Hi!! Well I am currently having a lot of trouble with my family in Michoacán; they moved a lot so it's been hard keeping track of them, and the only thing I know for sure is about their apparent social position due to these kind of clues, such as the "Don" and "Doña". I came across this very same thing in the burial of many of them: "cruz alta", "todas las insignias", "doble solemne" and "enterrado en tramo principal", so I thought it would pay off to dig deeper in that issue, as well as how the colonial society worked.

This (https://www.cultura.gob.mx/turismocultural/cuadernos/pdf16/articulo11.p…) is an article on death in Mexico, which talks a bit about this in page 10. I also found this (http://www.nuestrosranchos.org/archives/2003h2/msg00168.html) which talks about the issue.

Family search has a small say on the topic (https://www.familysearch.org/wiki/es/Entierro_de_cruz_alta,_de_cruz_baj…) in Venezuela, and this (https://www.redalyc.org/jatsRepo/127/12761653001/html/index.html) is an article about practices in Argentina. Not quite the same, but being latin america and catholic church we can assume there must be at least some simmilarities.

I also found out that the elements sometimes mentioned in the registries (such as "incensario" and "capa") are mourning elements still used in Semana Santa (idk if you translate if to Holy Week?) along with the color purple. I guess it talks a lot about the real importance that high class people had as opposed to the rest of the population, and how money really could afford the highest honors. It's a topic that could potentially give a lot of depth to our investigations, I think :)