Debt and few hands: what it takes to put on the All Souls Procession

There are many misconceptions about the All Souls Procession.

The big one is that the city pays for it to happen. Another is that the organizers get rich from it.

Neither are true.

“I think what can be hard sometimes is since I’m so in it, for me to be able to really tell people how this works and how it doesn’t work, there can be real resistance and a sense of when I talk about how financially perilous it is and how much my family has sacrificed to make it happen — I think it can be hard to hear,” says artistic director Nadia Hagen.

Each year, hundreds of thousands of people pack west-side streets to remember lost loved ones. Some carry DIY signs in remembrance of lost family members. Others paint calaveras on their faces or piece together extravagant outfits dotted with twinkling lights. 

The two-mile procession ends at the MSA Annex where love letters and prayers are burned in a giant urn followed by a ceremony with performances. This year, performers include Nexus Visions, Snow Raven, Odaiko Sonora, Flam Chen, Circus Sanctuary and community spirit groups.

The procession takes place 6 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 9. It winds its way from Speedway and Grande Avenue south to Congress Street, ending in the Mercado District, 100 S. Avenida del Convento. It’s free to participate in and free to watch — but it’s far from free to put on. 

“A big (misconception) is that the city pays for it or that we have some big corporate sponsor — that there’s some rich underwriter and there’s not,” Nadia says. “It’s theater — the nature of theater is that it looks amazing, it looks like it costs a million dollars, but that’s theater.”

“When there are festivals, the more the merrier. There can be tons of different ways of expressing art and tons of means of culture but I do want there to be a place where the reason to show up and be present is not just about money, it’s not just about commerce,” Nadia says. “I like markets but I think we need something in our lives that is just about connection and remembrance and sacred space. I think that’s really important as human beings and it’s really hard to make that happen.”

The All Souls Procession’s annual budget usually sits between $160,000 and $200,000, about a third of which goes toward infrastructure including barricades, police and sanitation like portapotties, Nadia says. 

“In most cities, the city provides those things but not in Tucson,” Nadia says, frustrated.

All Souls, which is organized by the nonprofit Many Mouths One Stomach that Nadia started with her husband and technical director Paul Weir, tries to raise between $100,000 and $150,000 each year (the lower amount is the baseline, the higher allows for improvements to be made). The nonprofit receives about half their revenue from individual donations that generally range between $5 and $20.

“That’s a lot of people putting $5 bills in little buckets,” Nadia says. “The creation of culture and the things that make life worth living in a place rarely come from the top down. They come from people, a lot of times they come from small movements. People are powerful. People are what make community.” 

Money also comes from small-business donors, grants — which are especially scarce right now and always time-consuming to complete — and ticket sales from benefit concerts throughout the year. (All Souls is more than just the Sunday procession. The weekend actually kicks off with an ofrenda dedication followed by two ticketed concerts and a free procession for kids.)

All Souls has built partnerships with businesses in the past, but they don’t take on any corporate sponsors — and it’s not because big businesses haven’t tried.

“The thing about sponsors is they’re there to get their message out through you,” Nadia says. “But they don’t care about you, what they care about is, ‘How can I co-opt your audience? How can I get your people to now buy my product?’ But that’s the problem — the priority for them is their own marketing and their own exposure and that runs completely counter to what we’re trying to do, which is to keep banners, to keep slogans, to keep brands off the procession because it’s a funeral.”

“We’re beholden to the people who come. I’m here to broadcast the message for the people who live in this community. I’m not here to broadcast a message for some corporation by using my community,” she says. 

Admittedly, it’s a decision that has left Nadia and Paul to take on debt year after year — debt they’re still paying off from last year’s procession. Nadia has a smorgasbord of part-time jobs: running events at the MSA Annex, making custom clothing and costumes, previous work at thrift stores. Nadia also founded Flam Chen, a performance troupe that combines acrobatics and pyrotechnics, which is on a partial hiatus.

“That’s another misnomer — people think we’re rich. People are like, ‘Oh, you must make tons of money off this event,’” Nadia says.

Besides Nadia and Paul, All Souls is made up of 25 directors who are in charge of tasks like organizing buskers or hosting the Procession of Little Angels. Some receive stipends, but most are volunteers. The folks who do tech work also get paid, as do the DJs and guest artists.

“Paul and I have lots of moments where we’re like, ‘Fuck this. This sucks.’ And then there’s these other moments, most notably when there are thousands of people holding banners and putting prayers in the urn and putting prayers on the altar and showing up with their families and they’re crying and telling us how much this means to them,” Nadia says. “I went to the bank and my teller was like, ‘Oh you do All Souls?’ and she just started crying.

“To be an artist in this society right now, with everything that we’re dealing with in the world, just making art so I can sell it seems really vapid,” she says. “When I’m on my death bed, I want to look back at my life and feel like I created things that had meaning and changed my culture in good ways and expanded my community. I don’t want to just think that I sold a lot of paintings.”

Nadia has been part of the All Souls Procession for the last 30 years, though the procession actually started five years earlier in 1990 when local artist Susan Johnson was searching for a way to grieve her late father.

“In the ‘90s, it was very rough. The late ‘80s, early ‘90s, it was very punk, it was very nihilist, it was very underground. I think there was a year where 30 people that I knew died in different ways. Life was just so dangerous; people did a lot of drugs but also people were just really on the edge. Life is still dangerous, but I’m not a teenager anymore and life is dangerous when you’re a teenager,” Nadia says.

“I wanted some way to make meaning out of that. I didn’t want to just forget all those people. Half of them, I didn’t even know their real names. The scene was very punk, people had names like Rat Shit, and then their parents came to take their bodies away and you’re like, ‘Oh, your name’s Bob?’” Nadia says. “Then the parents would come and they didn’t know any of (their kids’) friends and didn’t care about their friends and didn’t want them invited to the funeral. There were these breakages and holes and gaps in friendships and growing up in those scenes. The All Souls Procession was this way to make it up, to figure it out without having someone tell you that this is the agreed upon dogma, that you have to do these five things (to process grief). As an artist and wanting to use my creativity to reconnect myself to those people, to remember them and to find a way to process all that grief and all that loss for myself, I wanted to use something that meant something to me, I wanted to explore and discover that … And I wanted to do that for everyone else.”

“I came from a real rave-warehouse-underground-arts scene, an industrial music background, very DIY,” Nadia says. “I wanted (All Souls) to be way more radical and inclusive and to really open it up to anybody who wanted to do it. So my vision for it was different and I had the energy for it.” 

Of course, the procession was much smaller back then, a gathering of 200 or so people. No one could’ve imagined it would become as big as it did — especially so quickly. By 1995, Nadia coined Many Mouths One Stomach to organize the procession, which became a nonprofit in 2006 partially as a way to apply for grants.

Throughout the years, she’s witnessed plenty of push and pull. While many Tucsonans have a personal and emotional connection to All Souls, others don’t quite understand it. 

“I feel like it is my job at least to try to push the culture to be more accepting and more tolerant and for All Souls certainly to be a safe space for people to be really vulnerable,” she says. “People come out and are holding placards for their kids and people are sad. People are coming out on the street and they’re crying and their hearts are broken and I certainly want to cultivate a culture that at least for one day a year can have compassion.”

Dates to bookmark

• Nov. 4, 6-9 p.m.: Ofrenda dedication at the MSA Annex, 267 S. Avenida del Convento. Free.
• Nov. 7, 6-11:55 p.m.: Flow for the Soul event with dancing, DJs and a fire performance at the MSA Annex. $30.
• Nov. 8, 3-7 p.m.: Procession of Little Angels, dubbed a “pint-sized” procession for kids and families at the Literacy Connects campus, 200 E. Yavapai Rd. Free.
• Nov. 8, 5-11:55 p.m.: Dance of the Dead, curated vendors and a concert with Snow Raven, at the MSA Annex. $30.
• Nov. 9: The main procession takes place Nov. 9. Assembly for participants begins at 4 p.m. and the procession leaves at 6 p.m. from Speedway and Grande Avenue, heading south to Congress Street. The two-mile procession typically gets to Congress Street around 7 p.m., but that can vary. The procession ends with a ceremony at the MSA Annex. Free.

❤️ For more information on the All Souls Procession, head to the event’s website. ❤️