Musicians Play Role Comforting Mexican Mourners Damien Cavemarch - The New York Times
go to original April 7, 2014

With Guitar and Accordion, Comforting Mexican Mourners (NYTimes/worldnewsstoday)

MEXICO CITY — The gravediggers tossed dirt onto the gray coffin, the dust adding tears to weepy eyes. A young man in a T-shirt poured out a little beer for his cousin, who died at just 27. Then came the surge of music.

Hired for an hour at the entrance to one of Mexico’s biggest, grittiest cemeteries, the Wolves of the Sierra — two friends in black cowboy hats, one with a guitar, the other with an accordion — carried dozens of mourners into contemplation and grief with a classic song about a swallow hoping to fly.

“Today we’re sad, but tomorrow we’ll be happy,” said Jesús Rojas, 33, a cousin of the young man who was buried, Alberto Valvino Blancarte Colunga. “That’s why we have the music, to carry us through.”

Musicians hired for the moment are as integral to Mexican life as tequila and family — often, all three appear together — but in death, melodies play a special role. Ever since the Mexican Revolution, when songs known as corridos became aural obituaries for soldiers killed in battle, music has been used to celebrate the dead and remind mourners of more festive memories.

Especially here in Iztapalapa, a neighborhood of about a million people that has more homicides than any other borough of the capital, the Wolves have become a reliable companion. As the house band for the Panteón Civil de San Nicolás Tolentino, a 280-acre cemetery on a hillside full of graves either overgrown with weeds or graced with fresh flowers, they rarely go a day without being hired.

Read the rest at The New York Times

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