Day of the Dead celebration may lure Mexicans home

MEXICO CITY (AP) --They may have spent most of their lives in the United States, but
many Mexican-born migrants want to spend eternity in their homeland.

Thousands of Mexicans who die in the United States are flown home each year
to be buried in their native land, where death is celebrated in festive family
reunions at graveyards each Nov. 2. More than 300 homeward-bound bodies
arrive each month at the Mexico City International Airport, just one port in a
booming cross-border funeral trade.

"Nearly all migrant workers are sent to Mexico after they die," said Salvador
Calderon, manager of a funeral home in Guadalajara that ferries the dead from
the city's airport to small towns across the central highlands. "Even among the
residents or the nationalized (Americans), the adults always say they want to be
buried in their place of origin."

Mexico's annual Day of the Dead celebration -- in which families visit
cemeteries to set up altars with flowers, votive candles, a favorite meal and nip
of alcohol to welcome back the spirits of loved ones -- accounts for some of
the resistance to burial abroad, according to migration experts, funeral homes
and relatives of migrants.

Mexico's Day of the Dead mixes Indian traditions and the Christian church's All
Saints Day. It is generally a festive holiday, celebrated with skeletons and sugar
skulls featuring the names of both the living and the dead.

"The tradition up north is a little more impersonal," Calderon said.

A constant presence and lifelong companion

In Mexico, public viewing of the dead lasts all night and funeral rites can extend
for nine days. Death is regarded as a constant presence and lifelong companion.

"Bringing (deceased migrants) back here is a way to have them close to
celebrate the Day of the Dead and be with them for at least one day," said
tractor operator Julian Rivera, of Pozos, a hamlet of 4,000 people located 180
miles (300 kilometers) north of Mexico City.

Rivera said that on Sunday he and his family will visit the graves of his brothers
Roberto and Serafin Rivera, among 18 migrants who died in May after being
trapped in an airless trailer abandoned in Victoria, Texas. Although Serafin had
lived in Florida before, it was important to his family to go through the trouble
of bringing him home for burial.

His relatives planned to lay out food before dawn Sunday at Roberto and
Serafin's graves, say a few prayers -- and have a good time.

"We want (Roberto and Serafin) more than ever to be here in these days, to be
able to throw a party for them," Rivera said, noting that Roberto's wife, Cecilia
Gamez, is pregnant and expecting Roberto's second child any day.

Many migrant workers travel back and forth between towns like Pozos in
Guanajuato state and the United States, said Diana Leticia, who works for the
state's support office for migrants.

Finding a way back

"They don't want to lose this identity as a Mexican," Alvarez said. "What they
want is to find a way back to be here, even if they come back dead."

The same cultural ties don't extend to second-generation Mexicans living
abroad, according to consular officials and funeral homes.

"There are people who say, 'Now I'm nationalized. Now I'm going to stay
here,"' Calderon said.

Funeral homes charge at least US$1,500 to send a body to Mexico from most
U.S. cities, including about $500 for the cargo-class ticket and a modest coffin.
The option appears to becoming more popular.

In 2002, the bodies of 1,223 Mexicans were sent home from Los Angeles,
according to the Mexican Consulate there. That total is likely to increase this
year, with 1,156 bodies already sent home before Oct. 1.

Mexico's consulate in Houston has helped return more than 700 bodies as of
Oct. 24, surpassing the 588 bodies sent home last year.

Mexican consulates help poor families who can't afford to bring the remains of
their relatives home. Migrants often take up a collection from family, friends and
neighbors to cover a cross-border funeral bill.

Funeral businesses handle the labyrinth of paper work that accompanies each
body as it is identified and cleared by customs and health officials. Mexico's
Foreign Relations Department has a handout that details 14 steps in the
repatriation process.

National Migration Institute spokesman Hermenegildo Castro says Indian
traditions associated with death and the Day of the Dead are part of what
draws expatriate Mexicans home at life's end.

Castro, who is from an Indian village in the state of Oaxaca, planned to drive
eight hours with his family to visit his father's grave on Sunday. His father died in
the capital, Mexico City, but Castro said it wasn't right to bury him there.

"I took his coffin to where his spirit will return. It's not going to return to Mexico
City," Castro said. "You have to put him in his village because that is where his
vigor and spirit will return on Nov. 2."