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NEW BEDFORD — On his face and in his silence, Antonio Colaj Olmos carried the weight of the world as he visited a nutrition store on Acushnet Avenue.
For the day, it was briefly turned into a memorial for his wife, Nicolasa Ventura Colaj, 33, who died after a driver in an SUV hit her as she left a church service on the Ave early in the morning on Jan. 1. The Bristol County District Attorney’s Office said they are pressing charges against a 16-year old Dartmouth resident in relation to the collision. Hundreds had gathered to buy plates of carne asada, rice, tortillas, and salad to raise money for Colaj’s funeral expenses.
“She’s still at the mortuary,” Olmos told The Light in Spanish at the time. “We don’t know when we’ll be able to send her back.”
The primary goal of the fundraiser was to raise what could be up to $12,000 necessary to repatriate Colaj’s remains to Guatemala. Though it may be cheaper to bury her remains in the U.S., it is of the utmost importance to the culture and beliefs of the K’iche’ community.
“To many people the Guatemalan nation-state is an abstraction and their real connection is with their place of birth,” said Lisa Maya Knauer, an anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth who works with the K’iche’ community. “That is where the spirits of their ancestors are. You want to go back and kind of complete the cycle so your body will not be at rest until it returns to the place it began.
“Your spirit needs to be where there are other spirits that are part of its trajectory.”
What is repatriation?
Patrick Saunders grew up in the Saunders-Dwyer Funeral Homes, founded by his grandfather in 1967. He took over the business as funeral director in 2015.
“It’s the process of reuniting someone with their homeland,” Saunders said. “It’s not extremely common but we get them once or twice a year.”
The process is pretty straightforward, he said. Much of it involves the standard funeral costs, but the price climbs when it comes to paying an estimated $2,000 for air cargo fare.
The flight may be on a typical airliner but there are added steps required, including an air tray to contain the hermetically sealed metal casket that holds the actual casket with the body. While there is no legal requirement that the body be embalmed beforehand, airline policies generally do require it.
Saunders said his family’s funeral business started to do repatriations in the 1990s, about the time that the city’s Guatemalan community started to grow.
“Thankfully, I didn’t have to start doing it but I know my father and uncle had to figure out what we have to do in the process,” he said. “I remember when I was 17 or 18, I’d have to bring the passport to the Guatemalan Consulate to have them canceled.”
Now, the process of filling out the proper customs forms, canceling passports with the Guatemalan government, and arranging transport of the remains have become a solemn choreography for the business. Right up to the last step, when the body is transferred to a funeral official in Guatemala City.
“Either a receiving funeral home there picks up the body or the family does, and they have to pay a customs fee in Guatemala,” Saunders said. “And we found that if the funeral home paid it, it was less than if the family themselves did.”
All in all, the process generally costs around $9,000, Saunders said. He estimated that he has done about 15 such repatriations, with the vast majority of those to Guatemala.
“For Portuguese, it’s not common that you send someone to Portugal,” he said. “Cape Verdeans, it’s not common either. A lot of the time our Portuguese and Cape Verdean families have a longer time in the U.S.
“Like anything else, there are different cultures,” he said, “and different customs and religious practices.”
The impetus for repatriation has its roots in Mayan spirituality, culture and social structure before the Spanish conquest of the region in the 16th and 17th centuries, according to Knauer.
“This is not I think unique to the Maya community but it’s true to some Indigenous communities and a lot of Indigenous communities in Latin America,” she said. “It goes back to a deeply rooted cultural belief system.”
Over the centuries, first under Catholicism and then under Protestant evangelicalism, authorities actively suppressed many traditional practices. Others fell by the wayside as Christianity took root. In the 1980s, as genocide made indigeneity itself dangerous, evangelicalism took over under the military rule of Gen. Efraín Rios Montt. He imposed evangelicalism throughout Guatemala, especially in Indigenous communities.
But some traditions refused to die, including the belief in the soul’s need for closure after death.
“The Christian religions have been hostile to traditional belief,” Knauer said. “But a lot of those beliefs have remained impervious.
“And one of those is belief in the deep connection between the living and the dead,” she continued. “This is very much a place-based culture where your tierra natal is very important.”
Knauer said that beliefs about the afterlife contend that to be at rest, one’s body must return to the land where it was born. It is also the place to reunite with your ancestors.
“That is where the spirits of their ancestors are so on the one hand, you want to go back and complete the cycle. On the other hand, your body will not be at rest until it returns to the place its life began,” Knauer said. “You want to go back to where the umbilical cord is buried,” she added.
Communal gathering
“¡Más tortillas por favor!” Cristina Garcia Gonzáles shouted over the din at the tortilla sale. More tortillas please!
An assembly line of K’iche’ women, many from San Andrés Sajcábaja, Colaj’s hometown, formed an assembly line as orders streamed in. Gonzáles, who organized the fundraiser, said they sold 390 pounds of carne asada, totaling 500 plates that included rice, beans, and salad, to send Colaj’s remains home.
“God has called me to help those most in need,” she said in Spanish, “and this is one of those moments.”
Gonzáles found herself on the receiving end of such aid in 2021. In February of that year, a relative of hers was among the 55 killed when a tractor-trailer carrying 200 migrants crashed in the state of Chiapas, Mexico, bordering Guatemala.
“We did something here to raise funds and help the family out back home,” she recalled.
Coffee cans and boxes that bear the names of the deceased regularly appear at local Central American businesses soliciting funds for the repatriation. Apart from the material help the drives provide, it functions as a way to fortify connections within the community.
“The community is not a wealthy community and it’s not possible for a family to come up with the $10,000 or $11,000 it might cost on their own,” Knauer said. “It is very much a community thing that you bring people together, you compile what you can, you gather resources. Everybody chips in.”
Colaj’s remains arrived in Guatemala on Jan. 29, her final journey delayed by a massive storm that dumped over a foot of snow in the region.
“This is the Maya version of the circle of life,” Knauer said. “Life and death are intertwined and interdependent.”
Kevin G. Andrade can be contacted at kandrade@newbedfordlight.org.
