Just past noon Friday, at the bustling corner of a quinceañera boutique on Charter Way, the heady scent of cempasúchiles, also known as marigolds, saturated a makeshift stand.
At the shop’s intersection, a car stops, its passenger readying herself to inquire about the stand’s buckets of vibrant orange flowers — the flora widely known in Mexico as “flor de muerto,” or flower of the dead.
“How much?” the woman passenger asked Matilde Lopez Flores, the boutique’s co-owner and manager of her family’s cempasúchil stands throughout Stockton…