Hortensia invites you to her room. She rummages through the clothes that hang from a hook in the center of the room, finds David's uniform, and takes his medals from the pockets, proudly holding them up for you. He fought in the Revolution under Zapata, Villa, and Carranza--all three--"for the experience. He wanted to try out everything." And he has first-hand accounts that contradict the history books. But David does not have papers to prove that he is a veteran of the Revolution, and so the government will not grant him a pension. "People give us things. But truly it is a hard way to live, very hard."

David enters the room. He is soft-spoken, and his tongue moves through the hole left by two missing teeth on the bottom row. "What tales have you been telling the Senorita?"

"Is it not true, David, that you worked in the United States?"

"Yes. I worked in California, in...Idaho for seven years." David was a migrant worker during World War II. He remembers the need for labor and idealizes the working conditions in the United States. He wants to go back and work. He remembers some broken English. Hortensia will not let him: "It is better that we are here; I cannot learn English--they beat me in school for it."

Don Calixto stumbles into the room, two friends close behind. "Senorita, friends, I am 73 years old. And do you know how many grandchildren I have? 73. You know: you have one woman in one place, another in another."

Suddenly a bell starts ringing. The boy Oton, his plastic-covered sombrero pulled down over his eyes as usual, has run up the ladder that leans against the church wall to the roof and is swinging the bell back and forth. A three-day-old child has died. It was unable to urinate and the doctor could not be summoned from across the fields, over the bumpy road, fast enough.

You walk down to the house. The tiny room is lit only by a candle. The white, intricately carved coffin, carried on the roof of the bus from San Martin, lies beneath the small altar with its cross and holy pictures. Someone opens it, and some children are carried up to kiss the dead child. Then the mother comes and sobs, "My child, my most loved one, why has He taken you from me?" And the old great-grandmother, Guadalupe Cruz, also comes to weep over it.

Outside, the children are prepared with fresh flowers. They file up the road to the church, singing, four of them bearing the little coffin on a crude wooden frame. Inside, Don Efren plays a twangy banjo and Senora Gudelia and Senora Rosa sing an endless song in nasal harmony while two cousins perform a funereal ritual before the coffin. The other children play for their mothers' attention, or titter, or hold back their tears.

Then the coffin is borne through the mud and past the grunting of the pigs up to a plateau where the graveyard lies above the dark hills and valleys. The grave was dug the day before among the similar small graves which comprise more than half of the graveyard. Don Faustino lowers the casket, pours holy water over it in the shape of the cross, covers it with planks and quickly, with the help of other men, shovels the dirt back in.

On the way down the hill, you hear Hortensia saying, "But weddings are much sadder; I cry much more at weddings." The other women swallow their grins nervously. Don Imanuel walks up beside you. "Senorita, you should marry. Enjoy life before you die. For we all have to die sometime, you know." In the town, the brothers are dedicating a song over the loud-speaker to the mother of the dead child: "For Dona Rufina, in her grief."

It's sunset and the boys, covered in plastic, have long ago returned from the fields with their animals. Now, in their miniature adults' clothes, they are playing ball beside the school. The little girls with their dusty legs, giggle playing children's games that you cannot understand, and, if you ask them what they are doing, gaze up at you and say, "we're just here." You ask the youth Felipe, who is leaning against the church wall with his friends, watching the game, if he likes it here in the town. He looks at you shyly, perplexed. "Well, of course I like it: it is my town."

Sage Sohier spent two months in Vicente Guerrero working for the American Friends Service Committee.