Lakeside cemeteries literally come to life when the Día de Muertos season rolls around.

The grounds bustle with folks who come to spruce up gravesites and pay tribute to their departed relatives. Vendors haunt the spaces outside graveyard walls, hawking pots and bundles of marigolds, artificial flowers, and memorial wreaths to decorate tombs, snack foods and cool drinks to visitors arriving in throngs on November 1 and 2. Every camposanto is transformed into a place of bittersweet and rainbow-hued remembrance.

Except for the two foreign sections of Chapala’s Panteón Municipal. They remain lonely and eerily quiet in contrast to the whirlwind of activity happening in close proximity. Chalk up the distinction to several factors. Most of those buried there have no living relatives here. Graveyards are not generally comfort zones for Anglos. And a unified community effort to renew and preserve expat gravesites and honor their occupants is sorely missing.   

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