note calls the technique "ancestral," which is a word of praise, and then dates the flight to a Catholic holy day, 1 November. Ancestral, in a press release, is not a century. The century UNESCO printed is the one to use.

Measured widths, and a rule that the largest kites only stand upright while smaller eight-sided ones are the ones that fly, circulate in reference summaries. They are not in the UNESCO decision or in the ministry note used here, so they are not stated as fact. What those texts do say is enough for the custom. The kites are giant, made of tissue paper, built over months, and shown or flown at the fairs of the saints and the dead, in Santiago Sacatepéquez and in Sumpango, to communicate with ancestors and to ward off negative spirits. The committee, not a single artist, owns the fair. UNESCO says the boards set the rules and give the prizes. A prize for a kite is a strange kind of grave good, and it is a modern one: a town judging how well it has spoken to its dead, on a Catholic holy day, with paper.

Why the date matters

A custom can be beloved and recent. The skeleton parade in Mexico City is more recent still, a 2016 event prompted by a film: La Catrina and the parade. The kites are older than that parade and younger than the novena. Families in Sumpango and Santiago Sacatepéquez are not reenacting a museum hypothesis. They are building an object their grandparents' grandparents could have known, on a day the church already kept for all the saints, and they are using it to speak to their own dead. The Death Glossary defines an interment as the burial itself. The kite is what the living do afterward, in public, once a year, with paper and bamboo and a message. UNESCO's list is a recognition of that work. It is not a birth certificate from the sixteenth century, and the file does not pretend to be one.

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