#6 Lots o’ Pics on a Blog that’s Fixed, Wednesday morning, April 16

#6 Lots o’ Pics on a Blog that’s Fixed, Wednesday morning, April 16

First, my apologies for Tuesday’s blog.  The internet kept popping on and off, making it difficult if not impossible for me to download photos and have any idea how big they might be on your screen. I hope to do better today.

Halfway through the week seems like a good time for a few words about the traditional celebration of Holy Week in Guatemala and many other places in Latin America.  Here, in this part of Mesoamerica there is a strong Maya heritage and the villages we visited today, Wednesday, are nearly 100% Maya with Spanish being spoken or understood by well less than half the population, so we are told.

The village of San Antonio is a 25 minute camioneta (sometimes called a “chicken bus”) ride outside the city of Antigua.  (p.s., see the documentary film “La Camioneta” released in 2012).  In San Antonio we expected to see a procession walk over a few small alfombras (rugs on the street made from, among many other things, dyed sawdust, pine needles, fruits, vegetables, and/or flowers) as Sandy and I did last year on the same day of Holy Week.  We saw neither a procession nor any alfombras in San Antonio.  Things change and nobody bothers to publicize the changes.

The daytime procession this year was in the even smaller village of Santa Catarina about 3 minutes south by tuk-tuk.  We got there as quickly as possible, arriving at 9:40 AM, just 20 minutes before the procession was to begin.  The alfombras and the procession were the most moving we have seen, either this or last year in Guatemala or in Ronda, Spain in 2008.  What a surprise!  It seemed that nearly every inch of the procession route was covered with homemade alfombras, each better than the others, if that’s possible.  One of the alfombras even had a live rabbit, a live canary, and live doves (in small cages) that the procession passed over without harming or damaging.

The procession was particularly moving for me because of the local feel and the Maya people who participated in carrying the andas (floats), lining the streets, and preparing the path the procession would take.  The kids were cute and the women were decked out in traditional dress.  The bands behind the float carrying Jesus (and Gabriel?) and the one behind the float of Mary, carried by 42 women and girls at a time, that followed was just as loud and good as any we have heard in Antigua.  I’m not sure that is a compliment, though.

Now, a historical note is in order about the apparent origin of these and other religious processions in Mesoamerica.  We are told that processions started shortly after the Spanish took over in the mid-1500s as a way to draw people into the Catholic church.  The local people could not read and did not speak Spanish, and the mass was in Latin.  What a mess.  So, the church had processions throughout the year to entice folks to come in and see what was up.  Even after the language of the mass was switched to Spanish after Vatican II, in general the Maya community still did not understand it.  Today, the processions continue, the mass is in Spanish (not Mayan), and the church grows, I guess.

Fill’s Food Forum

Today’s hamburgesas for Sandy and me (we liked them) in San Antonio and Fillmore’s nachos (he did not) don’t seem to have made it to his “worth writing about” list.  So you’ve had your fill of Fill until tomorrow, I guess.  But someday he will have to comment on the liquados (like smoothies) we get almost daily deep inside the central Mercado Central (central market).