a requiem for the miners in Mexico

If a kiss, love,
if a kiss sees the light above,
don’t tell the boss
that I still love you,
go count
of the flowers of joy,
of the gift you put
on my chest and what it looked like.
Don’t comment up there
that your kisses, my life,
they lit up like candles
at the bottom of the mine.

The miners, Salvador Pliego (fragment)

There is nothing more certain than your arrival. Sister of life, death is inalienable to being, despite the fear that its evocation produces. It is that death is not rehearsed, it is not learned, nor is it corrected: when it calls us from beyond, it summons us only once and with no possibility of return. This explains our need to transcend and immortalize ourselves in the memory of others.

In Mexico, death is celebrated because it is the natural conclusion of life. Attentive to tradition, when the Day of the Dead arrives, we Mexicans remember our deceased and do our best to brighten their way to Mictlán with colored offerings of cempasúchil, sugar skulls, pan de muerto and a happy repetition of leaves of chopped paper . Made with centuries of wisdom, these rituals help us lighten the weight of guilt, minimize pending debts and believe that what was not reconciled has been resolved.

But death is not always joy, but an accumulation of anger and frustration. The offerings themselves have lost much of their calming ability; especially when the deceased has lost his life in a violent act or the deceased woman has been strangled and harassed by a femicide.

This year I will consecrate my offering to the beings I have loved and also to the dead men and women in the mines due to the injustice and lack of political will that hovers over their stories. I do so in an attempt to feel a small part of the pain that their families are experiencing and with the purpose of joining the voices of so many miners who, throughout the existence of our country, have denounced the inhuman working conditions that they cause. fatal accidents and the practical offensive of reparations of damage that cannot be repaired, but must be prevented.

It is not difficult to understand that something is wrong when, despite the fact that mining was conceived in the initial period of Colonial Mexico and after independent Mexico, in a period that covers more than five hundred years, so far in the 21st century we have eight accidents recognized by the authorities -many are not- due to the lack of security with which miners operate in our country: the last one, very recent, happened in Indé, Durango and left a dead miner who adds to the more than 3,103 who have perished in the mines of Mexico between 1883 and 2022.

Perhaps it is because of its irremediable nature that it is so frustrating for us not to be able to dialogue with death, see it coming or have the time to prepare the game. As painful as deaths due to disease are, in addition to the sadness and emptiness left by those who die in old age, nothing is like dying by suffocation, drowning in an indolent earth that denies us breath, or dying feeling the embers of an explosion. As for the bereaved, I can think of the tragedy of being forced to honor a dead man without a grave and lacking a physical space to visit him, mourn him and share his secrets.

In these days of nostalgia, offerings and evocation I will think of the miners who have lost their lives in the mines of our country. I hope many will join in this humble, but heartfelt tribute. I will also wish eternal rest to the eleven women victims of femicide who die every day in our country. I wish I didn’t have to. Hopefully very soon they will be less and in the best of cases, none.