Garro's one-act play offers an unusual combination of corpses and animate actors on stage thus combining life and death in the same body. Garro's piece presents students with an approach to "embodying" Mexican culture and its notions of death. The fusion of death and cultural practices in Mexico is a crucial part of the ongoing project for constructing an ideal nation in Garro's play, a project born out of the periods of Independence and Revolution. The family crypt in "Un hogar solido"--a house for the dead--becomes an allegorical site of residence for the Mexican national family which yearns for a solid and unified home. Through performance, students "inhabit" this house for the dead in ways not accessible through reading alone. Drama helps students to get inside the consciousness of other human beings and experience a critical segment of life. Thus, performances of "Un hogar solido" paradoxically provide student-actors insight into Mexican conceptions of death through live stagings.