This 24-Year-Old Latina Mortician Beautifies the Dead and Influences the Living
Growing up in Arleta with a first-generation family from El Salvador, Berrios admits that her family only embraced her career choice two years ago, after she started to win awards like “Young Funeral Director of the Year.” The 24-year-old works as the licenced funeral director and embalmer at Hollywood Forever cemetery. As a young person born in peak Generation Z, she's documented her deathcare journey on TikTok and has accrued more than 43K followers on the platform.
1:44 PM PDT on September 21, 2023
By Javier Cabral
When she was just 11 years old, Jasmine Berrios realized she wanted to spend the rest of her life making the deceased look presentable. It was after she‘d met an embalmer at a family party, who asked her, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Her answer? “I want to be in science and I want to help people.”
But Berrios didn’t want to be a doctor or nurse. Nor did she want to be in the medical industry either. A response from the family friend would lead Berrios down the path of deathcare.
“Well, I do science and help people,” he said. “Look around you right now: If someone you know in the room died, everyone would come to see that person, right? I get to help that one person who died, and I’m helping their friends and family, too.”
LA Taco: https://lataco.com/latina-mortician-career-hollywood-influencer
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of putting lipstick on a pig. I do not wish to demean the woman's art and I am sure that some people would treasure her skills.
I have to admit that I am biased as I just have never appreciated modern funerary practice, and when it is my time, it will be literally ashes to ashes. No plot, no stone, no ceremony, no magic incantations, no begging for the forgiving for my sins. Bring me home in a cardboard box and fertilize my favorite Live Oak with what remains. It that is too much trouble, flush me down the toilet. The funeral business hates me as bad as barbers have hated me all my life. 
That is not the worst of it. When I become king of the world, I intend to wipe all cemeteries off the face of the earth and replace them with low-cost housing. If any of the internees don't like it, they can sue or haunt.
I remember my first viewing of a body in a casket when I was 8-10 years old. The man had been one of my father's coworkers, and I knew him in passing. My lasting impression was that he looked like wax. (it may have been wax as I don't know what part of him was crushed under the car) I didn't like it then and I don't like it now, and no, they don't look like they are sleeping, they don't look peaceful, they look like they are dead, and it is not the last memory that I want of a loved one... At my mother's funeral, my siblings damn near insisted that I go gaze at my mother's dead body and I refused; I didn't need that kind of closure.
