Easter week, Semana Santa, has always been one of the highlights of
\n the religious calendar in Latin America, although it is celebrated very
\n differently from place to place. In most Catholic countries the rituals
\n and celebrations go on for an entire week, stretching from Palm Sunday
\n (Domingo de Ramos) through 8 days to Easter Sunday. <\/p>\n
Here in Manta, on the Ecuadorian coast, the celebration seems to be centered
\n mostly around drinking beer, eating out in restaurants, and playing football
\n on the beach. There are a few extra masses in the churches, and extended
\n families get together for extended feeds, with special traditional fare
\n based around seafood, bananas and peanuts, all homegrown staples of Manabi
\n province, but mostly it seems business as usual.<\/p>\n
This is largely because Manta is a popular resort destination, and during
\n the peak getaway times, Carnival and Semana Santa, the streets and beaches
\n are choked with vacationers rich and poor who arrive tired and desperate
\n for a good time, on interprovincial busses, in private cars, packed into
\n pickups and commandeered local mini-busses, from Quito the capital and
\n Guayaquil the business center. Friday night there was one half-assed religious
\n procession wandering through the streets, past numerous storefronts and
\n street corners where crudely drawn cardboard and crayon signs had been
\n nailed or taped to walls and lampposts identifying the spot as the "8th
\n Station of the Cross" and so on. We passed this procession in a taxicab
\n on our way back after an unsuccessful search for a spit-roasted chicken,
\n and it consisted of a skinny Christ-substitute with a burnt-cork beard
\n and lipstick wounds, dressed in a ratty robe supposedly approximating someone’s
\n idea of Biblical garb, and brown rubber sandals. He was followed by about
\n a dozen pious parishioners chatting quietly and interacting with the small
\n knots of people gathered on each corner to watch them pass by. We settled
\n for Chinese food.<\/p>\n
This sorry spectacle reminded us, in its dissimilarity, of the way
\n the holiday is celebrated in the Andean region. Up there, high in the
\n ghostly white-capped ridges and ranges, and deep in the sheltered canyons
\n and valleys,
\n live
\n millions of Indians whose culture, victim of centuries of abuse, neglect,
\n attempted extermination, assimilation and exploitation, has somehow flowered
\n into a marvelously mystical hybrid of the most esoteric and myth infused
\n variety of Christianity and the ineradicable strains of pre-Conquest rituals
\n and nature-infused animism.<\/p>\n
In the tradition of conquered peoples everywhere and throughout history,
\n these native Americans have over the centuries carefully and surreptitiously
\n lain new Gods and Saints over age-old beliefs and local forms of divine
\n inspiration. Old ceremonies adopted new symbols, spirits and soul-powers
\n took on new names and clothing, and celestial calendars were fit into new
\n monthly matrixes. In the Andes, what began as a way to appease Spanish
\n conquistadores and convert-or-kill Catholic missionaries has evolved into
\n a beautiful and enlightening form of angelic animism which sustains these
\n long-suffering people and allows them at least a tenuous and tortured link
\n to their ancestors and their lost universe.<\/p>\n
We are unable to forget (and why would we ever want to) one long ago April
\n when the Dowbrigade and wife #1, the Peruvian Princess, were on a voyage
\n of personal discovery in a small town named Carhuaz, located in an exquisite
\n valley high in the Peruvian Andes. The valley is called the "Callejon de
\n Huaylas", and is known by visitors as "The Switzerland of South America"
\n for its white rimmed skyline and popularity with the foolhardy foreigners
\n who flock there during climbing season to attempt to conquer the legendary
\n mountains and holy peaks which surround the Callejon.<\/p>\n
They gather in the tourist center of Huaraz, a slightly larger town at
\n the head of the valley, featuring climbing clubs, adventure tourism agencies,
\n fly-by-night outfitters renting ragged knapsacks and tents, crampons and
\n ropes, ice axes and maps left behind by previous expeditions, $3-dollar-a-night
\n hotels, pizzerias, pubs and juice bars, and an ever-changing cast of unlicensed
\n guides, local scammers and down-on-their luck travelers without the money
\n or wherewithal to leave.<\/p>\n
Unlike the more famous mountain-climbing destinations in Nepal and Tibet,
\n home to the only higher mountains on the face of the earth, where expeditions
\n must be arranged and registered years in advance, with requirements for
\n licensed local guides, international certification for each member, equipment
\n inspections and trained medical personnel, in the Peruvian Andes there
\n are no requirements or special permissions of any kind needed to challenge
\n these monstrous peaks. Any fool with a sleeping bag and a pair of sneakers
\n is free to risk his or her neck climbing Huascaran (28,000 feet) or Huandoy
\n (27,000). Every year a few of these idiots simply disappear off the face
\n of the earth, never to be heard from again, as the Peruvian government
\n has neither the resources nor the inclination to mount rescue missions
\n and, in fact, doesn’t even have a clue as to how many climbers leave Huaraz
\n or how many come back.<\/p>\n
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An hour from this outpost of Western adventurism, down the two-lane blacktop
\n which winds down the floor of the valley, the only paved road in the area,
\n the town of Carhuaz is in another world. A small town square around a one-block
\n park contains what consists of the local business community; the town hall\/court\/Hall
\n of Records and civil defense headquarters, a bank, a hardware store, a
\n pharmacy, two restaurants and the post office. In the center of the park
\n is a small fountain featuring carved stone cherubs hoisting aloft carafes
\n from which pours pure mountain water and which, before the government finally
\n put in a municipal water system in the 1960s was the main source of drinking,
\n washing and cooking water in the town. <\/p>\n
Distributed seemingly at random around the plaza are "ambulantes", small
\n carts selling anticuchos (marinated chicken hearts skewered on bamboo stakes
\n and roasted over charcoal fires), cigarettes and candy, hot Andean cocktails
\n consisting of pure cane liquor flavored with cinnamon and unknown Indian
\n spices, and raspadillas, the local version of the venerable snow cone.
\n The shaved ice treats are unique in our experience in that every morning
\n before dawn incredibly strong-legged and lunged Indians literally run up
\n twisting trails two hours to the edge of the icecap, to hack cooler-sized
\n blocks of ice from the face of the glacier, wrap them in woven carryall
\n blankets, and run back down to the square to provide the raspadilla-vendors
\n their raw material for the day. Ice, inviolate since the ancient days of
\n the last ice age, frozen before the first drop of acid rain or choking
\n smoke from the first internal combustion engine sullied the atmosphere
\n of the planet, is shaved from these blocks and flavored with sticky syrups
\n of myriad flavors and colors.<\/p>\n
The main economic activity of Carhuaz is to function as an interface between
\n the modern world, represented by the store owners and suppliers, mostly
\n mixed-blood descendents of the Spaniards who "civilized" the region 500
\n years ago, and the thousands and thousands of Indians who live high above,
\n in tiny hamlets and knots of 3 or 4 adobe huts, farming and tending flocks
\n of sheep, cows and goats. Once a week they haul their produce down to the
\n nearest road, and then by truck into town for the Tuesday market, there
\n to exchange them for the necessities of modern life; machine woven cloth,
\n knives, tools and machetes, metal pots and pans, shoes, cassettes of the
\n sad, haunting Andean music, and, of course, beer.<\/p>\n
These Indians, who come down to trade once a week, are actually a small
\n minority, the "Westernized" Indians, and most of them speak at least some
\n Spanish. But beyond their realms, far higher and deeper in hidden valleys
\n and along rushing rivers of glacial run-off, are entire worlds of indigenous
\n activity, beyond the reach of the beer trucks and radio broadcasts, centers
\n of habitation so isolated that their members need to walk two or three
\n days down terraced hillsides and tortured boulder-paths just to get to
\n a rutted dirt road or electrical line. Incredibly, these forbidding mountainsides
\n are spotted with these hamlets right up to the snowline – thousands and
\n thousands of human lives lived in their entirety lost in the fog-enshrouded
\n folds of some of the wildest ranges on Earth. For many of these people,
\n their contact with what we consider civilization is limited to a single
\n yearly pilgrimage – down to Carhuaz for Semana Santa. They speak no Spanish,
\n only Quechua, a linguistic descendant of the language of the Incas.<\/p>\n
At the time, the Dowbrigade and wife #1 were living in a ramshackle adobe
\n mansion known as "The House by the Bridge" on the outskirts of Carhuaz,
\n next to a bridge crossing a fairly large river about a mile above town.
\n The dirt road that passed the house, crossed the bridge and disappeared
\n into the mountains was the main access to that mysterious Andean realm,
\n and in the days leading up to Semana Santa it was full of a steady stream
\n of stony-gazed Indians, in groups of 20 or 30, who were arriving for the
\n festivities after days of tramping, drinking, singing and stumbling down
\n the mountainsides.<\/p>\n
We loved, in those days, sitting on a grassy knoll outside out house and
\n watching them pass. Always in a good mood as they descended, near now to
\n their destination below, they were a parade of cultural icons, and an anthropologist’s
\n dream. Dressed in their best ceremonial finery, each village displayed
\n a distinct sartorial style, variations on the regional theme; baggy white
\n trousers and deep blue shirts on the men, and colorful, hand woven long
\n wool skirts and white blouses for the women. The main features which distinguished
\n one group from the other are the intricate patterns woven into their ponchos
\n (for the men) and wraps (for the women), and the somewhat bizarre bowler
\n hats worn by the women.
\n These hats, prized possessions obtained in fact
\n during these yearly treks to the town, were decorated with a wild range
\n of feathers, ribbons, shiny metal do-dads, pins, woven hatbands and knotted
\n strings, each of which had a ritual significance we were not privileged
\n to know and which identified them as members of a particular village, family
\n or tribe.<\/p>\n
At the head of each group walked (or staggered) the village band, consisting
\n of a guitar, a churango, which is a kind of ukulele made with an armadillo
\n shell as sounding box, 2 or 3 or 4 Andean flutes, pan-pipe style, and an
\n assortment of wooden drums, tom-toms and hollow logs. The most important
\n member of the group, however, walked in the middle – the bucketboy. The
\n bucket he carried was somehow always full of the preferred and pervasive
\n Andean libation, a fermented corn mash somewhere between beer and mead,
\n called "Chicha", liberally spiked for extra punch with homemade cane liquor,
\n Andean white-lightning, somewhere around 150 proof, with all of the rocket
\n fuel raw power of the Appalachian version, which accounted for the staggering.<\/p>\n
Singing, laughing, dancing, they stumbled down the mountain lane, en route
\n to staking out a spot on the square or in a nearby empty lot, a home away
\n from home, just enough space to build a small cooking fire and have room
\n to pass out when the ritual of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, or
\n the attendant drinking, got to be too much.<\/p>\n
With dozens of these encampments arranged around town, things would start
\n to get really intense by Thursday night, which was the occasion of the
\n first of three official and ritual processions which would wind through
\n the streets of town from dusk to dawn. These processions bore little resemblance
\n to the meek, watered-down version we saw in Manta Friday. They would each
\n feature hundreds of wacked-out Indians, and 3 or 4 of the Andean bands,
\n who would take turns playing sad huinos, a local dirge-like musical genre,
\n or sometimes all playing at once in a sort of ambulatory battle of the
\n bands. <\/p>\n
Each village unit also had a number of individuals who formed a dance troupe
\n dressed in elaborate costumes, feathered or sequined, with colorful capes
\n and masks, and small bronze bells strapped to their ankles, adding to the
\n cacophony and keeping the rhythm set by the musicians. And, of course,
\n each procession featured multiple buckets of the magic mash, for which
\n a few chipped glasses and paper cups were constantly being passed from
\n hand to hand and mouth to mouth.<\/p>\n
The first procession, Thursday night, was meant to symbolize the forced
\n entry of Jesus and the two thieves into Jerusalem. That night, at the head
\n of the drunken, dancing mob were three privileged individuals selected
\n to represent the protagonists. They were easily identifiable by the brown
\n cassocks they wore over their traditional dress. As they went by, the other
\n members of the march, especially the children, would run up to them and
\n beat them about the legs with thin branches and string lashes. Although
\n these weapons looked as though they wouldn’t shoo a fly, Jesus and the
\n thieves would leap in the air and cry out when a little boy or girl swatted
\n them
\n with their sticks. Although we wondered, we never found out if the cassocks
\n were periodically passed from individual to individual or whether the same
\n poor
\n victims were
\n forced to leap and weep throughout the long night.<\/p>\n
For it was indeed a full 12-hour event, starting just after sunset and
\n continuing through the narrow streets and around the square until the first
\n rays of daylight broke over the mountains, at which point the assembled
\n faithful would stagger off to find a place to sleep for a few hours before
\n the next stage of the drama.<\/p>\n
The next night, Friday, was the most solemn and in many ways the most spectacularly
\n bizarre part of the ritual. Since Good Friday was the day when Christ was
\n supposedly actually killed, this night’s procession reached the saddest
\n and deepest depths of Andean sorrow, a sorrow unsurpassed in its historical
\n substantiation and centricity to the cultural core of what it means to
\n be a conquered nation 500 years on in the least developed corner of an
\n undeveloped country.<\/p>\n
Friday’s procession started with a Mass in the local church, delivered
\n in a linguistic polyglot of Latin, Spanish and Quechua. At the end of the
\n Mass, shortly after dark, the second procession would form in the small
\n plaza outside the church. At the head of the mob this time were the local
\n priest in embroidered white liturgical robes, and two long, narrow litters
\n made from tree trunks and hoisted to shoulder height by 6 halfway sober
\n litter-bearers. On one was placed a life-sized statue of the Virgin Mary,
\n recently removed from her customary alcove in the church. The statue appeared
\n to be made of plaster, but was dressed in a real cloth robe, deep royal
\n blue velour, with gold lame highlights, to which people would pin prayers,
\n notes to the recently deceased, and money. Lots of money. Bills of all
\n denominations, food coupons, the odd foreign banknote (who knows where
\n they got them from) IOUs and coin purses hung from the Virgin like multicolored
\n flies on a leg of lamb hung too
\n long
\n in
\n the local
\n market.
\n Loose
\n coins
\n littered the litter around the base of the statue, which was apparently
\n bolted to the wooden frame to prevent unceremonious spills or dumpings.<\/p>\n
At the very front of the procession was a sight so incredible we at first
\n thought it was a hallucination. They had taken a six-foot wooden statue
\n of Christ crucified, replete with bleeding wounds and a crown of real thorns,
\n and placed it in a specially constructed glass coffin. In order to fit,
\n the Christ’s outstretched arms had been sawed off and reattached to his
\n sides. The entire apparatus was eerily illuminated by several strings of
\n blinking Christmas tree lights running up the corners and sides of the
\n glass coffin and across Christ’s long-suffering body, powered by a 12-volt
\n car battery carried on a separate, smaller pallet by two stout young men
\n trailing a few steps behind. The effect was surreal, with a multi-colored
\n aura flashing on and off the body of Christ as the procession oozed slowly
\n through the streets of town.<\/p>\n
The music was also more solemn and haunting than on the previous night.
\n No melodic tunes or identifiable songs. For long stretches only the drums
\n would hold forth, hitting a hollow funereal rhythm and echoing off the
\n buildings and around the square. At times they were joined by the flutes,
\n welling up in long one-note laments which hung, wavering, in the crisp
\n mountain air. Many of the people, especially the women, were actually weeping,
\n moaning in a sort of soul-wrenching Andean ululation. Of course, none of
\n this interfered with their drinking – if anything they were going at it
\n even harder than the night before, morbidly, weepingly drunk, lost in the
\n depths of some communal sorrow far beyond the ability of a sallow pampered
\n observer such as ourself to comprehend.<\/p>\n
During the days between the processions, exhausted Indians would gather
\n in their localized spaces, resting and recuperating strength for the next
\n ceremonial session. Women made half-hearted attempts to cook, but everyone
\n was so wasted that meals consisted of a few pieces of bread or a handful
\n of rice. The drinking, of course, continued unabated throughout.<\/p>\n
Saturday night was a bit more light-hearted than Friday, but by this point
\n everyone had been dead drunk for three days so the staggering and slobbering
\n was much more pronounced. Seemingly unconscious bodies lined the parade
\n route like discarded sacks of spoiled potatoes. Communication was reduced
\n to grunts, cries and snorts interspersed around slurred attempts to form
\n actual words. Fights were constantly breaking out, but the participants
\n were invariably too far gone to do more than flail ineffectually at thin
\n air and then fall to the ground in a heap.<\/p>\n
The distinguishing feature of the Saturday procession was the reviled figure
\n of Pontius Pilot, representing evil incarnate and the de facto stand-in
\n for the devil himself. As an added idiosyncratic ritual tradition, Pilot
\n was represented by a full-size straw manikin, dressed in discarded clothing
\n and made up to resemble a particularly hated personage from the daily lives
\n of the Indians themselves during the previous year. Every year a different
\n person was chosen – a greedy landowner, a local philanderer, a disgraced
\n town official, and on one recent occasion an intensely disliked President
\n of Peru.<\/p>\n
The Pilot manikin was carefully dressed and made up, and then tied firmly
\n to the back of an ass, facing ass-backwards. As this final procession made
\n its way through the cobblestone and dirt streets of Carhuaz, people would
\n throw stones, sticks, dirt and empty bottles and cans at the poor doll
\n and donkey (mostly the kids threw actually, as almost all of the adults
\n were too wrecked by this point to throw anything but up). This ritual abuse
\n would again go on throughout the night, accompanied by unsyncopated drumming
\n and off-key bleating from plastered flautists. <\/p>\n
Finally, just as Easter Sunday dawned in the crystalline Andean skies,
\n the procession would arrive, as if my chance, in a specially prepared clearing
\n in a secondary plaza between the Church and the primary school. In the
\n center of this space a gigantic bonfire had been prepared, tree trunks,
\n two-by-fours, busted up furniture, doorframes and doors, massive branches
\n the size of railroad ties, piled 20 feet high and waiting to be lit. The
\n Pilot-figure was roped and thrown atop the fire-tower (the poor abused
\n donkey was cut loose and allowed to vamoose off to look for forage and
\n lick its wounds), and then to exhausted cheers and incoherent curses, the
\n entire conflagration was set off with huge, gasoline-soaked torches. People
\n made spastic and sloppy attempts to dance around the flames as they lit
\n up the rapidly disappearing Andean dawn.<\/p>\n
The final act in this Andean Passion play was a closing Mass, delivered
\n open-air in the same spot where the bonfire licked the sky. The priest
\n obviously
\n knew better than to let that way-beyond-drunken rabble into his church.<\/p>\n
After a few hours passed out in the park, or drooling, glassy-eyed in the
\n gutters and ditches of the town, the Indians would gather their meager
\n belongings and begin the long trek 2 or 3 or 4 days back to their points
\n of origin, having once again lived through the crucifixion, death and resurrection
\n of their nominal Savior. One can only guess at the personal significance
\n of this week-long pilgrimage and ritual auto-immolation in the interior
\n lives and religious realities of these noble and long-suffering people.
\n But it obviously fulfilled a need over and above the obvious and universally
\n human desire to get periodically smashed, dance and sing, and get away
\n from home once in a while. Whatever it is, it keeps them keep coming back
\n for more.<\/p>\n
The last year we were in Carhuaz for Semana Santa, the first Mrs. Dowbrigade
\n was pregnant with #1 son, this being the only reason she eschewed full
\n participation in the ritual in all its drunken glory. For those three days,
\n to avoid the nightly mile-long trek up the mountainside to the House by
\n the Bridge, we took refuge in the streetside Consultoria of the Sra. Beatriz,
\n Carhuaz’s midwife and the closest thing to a doctor for miles around. The
\n Dowbrigade had been consulting with Beatriz for birth weight data key to
\n our never-finished Master? thesis in Physical Anthropology (another story).<\/p>\n
We considered ourselves lucky to be able to stretch out for a few hours
\n at a time on the upholstered examination tables in this midwife clinic.
\n Between avoiding the stirrups and listening to the echoing drumbeats and
\n drunken wailings from the street outside we never really got much sleep,
\n but we guess that’s part of the point of the entire operation. The experience
\n certainly had an effect and left an impression which has never left us.
\n We sometimes wonder what effect it had on #1 son, born a mere two months
\n later in a thoroughly modern hospital in a city on the Peruvian coast.<\/p>\n
Actually, at this very moment, 22 years later, on Easter Sunday 2004, that
\n same son (and #2 son as well) are ensconced back in Carhuaz, two doors
\n down from the House by the Bridge, constructing an adventure tourism hostel
\n on a patch of land we bought alongside the river. Tomorrow when (hopefully)
\n our new telephone line is turned on here in Manta, our first call will
\n be to Carhuaz to find out what the boys thought about the incredible spectacle
\n they have just experienced for the first time- Semana Santa in the Sierra.<\/p>\n
more pictures from Carhuaz<\/a>\n <\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Easter week, Semana Santa, has always been one of the highlights of the religious calendar in Latin America, although it is celebrated very differently from place to place. In most Catholic countries the rituals and celebrations go on for an … Continue reading