It’s Saturday morning and volunteers are putting up two crosses on what they believe are the graves of Lupe and Mary Gutierrez Gonzales. The graveyard is in Del Mar, near St. Therese of Carmel Church. The twins died in infancy.
“As you can see they passed away in 1929. They were only two days old and they had respiratory problems,” said Michael Beltran, with the La Colonia Community Foundation.
They were very young but they were not forgotten.
Beltran was one of several people who showed up at the cemetery on a recent Saturday morning to tidy up the graveyard and put up two cross markers for Mary and Lupe.
Beltran grew up in La Colonia de Eden Gardens, what some called a little Mexican Village in what’s now Solana Beach. Some families with roots and memories in La Colonia have adopted their community’s cemetery, ensuring its care. Now an archeological survey is helping them in their goal to identify and honor the dead.
Beltran tells of the time the surviving brother of the buried infants met him at a restaurant. The brother knew he was leading an effort to discover the secrets of the cemetery.
“And he tells me, you know, I believe we have two twin sisters there, we just don’t remember where the markers are and they’re gone at this time,” Beltran said.
He and other members of the La Colonia Community Foundation eventually made contact with Jimmy Daniels, a senior archeologist with Michael Baker International. Daniels uses ground penetrating radar, GPR for short.
He scanned the graveyard and produced a report that identified multiple underground anomalies that he believes are grave shafts, most of them unknown and unmarked.
“The Knights of Columbus and the church, they have a record of the number of people that were buried here and it doesn’t match the number of markers that we have,” Daniels said.
Daniels believes the twins are buried in the spot where the two crosses were put up.
“We kind of verified those locations with additional passes with the GPR and found two anomalies that were roughly the size you would expect for an infant burial and kinda evenly spaced apart,” he said. “So this is our best guess as to the location of those two infant burials, just based on information from the community and what we found in the GPR data.”
Daniels said identifying grave sites, definitively, would require physical evidence.
“But that’s not the goal here. The goal here is some semblance of approximation and some sort of scientific evidence to back up the location of these burials, without disturbing the integrity of the burials,” he said.
In addition to graves of the twin girls, on Saturday they located what they believe is the grave of an elderly woman’s sister. The woman remembered approximately where her sister was buried, and GPR data supported her recollection.
A small group of people, most of them with family connections to La Colonia, has been formed to erect new grave markers and keep the graveyard clean. People like Lupe Trejo, who said her grandparents are buried here.
“I like coming out here. It’s fun seeing the families. I like reading the headstones even though I’ve seen them a million times. I wipe them down. Whatever I can do,” Trejo said.
It’s hard to know how many more gravesites will be identified. There are lots of them. Beltran said practically every step you take in this place, you’re walking above a grave.
