Onlookers in Harvard Square were treated to rare sights and sounds last night when a man in full Aztec warrior regalia, accompanied by an Aztec female dancer and another woman holding incense, led a procession of people wearing skeleton masks toward Andover Chapel at the Divinity School.

The group was part of a larger crowd celebrating El Dia de Los Muertos -- Day of the Dead, a Latino festival giving people the opportunity to interact with deceased friends and family. The march through Harvard Square represented the journey of the Chichimeca before founding of their capital Tenonchtitlan.

This year, the Divinity School Latino organization, Nueva Generacion, organized the event with the help of Consilio Latino, an umbrella group of almost 30 Latino University organizations.

The festival, which on November 1 and 2 is celebrated predominantly in Mexico, culminated in folkloric dances and a remembrance of the dead.

"[The Day of the Dead] is a way of remembering people who have died, dealing communally with grief but also celebrating their lives with them," said Maria Elena Gonzalez, one of the organizers of the event and a graduate student at the Divinity School.

The festival is an amalgam of an ancient Aztec ceremony celebrating the death of emperors, and All Saints' Day, which was brought to the Americas with the Spanish conquistadors.

"The festival is a funeral rite, a way of invoking the dead," said Chris Tirres, one of the organizers of the event and a Divinity School student. "It really started with the Aztecs, who had a preoccupation with the netherworld."

Aztec dancer Raul Ruiz, a third-year student at the Medical School, defined the concept behind the festivities in more mystical terms, going back to the idea that the festival blurs the line between life and death.

"These dance movements [of the procession] are the way in which we live in harmony with the cosmos and all the creations of mother earth," Ruiz said. "Mecatlicutli, the god of the under- world, when he calls us, he calls us to dance. Because death is a long dance."

Arriving at the Andover Chapel, Aztec dancing made way to the dancing of the Harvard-Radcliffe Ballet Folklorico de Aztlan, who performed before an audience of 50. The group performed two dances, "Colas," about a man who loves a woman and complains about how badly she treats him, and "La Bruja," a dance depicting witches practicing their art.

Afterwards, the remembrance service began. The service shifted to celebrities, friends and family members who had died this year.

To the question, "Does anyone have anyone they'd like to remember?" Each member of the congregation in the chapel volunteered a name they wanted to be remembered.

Reflecting the special communication with dead possible on the Day of the Dead, to each name everyone solemnly replied, "Presente."

The festival has acquired political undertones as an assertion of both Latino cultural pride and grievances.

"This ceremony has become a way to celebrate our culture and assert our presence, especially at Harvard," Tirres said.

Tirres said the festival was also symbolically important because it marks a victory in Nueva Generacion's ongoing struggle to increase the number of Latino students in the Divinity School from 12 in a total student body of 500.

It was not by accident that yesterday night's the remembrance of the dead started with a memorial for the late Cuban revolutionary, "Che" Guevara, someone who has represented the fight for freedom to many in the Latino community.

In his short introduction, Felipe Agredano-Lozano, a graduate of the Divinity School, spoke of how much Guevara meant to him.

"Che to me represents student activism," third world activism," Agredano-Lozano said.

On the day of the festival, Nueva Generacion had heard from Ron Thiemann, dean of the Divinity School, that it would try to accept more Latino students, and announced a conference on Latino religion, which will take place in the spring