Today at noon, in the central plaza, 25 life-sized papier mache puppets were blown up. This was supposed to represent the burning of Judas Iscariot (which, Amy tells me, didn't really happen - Judas died by hanging himself - but whatever). However, you'd have to stretch your imagination pretty far to make any of them look like Judas, especially the witches with the pointy hats and the Mexican banditos, but I suppose if we asked the local priest he'd say something about symbolism, but I suspect that the whole thing is not so much symbolic as it's just really fun and cool. I'm telling you, this beats an Easter Egg hunt hands down.
Here are the 25 of them strung up beforehand:
To add to the wackiness, each Judas was sponsored by a local business, as you can see by the attached banners. (Amy noticed that the Judas sponsored by the restaurant "El Mariachi" actually looks like a mariachi, and also that an awful lot of them looked like gringos.):
The witch on the right, complete with broomstick, was my favorite:
The way it works is that each puppet has a frame that holds a row of firecrackers. The puppet is lowered and the cord is lit:
Then the puppet gets hauled back up, and spins around and smokes for a few minutes:
And then explodes:
It makes a lot of noise:
The limbs get piled up here:
While this young man collects the heads:
He was quite good at this responsibility, carefully piling up the heads, which are later sold for 200 pesos each (although some of them required repairs first):
You can see how the head count increased over the course of the celebration:
Here's Indigo posing with the entire collection:
And here's a few assorted images:
After it's all over, people scramble for souvenirs:
A woman in my Spanish class who also went to this was laughing about the various political figures who appeared as Judas: Vicente Fox, George W. Bush, other presidents. She and the teacher both said you could tell not only by the faces, but in some cases by labels on the dummies. The only labels I saw were the ones you mention telling who donated each one, but the teacher lives in SMA and he said they are definitely political figures.
ReplyDeleteOne of the heads in your photos looks kind of like Al Gore's. Do you suppose it's an anti-NAFTA statement?
The last photos, of body parts flying around (& then being hoarded), is delightfully (and disturbingly) macabre.
ReplyDeleteThat is simply fantastic. Why can't the Catholic church in the rest of North America and Europe cotton on to these wonderful Mexican traditions and add a little boom and sparkle, not to mention community fun? I'd be very tempted to give up being lapsed, though your practicing neighbours are obviously glad to share their traditions with local non-believers as well. I reckon that's how it should be.
ReplyDeleteCatholicism in Mexico seems to always involve the combination of delightful fun, dress-up, and ghoulishness. I think all three of those come from indigenous traditions -- both the Mayas and Aztecs, and probably other indigenous peoples, loved to wear fancy clothes and chop people's heads off. I guess the indigenous traditions in the rest of the world just weren't as much fun, or as picturesque, or as creepy.
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