To Celebrate Day of the Dead, One Mexican Town Digs Up Its Dead

Maria Luisa Euan looked on tenderly as her second husband gently cleaned the pile of bones that was once her first.

With a white cloth, Jorge Jurado wiped down a femur, dusted vertebrae and polished each of the scattered teeth of his wife’s deceased husband, one by one.

“It’s with love and affection,” said Mr. Jurado, 66, brushing the dirt from what appeared to be a finger. “When she feels happy, I feel happy, too.”

Ms. Euan agreed. Days earlier, they had cleaned the bones of Mr. Jurado’s first wife.

“At our age, we don’t get jealous,” said Ms. Euan, 69. “And with the dead who have gone to rest, even less.”

It is also a ritual of increasing interest to tourists, and to local officials who sense an opportunity — a point of rising tension in Pomuch, one of the final places in Mexico with a living tradition of cleaning the bones of the dead.

Every year in the weeks leading up to Mexico’s famed Day of the Dead holiday — celebrated this weekend — residents of Pomuch head to the cemetery to unpack boxes of disassembled skeletons and dust off their loved ones’ bones, in a ritual intended to honor and soothe the spirits of their ancestors.

“We haven’t abandoned you, and I don’t plan to,” Mauro Canul, a 41-year-old Navy officer, said to his grandfather’s bones as he dusted them with a paintbrush.

The ritual has roots in the Maya civilization that dominated the region until Spanish colonizers arrived in the 1500s.

Scholars believe that Mayans sometimes exhumed remains and rearranged bones as a way to honor the dead, part of a larger belief that death is a passageway to an afterlife where ancestors look after their descendants. It is that belief that underpins Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebrations, which typically involve altars with offerings to deceased relatives’ souls.

Mexico is built on the mixing of Indigenous and Hispanic cultures, and that is true in Pomuch, too. Much of the town’s population has Mayan heritage and is deeply Catholic. Several residents cleaning bones this week cited the Bible as the basis.

Lázaro Hilario Tuz Chi, a Pomuch historian and anthropologist, said Pomuch has long had a rich history with the dead. It was once an important stop on a Maya route to a holy burial ground and a producer of burial shrouds. He said that helped breed a culture focused on the afterlife, which has become even stronger over the past two decades as he and other locals have promoted the bone-cleaning tradition.

As a result, Pomuch has recently landed on the Day of the Dead tourist circuit.

Last week, tour groups of French and Italian tourists spilled out of vans in front of the small tortilla shops across from Pomuch’s cemetery. Couples and families arrived in rental cars. One Dutch couple said they were there on the advice of ChatGPT. Drones sometimes hovered overhead.

“I don’t know if I’d be able to do this with my relatives,” said Chiara Ciliberti, 32, an Italian tourist on a group trip to Cancún.

This year, local officials tried to capitalize on the growing interest.

On Oct. 21, Pomuch’s local government posted on social media that it was offering a chance for people to observe and “participate” in the bone cleaning for 30 pesos, or about $1.60.

Pomuch residents quickly criticized the idea of turning their tradition into a tourist attraction, and many were confused over whether they would have to pay to enter the cemetery.

“The ritual is something totally private. It belongs to the family and their deceased,” said Carlos Ucán, a state lawmaker from Pomuch who criticized the plan on the floor of the legislature. “Many open it up and invite others to see, but even that is already crossing the fine line between sharing and monetizing.”

Eventually the local government reversed course. Pomuch’s mayor, Cevas Yam, said in an interview that his team had communicated poorly, but that he still wanted to find a solution that balances economic opportunity with cultural preservation. “There is sustainable tourism,” he said. “But it’s a very, very sensitive issue.”

Locals appear split.

“I want this tradition to be made known,” said Mr. Canul, just before holding up his grandfather’s skull for several French tourists to photograph. “We’re happy you’re here.”

Not all neighbors were as comfortable. A local handyman, José Fernandez, said his business charging 40 pesos, or about $2, to clean a box of bones was thriving. He said that he cleans roughly 200 remains a year, and that many clients hire him to avoid being under the gaze of outsiders themselves.

Locals traditionally exhume their relatives’ corpses three years after interment. Gravediggers then sometimes clean the remnants of decomposing flesh, before family members rub the bones with rum or quicklime and leave them in the sun to dry.

In subsequent years, the cleaning largely involves lightly brushing the bones, a process that is more about the emotional and spiritual connection with the dead than any actual cleaning, locals said.

Once dusted, the bones are wrapped in a new white, embroidered cloth and arranged in a box until the next year.

Many residents said they clean the bones of grandparents or parents who taught them the tradition, and last week, several older residents had brought along children or grandchildren with the hope that those younger relatives would one day clean their bones.

“They’ll do it on the day they need to, and their children have to do it, too,” said Dulce Cohuo, 84, watching her daughter polish her husband’s skull. “It’s a chain that can’t be broken.”

At the celebration, a group of local schoolteachers prepared the traditional Day of the Dead meal of the Yucatán: pibipollo, a large tamale stuffed with chicken, wrapped in banana leaves and cooked underground. The process, which has Maya origins, is thought to represent a body in a grave, and it has such a connection to death that some locals skip the ritual if a loved one recently died.

The schoolteachers said they wanted to educate outsiders to Pomuch about the tradition. They hoped the community could do the same with the cleaning of the bones — while also preserving the practice.

“That intimacy has been taken away. But my perception is that the people don’t see it in a bad light, but rather as a way to spread what Pomuch is about,” said one teacher, Eduardo Puc Medina.

What is Pomuch about? “We don’t just honor our dead,” his colleague, Marco Mut, explained. “We live with them every day.”