Sunday, October 01, 2006
Where To Begin?
This past weekend was the biggest festival of the year here in San Miguel. The semi-pagan, semi-Catholic Feast of St. Michael (San Miguel). Picture this. 2:30am, Saturday morning. We approach the jardin (town square) and find it filled to overflowing with multiple thousands of people. Families, kids, old people. It's a middle-of-the-night Mardi Gras. No one seems particularly tired. 3am! I've never seen anything like it. Karen and I are astounded and (need I say?) delighted. Every couple of minutes fireworks erupt. Bands wander through, followed by small troupes of dancers. A little past three, we see flashing lights around the corner, signalling the beginning of a parade. First come giant paper mache puppets, followed by marching bands, flaming lanterns and hundreds of celebrants twirling colorful 10-foot tall stars and crosses. Next, a long expentent pause, punctuated by the kind of whistling and stamping you'd hear from the restless audience at a rock concert. Suddenly, the lights illuminating the Parroquia (our Gaudi-esque cathedral) extinguished and the church bells start pealing like mad. Seconds later all hell (and metaphorically speaking) heaven broke loose. Fireworks like you've never seen. From the one side, the devil's, the sky erupted in red explosions. Then from in front of the Parroquia, the forces of good answered, ferocious displays of pure white. Back and forth. Red and white. For the better part of hour. Embers, ashes and debris reigning down on the spellbound crowd. Close to five it stopped. The Parroquia lights shot on. The bells pealed ecstatically. The devil, once again, was vanquished. Tired and amazed, we trudged home, along side dozens of our neighbors, for a few hours sleep. Only a few, because we didn't want to miss a) the hundred or so ranchers on horseback who arrived in front of the church sortly past noon to present offerings (along with what to this City Boy appeared to be prodigious amounts horse shit & piss); b) the strange and violent ritual of blowing up paper mache dolls, many of which were, pinata-style, filled with treats (like roasted penauts, sausages bananas and toilet paper[??]; c) the voladeros, guys who threw themselves backward off a fifty-foot pole and, tethered by ropes, gracefully "flew" down to the ground; and d) the most entertaining parade this parade-hating Gringo has ever seen. Indiginous tribes from throughout Mexico converged on San Miguel -- in skins, feathers and bells; with bands and drummers -- to dance their brains out. Interspersed were offerings -- huge panels balanced on telephone poles, covered with herbs, flowers, carvings and -- I kid you not -- bottles of FANTA!! And in the middle of it all, every so often guys dressed like devils or skeletons or confetti-throwing gargoyles would come dancing through, the most amazing of which was relentlessly cracking a whip. Oh yeah, did I mention the swordplay? Periodically, a couple of guys (or in one case, women), would go at each other with serious looking machetes. Whoosh clang, whoosh clang; clang clang clang. One guy slunk off nursing a bleeding hand! Then of course there were even more of the giant paper mache puppets. As the sun set and temperatures started dropping, we headed home to grab jackets intending to return for yet another fireworks display at nine. It started raining. We poured some red wine. We fell asleep on the couch, dreaming of man-birds and fire.
# posted by goots @ 5:34 PM 
