Looking back almost two decades later, it would have been hard for the Gonzales family to imagine their annual Día de los Muertos celebration getting this big when they first started it 17 years ago.

The Muertos PDX celebration — one of Portland’s largest Day of the Dead events — had humble beginnings as a small gathering of mostly family, said Elizabeth Perry, who started the event alongside her husband, Armando Gonzales.

“I’m from the border, El Paso, Texas, and we used to go to the cemetery and decorate the graves and celebrate as a family,” she told The Oregonian/OregonLive on Saturday, the first day of the two-day event. “But once we moved to Oregon, it became difficult.”

So Perry and her husband decided to hold their own Día de los Muertos gathering for friends and family, in an

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