As we have seen, Mexican Catholicism is a product of the collision between the indigenous Mesoamerican belief-system and the religious zeal of the Spanish conquering force. Catholicism’s association with Mexico began the day Cortés made his first landing on Cozumel Island, off the Yucatán peninsula, when an indigenous ceremony involving ritual sacrifice was broken up and a Mass said. Conquest had the blessing of both the king of Spain and the Pope, and though religious zeal may have been ousted by thoughts of treasure in the conquistadores’ minds, conversion was nevertheless the secondary aim of conquest and its main justification.
As in other Latin American countries, and indeed Spain, fiestas feature prominently in Mexican culture. They are also taken very seriously, both by academics analyzing them for clues as to the Mexican national identity and by the participants themselves, who enter into the spirit of the fiesta, whatever the occasion, body and soul. But no matter how it may look to an outsider, any Mexican will tell you that a fiesta is more than simply a big party. Ordinary Mexicans look for a release from their often harsh daily existence in the sense of camaraderie and social cohesion that a fiesta provides and that is often lacking from day to day. Every community, be it a city neighborhood or a rural village, has its own patron saint, who is honored with an annual festival. These follow the rituals of the Catholic Church to some degree, though in more indigenous communities many owe more to pre-Columbian traditions than to Rome’s influence. Neither does the hedonism of many such festivals have much to do with religion.
Mexico also has a whole range of regional and national festivals and holidays, some of them on a spectacular scale, and many going to the core of what it is to be Mexican.
• The New Year is celebrated by a midnight mass of thanksgiving for blessings bestowed over the previous year, followed by a public holiday on January 1.
• Epiphany (January 6). Children may open presents from the Three Kings, and eat a cake, the rosca de reyes, in which a small image of the baby Jesus is hidden.
• Constitution Day (February 5) is the second public holiday of the year, after New Year’s Day.
• Flag Day (February 24) is a public holiday, and children parade and salute the national flag. Mayan handicrafts are on display at a major fair in Mérida in the Yucatán throughout February.
• Carnaval (or Carnival), a nine-day blowout before the privations of Lent, usually begins in late February or early March, depending on how late Easter falls. A major, colorful event across the country, it bears comparison with famous carnivals across the world. This is especially true of the festivities in Veracruz on the Gulf coast; Mazatlán in Sinaloa and Mérida in Yucatán also party on a grand scale. Parades, fireworks, and concerts are typical of Carnaval, but the soundtrack is the key: samba, salsa, and marimba rhythms fill the air, and people dance and dance.
• Benito Juárez’s birthday (March 21) is celebrated as a public holiday.
• Semana Santa, Easter week, is taken as a vacation by most Mexicans (Easter Thursday and Friday are public holidays), with the more secular middle classes visiting the coast before the rainy season begins. It is more than just the country’s biggest holiday, however—it remains a deeply religious festival. Processions take place during the day, with Good Friday the culmination. Passion plays are performed all over the country, but are especially worth seeing in smaller towns throughout Oaxaca state.
• Feria de San Marcos, a three-week affair, is held in San Marcos, in Aguascalientes state. It includes a large parade on April 25, St. Mark’s Day. Typical of the festival are concerts, cockfights, bullfights, and charreadas (Mexican-style rodeo—see Chapter 6), with plenty of drinking, eating, and dancing thrown in for good measure.
• Labor Day (May 1). As in many other countries, trade unions march, politicians give speeches, and ordinary people mostly ignore them.
• Cinco de Mayo, or the Battle of Puebla (May 5), is a key date in the Mexican calendar. This national holiday is celebrated by Mexicans the world over. The focus of attention: on that day in 1862, Mexico defeated an invading French army at Puebla, on the road from Veracruz to the capital.
• Mother’s Day (May 10). The importance of this holiday in a matriarchal society such as Mexico should not be underestimated and many offices award all the mothers working there an (unofficial) half day’s holiday.
• St. Isidore’s Day (May 15), when animals and agricultural tools are blessed, is likewise an important date in rural communities.
• Corpus Christi (celebrating the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist) falls on the first Thursday after Trinity Sunday. Church services and processions take place all over the country. Papantla, in Veracruz state, offers something different. Huastecan voladores (flyers), in a display dating from pre-Columbian times, climb a pole in groups of five. The ritual invokes fertility and honors the sun. The first four leap backward off a platform at the top, each attached to the pole by a rope, while the fifth performs a dance and plays drums and a whistle. As the rope unravels, each volador circles the pole thirteen times, to a total of fifty-two, which symbolize the fifty-two-year cycle of the Mesoamerican calendar.
• Navy Day (June 1) is an official holiday, with port towns organizing events to honor the navy.
• Guelaguetza festival, on the first two Mondays after July 16, takes place in Oaxaca state. It celebrates indigenous dances, such as the Zapotec feather dance, a symbolic reenactment of the Spanish conquest of Mexico.
• Independence Day (September 16) is a national holiday. Fireworks and music fill the air on the evening before. This is followed by a typically Mexican flourish as the president repeats Father Miguel Hidalgo’s 1810 cry to arms, “El Grito” (“Mexicanos, ¡viva México!”), from the balcony of the Palacio Nacional in Mexico City center. Parades celebrating the independence heroes take place across the country on the following day.
• Descubrimiento de América (Discovery of America Day, October 12) has now become more a celebration of pre-Columbian Mexicans.
• Festival Internacional Cervantino, in October, is one of the highlights of the Mexican cultural calendar; it was founded by students in the 1950s in honor of the great Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes. Guanajuato provides the colonial backdrop for one of the world’s great arts festivals, which brings together theater companies, dancers, musicians, and the paying public from across the world.
• Día de los Muertos, or Hanal Pixan (the Day of the Dead, October 31–November 2) is the defining Mexican festival, and certainly the most visually arresting. It begins on the night of October 31. The belief is that the dead have divine permission to visit friends and relatives on earth once a year, and they are welcomed with offerings of food and flowers between this date and November 2. Salt and water, or the favorite meal of the dead person, may be left out for the spirit to come down and “eat.” Candles and incense are burned in graveyards, and tombs are decorated with flowers, but this is no somber occasion. History has given Mexicans a familiarity with death that is perhaps beyond the usual Western comfort zone: it is both mocked and celebrated. The skulls and skeletons on display everywhere are a uniquely Mexican artifact. They are spectacular, amusing, and made of any material imaginable, from tin to chocolate.
• Revolution Day (November 20) is an official holiday. Children parade in revolutionary costumes—it’s more of a ritual than a festival.
• Our Lady of Guadalupe (December 12) is the Day of the patron saint of Mexico (see Pilgrimages, below).
• La Noche de los Rábanos (the Night of the Radishes, December 23) takes place in Oaxaca. Radishes are carved into intricate animal and other shapes and put on display in the city’s central square. Originally a gimmick to attract people to the pre-Christmas market, it must now be counted among the more original excuses ever devised for a big party.
• The Posadas (December 16–24) dramatize the journey of Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. These are candlelit processions from house to house, the culmination of which is the smashing of a piñata, a colorful papier-mâché figure full of goodies. The children, blindfold, take turns to swing at it until it breaks and spills its riches.
• Christmas Eve and Christmas Day (December 24 and 25). As in most Catholic countries, Christmas in Mexico is celebrated on Christmas Eve (Noche Buena). A midnight mass is followed by a traditional supper at home, which varies, according to income, from simple corn dough tamales to roast turkey, ham, or suckling pig. In the capital and across the north of the country, lucky children may open their presents on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day.
Most Mexicans celebrate the day of the saint after whom they were named as if it were another birthday. They receive gifts and cards, and this is as much an excuse for another party as a Catholic observation.
The devout Catholicism of many Mexicans extends beyond merely attending mass on Sunday. Pilgrimages are periodically made across the country to shrines of Mexican saints.
The first and most important of these shrines is that of the Virgin of Guadalupe, now the patron saint of Mexico. The story goes that she appeared in December 1531 to an Aztec peasant, who had converted to Christianity and taken the name Juan Diego, on a hill in what are now the northern suburbs of Mexico City, the Cerro del Tepeyec. (Not entirely coincidentally, the hill was formerly dedicated to Tonantzin, the benign Aztec earth goddess.) The Virgin told him to instruct the local bishop to build a church on the site. The bishop ignored him until the Virgin appeared again; she told Diego to pick flowers from the hill and take them to the bishop, who found that the cloak into which Diego had gathered the flowers was imprinted with an image of the Virgin.
A church was built on the site in 1533, and more have been added since, each in turn housing the sacred cloak. The baroque façade of the eighteenth-century basilica makes it arguably the most interesting, but the modern, circular church built in 1976 is impressive for its scale—it seats ten thousand and is full every Sunday. A conveyor belt in front of the framed cloak stops people lingering too long before the image.
Each year, on December 12, the second apparition is commemorated with a gathering of several hundred thousand people. In the weeks leading up to this massive religious event, groups of poor, white-smocked people move purposefully along the roads to the shrine. Some cover the last miles on their knees as an act of devotion.
Lumping these two headings together is a little unfair, as in Mexico witchcraft goes far beyond superstition. It should really be classed alongside Catholicism in terms of how strongly people believe in it, if not actually with regard to the number of adherents. But many believe in both traditions simultaneously: witchcraft is not a dirty word as far as Mexicans are concerned. It has more to do with healing rituals and traditional herbal medicine than with putting curses on people, although this happens sometimes as well. And it is not confined to isolated backwaters: in Mexico City’s Mercado de Sonora (see Chapter 6) you will find all manner of herbs and plants for sale, most of them for use in witchcraft and healing, together with strange and exotic animals.
Well-respected witch doctors (curanderos) practice all over Mexico. This is particularly the case in the state of Veracruz, where, using lotions and potions, medicinal plants, effigies, charms, and black or white magic, they treat their patients for anything from ill-health to employment or marital problems. The “gift” is thought to be hereditary, stemming from pre-Columbian times.
Isolated indigenous communities still follow the shamanic beliefs of their ancestors. Shamans are a combination of doctors, priests, and healers. They regard the material and spirit worlds as inextricably linked, and in constant contact. These communities are in regular communication with their deceased ancestors, and believe that their spirits often visit the living world. One example of this (and there are dozens) is the Huichol Indian community on the border of Nayarit and Jalisco states in the Sierra Madre Occidental mountains.
Every year Huicholes travel to their sacred mountain near Real de Catorce, an eerie former silvermining town in the distant state of San Luis Potosí, to gather the plants needed for their practices, which are found only here. Symbolism is vitally important to the Huicholes, and appears on their brightly colored yarn weavings, beadwork, and decorative containers. The three most sacred symbols are frequently depicted—corn, deer, and peyote (a hallucinogenic cactus).
Many Mexicans are superstitious, some more than others. Popular sayings refer to curses: one good example is that if someone is looking at you strangely, they’re giving you mal de ojo (the evil eye), which brings bad luck. A particularly middle-class, urban openness to newer kinds of superstition is a more recent development. New Age and esoteric shops offer self-improvement books, palm and tarot readings, candles, crystals, and rituals for love, success, and happiness.