ABSTRACT
Death is the ultimate human weakness, the ultimate limitation, and every culture must conceptualize weakness and limitation. A central concern with death has been recurrent in western philosophy: it has certainly not been so in western social science. Patterns of behavior about death and bereavement are among areas that are most conservative and most resistant to change of any culture or subculture. The value placed on respect in the Mexican American culture has probably been greatly underestimated as a conservative force. A commentator on death’s treatment in Western art is disturbed by contemporary Mexican depiction of death in art. Many Mexican Americans, even in Los Angeles, did not have the experience of immigration, and the “community of the past” for most Mexican Americans in New Mexico, with its predominantly “charter-member” contingence, would be entirely different. Sampling for community values is a difficult problem in the study of Mexican Americans.
