In Tijuana, Traditional Day of the Dead Dawns Anew : Celebrations: Halloween’s encroachment has prompted efforts to revive interest in the two-day ritual, in which Mexicans pay respect to deceased relatives.

TIJUANA —  In a dusty hilltop cemetery on the edge of this city Tuesday, families gathered for graveside picnics, children played tag among the tombstones and a strolling musical group in cowboy hats sang the ballad “A Tear and a Memory.”

But for Enrique Limon, the Day of the Dead was an occasion for scholarly discourse. He expounded on the yearly clash of holidays at the border.

“Halloween is a diversion,” said Limon, 17. “The Day of the Dead is a tradition.”

Limon had just won second prize in a holiday contest sponsored by Tijuana’s Monte los Olivos Cemetery for a ceremonial altar dedicated to a Mexican bullfighter of the 1940s. His carefully researched and assembled display--containing everything from bullfight photos to the matador’s favorite foods--won the excited teen-ager 4 million pesos ($1,300).

The altar also represented a small bulwark against what some Tijuana residents see as the commercial onslaught of Halloween. Increasingly, they fear that the U.S. holiday has overshadowed the Day of the Dead, a two-day ritual combining indigenous and colonial influences in which Mexicans commune with and pay respects to dead relatives. The complaint reflects a larger concern in Mexican border cities that the predominance of U.S. culture dilutes Mexico’s customs and values, and even its language.

A columnist in the Diario 29 newspaper recently voiced this sentiment in a diatribe against the “aggressive Haloguin. “ He criticized neighbors who sprinkle their Spanish with “bye” and “OK,” and whose children run around in garish costumes demanding candy while neglecting the Day of the Dead.

“The United States bombards us in different ways,” wrote columnist Oscar Genel Gonzalez. “Halloween enfolds us like a dangerous vapor, like a traitorous fog. . . (It) hurts everything that is traditionally ours.”

Costumes, pumpkins and trick-or-treating (known by the phonetic approximation “triqui-triqui”) are omnipresent at this time of year in Tijuana; there were numerous cheerful painted faces waiting at the San Ysidro port of entry on Sunday to engage in cross-border trick-or-treating.

The boisterous side of Halloween also crosses the international line, said longtime Tijuana resident Evangelina Rivera, who explained that her middle-class Hipodromo neighborhood has been plagued with pranksters throwing eggs and breaking car windows in recent years.

“When I was a child, there wasn’t any Halloween in Tijuana,” she said. “This came to the next generation because of television and advertising.”

Schools and cultural institutions, which in border cities work hard to promote and defend the Mexican heritage, have led a drive to revive interest in the Day of the Dead among children. For the past week, students were instructed about the significance of the mystical Mexican holiday and its trappings: altars replete with offerings, the traditional skull-shaped candies and sweet bread.

Judging from the pilgrimage of cars and crowds Tuesday to local cemeteries, their efforts helped to reaffirm the importance of the holiday. Within sight of the steel border fence, families gathered at an old cemetery where neighborhood children made money selling refreshments and cleaning picturesque tombstones.

“We celebrate both holidays,” said Leonor Ruiz, who comes south from San Diego every year to visit her relatives’ graves. “I don’t think we are ever going to lose this custom. The cemetery is always full on this day. I think the two traditions can coexist.”

At the sprawling Monte los Olivos Cemetery Cemetery on the city’s dusty outskirts, Limon was busy telling visitors about his altar of offerings to matador Luis Castro, known as “The Soldier.”

“The salt in the dish is so his body won’t decay,” he told curious passersby. “The candy is because he liked sweets.”

Limon said his family combines cross-cultural influences: While he competed in the altar contest, his mother submitted a scary story to a Halloween contest sponsored by a Los Angeles newspaper. But he won a prize.

“Halloween is about fear of death,” Limon said. “Here we make fun of death, we play with death, we treat death as a friend. For the Aztecs, to be born was to die, and to die was to be born.”