Thread: When They Die

In death, a final trip home for Mexicans in U.S.
By Eduardo Porter
Monday, June 11, 2007

CONWAY, Arkansas: Héctor Acevedo was 22, in the United States illegally and far from his mother when he died last month in a car accident outside of town just across the Arkansas River.

But mother and son were soon reunited. The tight-knit immigrant network rallied to repatriate the body, adding Acevedo to a procession of thousands of dead Mexicans making their way home each year. A survivor of the accident approached a relative of another victim, who worked in a restaurant owned by one of Acevedo's relatives.

An uncle identified the body, contacted the Mexican Consulate in nearby Little Rock, and arranged the paperwork. For $2,300, and a $500 contribution from the consulate, they bought the "Hispanic Package" at Brown's Christian Funeral Services, which specializes in repatriation of remains to Mexico. Six days after the accident, Acevedo was buried next to his grandfather in the family plot in González, Tamaulipas State, in northeastern Mexico.

"Waiting for the body was agony," said Juanita Soto, Acevedo's mother. "I had to see him, to caress him."

Such posthumous reunions have become increasingly common in villages and towns across Mexico that have sent their sons and daughters, more often than not illegally, to find work in the United States.

"We deal with it every day," said Eric Levy, the consul who oversees the repatriation of remains at the Mexican Consulate in Little Rock, which opened in late April.

Last year, Mexican consulates across the United States recorded 10,622 shipments of bodies for burial back home, 7 percent more than in 2005 and 11 percent more than in 2004. The consulates, which do not track the immigration status of the deceased, spent $4 million in 2006 to help repatriate bodies to Mexico, up from $3.4 million in 2005.

As debate rages in the U.S. Congress over an immigration bill that would provide a path to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants and temporary working visas for hundreds of thousands, the reverse journey of the dead suggests that for many Mexicans the sojourn to the United States, legal or not, is meant to be temporary.

Home - at least in death - is south of the border.

"For Mexicans, the bonds of the family unit are very strong," said the Reverend John Brown, who ministers to Hispanics at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Conway and who presided over a memorial service for Acevedo. "The bond is broken when they go to work in the United States. It is restored in death."

In Mexican immigrant neighborhoods throughout the United States, collection boxes to help pay for the repatriation of a body are placed in grocery store windows. Employers also chip in. Acevedo's relatives, for example, were reimbursed for his burial by the restaurant where he had worked as a cook.

When the dead have no known relatives in the United States, friends often go to great lengths to find family in Mexico.

When the police shot a man known as El Cholo near a Hispanic meat market in Stockton, California, just before Christmas 2005, residents scrambled to figure out who he was. Armed with little more than the name of a town called Mazamitla in the state of Jalisco, the butcher at the meat market contacted a cousin who lived nearby.

The cousin contacted an official he knew in a neighboring town, who called his counterpart in Mazamitla, who found a sister of the deceased on the local voting register. The sister called two brothers, working as landscapers in Southern California, who picked up the body and sent it home.

"I hadn't seen my brother in four years; we didn't know where he was," said Ignacio Ponce MartÃ*nez, El Cholo's older brother.

"We had to send him to Mexico with his mother. We couldn't just leave him here."

Mexican consulates negotiate discounts with funeral homes, and help in other ways. There is a clear benefit for Mexican politicians to be seen helping migrants in their final homecoming, spurring some Mexican state governments to help, too. The government in the state of Michoacán promises to pay for the transport of returning bodies from any point in Mexico to the deceased's hometown in Michoacán.

Inevitably, haggling arises. The Mexican Foreign Ministry authorized the consulate in Little Rock to pay some $20,000, nearly half of the consulate's budget this year for body transfers, to cover the full cost of transporting to Mexico City the bodies of seven illegal immigrants from Oaxaca who died last month in a highway accident in Oklahoma.

The Oaxacan government initially agreed to pay only to move the bodies from the Oaxacan state capital to their hometowns and waited for days before picking up the tab for the transport from Mexico City, consular officials said.

AgustÃ*n GarcÃ*a, who runs Funerales GarcÃ*a in Mexico City, has a large share of the mortuary trade from the United States by visiting funeral home conventions there to pick up business on the receiving end.

"I have arrangements with 150 funeral homes all over the United States," Garcia said. "I receive about 2,500 bodies a year. I receive them in Mexico City and take them anywhere in Mexico."

For illegal immigrants, some of whom pay $2,000 to $3,000 to be smuggled across the border through the Arizona desert, the return trip in a coffin can be more expensive than the journey into the United States.

Typically, the cheapest "Hispanic Package" at Brown Christian Funeral Services in Little Rock, which includes pickup, embalming, dressing, a $660 coffin, the shipping container and airfare, costs $3,444. The funeral home offers a discounted package for those who are subsidized by the consulate. But during holidays, when the airlines are full, it costs an additional $688 for airfare.

Acevedo, who dropped out of a naval school in Tampico to come to the United States three years ago, lived the torn family circumstances of many illegal immigrants. He was not alone in the United States, living with his sister, Gabriela, her husband and their two daughters.

"We arrived in the United States together, and he always lived with us," Gabriela Acevedo said. "He spent more time with my daughters than my husband did." And there were aunts, uncles and cousins living around Conway and Little Rock.

Still, Acevedo's mother and father were in Mexico. When the car in which he was traveling went into a ditch, killing him and two friends, there was no discussion about where he should go. "My mother wanted to have him with her," Gabriela Acevedo said.

The transfer was expeditious. After a memorial service at St. Joseph's, Acevedo's body was sent back to Mexico with that of one of his friends killed in the accident. The third person who died, also a Mexican immigrant, was buried in Conway because his mother was in the area.

Back in González, Soto was grateful to see her son one last time.

"There was an enormous show of support," she said. "Family came from different parts of Mexico, friends of my son were there and some of my childhood friends."

http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/06/11/ ... mexico.php

What a strange and sad story.

My Grandparents immigrated from Italy and became Americans.
When they died they were buried in America. They would not have wanted it any other way.

"For Mexicans, the bonds of the family unit are very strong," said the Reverend John Brown

"I hadn't seen my brother in four years; we didn't know where he was," said Ignacio Ponce MartÃ*nez, El Cholo's older brother.

Those strong family bonds.

For illegal immigrants, some of whom pay $2,000 to $3,000 to be smuggled across the border through the Arizona desert, the return trip in a coffin can be more expensive than the journey into the United States.

All the more reason to stay home.

When the car in which he was traveling went into a ditch, killing him and two friends, there was no discussion about where he should go.

It just went into a ditch all by itself? No one was driving the car? Possibly under the influence?