Women clean the bones and skulls of their deceased relatives from the Uitz Poot family at the cemetery of Pomuch, Campeche state, Mexico on October 22, 2022. Every year in preparation for Hanal Pixán, the Mayan Day of the Dead celebration, members of the Pomuch community in southeastern Mexico extract bones from their niches and carefully clean them – an ancestral tradition seen as a gesture of love and a way to get closer to deceased family members. This ritual, which in Mayan is known as Choo Ba’ak, can be done for the first time when a person has been dead for three years. Pomuch and a handful of other Mayan communities are believed to be the only places in the country where people clean the bones of the dead. Since 2017 this tradition is considered Cultural Heritage of the State of Campeche. Photograph by Bénédicte Desrus