1994

1994 marks scenes set in both San Diego and Mexico, and gives a specific calendar frame to a Day of the Dead observance shadowed by recent mass killing. In Mexico, Don Adán Barrera’s ritual of remembrance turns the year’s date into a measure of grief: nine graves, nine shrines, and nine meals for relatives murdered only weeks earlier.

Date and Setting

The year is explicitly attached to scenes in San Diego and Mexico. The supplied passages do not establish that every event in either place occurs in 1994; rather, they locate particular moments in that year, including a San Diego setting and a separate sequence in Mexico.

Day of the Dead in Mexico

The Mexican scene falls on the Day of the Dead, described as a major day in the country. Don Adán Barrera has spent the day visiting cemeteries. He has nine graves to visit, builds a small shrine at each, and lays out an elaborate meal for each dead relative, making remembrance a concrete, repeated act rather than a passing reflection.

Recent Violence and the Meaning of the Year

The nine family members had been killed by Güero Méndez’s men in a single night, barely a month before the cemetery visits. Disguised in the black uniforms of federal officers, the killers took some victims from their homes and abducted others from streets in Mexico City, Mexico, and Guadalajara. They tortured them in safe houses and left their bodies on busy corners to be found by morning street sweepers. The proximity of the killings to the 1994 observance makes the ritual an immediate response to violence: each grave and meal answers, in the language of family remembrance, to a loss that is still painfully recent.