Over the next few days, space will grow increasingly tight at the Guadalupana Bakery in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. The counters are piled high with displays of colorful breads in the shapes of skulls or figures in repose, and customers are coming in droves to buy special pan de muerto, or bread of the dead, some of them 10 loaves at a time.
Founded 16 years ago by a family from a tiny town in Puebla, this Mexican bakery is always busy, especially in the evenings when people stop in on their way home to pick up pan dulce, or sweet bread, traditionally eaten with coffee or hot chocolate at the end of the day. But the small shop is taking on a far more festive air as owners and customers prepare for Día de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, on Saturday.
The table where you would normally find the bakery’s fresh sandwich rolls and coffee, for example, has been converted into an elaborate altar known as an ofrenda, or offering, like those in many of its customers’ homes. It is festooned with sugared skulls, flowers and other mementos of the family’s departed, and at the center is pan de muerto.
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