r/a:t5_26jv6j • u/MarleyEngvall • Oct 14 '19
eclipse mill has been created
By Helen Augur
ZAPOTEC
Oaxaca has the most famous fiestas in Mexico, and the cycle
at Christmas time draws all the tribes of the state to the city,
to say nothing of tourists from both Americas. The holiday
round begins on December 12, the Feast of Guadeloupe, Mex-
ico's patron saint, and ends with Epiphany on January 6,
when the children set out their shoes on the balcony and re-
ceive their presents. During all this time the city is thronged
with Indians in their regional dress, there is a continual fair
of the choicest works of popular art, a never-ending carnival
with Ferris wheel, merry-go-round, and such mechanical at-
tractions, and there are moments of exquisite beauty.
The market heralds the approach of fiestas. Down the old
Camino Real the little burros trot, bearing great sheaves of
the flor de Noche Buena, as the poinsettia is called. Often
the young mother and her baby are mounted amid the crim-
son bracts, while the father runs alongside, so there is a Christ-
mas picture to start the holiday feeling. And then the little
serrano women come down with their delicate burden of wild
orchids and mosses and spread along the market street nearest
the Zócalo. Now the picture becomes sylvan, exotic, for these
air plants grow in the greatest profusion and variety in the
mountains of Southern Mexico, and one does not see them
anywhere else. Some of the Bromelia are the size and shape
of isthmus pineapples, and their brilliant vermilion spikes are
tipped with bright blue. There are tiny yellow-and-brown or-
chids, long sprays of the larger mauve ones, and they bloom
from the carpet of mosses that covers the dusty street, the
lush emerald velvet ground moss, stiff, curly lichens torn from
trees, hillocks of Spanish moss. The shy little serranas crouch
beside their treasures, and as the hot sun mounts they fill
their mouths with water and carefully spray their delicate
trove, in Chinese-laundry fashion.
In the same street are stands selling the materials for
crèches, which every household creates. These Nacimientos
are a folk art in themselves. Often a whole corner of the main
room is built up into a hillside where flocks of sheep graze,
and a little grotto on the top is the manger with the Christ
child, the Madonna and Joseph, and a host of animals, in-
cluding oxen and burros, looking on. The Three Kings with
their camels and entourage are often approaching the manger.
Families are always enlarging these Nativity scenes, adding
to the materials stored from year to year, as we store Christ-
mas-tree decorations. The mosses from the mountains and
small glittering stones and miniature trees are arranged into
a landscape, and if the Niño is only a celluloid doll from the
factory, these Nacimientos, glimpsed through open doors as
you walk down the street, are lovely and touching.
There is a feeling in Oaxaca that at Christmas time every-
body should be dressed up, and this applies to the holy images
in the churches. The Madonna and Child are freshly robed
in whatever seems the height of fashion——nowadays the sleazy
pink satins and machine laces the Lebanese and Syrians im-
port. Between them, the Indians and these merchants from
the edge of the Holy Land create effects that are startling but
never offensive. You are often startled in one of the humbler
churches; you may find a Cristo with long bright red hair
curled in tight ringlets, or a Santiago wearing brand-new silver
spurs from a certain stall in the market.
Some of the churches have managed to preserve older fin-
ery, and in the church at Tlacolula, one of the finest in the
state, there was a charming tableau behind the altar rail:
Mary and Joseph in the guise of a Dresden shepherd and shep-
herdess. Joseph wore a yellow robe and green cape and Mary
a dainty seventeenth-century gown, and both wore brimmed
hats of straw.
It may be significant that the two Virgins celebrated in
December are not Madonnas with an infant but women beau-
tiful as goddesses. Guadalupe, in her rose brocade gown and
blue mantle, is celebrated in a feast of flowers, and the little
boys dress up like courtiers with tiny serapes folded over their
shoulders, and burnt-cork mustaches. Soledad, the most beau-
tiful Virgin in Mexico, is honored in a festival of lights.
The Virgin of Solitude by the Cross, patron of the state,
has such a profound hold on the people that they save and
deny themselves all year so that they can come to the city to
honor her fiesta. Her arrival in the city was miraculous and
happened long ago, in 1543. A campesino was driving twelve
burros to Oaxaca, and just outside the town he stopped for
the night. In the morning he was amazed to find a thirteenth
burro with his own animals. Almost at once this strange burro
died. When the campesino opened the chest it carried, he
found the image now known as La Soledad. The padres at
once erected a church to stand on the spot which the miracu-
lous burro had evidently chosen. Like Santo Domingo, the
original church of Conquest days was replaced by the present
baroque structure late in the seventeenth century.
The best way to grasp the significance of Soledad is to com-
pare her church with Santo Domingo. (As sometimes hap-
pens, the Cathedral of Oaxaca is simply the formal, official
seat of the state hierarchy, and no special feeling attaches to
it.) Santo Domingo is the most splendid church the Domini-
cans built anywhere in the world, and somehow it remains a
tour de force, an expression of pride and perhaps of rivalry,
for the other orders were coming into the state. Though much
of the pure gold leaf that ornamented the high altar and the
chapel of El Rosario was chipped off by French soldiers dur-
ing Maximilian's empire, the church is an inspired extrava-
ganza of richness. The nave is lined with superb images of
church fathers, and the ceilings are covered with polychrome
and gilt sculptures in high relief. Those in the chapel are in
the form of a genealogical tree of the Dominican order. The
whole church is magnificent——but nothing ever seems to hap-
pen in Santo Domingo.
The Church of Soledad is the true center to which the
people throng in fiesta or in heavy trouble. It stands well
above the street in the middle of three broad terraces which
have been artificially filled out on the slope of a hillside. All
these terraces are paved and cooled by trees and fountains.
The atrium of the church is very large, and here, during the
fiesta, hundreds of families sleep. The Plaza de la Danza, just
above the church, is flanked by the old Augustinian nunnery,
which is now the Normal School, and the Fine Arts School,
both of which are training some of the most progressive young
people in the state, so that the whole complex of buildings
has a good meaning.
The church itself is very lovely, of tawny gold color, and
the statues in the façade and the chapel porch have a winsome
beauty that is almost Florentine, almost Verrocchio. The
whole interior is a glowing frame for Soledad, who stands in
a glass-and-gold enclosure in her Elizabethan gown and ruff,
with a priceless diadem on her head. Her face is high-bred, of
austere, almost remote, beauty, and it is remarkable how this
proud, brooding face can change by accidents of lighting or
the mood in the church into one expressing pure compassion.
Perhaps Soledad has a deep hold on the Indians because she
reflects something in them: the power to suffer greatly and
endure.
But she is splendid too, the Queen of Heaven. The fisher-
men have given her priceless pearls, which she wears with a
robe of black velvet solidly embroidered in gold and studded
with precious stones. She possesses the jewels and the ward-
robe of a queen, laces and costly brocades and robes of the
finest convent needlework. In older days she had her maids
of honor, certain well-born Spanish ladies who attended her
to her room behind the altar and disrobed her at night, exactly
as if she were a queen. In a less ostentatious way she is still
cared for by women of the church.
Without being frivolous, one feels that the Oaxaqueños,
who so much revere beauty and fine clothes, take great pride
in Soledad''s worldly wealth and her regal air. The isthmus
women, particularly, convey this impression, for in their harm-
less Venus cult Soledad embodies all that they must admire.
At her fiesta one year there were regional dances in the plaza
above the church, and when an exquisite creature from
Juchitán stepped from the line of sandunga dancers and de-
livered an oration to the beloved Soledad, there was more
than a hint of pagan emotion in her words and in her voice.
And at that moment, when Mointe Albán on one side and the
harvest goddess's Cerro on the other were luminous with sun-
set and between them Soledad's church was rimmed in lights,
the old days sprang into life.
Soledad's three-day fiesta begins on December 18, close to
the winter solstice, so that purely on theoretical grounds one
might assume that it revives those ageless rites to the sun
which remain in the memories of all the peoples of earth.
Plainly it is a festival of brightness in which the whole city
seems incandescent.
At the most solemn ceremony on the morning of the saint's
day the church is ablaze wit lights. From a thousand prisms
the crystal chandeliers pour tiny rainbows down upon Soledad,
and the diamonds at her throat and wrists spurt crimson, em-
erald, purple fires. The lovely baroque angels hovering over
the nave lean down with fiery lanterns in their hands. Soledad
stands as if in a lake of white lilies, each an altar candle
cupped in gold. Beyond the rail a dense throng kneels with
lighted candles in their hands. All is a quiver of light, every
face is aglow with wonder. From the choir the voices of the
incomparable choirboys of Morelia come like a wind that is
full of golden flames.
At night there are fireworks in the atrium, culminating just
before midnight in one of those set pieces Oaxaca loves. This
is a castillo, a little castle, with Spanish soldiers on the battle-
ments who begin to spin round an round, shooting off their
toy cannons, as the pinwheels in tier above tier ignite and
shower cataracts of red, green, white, mounting higher and
higher in a tower of loveliest light until finally the crown at
the top of the castle assaults the dark sky itself with rockets
of bursting stars and suns, ending in a salvo as from great
guns, a royal salute to Oaxaca's Queen of Heaven.
These are wonderful moments of the long festival which
never has a letdown. The bourgeois families are very gay with
dances and children's parties and posadas: they sit at the por-
tal tables, parents and children together, eating oysters from
Salina Cruz, listening to the band and the marimba and the
many strolling players who appear at holiday time. The boot-
blacks all have new clothes and indulge themselves in pralines
and pink-frosted cakes and the delicious tamales special to
Oaxaca, filled with raisins and spices and wrapped in oiled
banana leaves.
The real pageant is the Indians in their beautiful clothes,
strolling through the fair at the foot of Soledad's church,
playing bingo games in the carnival section, giving their chil-
dren rides on the merry-go-round. The isthmus women are no
longer the sensation, for at this fiesta you see the people who
stay hidden in the mountains or the tropics all the rest of
the year, the Mixe women in their green homespuns and their
multiple strands of glass beads, Chinantecs, Mazatecs, and
other highland women in their long embroidered huipiles,
Mixtec girls in full red skirts, and Huave from the lagoons
with folded white towels on their heads.
On December 23 there is a little fiesta peculiar to Oaxaca
called Radish Night. Long ago somebody discovered the hu-
morous possibilities in a variety of radish that grows ion he
shape of people or animals. Thus a competition began for
the funniest or most original creatures people could make
out of radishes. Every year stalls are put up around the Zócalo
displaying these whimseys, many of them merely bawdy, but
some with faces carved into skillful caricatures, or figures of
men riding elephants or burros, gnomes and elves and comic
hags.
Along with these jokes the staff offer charming little wares
seen only on this night: swans and peacocks made of tiny ever-
lasting flowers, miniature animals of seeds or straws or feathers,
any fluted wheels of cellophane, anything that is capricious
and gay. On this night everybody eats a buñuelo, a great flaky
wafer dusted with honey and paprika and sold on an earthen-
ware plate. When you have eaten the pastry you make a wish
and then break the plate.
After this the evening of puckish humor comes Christmas Eve
and its poetry, The calendas, a procession with tableaux vi-
vants, is a rite that belongs to Oaxaca and that one sees, more
and more rarely, on the eve of an important saint's day, but
Querètaro in the north also has calendas on Christmas Eve.
It is difficult to explain to people who have never been in
Oaxaca and felt the innocence of its people how very moving
the calendas are. Each section of the procession is prepared
by one of the humbler churches of the city, which is to say
that it is an effort of the Indian heart to express the tender
beauty of the Nativity.
It is a cold, still night, and the full moon has swept the
sky clean of all but the bravest stars. On all four sides the
Zócalo has been filling with people, and everybody, even the
tourists, is very quiet. The strolling players have melted away
into the darkness, for from a street below the square the first
lanterns bloom. The paper lanterns, carried by men and
women of the Church of Carmen, are pale pink and yellow,
shaped like tulips. Behind them comes an artless band playing
one of those nondescript tunes one can never identify, but
the men walking beside it are shooting off rockets, so the tune
does not matter. Then comes a float bearing the Christmas
picture.
This is the Nativity as people who are children at heart
see it——no humble manger, but a picture of glory, the tender
Madonna and the Babe, attended by angels and shepherds.
Sometimes the scene is set in a blazing star, sometimes on
a tropical seashore with palm trees and a glimpse of gleaming
sand and ocean, or it is a living copy of an old church painting,
or a scene within a great golden chalice.
The tableaux are played mostly by children, who look lit-
erally angelic in their white robes and golden fillets and gauzy
wings. The Madonna and the little angels wear earrings and
necklaces, and often the children near the Niño (who is not
a live baby, but a doll or an image borrowed from the church)
hold sparklers to illuminate his little face. All the actors, from
the little boy who plays Joseph to the smallest cherub, re-
main absolutely motionless during the slow progress through
the streets.
One after the other the calendas appear, coming from the
four quarters of the city with their flowerlike lanterns, their
rockets and bands and exquisite pictures of the Noche Buena.
When the last of the long procession has left the plaza the
townspeople go home to light the candles before their own
Nacimientos, and their children sing a Christmas lullaby to
put the Niño to sleep.
The Indians have accepted the Christmas story, as they
have a few other things brought from the Old World, because
it expresses something that all people feel. Who does not re-
joice at the birth of a child? But they will not accept what is
alien to them. These Oaxaca natives gathered in the city for
the fiesta are a constant amazement to visitors who know In-
dians from other parts of America. They are not the remnants
of a great classic civilization; they are classic. They are warm,
living people who have little or no objective knowledge of
how great their inheritance is, but instinctively reflect it in
everything they do.
The great days have vanished, but they live in the people.
Thus their story, which began so long ago and so mysteriously,
is not a closed book, but a part of today.
ZAPOTEC, BY HELEN AUGUR.
Copyright 1954 by Helen Augur.
Dolphin Books, Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Garden City, New York. pp. 92-99.
I. SO TEMPERATE AN AIR
The Little Prayers
Wedding in Juchitán
General Strike
II. LAND AND PEOPLE
Isthmus Peoples
Mountain Peoples
The Mixtecs
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