Semana Santa in the Sierra

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 entire week, stretching from Palm Sunday
(Domingo de Ramos) through 8 days to Easter Sunday.

Here in Manta, on the Ecuadorian coast, the celebration seems to be centered
mostly around drinking beer, eating out in restaurants, and playing football
on the beach. There are a few extra masses in the churches, and extended
families get together for extended feeds, with special traditional fare
based around seafood, bananas and peanuts, all homegrown staples of Manabi
province, but mostly it seems business as usual.

This is largely because Manta is a popular resort destination, and during
the peak getaway times, Carnival and Semana Santa, the streets and beaches
are choked with vacationers rich and poor who arrive tired and desperate
for a good time, on interprovincial busses, in private cars, packed into
pickups and commandeered local mini-busses, from Quito the capital and
Guayaquil the business center. Friday night there was one half-assed religious
procession wandering through the streets, past numerous storefronts and
street corners where crudely drawn cardboard and crayon signs had been
nailed or taped to walls and lampposts identifying the spot as the "8th
Station of the Cross" and so on. We passed this procession in a taxicab
on our way back after an unsuccessful search for a spit-roasted chicken,
and it consisted of a skinny Christ-substitute with a burnt-cork beard
and lipstick wounds, dressed in a ratty robe supposedly approximating someone’s
idea of Biblical garb, and brown rubber sandals. He was followed by about
a dozen pious parishioners chatting quietly and interacting with the small
knots of people gathered on each corner to watch them pass by. We settled
for Chinese food.

This sorry spectacle reminded us, in its dissimilarity, of the way
the holiday is celebrated in the Andean region. Up there, high in the
ghostly white-capped ridges and ranges, and deep in the sheltered canyons
and valleys,
live
millions of Indians whose culture, victim of centuries of abuse, neglect,
attempted extermination, assimilation and exploitation, has somehow flowered
into a marvelously mystical hybrid of the most esoteric and myth infused
variety of Christianity and the ineradicable strains of pre-Conquest rituals
and nature-infused animism.

In the tradition of conquered peoples everywhere and throughout history,
these native Americans have over the centuries carefully and surreptitiously
lain new Gods and Saints over age-old beliefs and local forms of divine
inspiration. Old ceremonies adopted new symbols, spirits and soul-powers
took on new names and clothing, and celestial calendars were fit into new
monthly matrixes. In the Andes, what began as a way to appease Spanish
conquistadores and convert-or-kill Catholic missionaries has evolved into
a beautiful and enlightening form of angelic animism which sustains these
long-suffering people and allows them at least a tenuous and tortured link
to their ancestors and their lost universe.

We are unable to forget (and why would we ever want to) one long ago April
when the Dowbrigade and wife #1, the Peruvian Princess, were on a voyage
of personal discovery in a small town named Carhuaz, located in an exquisite
valley high in the Peruvian Andes. The valley is called the "Callejon de
Huaylas", and is known by visitors as "The Switzerland of South America"
for its white rimmed skyline and popularity with the foolhardy foreigners
who flock there during climbing season to attempt to conquer the legendary
mountains and holy peaks which surround the Callejon.

They gather in the tourist center of Huaraz, a slightly larger town at
the head of the valley, featuring climbing clubs, adventure tourism agencies,
fly-by-night outfitters renting ragged knapsacks and tents, crampons and
ropes, ice axes and maps left behind by previous expeditions, $3-dollar-a-night
hotels, pizzerias, pubs and juice bars, and an ever-changing cast of unlicensed
guides, local scammers and down-on-their luck travelers without the money
or wherewithal to leave.

Unlike the more famous mountain-climbing destinations in Nepal and Tibet,
home to the only higher mountains on the face of the earth, where expeditions
must be arranged and registered years in advance, with requirements for
licensed local guides, international certification for each member, equipment
inspections and trained medical personnel, in the Peruvian Andes there
are no requirements or special permissions of any kind needed to challenge
these monstrous peaks. Any fool with a sleeping bag and a pair of sneakers
is free to risk his or her neck climbing Huascaran (28,000 feet) or Huandoy
(27,000). Every year a few of these idiots simply disappear off the face
of the earth, never to be heard from again, as the Peruvian government
has neither the resources nor the inclination to mount rescue missions
and, in fact, doesn’t even have a clue as to how many climbers leave Huaraz
or how many come back.

An hour from this outpost of Western adventurism, down the two-lane blacktop
which winds down the floor of the valley, the only paved road in the area,
the town of Carhuaz is in another world. A small town square around a one-block
park contains what consists of the local business community; the town hall/court/Hall
of Records and civil defense headquarters, a bank, a hardware store, a
pharmacy, two restaurants and the post office. In the center of the park
is a small fountain featuring carved stone cherubs hoisting aloft carafes
from which pours pure mountain water and which, before the government finally
put in a municipal water system in the 1960s was the main source of drinking,
washing and cooking water in the town.

Distributed seemingly at random around the plaza are "ambulantes", small
carts selling anticuchos (marinated chicken hearts skewered on bamboo stakes
and roasted over charcoal fires), cigarettes and candy, hot Andean cocktails
consisting of pure cane liquor flavored with cinnamon and unknown Indian
spices, and raspadillas, the local version of the venerable snow cone.
The shaved ice treats are unique in our experience in that every morning
before dawn incredibly strong-legged and lunged Indians literally run up
twisting trails two hours to the edge of the icecap, to hack cooler-sized
blocks of ice from the face of the glacier, wrap them in woven carryall
blankets, and run back down to the square to provide the raspadilla-vendors
their raw material for the day. Ice, inviolate since the ancient days of
the last ice age, frozen before the first drop of acid rain or choking
smoke from the first internal combustion engine sullied the atmosphere
of the planet, is shaved from these blocks and flavored with sticky syrups
of myriad flavors and colors.

The main economic activity of Carhuaz is to function as an interface between
the modern world, represented by the store owners and suppliers, mostly
mixed-blood descendents of the Spaniards who "civilized" the region 500
years ago, and the thousands and thousands of Indians who live high above,
in tiny hamlets and knots of 3 or 4 adobe huts, farming and tending flocks
of sheep, cows and goats. Once a week they haul their produce down to the
nearest road, and then by truck into town for the Tuesday market, there
to exchange them for the necessities of modern life; machine woven cloth,
knives, tools and machetes, metal pots and pans, shoes, cassettes of the
sad, haunting Andean music, and, of course, beer.

These Indians, who come down to trade once a week, are actually a small
minority, the "Westernized" Indians, and most of them speak at least some
Spanish. But beyond their realms, far higher and deeper in hidden valleys
and along rushing rivers of glacial run-off, are entire worlds of indigenous
activity, beyond the reach of the beer trucks and radio broadcasts, centers
of habitation so isolated that their members need to walk two or three
days down terraced hillsides and tortured boulder-paths just to get to
a rutted dirt road or electrical line. Incredibly, these forbidding mountainsides
are spotted with these hamlets right up to the snowline – thousands and
thousands of human lives lived in their entirety lost in the fog-enshrouded
folds of some of the wildest ranges on Earth. For many of these people,
their contact with what we consider civilization is limited to a single
yearly pilgrimage – down to Carhuaz for Semana Santa. They speak no Spanish,
only Quechua, a linguistic descendant of the language of the Incas.

At the time, the Dowbrigade and wife #1 were living in a ramshackle adobe
mansion known as "The House by the Bridge" on the outskirts of Carhuaz,
next to a bridge crossing a fairly large river about a mile above town.
The dirt road that passed the house, crossed the bridge and disappeared
into the mountains was the main access to that mysterious Andean realm,
and in the days leading up to Semana Santa it was full of a steady stream
of stony-gazed Indians, in groups of 20 or 30, who were arriving for the
festivities after days of tramping, drinking, singing and stumbling down
the mountainsides.

We loved, in those days, sitting on a grassy knoll outside out house and
watching them pass. Always in a good mood as they descended, near now to
their destination below, they were a parade of cultural icons, and an anthropologist’s
dream. Dressed in their best ceremonial finery, each village displayed
a distinct sartorial style, variations on the regional theme; baggy white
trousers and deep blue shirts on the men, and colorful, hand woven long
wool skirts and white blouses for the women. The main features which distinguished
one group from the other are the intricate patterns woven into their ponchos
(for the men) and wraps (for the women), and the somewhat bizarre bowler
hats worn by the women.
These hats, prized possessions obtained in fact
during these yearly treks to the town, were decorated with a wild range
of feathers, ribbons, shiny metal do-dads, pins, woven hatbands and knotted
strings, each of which had a ritual significance we were not privileged
to know and which identified them as members of a particular village, family
or tribe.

At the head of each group walked (or staggered) the village band, consisting
of a guitar, a churango, which is a kind of ukulele made with an armadillo
shell as sounding box, 2 or 3 or 4 Andean flutes, pan-pipe style, and an
assortment of wooden drums, tom-toms and hollow logs. The most important
member of the group, however, walked in the middle – the bucketboy. The
bucket he carried was somehow always full of the preferred and pervasive
Andean libation, a fermented corn mash somewhere between beer and mead,
called "Chicha", liberally spiked for extra punch with homemade cane liquor,
Andean white-lightning, somewhere around 150 proof, with all of the rocket
fuel raw power of the Appalachian version, which accounted for the staggering.

Singing, laughing, dancing, they stumbled down the mountain lane, en route
to staking out a spot on the square or in a nearby empty lot, a home away
from home, just enough space to build a small cooking fire and have room
to pass out when the ritual of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, or
the attendant drinking, got to be too much.

With dozens of these encampments arranged around town, things would start
to get really intense by Thursday night, which was the occasion of the
first of three official and ritual processions which would wind through
the streets of town from dusk to dawn. These processions bore little resemblance
to the meek, watered-down version we saw in Manta Friday. They would each
feature hundreds of wacked-out Indians, and 3 or 4 of the Andean bands,
who would take turns playing sad huinos, a local dirge-like musical genre,
or sometimes all playing at once in a sort of ambulatory battle of the
bands.

Each village unit also had a number of individuals who formed a dance troupe
dressed in elaborate costumes, feathered or sequined, with colorful capes
and masks, and small bronze bells strapped to their ankles, adding to the
cacophony and keeping the rhythm set by the musicians. And, of course,
each procession featured multiple buckets of the magic mash, for which
a few chipped glasses and paper cups were constantly being passed from
hand to hand and mouth to mouth.

The first procession, Thursday night, was meant to symbolize the forced
entry of Jesus and the two thieves into Jerusalem. That night, at the head
of the drunken, dancing mob were three privileged individuals selected
to represent the protagonists. They were easily identifiable by the brown
cassocks they wore over their traditional dress. As they went by, the other
members of the march, especially the children, would run up to them and
beat them about the legs with thin branches and string lashes. Although
these weapons looked as though they wouldn’t shoo a fly, Jesus and the
thieves would leap in the air and cry out when a little boy or girl swatted
them
with their sticks. Although we wondered, we never found out if the cassocks
were periodically passed from individual to individual or whether the same
poor
victims were
forced to leap and weep throughout the long night.

For it was indeed a full 12-hour event, starting just after sunset and
continuing through the narrow streets and around the square until the first
rays of daylight broke over the mountains, at which point the assembled
faithful would stagger off to find a place to sleep for a few hours before
the next stage of the drama.

The next night, Friday, was the most solemn and in many ways the most spectacularly
bizarre part of the ritual. Since Good Friday was the day when Christ was
supposedly actually killed, this night’s procession reached the saddest
and deepest depths of Andean sorrow, a sorrow unsurpassed in its historical
substantiation and centricity to the cultural core of what it means to
be a conquered nation 500 years on in the least developed corner of an
undeveloped country.

Friday’s procession started with a Mass in the local church, delivered
in a linguistic polyglot of Latin, Spanish and Quechua. At the end of the
Mass, shortly after dark, the second procession would form in the small
plaza outside the church. At the head of the mob this time were the local
priest in embroidered white liturgical robes, and two long, narrow litters
made from tree trunks and hoisted to shoulder height by 6 halfway sober
litter-bearers. On one was placed a life-sized statue of the Virgin Mary,
recently removed from her customary alcove in the church. The statue appeared
to be made of plaster, but was dressed in a real cloth robe, deep royal
blue velour, with gold lame highlights, to which people would pin prayers,
notes to the recently deceased, and money. Lots of money. Bills of all
denominations, food coupons, the odd foreign banknote (who knows where
they got them from) IOUs and coin purses hung from the Virgin like multicolored
flies on a leg of lamb hung too
long
in
the local
market.
Loose
coins
littered the litter around the base of the statue, which was apparently
bolted to the wooden frame to prevent unceremonious spills or dumpings.

At the very front of the procession was a sight so incredible we at first
thought it was a hallucination. They had taken a six-foot wooden statue
of Christ crucified, replete with bleeding wounds and a crown of real thorns,
and placed it in a specially constructed glass coffin. In order to fit,
the Christ’s outstretched arms had been sawed off and reattached to his
sides. The entire apparatus was eerily illuminated by several strings of
blinking Christmas tree lights running up the corners and sides of the
glass coffin and across Christ’s long-suffering body, powered by a 12-volt
car battery carried on a separate, smaller pallet by two stout young men
trailing a few steps behind. The effect was surreal, with a multi-colored
aura flashing on and off the body of Christ as the procession oozed slowly
through the streets of town.

The music was also more solemn and haunting than on the previous night.
No melodic tunes or identifiable songs. For long stretches only the drums
would hold forth, hitting a hollow funereal rhythm and echoing off the
buildings and around the square. At times they were joined by the flutes,
welling up in long one-note laments which hung, wavering, in the crisp
mountain air. Many of the people, especially the women, were actually weeping,
moaning in a sort of soul-wrenching Andean ululation. Of course, none of
this interfered with their drinking – if anything they were going at it
even harder than the night before, morbidly, weepingly drunk, lost in the
depths of some communal sorrow far beyond the ability of a sallow pampered
observer such as ourself to comprehend.

During the days between the processions, exhausted Indians would gather
in their localized spaces, resting and recuperating strength for the next
ceremonial session. Women made half-hearted attempts to cook, but everyone
was so wasted that meals consisted of a few pieces of bread or a handful
of rice. The drinking, of course, continued unabated throughout.

Saturday night was a bit more light-hearted than Friday, but by this point
everyone had been dead drunk for three days so the staggering and slobbering
was much more pronounced. Seemingly unconscious bodies lined the parade
route like discarded sacks of spoiled potatoes. Communication was reduced
to grunts, cries and snorts interspersed around slurred attempts to form
actual words. Fights were constantly breaking out, but the participants
were invariably too far gone to do more than flail ineffectually at thin
air and then fall to the ground in a heap.

The distinguishing feature of the Saturday procession was the reviled figure
of Pontius Pilot, representing evil incarnate and the de facto stand-in
for the devil himself. As an added idiosyncratic ritual tradition, Pilot
was represented by a full-size straw manikin, dressed in discarded clothing
and made up to resemble a particularly hated personage from the daily lives
of the Indians themselves during the previous year. Every year a different
person was chosen – a greedy landowner, a local philanderer, a disgraced
town official, and on one recent occasion an intensely disliked President
of Peru.

The Pilot manikin was carefully dressed and made up, and then tied firmly
to the back of an ass, facing ass-backwards. As this final procession made
its way through the cobblestone and dirt streets of Carhuaz, people would
throw stones, sticks, dirt and empty bottles and cans at the poor doll
and donkey (mostly the kids threw actually, as almost all of the adults
were too wrecked by this point to throw anything but up). This ritual abuse
would again go on throughout the night, accompanied by unsyncopated drumming
and off-key bleating from plastered flautists.

Finally, just as Easter Sunday dawned in the crystalline Andean skies,
the procession would arrive, as if my chance, in a specially prepared clearing
in a secondary plaza between the Church and the primary school. In the
center of this space a gigantic bonfire had been prepared, tree trunks,
two-by-fours, busted up furniture, doorframes and doors, massive branches
the size of railroad ties, piled 20 feet high and waiting to be lit. The
Pilot-figure was roped and thrown atop the fire-tower (the poor abused
donkey was cut loose and allowed to vamoose off to look for forage and
lick its wounds), and then to exhausted cheers and incoherent curses, the
entire conflagration was set off with huge, gasoline-soaked torches. People
made spastic and sloppy attempts to dance around the flames as they lit
up the rapidly disappearing Andean dawn.

The final act in this Andean Passion play was a closing Mass, delivered
open-air in the same spot where the bonfire licked the sky. The priest
obviously
knew better than to let that way-beyond-drunken rabble into his church.

After a few hours passed out in the park, or drooling, glassy-eyed in the
gutters and ditches of the town, the Indians would gather their meager
belongings and begin the long trek 2 or 3 or 4 days back to their points
of origin, having once again lived through the crucifixion, death and resurrection
of their nominal Savior. One can only guess at the personal significance
of this week-long pilgrimage and ritual auto-immolation in the interior
lives and religious realities of these noble and long-suffering people.
But it obviously fulfilled a need over and above the obvious and universally
human desire to get periodically smashed, dance and sing, and get away
from home once in a while. Whatever it is, it keeps them keep coming back
for more.

The last year we were in Carhuaz for Semana Santa, the first Mrs. Dowbrigade
was pregnant with #1 son, this being the only reason she eschewed full
participation in the ritual in all its drunken glory. For those three days,
to avoid the nightly mile-long trek up the mountainside to the House by
the Bridge, we took refuge in the streetside Consultoria of the Sra. Beatriz,
Carhuaz’s midwife and the closest thing to a doctor for miles around. The
Dowbrigade had been consulting with Beatriz for birth weight data key to
our never-finished Master? thesis in Physical Anthropology (another story).

We considered ourselves lucky to be able to stretch out for a few hours
at a time on the upholstered examination tables in this midwife clinic.
Between avoiding the stirrups and listening to the echoing drumbeats and
drunken wailings from the street outside we never really got much sleep,
but we guess that’s part of the point of the entire operation. The experience
certainly had an effect and left an impression which has never left us.
We sometimes wonder what effect it had on #1 son, born a mere two months
later in a thoroughly modern hospital in a city on the Peruvian coast.

Actually, at this very moment, 22 years later, on Easter Sunday 2004, that
same son (and #2 son as well) are ensconced back in Carhuaz, two doors
down from the House by the Bridge, constructing an adventure tourism hostel
on a patch of land we bought alongside the river. Tomorrow when (hopefully)
our new telephone line is turned on here in Manta, our first call will
be to Carhuaz to find out what the boys thought about the incredible spectacle
they have just experienced for the first time- Semana Santa in the Sierra.

more pictures from Carhuaz