In his ethnography, Power and Persuasion, Stanley Brandes studies the Mexican village of Tzintzuntzan's fiesta cycle. While Brandes is able to articulate the majority of the changes that have occurred in Tzintzuntzan's fiesta cycle, his methodology does not adequately account for the transformations that have taken place in the Night of the Dead (la Noche de Muertos), a fiesta analogous to Halloween in the United States.

    Brandes fails to address this fiesta's transformation because its impetus came not from within Tzintzuntzan, but from outside of it. As he argues, the changes began as "manipulative state policies" that transformed the "pure" indigenous fiesta into a tourist ritual: a theatrical performance, bustling with commerce, put on for the benefit of outsiders (Brandes 1988, 88 [italics in original]).