Last trip home to Mexico

Thursday, Jan. 19, 2006 | 7:48 a.m.

To obtain the visa, the following documents are needed:

For more information, call 383-9129.

In the classic song, "Mexico Lindo y Querido," singer Jorge Negrete crooned to his country, "If I die far from you / say that I fell asleep / and bring me back here."

Sharing the sentiment from the song, which means "Beloved and Beautiful Mexico," that's what dozens of families whose loved ones met death on this side of the border did in 2005.

Last year, 137 families in the Las Vegas Valley sent the bodies or cremated remains of their departed to Mexico, according to Euclides del Moral, alternate consul of Mexico in Las Vegas.

Of those, 54 sought financial help from the consulate in paying the hefty price tag -- from $4,000 to $6,000 -- of sending a body to Mexico for burial. The consulate spent $47,000 helping those families.

"In Mexico, the sense of belonging to the country of origin is so strong that many want to return to their homeland in death," del Moral said.

Raquel Casas, UNLV associate professor of history, said the desire to be buried in Mexico is common in immigrant communities across the nation -- particularly among those originally from rural areas.

"People who have lived in a village or town for generations and ventured into a foreign land ... (still have) an attachment to family and natal places," Casas said.

She noted that the custom was the basis for the recently released movie, "The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada," in which Estrada is buried on the Texas side of the border, only to be dug up by his best friend, who insists on taking the body to Mexico to comply with the dead man's last wishes.

Domingo Alfas had the same wish. After years of struggling with diabetes, the 64-year-old Las Vegas resident died Dec. 17.

As he had become sicker in recent months, Alfas resisted the entreaties of his brother and sister-in-law, Jesus and Socorro Alfas, to return to Mexico to see his three children for the first time in decades.

But in a strange twist, when Domingo Alfas died, Jesus Alfas revealed to his wife that his brother had said he wanted to be buried in his hometown near Guadalajara.

"We had to do it," Socorro Alfas said recently, after a day's work cleaning recently built condominiums.

They felt particularly beholden to Domingo Alfas because he had lived with them for 17 years, becoming a part of the immediate family and a doting uncle for their five daughters.

And they soon learned that his sons felt the same way.

"They wanted to be able to visit his grave," Socorro Alfas said.

Casas called this "the continuation of the family and community life."

But on this side of the border, the Alfas family discovered that complying with the last wishes of their loved one would cost a lot of money and involve paperwork.

Del Moral said the average cost of sending a body back to Mexico is about $4,000, but Socorro Alfas said the first place her family visited charged $6,000.

She said she heard from a friend that the consulate would help bear the costs, which wound up being $4,120 -- a helping hand in a time of need, since she earns about $70 a day for occasional work cleaning, and her husband earns about $1,800 a month as a porter at the Bellagio.

The alternate consul said that all families wishing to send the body of a loved one to be buried in Mexico must obtain a visa for that purpose.

The consulate issues the visa after receiving a certificate from a mortuary indicating that the body has been embalmed according to international standards, a death certificate from the Clark County coroner's office and a "burial transit permit," also from the county.

The process can take up to 10 days -- during which families on both sides of the border are often anxious, del Moral said.

"They wish it was immediate," he said.

After wiping the tears off her cheek, Socorro Alfas was able to laugh at the thought of her own death.

"I'm not going to be like him," she said of her brother-in-law. "I want to be buried here.

"All my children and most of my family live here. You think they would go to Mexico to visit my grave?"

Timothy Pratt can be reached at 259-8828 or at timothy@lasvegassun.com.