Maymanta kanki- Where are you From? The Festival in Andahuaylillas
ANDAHUAYLILLAS, PERU- On Tuesday, June 29, the people of Andahuaylillas celebrated the Festival of the Patron Saint, San Pedro, and the designation of Andahuaylillas as a national cultural heritage site.
The festivities began Monday night with a special church service in the Iglesia de San Pedro, christened the Sistine Chapel of the Americas, and a fireworks display that would have been illegal in the United States. The fireworks were set off in the town plaza in front of the church. However, the proximity of the on-lookers and the occasional rocket that fell into the crowd was not the only reason the display would not have been permissible in the U.S. While older children were responsible for setting off the fireworks, the younger children played a game that entailed running under the waterfalls of sparks. Near the end, one young boy put the frame of a bull over his head. The sparklers in the bull’s mouth were ignited and the boy ran around and aimed the streams of silver sparks at the crowd. Not exactly the July 4 fireworks over the Boston Harbor that I grew up watching.
A short documentary about the Iglesia de San Pedro was also projected onto the white wall of the church-run community center. I walked closer to see the subtitles on the screen because it was impossible to hear the movie over the voices of all of the excited children. I saw that the subtitles were in French and when I listened closely to the voices I realized that the documentary was indeed in French. Why then were all of the locals standing around in the freezing cold and watching a movie that they could not understand? Some of the people in Andahuaylillas and the surrounding towns don’t even speak Spanish, only their native Quechua, let alone French. I asked Enrique, a teacher at the local school Fe y Alegria.
“Many of these people have never seen a movie,” Enrique said. “Plus they can seen their town, their houses, their friends or maybe even themselves on screen.”
That really was a novel concept for me; that movies were a novelty for the townspeople. I’ve spoken with many of the locals about movies and many of them can name every movie they have ever seen on one hand.
The following day’s festivities included a procession of 47 saints, a chiriuchu cooking competition and traditional dances in the town-square. Chiriuchu is basically a platter of traditional Andean foods; including, guinea pig, fish eggs, toasted corn kernels, cheese and pig.
Hundreds of dancers participated in the traditional dances, which were at times more like mini-plays or comedies. One dance lasted for over a half hour and included clowns that represented the Andean indigenous people whipping the actors dressed as the Chileans. Tension has existed between the Peruvians and Chileans for decades and the locals were greatly amused by the slapstick comedy routine which at one point included setting off a firecracker under the top hat on the head of the “Chileans”. Other dances were about the production and harvest of the coca leaf, malaria, the Incas or colonial rule.
The festival was originally supposed to wrap up with a large general fiesta in the plaza. However, not many people attended. The reason? Alcohol…or the prohibition of it. The priest of Iglesia de San Pedro, Padre Oscar, asked that the municipal government not permit the stands in the plaza to sell alcohol seeing as it was a religious holiday and in past years the festival has concluded with lots of drunks on the steps of the church at 3 a.m., which here is about an hour and a half before most people start their morning. For the locals, no alcohol meant less dancing and less music, so many people did not stay around for the general fiesta.
What struck me as most interesting about the festival was a poster that was posted on a bulletin board in the town plaza by the Municipal government. It showed Andahuaylillas’s most well known landmarks surrounded by skyscrapers and modern transportation. The ominous warning, “If we don’t take care of it…,” was stationed on colored construction paper next to the computer enhanced photos of a modern Andahuaylillas The municipal government posted more information on the bulletin board explaining why it is important for Andahuaylillas to maintain its traditional appearance and guard its cultural heritage.
This lends itself to a polemic debate: should Andahuaylillas and similar villages modernize or should they guard antiquity? By maintaining the status quo are the leaders depriving the locals from advancing or preventing them from enjoying the standard of living of people in more developed regions? How can Andahuaylillas and the surrounding villages eliminate poverty and improve the standard of living of its citizens while simultaneously safeguarding the village’s cultural heritage. How important is maintaining the traditional culture to the Andean indigenous identity? How important is recognize identity in the contemporary globalized society.
