Día de los Muertos, says artist and teacher Martha Ramirez-Oropeza, is a "mestizo celebration," which basically means it's pretty mixed up.

Mestizo refers to the racial mixing of Europeans – generally Spanish and Portuguese – with the indigenous peoples of the New World.

Día de los Muertos – or Day of the Dead – is just one offspring of that blend, one that continues to be fertile.

Art shows in Nevada and Placer counties, and a series of events at Sacramento's La Raza Galería Posada, are testament to the ever-changing interpretation of the holiday.

A show at Roseville's Blue Line Gallery, for example, shows skeletons with surfboards – a modern take on a traditional Día de los Muertos image.

Ramirez-Oropeza, however, has enmeshed herself in the more traditional celebration, and will talk about that at 7 p.m. Saturday at the La Raza Galería.

For decades, she has studied El Novenario of Ocotepec, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, where pre-Columbian festivities are still observed, albeit with Spanish Catholic overtones.

The residents celebrate the return of the departed from the land of the dead over nine days, Ramirez-Oropeza said.

Fireworks have been added to ancient noisemaking directed at the dead, "so they can orient themselves and come to Ocotepec," she said.

Traditional orations in Nahuatl – the Aztec language – are used to speak to loved ones who have died.

"They invite them to come and enjoy the celebration," Ramirez-Oropeza said. "People still speak the language."

The nine days of the Nahuatl celebration include an Oct. 27 ritual directed at those who died in accidents or from violence, and an Oct. 30 memorial for children who have died, she said.

They are paralleled by the nine days of the Catholic novena.

Ramirez-Oropeza is also fascinated by the way Mexicans use death – skeletons, in particular – as a means of commenting on current political and social situations.

Much of this comes out of the art of José Guadalupe Posada, whose political woodcuts in turn-of-the-20th-century Mexico have inspired other artists and satirists.

Ramirez-Oropeza has worked with a couple of prominent political artists on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

As a teen, she interned with the renowned Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros – one of the big three, with Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco – after brazenly challenging him to take her on as a student.

Living in Los Angeles, she had done a school report on a local mural by Siqueiros that was whitewashed for being too political.

"I wanted to meet Siqueiros," she recalled. "I had this mission in life."

She talked her parents into taking her in December 1970 to Mexico, where she knew the "maestro" was working. She found him giving a tour.

"By then, I had all my speech ready," said Ramirez-Oropeza.

When she got the opportunity, she wowed the tour group by telling of the role of arts in the Chicano movement, then at its peak. She concluded by telling Siqueiros that – if he was the great political artist she thought he was – he should take her on as an intern.

"Everybody looked at him and he laughed and said, 'Come back in February and we'll find something for you to do,' " she said.

Ramirez-Oropeza is co-author of "The Toltec I Ching" (Larson, $27.50, 296 pages) and teaches in Los Angeles schools and lectures at University of California, Los Angeles. She also once worked with Judy Baca, a muralist famous for the Great Wall of Los Angeles, a mural of California history.