Just past noon Friday, at the bustling corner of a quinceañera boutique on Charter Way, the heady scent of cempasúchiles, also known as marigolds, saturated a makeshift stand.
At the shop’s intersection, a car stops, its passenger readying herself to inquire about the stand’s buckets of vibrant orange flowers — the flora widely known in Mexico as “flor de muerto,” or flower of the dead.
“How much?” the woman passenger asked Matilde Lopez Flores, the boutique’s co-owner and manager of her family’s cempasúchil stands throughout Stockton.
It would be a question Lopez Flores would hear all weekend, as hundreds of customers bought cempasúchiles for Day of the Dead, a holiday observed throughout the first two days of November to remember deceased loved ones.
By Sunday morning, the Lopez Flores family had sold hundreds of bunches — only a portion of the burnt-orange marigolds on stands at almost every major Stockton street corner.
“That’s how we grew up,” said Lopez Flores, thinking back to selling marigolds alongside her family in Mexico since she was 8 years old. “Now, we continue selling, our children also learning from us.”
And like other vendors, gathering marigolds for the Lopez Flores family was no easy task.
“Here, in this area, there are no flower crops,” said Lopez Flores, whose family traveled to a Fresno nursery to handpick the marigolds. When they first opened their marigold stand five years ago, they had “to go far,” Lopez Flores added, making a six-hour trek to Los Angeles for fresh stems.
Others, like Isabel García, who operates a cempasúchil booth near the Rancho San Miguel Market, traveled to Oxnard — a commute of more than 10 hours roundtrip. She traveled with another vendor, bringing back 100 large bunches, each with 40-50 stems to divide between them.
“We need to push hard to bring them here,” García said of the marigolds as she tended to deep velvet crested celosia on a Friday morning at her stand. The velvet celosia, known as flor de terciopelo or cresta de gallo in Spanish, often accompany orange marigolds as part of Day of the Dead altars.
This year, it’s García’s first time selling her own harvest of flowers. The celosias, carefully pruned and arranged inside her handmade bouquets, are handpicked from her home garden each morning, García said.
“One relaxes, watering them,” García said of caring for her garden. It beats “being inside,” she said, at least for “a little while.”
The Friday morning before arriving at her marigold stand, García had hurriedly lit a candle and laid white flowers and a glass of water inside her home. The items, García said, were meant to guide the soul of her unborn child, a tradition observed in some Mexican towns Oct. 31 to honor children who died before being baptized.
“Que no les falte su luz, ni su agua para su camino,” García said in Spanish, recalling a practice her mother taught her. “May they not lack light or water for their journey.”
The tradition, García explained, helps guide spirits to Día de Muertos altars.
Most, like García, sell their bunches for $10 — the money taking into account the labor and time of getting the flowers to Stockton. Supermarkets, such as Vons and Safeway, sell bunches for a little less than the local vendors. Trader Joe’s sells 5-6 stems for about $3.99.
“It’s getting bigger and bigger,” said Manuel Ayala, a marigold farmer and CEO of Channel Islands Flowers in Oxnard. In Oxnard, he’s noticed, families have begun decorating graves with cempasúchil, a tradition he first saw in his hometown of Michoacán, Mexico.
His company, Ayala said, began selling because of increased “demand” from flower markets. In the past two years, he said, demands have also come from major grocery chains like Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s.
“I don’t think it’s because there’s more Mexicans or more people from other countries,” he continued. “It’s just that people from the USA are celebrating the holiday.”
In Stockton, despite a heavy rainfall that cooled much of the Central Valley mid October, fall temperatures still reached up to 91° — too hot for marigold harvest, Ayala said.
But along the coast, where the humidity and temperature mimic that of marigold harvest towns like Michoacán and Puebla, the weather, Ayala said, is “perfect.”
“You can do it,” Ayala said of cultivating marigolds in hot areas like Stockton. “But it’s not going to be as good.”
Juan Guzman, 21, tended his family-run cempasúchil stand for nearly a whole week before Day of the Dead festivities — driven, he said, primarily by his desire to “help out.”
“You get to hear the sad parts … but also the joyful parts,” Juan said of stories he’s heard from customers buying cempasúchiles. “It helps you appreciate your own family more.”
Libna Rizo and Ivan Guzman Luna, parents to Juan, manage three other cempasúchil booths, including one nestled in the southeastern corner of Stockton.
In their third year operating off of a dirt patch near Mariposa Road and 8th Street, Rizo and Guzman Luna’s path to becoming marigold vendors came as a way to make ends meet.
“We were so desperate,” Rizo said. Now, coupled with a Mexican food stand and Guzman Luna’s DJ business, marigold sales have helped keep the family afloat.
“This gift from the earth,” Rizo said before gesturing to her heaps of rich-toned cempasúchiles at her Mariposa Road stand, “has given us bread for the week.”