Winged Messengers: How Monarch Butterflies Connect Culture and Conservation in Mexico

Photos by Alejandro Ruiz

Every year at the beginning of November, Mexico is set alight with the sights, smells and sounds of its Día de los Muertos celebrations. The holiday is one of remembrance and reunion: stories of loved ones are shared over pan de muertos, and families gather by candlelight to arrange ofrendas to the dead. Heavy fragrances of marigold and copal incense fill the air, coaxing the souls of ancestors back to the world of the living.

This year, one of the holiday’s many symbolic faces will return with a new urgency: the monarch butterfly, whose lifespan expresses a different sort of tradition.

Each fall, like clockwork, clouds of monarchs descend upon the highland forests of central Mexico. Their arrival marks the finish line of a 3,000-mile journey: once in a lifetime, the butterflies fly south from their summer breeding grounds in Canada and the United States and return to the same oyamel fir forests as generations before them.

Millions of fluttering orange wings blanket the forest, enveloping the branches that will shelter them throughout the winter months to come. How the monarch’s internal compass navigates them, generation after generation, to the same overwintering site is not entirely understood. To add to the mystique, the annual migration coincides with the Day of the Dead celebrations.

For all their intrigue, monarchs are now an endangered species. The butterfly was added to the IUCN’s Red List in July 2022 following an estimated population decline of nearly eighty percent since the mid-1990s. Monarchs face the same threats that endanger all biodiversity: a cumulative mix of climate change, environmental pollution, and habitat destruction. But for Mexico, conservation of the nationally iconic species has both cultural and environmental gravity.

Communities in Michoacán assist in planting seedlings to reforest monarch overwintering sites.

Indigenous forest communities of central Mexico—the Purépecha of Michoacán and the Mazahua of Estado de México—revere the monarchs. According to pre-Hispanic folklore, the migrating butterflies carried the souls of ancestors visiting from the afterlife. For centuries, Mexico’s monarchs have served as a powerful cultural symbol of connecting the living to the dead.

“All of Mexico’s Indigenous people thought of the monarchs as sacred in some way,” artist and educator Noemi Hernandez-Balcazar explained over Zoom. “You can see them in Aztec paintings and stone carvings, represented in the way Egyptians would depict cats.”

Day of the Dead traditions are today a syncretic blend of the celebration’s pre-Hispanic origins and Catholic elements. The monarch’s original spiritual symbolism, though, is still very much intact. Decorated ofrenda home altars to the dead often include monarch imagery nestled between candles, calaveras (sugar skulls), and cempasuchil (marigold flowers). Elsewhere, during the festivities, the butterfly’s presence is felt through the steps of dancers in monarch-inspired costumes that echo the insect’s delicate movements. Songs reference the monarch in their lyrics.

“There was an understanding that you didn’t mistreat a monarch, because they contained a soul within them,” Hernandez-Balcazar told me, speaking from memory of her childhood in Mexico City. “You had to be extremely respectful.”

Hernandez-Balcazar used the Spanish word arraigado (deep-rooted) to describe the beliefs woven in Mexico’s cultural imagination. “En México, somos muy arraigados,” she laughed, bouncing between Spanish and English. “We respect a higher power, whether you want to call it nature, God, or gods. So when it comes to animals that have a special meaning, we are very respectful.”

Read the full story, published October 31 2022, on Smithsonian Folklife.