KUMEYAAY CEMETERY

Para Español Traduzca esta página inglesa al español

The Kumeyaay cemetery of San Jose de la Zorra Indian village participates in the Mexican DAY OF THE DEAD Dia de los Muertos. This is an annual Mexican tradition where family members and friends clean up the graveyards, decorate the graves and light candles in honor of the dead buried there.

Pictured standing at the grave of her beloved grandmother, EVA SALAZAR poses for a picture. Although Eva posed for this photo, she and her five children participated in the cleaning, decorating and lighting of the candles in honor of their many deceased relatives here in the Kumeyaay Indian burial ground.

The burial grounds were empty when this picture was made, and no other pictures were taken during the event out of respect for participating families and their privacy.

During the day and early evening the cemetery was full of Kumeyaay Indian children, adults and elders cleaning the cemetery, decorating the graves, remembering their ancestors and socializing.

Webmaster's note:

I received permission to photograph this event days in advance directly from San Jose de la Zorra tribal leader and Kumeyaay elder Andres Vega, including support from Eva's family members to publish this picture.

This DIGITAL PICTURE was exposed for six seconds at f/8 (on a tripod) .nef RAW format.

The file was opened in Adobe Photoshop in 16-bit Adobe RGB and optimized in that high-bit adjustment-layer workflow, and converted to sRGB for the Kumeyaay web sites.

Cultural Pictures, Writing and Web Page Design Contributed by webmaster, multimedia journalist GARY G BALLARD, San Diego.