A pair of oxen with their flowered headdress, orange/bread necklaces, and tequila bottles in place on their heads. They are ready for fiesta in Talega, Mexico.
A Fiesta appears to be Mexico's answer to all of life's mysteries, but it took me some time to realize the answer is possibly a bigger mystery. In 2019, when I first came to Mexico from Seattle, I thought I would quickly embrace the concept of fiesta and immediately figure it out because all those fabulous events looked so seductive in the travel brochures and blogs, and I'm so damn smart. Right--no problem. As I realize now, Mexican fiestas are astounding to watch, often impossible to understand, and all points in between. I will never comprehend all the elliptical traditions, contexts, and rationalizations behind the idea of fiesta, but if I focus specifically on very small pieces, I can safely say there are moments of clarity. I wouldn't go so far as to call it an understanding, but I would go so far as to call it a sense of wonder with it all, and maybe that's where it should stay.
A popular ex-pat theory is that traditional Mexicans celebrate so much because the rest of life is so hard. I don't think so. Mexicans celebrate because they have to, want to, and can, so they do. They have to because the fiesta is part of a well-lived life, and unlike many other countries, these guys celebrate life and death in the same long breath, so life has to fight for breathing room, and often, fiesta is the weapon of choice.
In his book The Labyrinth Of Solitude, the honored Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz says, "In fiesta, we Mexicans throw down our burdens of time and reason. Fiesta shot through with lightning, and delirium is the brilliant reverse of our normal silence, apathy, reticence, and gloom. We don't seek amusement. We seek an escape from ourselves. The fiesta is an experiment in disorder, reuniting contradictory elements and principles to bring about a renascence of life." Yep, I'm happy leaving it right there.
Mexican fiesta is Spanish/Catholic born, and it goes back almost 500 years to just after the conquest of the Aztec empire and the absorption of "New Spain." We can't count, and nobody even attempts to keep track of the reasons Mexicans celebrate. An excellent place to get started is with the church. The Catholic Church currently recognizes more than 10,000 saints, most of whom are celebrated one way or another. Every small town in Mexico has at least one or two patron saints celebrated yearly in what they call Fiesta patronales. Instead of national holidays, government-inspired celebrations, and big-city festivals, the small-town Fiesta patronales strike closer to the heart and the glorious madness of the real Mexico.
Rather than repeating the predictable shotgun blast of big city fiesta photos, I focused on a small piece of a small fiesta in a small farming town close to my home of San Miguel de Allende in Central Mexico. The town is called La Talega (maybe 300 people). This Fiesta patronales is the celebration to honor San Isidro Labrador--the patron of farmers and a bountiful harvest. The history of San Isidro goes back 1080 years to Madrid, Spain. Isidore, the farmer, was a hard-working day laborer who came to represent the united image of poor farmers everywhere. San Isidro is now honored worldwide, and in La Talega, this year's fiesta happened on May 28, 2022, before the planting of the fields and the start of the rainy season in June. This is the fiesta that includes the blessing of the oxen, which, in Mexico, appears to be unique.
The fiesta celebration in Talega includes local music, church services, a ceremonial group of at least 50 horsemen riding into town, horse races, free food, multiple concerts, enormous amounts of tequila, and mezcal, which never runs out or even gets low, and fireworks all day. The highlight of this celebration happens mid-day and includes the ceremonial decorative costuming of working teams of oxen that plow a field while wearing huge headdresses of paper flowers and giant necklaces made of bread, oranges, and tequila bottles. I've seen a few things, but I've never seen anything like this.
Remidios and Consuelo Valle create the crepe paper flowers and build the headdresses.
A month before the fiesta, the blessing of the oxen preparation begins with the construction of paper flowers and ornamental headdresses. Nobody knows exactly when this tradition started, but Remedios and Consuelo Valle have created the flowers and headdresses for the past thirty-five years. Their mother, Doña Dolores Espinoza, now 94, helped make the decorations when she was young, and her mother made them before her. It's been that way for generations.
The forms for the headdresses are made with small, flexible tree branches from the desert tree called palo dulce. The branches are bent into various shapes that look kind of like the frame of a stained-glass window and then tied together with twine. Remedios and Consuelo made the flowers by hand from pieces of brightly colored crepe paper, a special glue, and wire. One week before the celebration, they assembled the massive headdresses and tied the flowers to the tree branch frames using whatever colorful designs they personally wanted to create. The astonishing finished decorative pieces stand around 5 feet tall and look precisely like nothing else anywhere else.
The work on the flowers and headdresses begins almost a month before fiesta. The crepe paper flowers are hung from the ceiling of the house to dry and then tied to the headdresses a couple of days before the celebration.
On fiesta day, about 50 horsemen rode the cobblestone road into town and gathered their horses in front of the church, as a mass in honor of San Isidro Labrador took place inside. At the same time, the yunteros (plowmen) led their oxen, from a corral, less than a kilometer, to the large field that would soon be planted with corn. Somehow, the yunteros managed to tie the headdresses vertically to the yunta (yoke) frame between each team of two oxen. Let me say this carefully: The headdresses made of bent tree limbs and paper flowers stood about 5 feet tall and were tied to the yoke, which was already about 4 feet off the ground. That put the top of the headdress carried by the oxen spectacularly about 9 feet off the ground. The yunteros then draped huge necklaces of large oranges and small bread loaves strung together with heavy twine around the neck of each ox. But wait. A 750 ml bottle of 90-proof tequila was then tied between their horns and hung loosely on their foreheads, so it bounced between their eyes when they walked, as in it bounced between their eyes when they walked. That's the truth, and Dorothy reminds us, "Toto, I've a feeling we aren't in Kansas anymore."
Horsemen gather at the church while the mass is taking place. In the field, the yunteros tie the headdresses to the oxen yolks and hang the necklaces of oranges, bread loaves and tequila bottles from the heads of the oxen.
Let's take a breath here for a moment, and just for fun, let's assume you're a three-year-old ox weighing around 1,200 kilos, and in the name of fiesta and a whole bunch of other stuff, someone intentionally does all this to you. Would you put up with this nonsense? Even for a moment? Or, would you use your horns to kill everything you can reach within a couple of quick strides? Instead, those oxen just stood there as though they, unlike myself, understood “All the world is a stage”. I swear, I thought it was a peyote dream from that night in 1969. God, I love Mexico! Even in a country sometimes defined by frustrating contradictions, how on earth do you get here from there, and why would you ever want to leave once you got here?
The mass in the church came to an end. The priest José Manuel Briones, in a white robe, lead a procession a short distance down the cobblestone road to the field. The parade included a mariachi band, a woman carrying the small statue of Saint Isidro, another woman carrying a small statue of a symbolic pair of decorated oxen called San Isidro yuntita, all the horsemen, and most of the townspeople.
The oxen took all this on with little more than a couple of grunts and shuffles. Stay with me here. Then, individual yunteros gathered their oxen teams with their flowered headdresses and necklaces of oranges, bread, and tequila bottles flopping around on foreheads. Each team walked out into the field to ceremoniously plow the ground on this fiesta day as they have done for maybe two hundred years. For as long as anyone in Talega can recall, it has always been so. There was a moment when I stopped shooting photos and watched one team of decorated oxen and a 68-year-old grandfather named Jerónimo Ríos plow the field. It had to be an allegory or a parable, or maybe it was a metaphor. Or something. The whole scene was mystifying. I let out a deep breath, shook my head, and stared at the ground as though an answer might be found looking in that direction. The good people of La Talega treated this entire theatrical event with respect, honor, humility, devotion, passion, and grace. They treated it as though it were all written somewhere in the scriptures, and if it is our intention to be fair, I'm gonna say it is. It was simply gorgeous.
68-year-old Jerónimo Ríos and his team of Oxen work the field in Talega on fiesta day as it has been for generations before him.
The priest walked up to and faced the six assembled teams of decorated oxen. He carried a tiny tree branch full of leaves in his right hand and repeatedly doused water that had been soaked onto the leaves from a filled Home Depot water bucket, straight into the faces of each team of oxen. The holy water sprayed onto those oxen faces, and they stood fast to their marks in the center of the vast dirt stage. After the blessing of the oxen, right there in front of heaven and the whole town, Father José Manuel spoke loudly so everyone could hear him and he said a prayer to Almighty God for a bountiful harvest and good fortune for the hard-working farmers of La Talega. It was a time for fiesta. It was a time for redemption. It was a time for "a renascence of life". I have a question. Honestly, if God is truly great and knows all, considering what happened here, how could God possibly refuse?
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