TIJUANA — Nobody knew the woman with the finely manicured eyebrows and the cross tattooed across her left arm. Or, if someone did, they did not come forward to claim her. She had a rich head of black hair, pulled behind her head. It seemed she was probably somewhere in her 30s.
For nearly two weeks, her battered body lay on a metal shelf in a large freezer room at this city's morgue, a stucco building just outside of downtown that is surrounded by funeral homes.
Then case number TIJ-0120 was placed in a particleboard casket, like the other bodies of the unknown and unclaimed, and trucked to the city's fosa comun -- common grave. There, the corpses are buried nine deep, each grave marked by a single metal rod with numbers assigned to the dead who lie below.
Most of the unclaimed are Mexicans whose visions of crossing to a better life in the United States have ended tragically -- in car accidents, stabbings or sudden illnesses. Some are Americans -- tourists who had been seeking a bit of revelry or retirees who had moved south of the border in search of cheaper housing.
The morgue and common grave are among the first places authorities search for the missing. They are among the last places many relatives can imagine losing their loved ones.
Yet more than 500 unclaimed bodies are buried, on average, each year in Tijuana. Through June 1 this year, Tijuana officials had buried 288 bodies in the common grave of Municipal Cemetery 11.
Nearly two-thirds were not identified. In Los Angeles County -- which has nearly eight times as many people as Tijuana -- only six bodies could not be identified during that same period.
The bodies of the unclaimed and unidentified will soon fill the 11th cemetery of the unknowns in Tijuana--perhaps the best measure of this city's status as Mexico's ultimate crossroads, a place where the search for a better life sometimes meets lost dreams and a lonely end.
When would-be migrants don't make it north across the border, they are left with few options. Some are able to find temporary jobs and homes. But others sleep on the streets, where they risk getting robbed or assaulted.
Still others become criminals themselves. Many end up dead, far from home. They often don't carry identification, for fear authorities will catch them and send them back where they came from.
