Culture : Family Reunion for the Dead : Two-day celebration among Mexicans extends hospitality--and one for the road--to visiting spirits.

SAN ANDRES MIXQUIC, Mexico — The candles on the graves have burned down, the bright orange cempaxochitl flowers have faded and Damaso San Juan Martinez will awake this morning convinced that he spent the past 24 hours with his dead grandfather.

While most cultures devise ways to discourage ghostly hauntings, Mexicans welcome the spirits of their dead loved ones home on Nov. 1 and 2. They burn candles at the cemetery in an all-night welcoming vigil and sprinkle flower petals in a path to their homes where they have built special altars to the “faithful dead.”

The tradition goes back to the time of the Aztecs and the Mayas--long before Europeans set foot on the continent. It survived Mexico’s conversion to Catholicism in the 16th Century--people just modified the custom, mainly by adding rosaries to their home altars. And the tradition continues today in the face of department store promotions for Halloween that send middle-class children trick-or-treating and despite the blatant commercialism of the most famous Day of the Dead festivals here and on the island of Janitzio in western Mexico.

“In terms of its impact on society, this is the most important celebration of the whole year,” said Luis Berruecos, director of the ethnology department at Mexico’s National Anthropology and History Museum. “It is a day for joy, a day for sadness. It is a cease-fire, when people are expected to forgive each other. It gives people inner strength. It is sad to see a relative die, but it is not so sad if you have this belief.”

“This belief” is the conviction that one day a year, the dead return to life. Like Emily Gibbs in Thorton Wilder’s play “Our Town,” they rise from their graves and go home to visit.

“I can’t prove it scientifically, but you feel something strange,” San Juan Martinez said. “They say that the dogs bark, because they have a gift for seeing spirits.”

San Juan Martinez and his family live a few blocks from the square of this village on the outskirts of Mexico City. Downtown, a band on a makeshift grandstand near the church blares out over the loudspeakers that broadcast continuous masses for the dead. Visitors line up to enter the church and then stop for a taco or to play a carnival game at the booths lining the streets.

Children dressed as witches and skeletons walk through the festival carrying jack-o’-lanterns and asking for money or candy. Francisco Garza, a native of the town, has turned his front yard into an open-air restaurant.

“It used to be a religious festival, but it has become commercial,” he said. “The people of the village take advantage of it to make a little money.”

But not at the San Juan Martinez home. “It seems that it is up to the humblest people to carry on our traditions,” the mustachioed 32-year-old father said.

In their two-room, cinder-block home, he and his family have built an altar for loved ones. It is simple, but has all the traditional elements: water, sugar cane, incense, salt, chocolate and a special, sweet “Bread of the Dead” that they baked at home.

The offerings are to refresh the dead after their journey. It is a long way back from the nether world to the land of the living.

Nov. 1, the day when tradition says dead children return home, the bread on the altar is made into animal figures and doughnuts. Toys are placed among the offerings.

On Monday, San Juan Martinez planned to add a beer for his grandfather and pulque --a mild alcoholic drink made from a succulent similar to the century plant--for an uncle who disappeared decades ago and is presumed dead.

“We always remember the best of people,” he said. “My grandfather did not smoke or drink hard liquor, but he liked his beer. He was always good to the children. He died in March, 1991, and we still miss him.

“This is a way to have him here, not in life, but in spirit,” he said.

His aunt, Maria Guadalupe Martinez, who lives next door, has an equally compelling reason for building her altar.

“My grandmother taught me to build the altar for the dead the traditional way,” she said. “Now, I build the altar to welcome her. I tell my daughters to watch what I do so that some day, when I am dead, they will build an altar for me.”

Monday, she planned to cook a big dinner of traditional Mexican foods, such as mole , or chicken in chocolate sauce, so that her dead loved ones could return to heaven well-fed.

She will invite the neighbors in to share the feast, eating from the altar along with the spirits.

Then, she and her daughters will light candles to lead the dead back to their graves. Often, that walk back to the cemetery ends with “one for the road” at the burial spot.

“Foreign visitors are often shocked to see graveside drinking, but pity the poor Mexican president who decides to prohibit drinking in the cemetery on Day of the Dead,” ethnologist Berruecos said. “He will not last one more day in office.”

In the nearby village of San Gregorio, people do not just wait for their dead at home; they go out to the cemetery to welcome them.

The night of Nov. 1 and dawn of Nov. 2, they keep vigil at the graves, decorating them with flowers, candles and cempaxochitl petals. As Maria Guadalupe Alvarado decorates the grave of her Aunt Adelaida, dead for 24 years, she tells a Day of the Dead legend.

In the time of the Aztecs, there lived a widower who was curious about whether the dead truly returned to life. He pestered the priests so much with his questions that one Day of the Dead, the clerics--familiar with the legend that canines have special abilities to see spirits--rigged up a pair of dogs’ eyes like eyeglasses for the widower so he could find out for himself.

On Nov. 1, he saw the dead children jump out of their graves and run home to play with their toys. The next day, he saw a procession of dead adults coming from the cemetery, led by his late wife.

“Why have they made you the leader?” he asked her.

“I head the parade this year because of you,” she replied. “You are so curious about us, we have decided you should join us.”

“And he died right then,” concluded Alvarado.