Near the end of the Mexican Revolution in the early 1900s, politics and economics prompted Manuel Luna Herrera and Norberta Herrera Ynigue to leave the rancho in Mexico where their ancestors had lived for hundreds of years.

The couple, my maternal grandparents, immigrated to Texas with their first two children before making their new homestead in Detroit in 1926. They had 10 more children before they died young in the 1940s, orphaning their brood. My mother, Julia Luna Kozlowski, was the youngest, and was 9 years old.

But the family survived, and thrived. A century after the Luna family came to Detroit, their lives are being celebrated in the hallowed halls of the Detroit Institute of Arts on a Day of the Dead altar that I created to honor dozens of people in mi familia who lived and loved in Detroit, but are no longer with us.  

My altar, or ofrenda, is among 11 other ofrendas that are on display starting Saturday at the DIA’s 9th annual community exhibition celebrating the Day of the Dead, or Dia de Muertos.

“We should honor our loved ones because they are part of our heritage and a statement of love that we will never forget them, and they will always be our hearts,” said Theresa Verdusco, one of my cousins who lived in Centerline.

The DIA’s popular ofrenda exhibition, a collaboration with the Mexican Consulate of Detroit and the Southwest Detroit Business Association, is aimed at connecting the traditions of the Mexican-American community with others in the…