A commemoration of the dead will take place at 6 p.m. today at the rock on Farm Lane.
Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is traditionally a time when families in Mexico set up alters and give offerings to symbolically celebrate their deceased family members' lives - how they lived and their accomplishments.
"We want to celebrate the happy times that the person had," said Oscar Vega, a Students for Economic Justice (SEJ) and Movimiento Estudiantil Xicano de Aztlan (MEXA) member.
At MSU, MEXA and SEJ will celebrate the lives of more than 370 women who were killed in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, due to the exploitation of women sweatshop workers, said Tommy Simon, an SEJ member and social relations and English sophomore.
He said the creation of "maquiladoras," or sweatshops, in cities leads to the deterioration of those cites.
"The city of Juarez is more or less destitute and taken over by sweatshops and factories," Simon said. "Once the factories came, then came in poverty, rape, and murder."
More than 370 crosses will be painted pink and adorned with a different deceased woman's name, and students will each hold a cross to commemorate the women at the ceremony. Also, an alter complete with pictures of the women who died in Ciudad Juarez will be placed on the fourth floor of Berkey Hall near the Chicano/Latino studies office to honor their lives.
The majority of the people working in the sweatshops are women, Vega said. He said the women live in poverty and are often kidnapped because they work night-shifts in dangerous Mexican border towns.
"Some of these maquilas are really placed far away from the city and closer to the desert," said Vega, a telecommunication, information studies and media sophomore. "It's also really alienated. They could have security for building premises, but what about waiting for the bus or walking home?"
Little is being done by local government to help the state of the women, MEXA member and sociology senior Anna Villanueva said.
"These women have been raped, murdered and mutilated on their way to and from work, and some of them have gone missing," Villanueva said, adding she is appalled at how little is being done to rectify the situation. "The Mexican government and the U.S. government don't care. If the U.S. government cared, they'd stop outsourcing jobs to countries like Mexico."
SEJ and MEXA students also see their celebration as a way to continue their five-year effort to urge the university to join the Worker Rights Consortium to support better conditions for workers.
