{"id":28045,"date":"2021-11-30T16:22:04","date_gmt":"2021-11-30T23:22:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.colef.mx\/elmuro\/?p=28045"},"modified":"2021-11-30T16:22:04","modified_gmt":"2021-11-30T23:22:04","slug":"thanksgiving-in-the-stockton-graveyard-david-bacon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colef.mx\/elmuro\/thanksgiving-in-the-stockton-graveyard-david-bacon\/","title":{"rendered":"Thanksgiving in the stockton graveyard | David Bacon"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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If you drive straight ahead after passing through the cemetery gate, you soon find yourself among dark stone mausoleums.\u00a0 These are the grey memorials to Stockton’s Catholic elite.\u00a0 Along empty tree-lined avenues leaves blow past the stones and their dark shadows.

If you turn right, though, you arrive at the corner of the graveyard where Mexicans and Filipinos bury their dead.\u00a0 Innocencio Galedo, who migrated to work in Stockton fields in 1922, is buried here.\u00a0 Next to him is his wife Sotera, who came from the Philippines to join him after the war.\u00a0 Once a year one of their kids cleans off the two flat grave markers – picking away the crabgrass and putting flowers in the two holes in each one.\u00a0 This year it’s Lillian’s turn.

On Thanksgiving the graves in this corner are a bewildering cacophony.\u00a0 Many families clearly see visiting them as a part of the holidays.\u00a0 November is just after Dia de los Muertos, and grave decorations are a jarring combination of pumpkins, skulls and babies.\u00a0 Plastic flowers combine with real ones.\u00a0 Votive candles bear the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. A small statue, at first glance a dark figure from a surreal dream, resolves into a chubby infant holding a bird.

Against the fence at the edge of the cemetery, with warehouses and barrels visible through the slats, birthday balloons are the memorials left by families unable to afford elaborate gravestones.\u00a0 Where the children are buried, dolls sit next to little figurines of elephants or cartoon characters, under photographs of smiling sisters and brothers.\u00a0 The little pony, beloved by six-year olds, has become a blown-up metallic unicorn.

After putting her decorations on the flat gravestone in front of her, a girl sits remembering who’s buried underneath.\u00a0 In one large photograph a father stares out from the past.\u00a0 Other families, unwilling to forget the faces of their buried dead, have set small photographic portraits into the stones of other markers.

Many tomb decorations celebrate life, as though the person in the ground is still there to party.\u00a0 A bottle of brandy and a beer, a calacas with a guitar, and even a snow globe surround a flag, candles with saints, and the statue of a strangely pensive child.\u00a0 It’s an altar for Day of the Dead, in the campo santo, or the holy field that belongs to them.

Walking away, I notice a new burial.\u00a0 An enormous flower decoration spells out DAD – another father receiving his family’s tribute.\u00a0 People say funerals and burial arrangements are for the living, rather than for the dead.\u00a0 The dead, after all, don’t live to see them.\u00a0 But if they somehow were able to see what’s come after they’re gone, the ones buried under the flat stones and balloons are probably happier than the respectable folks in the grey mausoleums.

THANKSGIVING IN THE STOCKTON GRAVEYARD
Photographs by David Bacon
https:\/\/
davidbaconrealitycheck.
blogspot.com\/2021\/11\/
thanksgiving-in-stockton-graveyard.html<\/a>

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