When we travel by car on the roads of southeastern Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula, we can delight in different landscapes, from forests and hills to beautiful beaches.
However, in the journey through the states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, Tabasco, Veracruz, Quintana Roo, Campeche, and Yucatán there is something that catches the attention. It is the number of empty tombs with crosses of different sizes and shapes placed on the edge of the roads, which are the memory of a tragedy.
The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy indicates that the name of this type of altar is “cenotaph”, which means “funerary monument in which the corpse of the person to whom it is dedicated is not present”, from the late Latin cenotaphĭum, and this from the Greek kenotáphion which means “empty tomb”.
These are crosses on the side of the road, or buildings to protect religious images, photos, and even the person’s belongings.
The writer Pablo Pablo Huerta Gaytán clarifies that these niches or chapels are placed in places where people suffered a tragic death, which is why it is common to see them on the roads. However, they are also placed on streets or avenues within cities, although less and less frequently in cities.
The author expresses that, in reality, it has become a tradition in almost all Latin American countries, whose elaboration is a cultural and religious expression inherited from the Colonial era.
In some municipalities of states such as Chiapas, Oaxaca, or Tabasco, it is believed that they are established not only to remember the deceased but that when it is a violent death: crash, rollover, hitting pedestrians or cyclists, the soul or spirit comes out. Unexpectedly the body is not aware that he is already dead.
Then some families usually make a kind of procession, with prayers for nine days (they could use the deceased’s clothes), from the place where they settle to where they were buried.
In the states of Yucatán, Campeche, and Quintana Roo, on the Yucatán Peninsula, there is also the custom of building these empty tombs or cenotaphs in a chapel-type style with a cross, with the intention of remembering the relatives who were victims of a crime or a tragedy.
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