By Marrion Cruz
San Francisco gleamed in marigold and candlelight on the first weekend of November, as the Mission District honored Día de los Muertos, the annual celebration of the dead that merges Indigenous and Catholic traditions. The Marigold Project hosted its Festival of Altars at La Raza Park on Nov. 2.
Litzia Sierra picked up her own marigold flowers in preparation for the Yucatec Mayan version of the holiday, Hanal Pixán. “I like to keep the memories of my ancestors alive,” she said.
Sierra, one of the cultural bearers at the Festival of Altars, played instrumentals featuring drums and flute between poetry readings, evoking the celebration’s themes of fire and earth.
Community members brought offerings, photographs, and mementos to remember loved ones. The celebration unfolded in the shadow of one of the city’s last resting places.
Mission Dolores Cemetery
On Dolores Street, less than a mile away, a narrow gift shop hums beside the thick adobe of Misión San Francisco de Asís. Beyond its doors lies the small Mission Dolores Cemetery, shaded by cypress and bright with native yerba buena roses and magnolia trees. It’s one of the two remaining cemeteries in San Francisco.
Beneath them lie thousands whose names were never marked.
Founded in 1776 atop the Ohlone village of Chutchui, the mission served as both a church and a graveyard for over 5,000 Indigenous men, women, and children who were baptized, renamed, and buried there during the Mission period. Today, the surviving acre sits quietly under cypress and sage, a fraction of a cemetery that once stretched under what are now classrooms and a playground.
A statue of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint, stands in the garden, honoring thousands whose graves remain unmarked.
Mission Dolores’ Cemetery and Museum curator, Andy Galvan, was out of the office at the time of publication. Galvan was interviewed in a KQED news video last year, going through the cemetery and the history of its inhabitants with reporter Anna Vignet.
The cemetery remains open for self-guided tours, with an entrance fee of $10.
National Cemetery
Across the city, memory takes a different shape. The San Francisco National Cemetery, at the northern edge of the Presidio, slopes toward the bay in precise rows of stones.
Although the cemetery was still open during the federal shutdown, it’s unclear whether the cemetery’s caretakers were furloughed. A press release from the Department of Veterans Affairs stated that they were “no longer performing grounds maintenance” at any of their 157 national cemeteries.
Established by the Department of Defense in 1884, it was the first national cemetery established on the West Coast. Soldiers from every major U.S. conflict rest there, from the American Frontier Wars through World War II. The unknown dead, reinterred together in 1934, lie beneath a single monument overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.
By 1901, the Board of Supervisors banned new burials, forcing the relocation of graves from Lone Mountain to North Beach. Entire cemeteries, such as the “Big Four” Laurel Hill, Calvary, Masonic and Odd Fellows, were emptied, and their stones were sold and reused in seawalls and park stairs.
Thousands of bodies were left behind, and bones continue to surface during construction at the University of San Francisco. Some, as recent as 2022.
Most of the city’s dead now rest in Colma, incorporated in 1924 as the town of cemeteries.