Curiosity Roving : V.20 : Morelos Chinelos
Curiosity Roving
The Grand Adventures of L Rose Goossen
V.20 : Morelos Chinelosin which we observe the ritual
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Greetings and Salutations!
Welcome to the (landmark) twentieth volume of Curiosity Roving. I thank you kindly for your attention. A big special gratitude shout-out today for everyone who chose to use their hard-earned internet money to buy me a coffee or five. I am generally caffeinated to bumblebee frequency when I start composing these letters every month, so you can trust that your good deeds are going to good use. In celebration, I've given myself free rein on the word count in this edition. Fair warning: it's a bit maximalist (and completely worth your time).
In the month that has elapsed since Volume Nineteen, I have weathered a border, a bautiza, and a boda, all of them Mexican. I've seen Dia de los Muertos in Peñón de los Baños and chuckled at the humbled hangovers of the following morning with the only other person who didn't have one. I've churned up the alphabet soup of my brain to stumble back into my Spanish state of mind and affirmed that the best place to have a partner is on the dance floor. I've wandered shoulder-width alleyways decoratively paved and walled with the same porous volcanic rock - terrible cell service in there. I've seen the moon turn as red as the Coca-Cola camions that resemble a cosmic apparition when they squeeze through streets designed for horse and cart. I've eaten mysterious meats and flowers and by this method learned their names. I've enjoyed the symphonies of goats, roosters, cats, small dogs, and the occasional passing cabalgata. I've contemplated the ravages of age, the relationship between custom and culture, the evolution of friendship and its limits, the ambiguity of the spiritual, the earned nuance of family and manners and tradition, and the fierce necessity of rest. The other day, I had the opportunity to explain very slowly and with very poor grammar that I require a great deal of time to engage with my vocation and purpose in this lifetime, so I try not to work too much.
available resourcesDeep in a dusty milk crate tucked at the bottom of some shelves in one of the bookshops in downtown Tepoztlán, I found a copy of Daniel Pinchbeck's 2012: The Year of The Mayan Prophecy. In the introduction, he writes of feeling "less like a person than a convenient intersection for ideas to meet and mesh, a magnet or strange attractor, compelled or fated - perhaps tragically misguided - to draw together" a wide selection of diverse arcana and systems of thought. This is precisely how my life feels lately; viewed through a practical lens, so much of my activity would appear to be dissipated to the point of utter uselessness, but then a moment arrives when the magic of it all breaks a chiming dawn, and I have to lean back and accept that whatever it is that I am or am not doing, it is working and it must be correct.
peak over marketI'm writing to you from the mountains of Morelos, one of the smallest states of Mexico, which lies directly south of Mexico City and carries the name of a hero from the 19th-century independence movement. Human settlement in the region dates back to the Toltec farmers of 2000 BC. I arrived in the area on November 2nd, and I haven't found it necessary to go anywhere else. Sitting poolside in an outer barrio of Tepoztlán, I am just a hop and skip from the canonical birthplace of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent of the ancient Aztec pantheon, and one slope from El Tepozteco, the temple of the god of drunkenness and fertility in the same tradition.
moon over sugar caneThe economy of Morelos is based in services, manufacturing, and agriculture; tourism appears to be mostly domestic. Last week, I had the immense fortune to experience one of the primary attractions of the area, the carnival of the Chinelos, in Los Arcos de San Carlos.
Let me begin this section by saying that for a person raised in the multicultural beige of the colonized north, there is nothing so thrilling as to witness a tradition that remains intact. In my country, culture is localized by residence; go door to door in a Canadian city and you encounter different food, different manners, different languages. To experience the energy of an entire town, even a small one, with a commonality in their ritual and a deep commitment to its execution, is a true thrill to a consciousness that is accustomed to fragmentation.
Los Chinelos is a festival of costumed dancing, with particularities that vary from one town to the next. It is a subversive tradition. In the nineteenth century, Spanish colonizers in Mexico celebrated the traditional Catholic Carnevale and, in their infinite compassion, allowed their indigenous labourers a rare day off. Those labourers decided to use their free time to make mockery of the pretentious Spaniards in costume, pageant, and public spectacle. Thus, the Chinelos were born.
tiny dancersIn Los Arcos, the standard costume is a long robe of white and blue stripes, with silky scarves tied to form a fluttering diamond down the back, a wide fringed hat with tall and brightly coloured feathers, and a mask with a pointed beard. I saw Chinelos of every size throughout the weekend; I can confirm that the small ones are extremely cute.
faces for saleThe dance of the Chinelos is known as a brinco - not actually a dance, but a "jump". During the four-day festival in Los Arcos, there were five official Brincos de Chinelo, each of them scheduled to last anywhere from two to twelve hours. Some of these brincos took place under a shade canopy in the town square, others were parades that traversed up and down the hill and the highway, roaming the entire town centre and wreaking havoc on street traffic. One such parade was accompanied by schoolchildren in costume, another by young men in flamboyant drag. Each brinco was accompanied by a live brass band that swelled between twelve and twenty people over the course of the weekend and played the same four or five melodies on repeat. The embouchure prowess was truly phenomenal. The horn players of Banda Joel y Sus Guapachosos blew up to eight hours a day at top volume from Friday morning until Monday night, often while eating, drinking, and smoking. I have never seen anything like it.
uphill floodDuring the festival, every corner store in this little town also became a vendor of micheladas. In Morelos, a michelada is an entire litre of beer, usually Corona or Victoria, swirled into a disposable cup as big as my head with lime juice and salt, rimmed with sticky tamarind and sesame seeds or some other variation on the theme of red goo. It is a brilliant endurance beverage - the citrus and salt counter the effects of a hot day or a rough night - and also phenomenally unhygienic. The red goo invariably drips, very aesthetically, down the side of the very large disposable cup, and the drinker constantly has to negotiate a choice about whether to lick the outside of the cup or their fingers, or to cover everything else in the vicinity in sticky red goo. And remember, this is partner dancing culture - we are always hand-to-hand. It was a joyful inoculation of bacteria after some long, sterile years.
My traveling companion lived through the sixties, and even he said that it was one of the wildest parties he had ever seen; locals told me that this was one of the smallest Chinelos events in the region.
under the big topI have a long-standing theory about intense and unfamiliar parties, which I call the Phi-Phi Bucket Effect. It's simple: to have a good time, you have to work with the format and you have to do everything. It doesn't matter if you have two left feet - when they turn on La Sonora Dinamita, dance with somebody. Drink the beverages. Lick your fingers. Climb the hills. Accept invitations. Shout at the football players. If someone hands you a beer, or a costume, or a trumpet, take it, say "thank you", and put it to work. Participate completely, and you will get to where you want to be.
unified effortIn the universe postulated by quantum mechanics, there can be no such thing as an observer - presence is participation. There is no thick glass wall to safely, sanely separate the audience from the play, the doctor from the patient, the child from the tarantula. When consciousness is embedded in the process that it perceives, the two are endlessly in dialogue, acting on each other, connected, under a mutual influence. And, if you are inevitably going to participate, it is usually more enjoyable to do it wholeheartedly. Following the guidance of the Phi-Phi Bucket Effect, Monday night found me pole-dancing with the gay boys in the central square until they shut the music off (there are one hundred thousand videos of me that I will never see). I really do recommend it.
patterns, repeatingThat's it, reader! That's all I've got! I'm about to go frolic with the trendy people of Distrito Federal, then off to Bogotá to show up for the last item on my to-do list. I literally do not have a single plan after December 14th and I have absolutely no idea what is going to happen. Life is wild. Stay tuned!
Thank you always for joining me here in my verbal playground, and if you happen to know of someone around central or south America who is looking for a competent Canadian to fill some sort of job or volunteer role, please do consider referring me, and even if you don't, remember that I always love to hear from you.
Until next time, stay curious. -- Rose
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