So you wake up one morning in beautiful downtown Catemaco, Veracruz and your street has turned into a dead end. A hive of workers apparently spent the night building a fair size slum shack in the middle of the street to celebrate the 475th anniversary of The Virgin of Guadalupe of Tepeyac.
According to my Popoluca partner, this particular neighbor is famous for an annual ritual and invites the entire town to free food, worship and hot chocolate. Invite is not the word, there is one of those giant loudspeakers on wheels cruising the neighborhoods belting out invitations.Meanwhile apparently a dozen women slaved over rolls of colored paper, creating exquisite flowers, while their male friends are driving my dogs nuts with illegal Iraq sized firecrackers.
By now the downtown streets and the basilica are a parking lot of arriving worshippers, who ran, pedaled or bused into town from places as far as several hundred miles away. Since the reason for these pilgrimages lies in a personal commitment people made during the year to express their thanks, this Virgin must have made a lot of people happy this year.
So tonight, I, too am invited and can’t wait for the goodies. My Popoluca will do the praying. Later on we’ll have the chance to get rid of our 10 peso coins or (tamales by the cash deficient) to hordes of child troubadors repeatedly singing a single refrain from the Guadalupana.
And if we stay up long enough, by midnight the entire town will be singing Las Manañitas. Tomorrow, it will be a rare street that does not have something similar to my dead end happening throughout the day.
AND THEN, a few days of quiet (I hope they ran out of firecrackers) and then the posadas begin on Hanukah (only coincidentally occuring on the 16th of December this year), and this sleepy little village will not rest till after January 6th.
I am considering moving to Oaxaca.
