Page 3 of 4
Back at Behena's Excelsior home, the three men and Behena's wife, Veronica Hernandez, dumped the coins and wrinkled bills from one box on the dining room table to silently count the stash: $479.20. Another box they picked up later that week from a beauty salon contained another $300. The money will be used to help Perez' family back in Mexico with the roughly $600 cost of getting the body driven from the airport in Villahermosa, Tabasco, to the family's home.
After whisking the money into a box, which will later be wired south of the Rio Grande, Veronica serves her guests cinnamon tea and leftover Mexican pastries from the funeral the day before. They reflect on the difference of dying here versus there. "There, in my town," she starts, "they help us with money, beans and corn, coffee. People come to your house and offer you help."
"There's no need to go around putting out little boxes," Behena adds.
The guests agree that if they die, they'd want to be sent back, too.
"Of course," Veronica says, and Behena tells the story of a woman he met at the consulate the prior week who was sending back her deceased toddler. Someone asked why she didn't bury her daughter here. "This girl said, 'If they [deport] us all out tomorrow, who's going to bring a flower for my child?'"
The family say they'd all follow Perez' body for the burial if they could, as funeral directors say Filipino families often do. "Since they don't give us papers, we can't come and go," Behena says. "We'd all be at the border waiting two months trying to get back here." For the first time that day, everyone at the table laughs.
About 40 mourners shuffle into the pews of Driscoll's Chapel #3 the Sunday after Thanksgiving, one day after Victor Lopez had planned to start his postponed drive to Mexico. Many are family — uncles, cousins. One cousin hands out black bows to attendees; they'll pin them on their shirts for several days, and, later, hang them on their doors.
Over the past two decades, members of the Lopez family have gradually immigrated to San Francisco, many from Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán. Migration to the United States is a thoroughly embedded part of the central coastal state's culture. More Michoacános now live in the United States than in Mexico, the dollars they wire back annually now dwarfing the amount allocated to the state from the federal government.
Lopez' father was caught by the border patrol while attempting to enter the U.S. in May 2001, after which he called his wife from Tijuana: I'm going to try to cross again. That was the last anyone heard from him.
After his father's presumed death, Lopez, the eldest son but just 15, ignored his mother's warnings and left for San Francisco, intending to support his family. He got painting jobs through Gerardo, and sent back enough money for his mother to buy a house from an uncle while Lopez was still a teen.
But the Mission can be full of temptations of quicker money for a young migrant, and in late 2005, Lopez ditched painting for hanging out in the street with thugs Gerardo suspected were gangbangers. Gerardo told his nephew he didn't want these new pals around his kids, so in late 2005, Lopez moved out. He was arrested at Mission and 17th streets for possession of crack cocaine for sale in January 2006, but was deported before he could make his April court date.
Returning to Mexico seemed to snap Lopez out of his short stint with crime. Never telling his mom why he had been deported, he started driving a taxi and attending an evangelical church several times a week. He had hope for the future: He had started dating a nursing student named Magali, the younger sister of his taxi fleet's boss, and eventually proposed to her. He called Gerardo from Mexico: Will you give me one more chance? He wanted to make some money to outfit his future home with Magali. Gerardo accepted: "He was like a son to me."
Lopez returned to San Francisco last summer. This time, Gerardo says Lopez came straight home from painting jobs, preferring to watch Westerns like 3:10 to Yuma and The Magnificent Seven with Gerardo and his kids rather than hanging out with his old troublemaking friends. The Mission suffered a rash of homicides in late summer, but Lopez largely dismissed the violence as something that happened only between gang members, not people who stayed out of it. You can't go out in the street much, he told his mom in their phone conversations. Mostly, he was eager to return to Mexico and marry Magali.
In late November, the San Francisco medical examiner traced the path of a single bullet through Lopez' chest. Driscoll's staff collected Lopez' corpse in a body bag and embalmed him, a standard requirement when shipping the deceased to another country. The embalmer's apprentice dressed him in the black tux Gerardo's wife had bought at Serramonte Center, so that his fiancée could see him the way he was supposed to return to her: as her groom. The apprentice lowered Lopez into the $2,595 "Paradise" white metal casket with silver angels inset in the corners, which Gerardo had chosen earlier that week.
For the funeral, red roses cascaded down the casket, placed between two gold columns in the chapel. A deacon led the mourners in murmuring a litany of Hail Marys for Lopez' soul. Gerardo placed a rose on his nephew's chest, and a funeral attendant lowered the casket's lid. As the family filed out, the casket was left behind to await its Wednesday midnight flight.
Cristella Hernandez of Driscoll's now had a deadline. At 9:00 on the Monday morning after the funeral, she hopped into the funeral home's green Ford Windstar body removal van and blazed downtown to start her rounds. The city health department for the death certificate; the county clerk's office to get it certified; the secretary of state to seal the death certificate with an Apostille; and the embalmer's letter stating that Lopez had been embalmed and that the casket contained only his remains. Skipping to the front of the long line at the Mexican Consulate, she turned in the documents for approval.
