Page 7 - IAV Digital Magazine #576

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
A Funeral Home In El
Salvador Offers Pink Coffins
With Barbie Linings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwnWTu1sK1U
SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — A funeral home in El Salvador has taken Barbie mania to an extreme, offering pink coffins with Barbie linings.
It’s all designed so you can be a Barbie fan till the day you die — and even after that.
The pink metal coffins are on
sale at the Alpha and Omega Funeral Home in the city of Ahuachapán, near the border with Guatemala.
Owner Isaac Villegas said Friday he had already offered the option of pink coffins before
the July premiere of the Barbie movie. But the craze that swept Latin America
convinced him to decorate the cloth linings of the coffins with pic- tures of the doll. The coffins are also decorated with little white stars.
“I said, ‘We have to jump on this trend,’” Villegas said of the coffins, noting “it has been a suc- cess.”
He said the funer- al home has already launched a promotional campaign around the Barbie boxes, and has sold 10 of them. Though that doesn’t mean 10 people have actually been buried in them — many people in El Salvador buy a pre-paid package for future burial.
Villegas said that until a year ago,
families had pre- ferred traditional coffins in colors like brown, black, white or gray. But a year ago, he sold his first pink coffin to family who wanted their very happy rela- tive buried in a happier-colored coffin.
Now he has no plans to turn back, though he still offers darker colors.
“We are going to have more pink coffins, because people are asking for it,” he said.
Latin
America jumped on Barbie
mania with pink- colored tacos and pastries, commer- cial planes bear- ing the Barbie logo, political ads, and even Barbie- themed protests.
The famous doll’s theme has also taken a macabre tone.
In July, anti-gov-
ernment demon- strators dressed up two women in pink and put them in giant Barbie boxes in the main square of Lima, Peru’s capital, to protest President Dina Boluarte, under whose administration police have often clashed with pro- testers.
And in Mexico, a sister of one
of Mexico’s 112,000 missing people began sewing doll outfits to make a “Searching Mother” Barbie, referring to the volunteers who fan out across Mexico’s dusty plains to search for gravesites that might contain their children’s remains. Her cre- ator, volunteer searcher Delia Quiroa, hopes to publicize the plight of mothers who have to carry out the searches and investigations police won’t do.
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine