In Digging the Days of the Dead, Juanita Garciagodoy depicts various aspects of the celebration - including Prehispanic and Spanish Catholic traces on its development as well as folk and popular culture versions - and describes its changing place in contemporary Mexico.

Garciagodoy examines in detail differences in attitudes toward death in Mexico and the United States. In part because the living do not exclude the dead from their family circle, celebrants of Dias de muertos treat death as an intimate life companion and fear it less than their northern counterparts, who tend to view death as inimical.