Alborada

We left Mexico City earlier than we’d planned in part to make it back to San Miguel in time to catch the weekend-long Alborada festival. We grabbed the fancy fast bus from MXCD to San Miguel, which came complete with seat-back movie screens that the kids used to watch some cartoons in Spanish. I watched the countryside roll by and, by force of habit, kept track of campgrounds via the ioverlander site.

Since we got to San Miguel four days early, we had nowhere to stay. Fortunately Corrinne’s parents squeezed us in and we spent the next day wandering around, getting a feel for our new home.

A day later the Alborada began. At 4 AM in the morning. Actually it was closer to 2 AM. The Jardin was packed, there was plenty of music and then thousands and thousands of fireworks. Not that I saw it, but I did periodically wake up to volleys of fireworks between 3 and 5 AM.

I’ve been in quite a few large scale parties — Songkran, Chinese New Year, New Year’s Eve in New York. San Miguel’s Alborada deserves a spot among those, it’s a hell of a party and it lasts for four or five days.

There’s way too much to keep track of as an outsider, but we managed to see a couple parades, hours and hours of dancing, drumming and music, a blessing of the horses, which saw at least a thousand horses and riders come into town one afternoon (technically I don’t think the horses are part of Alborada, but it happened the same weekend this year), giant paper maché dolls dancing, and the “Voladores de Papantla” which are people spinning on ropes around a 100 foot high pole, slowly lowering to the ground.

From what I’ve read, the central premise of the festival/party is, well, it depends a little on who you are, how Catholic you are and how far back into history you want to reach. Ostensibly though the parade at least is the story of St Michael, patron saint of San Miguel, defeating um, something. How exactly the very indigenous parts of the festival — the Chichimecas are the local tribe in this area — fit with that is a little mysterious to me.

The dancing groups are highly organized in a hierarchy of seniority, with each group of dancers having two elders who represent the Aztec gods Cipactonal and Oxomoco, who handed down the various rites to humanity. And at least some of the dances represent the various tribes asking for forgiveness for “misunderstandings and mistreatments” from the other tribes.

That much a bit of research can teach you, but how that all fits together with the post-conquest Catholic symbolism and the festival of St Miguel is something you’d have to be born into to really understand in any meaningful way.

As an outsider all you can really do is watch. So we did. And there were conchero dancers, huge xúchiles (floral arrangements with palm fronds and lots of marigolds mounted on bamboo frames), and more traditional parade-style floats, all going up our street to the church and square at the top of the hill, the parroquia.

The dancing lasts late into the night. We, for most part, did not last very late into the night. One night after the kids were asleep Corrinne and I walked up to the parroquia and watched the Voladores.

The next day everyone was back up in the parroquia area and the dancing picked up roughly where it left off. We went up so the kids could see the Voladores, but their patience isn’t quite up to Mexican standards just yet.

It went on for at least one more day, in some cases two, perhaps even three, depending on who you are and what you were celebrating. We pretty much gave up after Saturday night, we were exhausted. Clearly we’ll have to work ourselves up to Mexican levels of celebration before Día de Muertos rolls around.