The All Souls Procession is Tucson's defining annual event — a two-mile mass walk through downtown on the Sunday after Halloween, in which tens of thousands of people in skeleton makeup, masks, and costumes carry photographs, written intentions and effigies of their dead through the streets to a final urn-burning ceremony.
It is not a parade but a procession — silent or musical, deeply personal, melancholy and celebratory at the same time. The Pet Procession and Día de los Muertos altars surround it. Drawn from Mexican tradition but reinvented here as something specific to Tucson.