Tuesday, August 21, 2007

!Fiesta!


My friend Gail from Grace Church called yesterday. She said that she had been reading my sabbatical blog and had a better understanding of our Latino neighbors because of it. That really is wonderful to hear. The members of Grace Church understand that to live with each other in the community of the church we have to learn about each other and understand each other. It's important to "get" the other person. Thanks Gail for reading my blog. Thanks Dave, my friend at Grace for printing my blog for parishioners who can't access it on the computer. Thanks Maria, my neighbor for reading and posting responses. I did get to Mexico City and spent four hours at the Museo de Antropologia. Thanks for your encouragement.

There were many cultural things I had to adjust to in Mexico. Thankfully, I had read quite a bit about the culture and the people. But I wasn't used to the constant noise. When I lived with Evelia I heard loud music from cars, children shouting until late at night playing ball and throwing it against the metal garage door under my room, loud music at El Centro, fireworks until late on the weekends, the constant "riot" of dogs that lived in the street corner with the family that had come in from the poor area of town and "squatted" under a tarp they had put up.


I understood from the history of Mexico that there are fiestas for everything: birthdays, The Virgen de Guadalupe, the pagan indigenous rituals from hundreds of years ago, the neighborhood patron saint/s, the 15th birthday of the daughters, baptisms, first communions. Almost every day has some reason for a fiesta. Even the day of the dead, November 2 is a fiesta.

One of my teachers explained fiestas to me. She described their link to poverty. She said that there is a tradition of spending all you have on fiestas, especially the poor. There is not much of a tradition of saving. So, the day after the fiesta, people are poorer than before the fiesta. She worries that this is a problem for the future.

The Nobel Prize winning author Octovio Paz, a Mexican wrote the following in his book, "Labyrinth of Solitude", "It is impossible to calculate how many fiestas we have and how much time and money we spend on them. I remember asking the mayor of a village near Mitla, several years ago, 'What is the income of the village government?' 'About 3,000 pesos a year. We are very poor. But the Governor and the Federal Government always help us to meet our expenses.' 'And how are the 3,000 pesos spent?' 'Mostly on fiestas, senor. We are a small village, but we have two patron saints.'"

Paz goes on to write, "...how could a poor Mexican live without the two or three annual fiestas that make up for his poverty and misery? Fiestas are our only luxury. They replace, and are perhaps better than, the theater and vacations, Anglo-Saxon weekends and cocktail parties, the bourgeois reception, the Mediterranean cafe."
One thing I know from my time in Mexico: poverty, fiestas and the meaning of life in Mexico are very complicated themes.

My friend Gail now understands the loud music - why we frequently hear it playing in our neighborhoods, near our church, Grace, from an occasional car - it's fiesta!

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