The Final Journey

Among the possibly hundreds of obscure and uncomfortable tidbits of information in Portland funeral director Erin Phelps' brain, one jumps out: Families of Mexican migrants who die here tend to favor a steel casket known as "The Bradford."

Priced for $862 at Phelps' Omega Funeral and Cremation Service on Southeast 122nd Avenue, the Bradford comes in five colors—including baby blue, eggshell white and cotton-candy pink.

But the Bradford is a suitable pick for more than affordability or aesthetics, Phelps says.

Most families of illegal Mexican immigrants want their undocumented loved ones buried in Mexico. And the Mexican government requires that bodies coming back south arrive in sealed metal caskets for safety reasons.

At a time when illegal immigration is a hot topic everywhere from the Oregon Legislature to the 2008 presidential campaign trail, the debate turns on whether U.S. taxpayers should pay for services that go to undocumented adults and their children.

But there is one service that gets no taxpayer support: burying undocumented immigrants abroad.

And that passage home, when death arrives unexpectedly, is often a struggle for poor families. Take Carlos Encarnación Bautista, 23. When he died last April, his family in Hillsboro set up collection boxes to raise money to send him back to Oaxaca.

A small but growing number of Portlanders have acquired firsthand knowledge of details like this and the popularity of the Bradford as part of the burgeoning and overlooked business of dealing with the cold realities of everyday life faced by illegal immigrants.

In recent years, Phelps and his wife, Kathy, who co-own the funeral business in outer Southeast Portland, have helped, on average, two families per month return relatives to their home countries.

Often that home is in Mexico, says Phelps, whose business serves about 65 families a month.

"Their life here is temporary," Phelps says of his Mexican clients on a recent Friday while seated in the parlor of his funeral home, in which signs are in English and Spanish. His observation is both matter-of-fact and unintentionally Zen-like.

Mexican culture has long held that family members should be buried where relatives can visit them easily.

And while undocumented immigrants from Mexico are attending school, working at jobs and buying homes in the United States in ever greater numbers, their shared desire to be buried in Mexico is perhaps the clearest indication of their ambiguous status in this country.

Águstin García, the owner of García Funeral Home in Mexico City, is one of the Phelpses' partners in this endeavor. "Although it costs a lot of money, people want to return to Mexico," García says.

As proof, García adds that he has assisted close to 2,300 families in Mexico City retrieve the bodies of loved ones from the United States this year. Just 10 years ago, that number would have been closer to 200 a year, García says.

It costs more than $4,000, including airfare in the cargo hold, to repatriate a body to Mexico. In some cases, the Mexican government will cover up to half the cost of sending the body home.

And it takes nearly two weeks to process all the paperwork and hold both a wake and a Mass service in the United States.

It's not just local funeral directors who are seeing more of this niche business.

Sarah Braun Hamilton has helped numerous families translate official documents like death certificates from English into Spanish, a process she has called "really sad work," through the International Language Bank with the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization in Portland.

"It's easy to disconnect the business of that from people's lives," Braun Hamilton says of her other jobs. "But when you're talking about a death certificate, there is always more awareness that this is real."

She notes, too, that most of the death certificates she has helped translate lack Social Security numbers, one indication the deceased people probably were not in the country lawfully.

To Phelps, such matters are inconsequential.

"Following the person's death, whether they are here legally or not is beside the point," Phelps says. "I have a lot of respect for these families."

WWeek 2015