The Homecoming Hearse

Alberto Diaz was a short, thin man. He had a mustache, a goatee and a ponytail, and he grew up in the village of Maxela in Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest states. He immigrated to Southern California 20 years ago, eventually settling in Ontario along with others from his hometown. He made his living in Ontario for many years, working at a factory that made aboveground swimming pools, but his heart remained in Maxela. He learned little English.

Diaz’s job helped him support his wife and two children, who remained in Maxela. He would visit them when he could, at least once a year. Then, late last year, he was diagnosed with colon cancer. Within a few months, at the age of 43, Diaz was dead. A few days later, his body was loaded onto a Mexico City-bound Delta flight, where it fell into the experienced hands, and black Grand Marquis hearse, of Oscar Cedillo.

Cedillo drives for Funerales Olimpia, a Mexico City funeral parlor. For five years he has been driving dead immigrants back to be buried in the places, and among the people, they left behind. If the immigrant’s persistent dream is to return home someday, it’s the job of Cedillo and other drivers to accompany some of those travelers on the final leg of what often has been a long and difficult journey.

Each year, according to the Mexican government, families arrange to have approximately 3,000 corpses of immigrant relatives flown back to Mexico from the United States for burial. A small collection of funeral homes in Mexico takes these corpses home. At least four funeral homes in Mexico City provide this service; Olimpia is one of the cheapest. For between $150 and $350, Olimpia will transport a body from the Mexico City airport to anywhere in the 10 states surrounding the nation’s capital.

Mexicans are the archetype for this world of blurred borders and mass movements of people. Over the decades, they have left home and come to the United States by the tens of millions--numbers greater than perhaps those of any group that ever left for another country. In the United States, a poor man who works hard can give his children a better future, so leaving Mexico makes sense.

But human beings don’t always obey socio-economic theory. Immigration, especially, is a story of the human heart, where nothing is neat or simple. The American Dream is not necessarily the Mexican immigrant’s dream. Instead, the immigrant often yearns to one day go home for good, to be comfortable and comforted, to be the stranger no more. That is why so many people who have achieved so much in the United States still ache for the country from which they fled.

Says Roberto Garcia, a son of Olimpia’s owner: “Every Mexican who dies up there, his last desire is to return to his hometown.”

This paradox explains vendors at the Paramount Swap Meet who sell Mexicans ostrich-skin cowboy boots and belts adorned in piteado-style stitching. It explains stores on Pacific Avenue in Huntington Park that find a market for grainy videotapes of amateur bull riders at Mexican village fiestas. It explains businesses everywhere that sell these same customers international telephone cards and airline tickets to Mexico. A good dollop of the Los Angeles economy depends on Mexicans’ desire to be reminded of the country they left, and to someday return to it.

This also explains the existence, in a working-class neighborhood near the Mexico City airport, of Funerales Olimpia.

The funeral home sits quietly in a narrow storefront on the poor eastern side of Mexico City. Outside rages the immense Ignacio Zaragoza Boulevard, a cacophonous channel of buses, cars and taxis. Olimpia is a funeral home for the working class, which is how it fell into transporting immigrant bodies. One day in 1992, a funeral director in San Diego called to ask Olimpia’s owner, Telesforo Garcia, whether he could pick up the body of an immigrant at the airport and take it home cheaply.

The immigrant’s return is now a sizable part of Olimpia’s business. Every year, the funeral parlor takes home 150 to 300 bodies from the United States. Garcia and his sons have a Web site, www.funeralesolimpia.com, and they have considered advertising in the United States. Each month the company also transports 20 to 30 bodies of people who had migrated to Mexico City from the provinces but didn’t want to spend eternity in the capital they never loved.

Olimpia driver Oscar Cedillo is a thin, unassuming, mustachioed fellow with hair that seems permanently matted from attempted sleep, of which he rarely gets enough. He has worked at funeral homes since he was 11, and at Olimpia for a decade. Now 27, he thinks nothing of spending hours alone with his passengers, winding his hearse through city streets or the Mexican outback. Old ladies everywhere cross themselves as he passes. Mothers’ tears rarely reach him. Nor do the stifled sobs of grandfathers, or the wife of the deceased pulling her hair. He has driven caskets up the most harrowing mountain paths and across the most desolate plains.

“My parents don’t like that I haul dead bodies,” he says. “They’re afraid I’ll bring the spirits home with me. But I tell them I like it.”

There remains in Cedillo’s heart a tender, almost proprietary spot for the immigrants he takes home. He’ll defend them to those who find what he does ghoulish. “People are afraid of hearses,” he says. “But I think you should be more afraid of a live person than a dead one.” On long trips, he sometimes sleeps in the hearse alongside the casket.

Most of the people whom Cedillo takes home are men who died too young. Some were shot or stabbed; more often they died of diabetes, heart attacks, work accidents, AIDS or a variety of cancers. Above all, they are anonymous--absorbed and forgotten in the swollen river of humanity that social scientists call immigration. Their deaths register only with their families, and sometimes not even then.

To accompany Cedillo on his trips is to see the roots of Mexican immigration. Many villages he visits are gloriously bucolic. The air is clean, and on sunny mornings the villages sparkle like crystal. But without a meaningful economy, young people or hope, they are quaint only to those from somewhere else.

Maxela, Alberto Diaz’s hometown, is one of these villages. It climbs a hill of dry brush in northern Guerrero. A three-mile road connecting it to a nearby highway recently was paved, but that only made it easier for the men to leave for El Norte. Most of the 3,000 people whom Maxela counts as its townspeople live somewhere else.

Diaz’s body arrives at night, but even then it’s easy to see why he left. Maxela is arid and dusty. It rarely rains, and subsistence crops are failing, sending even more residents than usual to places such as Ontario and Houston, Texas. But amid the despair, expensive houses of concrete and brick cling to the hillside and rise high in the night. These houses were built with U.S. dollars, which, being more constant than the rain, are what sustains the town. Many of the homes are vacant; their owners are abroad. So the houses serve not as homes but as promises to return.

“The money up there can’t buy much up there, but it can down here,” says Catalina Martinez, Diaz’s aunt. “So with dollars, they build their little homes.”

In his many trips to villages such as this, Cedillo has learned not to smile or talk too much around the mourners. He did not know the deceased. So once the casket is unloaded and the documents signed, he’s on his way. Alberto Diaz, at last, is home to stay.

Still, the man who drove him the last leg of his journey wants nothing more than to go north to the United States. “I just want to see it for myself,” he says. He imagines living well, working for an American funeral parlor. He asks if there are any jobs at funeral homes in Los Angeles, and what might be the best way to slip into the country.

“If I were single, I’d already have gone up there to Las Vegas, Disneylandia. But I don’t have anyone to go with, or anyone to stay with once I’m there.”

So instead, Oscar Cedillo, the immigrant’s last ride, remains in Mexico and waits to drive the next one home.