Fiestas
Spring 2014 | Volume XIII, Number 3
Table of Contents
Editor’s Letter →
by June Carolyn Erlick
Identity
Fiesta and Identity
English + Español
In Barranquilla the days of Carnival begin early. From the first hours of the day—already confused with the last hours of the night—the smells of celebration are in the air. The streets…
Whose Skin Is This, Anyway?
An African-American dresses as a Plains Indian, as if seen through the lens of Fellini, while Andean natives wear white masks and carry whips, pretending to be colonial overseers. Whites…
Divas Play and Queer Belonging In Brazil
For the past seven years or so, I’ve been tracking down scenarios of queer friendship in Fortaleza, a major city in Brazil’s Northeast. I’ve discovered that what…
The Carnival of Rio de Janeiro
Carnival in Brazil, introduced at the beginning of the Portuguese conquest of Latin America, was an urban affair derived from paganism and restricted to…
Bodies and God
When watching the Festival des Divinités Noires in Togo in 2011 I was reminded of the images of samba school parades, which I’ve researched in Rio. Even…
Masks and Music
São João in Campina Grande
Campina Grande, deep into the state of Paraíba in Northeast Brazil, is not a common tourist destination. Except, that is, for the month of June, when fans…
Masked Enigmas
The brilliantly colored and captivatingly grotesque mask of the Vejigante remains enigmatic. The name derives from the Spanish vejiga or…
La Conga
I was trying desperately to sleep, but it was too cold. It was July in Cuba, but the air conditioning on the cross-country Viazul bus had two settings—“freezing” and…
Carnaval in the Dominican Republic
I stand mesmerized by the flashing fangs and devilish eyes of the mask, topped with spiked horns and kaleidoscopic mane, worn by a whirling, dancing…
Resistance, Community and Politics
Festival and Massacre
Festivals are privileged spaces to help us understand the meaning of community. They are a special way of presenting historical narratives, bringing…
The Fiestas de San Pacho
The Fiestas de San Pacho (St. Francis of Assisi) in Quibdó, El Chocó, Colombia, are sixteen days of barrio-based parades and religious observations (and, in fact, less well-known activities…
Colombian Devils
The devils from Europe and Africa arrived in Colombia and as soon as they encountered the indigenous devils, they happily got together to amuse themselves. They take advantage of any…
Pleasure is Power
I was a little late to the parade called La Invasión (the invasion)—the largest street parade in the conga tradition of Santiago, Cuba. Then I heard this simple…
The Fiesta Must Go On
For more than 150 years, gold mining has been the life-blood of Segovia, a town in central Colombia that sits atop a labyrinth of underground tunnels where…
Nation, Nature and Patrimony
Patsa Puqun
It was a chilly predawn morning in 1984. I enthusiastically joined my Quechua-speaking host family going to their field at the base of one of Peru’s highest…
This Isn’t Your Grandmother’s Vodou
Julmis Pierre, the head Vodou priest of Cité Soleil, awaits clients in his 15’ by 15’ cement cube of an office on Rue Audain in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. His slight frame…
Fiesta Politics
Zaída García sat at a table in the middle of a small storefront facing the plaza of Ocumare de la Costa in Venezuela. She was busy working late at night, drawing…
Carnival Inc.
In the rainy season, streams of water take over Barranquilla. Streets transform into abundant, improvised rivers. They stop traffic, spilling over onto the…
Carnavals, Global Mega Events and Visitors in The Marvelous City
In the heart of my home city, Melbourne, a television on the wall of a popular café plays footage from Rio de Janeiro’s famous Carnaval. Across the screen…
Celebrating Diaspora
Fiestas Madriguayas
English + Español
I’m writing this story from the neighborhood of Barrio Sur in Montevideo, Uruguay. The lively pulse of the candombe drum reaches me from the streets. This Afro-Uruguayan rhythm…
Bolivians in Argentina
English + Español
In 2007, while living in Brazil, I decided to take a short trip to Argentina to attend the Festival of Independent Film (BAFICI) held every April in Buenos Aires. I looked forward to …
Proud to be Bolivian
There was a time in Buenos Aires when Bolivians were often victims of hate crimes. They huddled in their working-class neighborhoods, hoping they might…
Death in L.A.
I was a Chicano boy growing up Apostolic-Pentecostal in Los Angeles. I never celebrated anything remotely Catholic like the feasts of All Souls nor All Saints…
Making a Difference
Making a Difference: A Tale of Two Centuries
Harvard’s ties to Latin America go much farther back in time than 1994, the year that Neil Rudenstine and David Rockefeller launched the David Rockefeller…
Book Talk
Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro
In her book Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, Susan Buck-Morss cautioned against the growing trend in the academy towards specialization. Specialization…
Paper Cadavers: The Archives of Dictatorship in Guatemala
In July 2005, Edeliberto Cifuentes, a noted historian at that time employed by the office of Guatemalan Human Rights Ombudsman (PDH) as a hands-on…
Venezuela Before Chavez: Anatomy of an Economic Collapse
In early 1999, in an event organized by the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington D.C., Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez addressed the U.S. policy…
Intimate Enemies: Violence and Reconciliation in Peru
A little more than twenty years ago, Andeanist anthropologists were taken to task for “missing the revolution.” At the time—the early 1990s—Peru was awash in…
Enduring Violence
When I was a graduate student in Latin American history at Berkeley in the 1980s, the words “violence” and “Guatemala” seemed inextricably linked. We…
Derecho al Derecho
On March 23, 2011, a woman attacked by her partner, was denied a legal remedy under Puerto Rico’s Domestic Violence Prevention and Intervention Law in a…