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Aside from being Columbus Day, October 12 is also one of the most important days on Guadalajara’s calendar. On this day La Generala (the little General), also known as Our Lady of Expectation or the Virgin of Zapopan makes her annual pilgrimage from the cathedral in the heart of Guadalajara to her own basilica out in Zapopan (a city long swallowed by the sprawl of Guadalajara, and one of the wealthiest in Mexico).
Millions of people attend the procession every year, shutting the city down and suffocating the streets. This particular virgin is one of the most beloved in Mexico, with a swathe of miraculous interventions attributed to her. Festivities commence on the night of the 11th and continue right throughout the following day (although longtime Guadalajara residents murmur that the event is not as elaborate or as well attended as it once was).
I banded together with other couchsurfers and we brewed thick Oaxacan coffee and wrapped ourselves in layers, steeling ourselves for the long night ahead. A jolt of caffeine and some long sleeves weren’t going to be nearly enough though. The serious revellers, most from the outlying barrios of Guadalajara, had swarmed into the city centre taking over the parks and plazas and patios, turning the city into an enormous slumber party. This was how you prepared for the procession; by staking your place, laying out the blankets, and sleeping through the cold hours of the mid-night, until the virgin finally stepped forth from the cathedral, beginning her journey home.
Even aside from the thousands of inert forms packed under the arcades and around the monuments and into the flowerbeds, this was a very strange celebration. When the coffee proved ineffectual we bundled into one of the street cafes, switching to beer. We were virtually the only people drinking. Beer generally requires no pretext, but here was the biggest pretext on the Guadalajara calendar, and yet… the diminutive virgin must be truly loved, or feared, or both. Under the stern, benevolent gaze of their lady the revellers were proving that you don’t need alcohol to have fun; you can have just as much fun with multiple stages playing hokey Christian rock.
As the hours until the emergence of the virgin slunk by, more and more traditional groups converged on the cathedral. They had danced for hours and they would dance for hours more, waiting for their lady to emerge so they can shepherd her and be shepherded by her as they pilgrimaged the streets.
These dance groups were a mash of cultures. Headdressed injuns with bison on their shields stomped down the main streets. Ranks of cowled and masked men clamoured before the cathedral in their demented beat-iron tap shoes. Aztecs beat furious drums and dervished around each other. Solitary whip-crackers prowled between the groups and looked certain to put someone’s eye out with those things. Every groups had their protector ghouls, garbed in vampire-inquisitor robes and sporting the most obscenely fantastic face masks. They kept no time as they stomped among the dancers, but kept the crowd in order and posed for photos.
A steady torrent of people surged through the cathedral to pay their respects to their lady. Whole dance groups crashed through, still playing their music and drowning out the robed men at the front who were trying to raise a hymn. I have no idea how the dancers kept it up. As the caffeine exhausted itself the virgin still looked firmly ensconced in her church; she would not be moving for hours. Rather than join the slumber party we retired to rather more discreet beds and abodes. People were still trickling into the centre as they left. They were all sobre. She really is just that powerful.
I passed Sábado de Pasión and Domingo de Ramos camping by lonely, abandoned churches in the countryside, and returned to Sucre as Semana Santa – Holy Week – was beginning.
Holy as the week was supposed to be, Sucre did no celebrate in a big way. It is too peaceful, and perhaps to self-focused to go in for the truly rapturous celebrations. Other cities in Bolivia, cities more unabashedly indigenous and traditional, held bigger, longer, more frequent processions and festivities. The first half of Sucre’s Semana Santa passed for me in Spanish classes, surprise Champions League results, and hours spent at the computer.
Holy Thursday came around and the bars filled ahead of the midnight alcohol prohibition. It was a beautiful evening to be on the streets, as every church in the town threw its immense doors open, and a steady flow of pilgrims streamed in through and out of the portals, the same faces appearing by every shrine or altar I visited. This one of the rare chances to see the treasures of all those colonial churches accessible to the public without having to pay an entrance fee.
Down by the central market at la Iglesia de San Francisco – one of Sucre’s oldest and most important churches – the scaffolds and tarpaulins were cleared away and the restoration process was put on hold for the night. Inside the impressive carved ceiling and gilded altars contrasted with the coarse, sanded walls, the regal saints looking down on the murmuring congregation from behind sheets of protective plastic.
In la Iglesia de Santo Domingo mass was taking place, but the priest could barely be heard over the chuckling children and greetings of families and neighbours. People knelt by the statues of a bloodied Jesus while the young and the old dozed in the pews. It was a lovely scene; the church opened up as a public place and filled not with solemnity but vivacity. A hymn rippled through the crowd, softly sung without accompaniment.
At midnight a veil of rain trembled over the city, but this didn’t the stop the customary procession up to one of the hills overlooking the city. The hill has no special importance – it is just the one that isn’t festooned with broadcasting antennae – but this in no way deterred the crowd from praying by the stations of the cross and lighting candles.
For the remainder of the long weekend the streets emptied and houses filled with parties and dinners. The occasional procession was ushered through the streets by bands and banners, but the more important business this weekend was food and family. Gringos assembled to meld their own Easter customs with Bolivian tradition. On Good Friday evening I sat down to a typical seven-course meatless meal that was made up of various signature gringo dishes – lasagne, pizza, humus, fried things. The local ban on alcohol could not be reconciled to the need for wine though, and red flowed freely. On Sunday I sat down to a Dutch brunch heavy on cheese and chocolate. It was a weekend of great ease and satisfaction, Sucre at its prettiest and most sociable.
The alcohol ban lifted, the bars filled, and by Sunday evening meat and booze were back on every table. The brief hush and mumble of another Semana Santa passed, and cars retook the streets. The figures of wounded Jesus and pious Maria were cast back into shadows and cobwebs as the churches closed the doors and the holy places were shut up, and life carried on as before.
I feel like i haven’t been doing justice to Sucre in my recent blogging. I’ve been here two months and Cochabamba stilll comes up bigger and bolder in the tags on the right of the page. Not that i’m keen to efface Cochabamba or anything. But Sucre’s prettiness needs to be expounded upon, and this is much easier to do with many photos.
So, here are some picks from a recent trip to a Convent in Sucre. San Felipe Neri, today operating as a school, but once a place where monks kneeled on the roof doing penance, where priests and nuns met clandestinely in the same catacombs that were used by independence fighters, and where the belltowers look out over the whole radiant city…
I had prefaced my quick trip to Peru with a biography of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, and on my way back from Peru I was lucky enough to pick up a copy of his history of the Incas.
Reading a book I’d already had the presumption to summarise and write about was interesting. There were no grand surprises, but I did find that de la Vega’s history of the Incas was not exactly the book I had expected it to be.
De la Vega was born to an Inca princess in Cusco. That makes him a part of the Cusco bloodline. For most of Inca history there had been only one bloodline, but the eleventh Inca emperor, Huaina Capac, had split this line in two, by dividing his lands between two of his many sons. After Capac’s death the sons, Atahualpa of Quito and Huascar of Cusco had fought each other for control of the empire, and in doing so had weakened the empire enough that a ragtag band of Spanish mercenaries could conquer it all in a few short years.
Atahualpa had won the civil war but had been killed by the Spaniards. His kingdom in Quito had been razed to ashes. Huascar had also been killed (by Atahualpa’s men) but Cusco had escaped complete destruction, and so the last remnants of the Incas were those of Huascar’s court, who considered Atahualpa a bastard and a traitor. This was de la Vega’s heritage. The stories taught to him by uncles and other nobles who had witnessed the fall of Cusco, first to Quito and then to Spain, were loaded with hatred for Atahualpa.
In these stories Atahualpa stormed Cusco in a single act of treachery, and set to work butchering the nobles of Cusco. By contrast, the wikipedia-style histories that I had previously read suggested that Huascar, something of a brat of a crown-prince, had made war on his father’s favourite, Atahualpa. Atahualpa had won the war largely due to the experience of his father’s troops, who had been fighting on the frontiers of the empire for decades.
It is almost impossible to tell where the truth lies, and this is the dominant thing I felt while reading de la Vega’s histories. The Incas left no written records (the nearest thing they had was a sophisticated systems of knots tied in pieces of cord, but this was largely used in mathematical capacities), and the Spanish records are far from accurate, bearing the heavy hand of Spaniards trying to justify their greedy, cruel actions, as well as the biases of the translators and allies they recruited or conscripted along the way.
What we know of the Incas, then, is a history written by its losers, by the remnants of an empire that rose and fell with incredible speed, an empire that, as it approached its last days, was filled with melancholy omens and portents of impending doom. The sense of hopelessness and despair that overtook the empire has seeped into its history.
What does come through quite clearly is the consuming greed of the conquistadors, and their disregard for human life and dignity. De la Vega finds justification for the conquest in its bringing of Catholicism to the Americas. He was a man of the church and for him no other justification was needed; it balances his history by finding the positive and negative in all involved.
If however, the bringing of Christianity – and this particularly vitriolic and remorseless branch of Christianity – to the Americas is not taken as an unquestionably good thing, then there is really no justification left for the actions of the conquistadors. The Inca empire was, to me, an in bred family of despots ruling with a heavy hand over their conquered territories, but they were no worse than the corrupt, bloodthirsty empire that overtook them. Their religion was in some respects monotheistic, and according to de la Vega, was moving away from worship of the sun and other objects and towards more metaphysical speculation. If the God of Europe really wanted to be worshipped by the Incas, it seems like he was taking steps to achieve this, without the need for gunpowder, smallpox or the other tools of conquest.
Having read de la Vega’s histories I know more about how the Inca’s built roads and bridges, and celebrated festivals and so on, but more than anything I feel like I’ve caught a glimpse of the protean, unstable nature of history, and of everything that we take, or pass off, as concrete fact.
At the beginning of time, the land was dark, and full of stone and precipices. Viracocha, the creator of civilisation, decided to bring light to the world, and called the sun, followed by the moon and the stars, up out of the waters of the great dark lake. Then he summoned a race of giants out of the cold rocks, but they were ignorant and rebellious, so he swept them away, swelling the lake and flooding the land. When the waters receded he made a smaller race of men out of clay and pebbles. Once the best of these had gone forth and founded a civilisation in the high mountains, he began to wander the land as a tramp, leaning on his staff and instructing the people. Then Viracocha, the bearded old man, the white god of the Andes walked west across the ocean, leaving his creations to their destinies.
Before the first gringos arrived in South America – those bearded, shining beings that seemed momentarily like Viracocha returned, until they opened fire and set about dismantling the civilisations that the creator god had crafted – Titicaca was a tourist destination, a pilgrimage site at the heart of the Inca empire. Isla del Sol, the island of the sun is where the sun and man first rose, and ever since then people have been visiting it to pay their respected.
Once the Spanish did arrive, bringing Catholicism with them, a town on the shores of the lake, Copacabana, became an equally important pilgrimage site. Here resides the Virgen de Candelaria, one of the most important icons in the latino canon, with a long history of bestowing miracles.
Arriving in Copacabana I could see why such importance was invested in the place. The town, surrounded by hills and pastures, was far smaller and far prettier than I expected, the streets empty save for the faint murmur of a bustle around the cathedral. A beach – one of the few in Bolivia – spanned from hill to hill in a long, colourful crescent of trout restaurants, boats and fussball tables. The sky and lake mirrored the blue warmth of one another.
Though the streets of Copacabana are heavy with handicraft stall and pizza restaurants, the town doesn’t need gringos. A steady flow of pilgrims flow through town to have babies and vehicles blessed at the cathedral. Hippies from all over South America come to camp on the beaches of Isla del Sol, and to sell jewellery and jugglery on the streets of Copacabana.
Fortuitously, I arrived on a weekend, which meant that the street outside the cathedral was full of stalls selling religious trinkets, and of cars, trucks and vans decorated with ribbons and flowers, there to be blessed by the priest and his holy water, and by families pouring out libations of beer and wine. In her sanctuary – probably the most beautiful church I’ve seen in South America – the Virgen was on display, her holy curtain pulled back to reveal the little icon, surrounded by gold and icon and saints a martyrs.
On the hill above the town – itself a pilgrimage site – people bought model cars or shops or houses or children or whatever it was they wanted most. They cracked beers and poured them over their offerings. They lit candles in grottos, niches and caves, the whole hill stained with black wherever offerings had been made to the syncretic god of the town.
On the morning of my trip to Isla del Sol the sun was strangely absent, and rain was prickling the surface of the lake. As the clouds gradually cleared the enormous mountains off behind the lake became visible, as did the other islands, peninsulas, beaches and bays of the lake. This undoubtedly is the best of lake Titicaca. From high up on the spine of Isla del Sol the entire lake is visible – an immense thing but never quite so large that the horizon swallows the distant mountains. The perfect size to be both amazing and beautiful. Far away I could see the Peruvian side of the lake, and the islands and hills I had already visited.
The island self is a strange mix of pre-Colombian ruins and herds of sheep and eucalyptus groves and barren slopes of brightly coloured, layered stone. At time it looks like Australia, at other times like the Mediterranean, and at other the chill fjordlands of Chile or New Zealand.
The particular sites of the island were not particularly interesting before the weird beauty of the island itself – the ruins of an Inca temple, another labyrinthine ruin inhabited by nervous sheep, a ceremonial stone table, a sacred stone, the rock Titicaca which gives its sacred name to the whole lake – but the path of carefully laid stone twisted between these sites, while on all side the magnificent lake was changing colours and textures and tones.
In a long day I walked the length of the island, spied its many barren peaks and tiny villages and hidden beaches, and at every turn it was easy to see why this should be the sit of creation myths, the birthplace of civilisation and the sun.
In the evening back in Copacabana a spectacular sunset rose out of the lake, the colours changing and blooming as I watched. These sunsets no doubt having settled over the lake for centuries, seen variously by pilgrims from all corners of the old and new worlds, and affecting all of them, causing them all to pause and consider what a beautiful land they had come upon.
