From The New York Times For Day of the Dead, One Mexican Town Digs Up Its Dead by Jack Nikas

Pomuch, Mexico, is one of the last places where residents clean their relatives’ bones. Now they are grappling with a new challenge: tourists.

Maria Luisa Euan looked on tenderly as her second husband gently cleaned the pile of bones that was once her first.

With a white cloth, Jorge Jurado wiped down a femur, dusted vertebrae and polished each of the scattered teeth of his wife’s deceased husband, one by one.

“It’s with love and affection,” said Mr. Jurado, 66, brushing the dirt from what appeared to be a finger. “When she feels happy, I feel happy, too.”

Ms. Euan agreed. Days earlier, they had cleaned the bones of Mr. Jurado’s first wife.

“At our age, we don’t get jealous,” said Ms. Euan, 69. “And with the dead who have gone to rest, even less.”

Here in Pomuch, a town of 10,000 on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, exhumation is an act of love.

It is also a ritual of increasing interest to tourists, and to local officials who sense an opportunity — a point of rising tension in Pomuch, one of the final places in Mexico with a living tradition of cleaning the bones of the dead.