Half a century of migration has remade Lima into an Andean city, with the world's single largest population of Quechua speakers. New arrivals have redefined identities and cultures, maneuvering to forge a popular culture at the fraught intersection of the autochthonous and the imported, the past and the present, the indigenous and the Western. One of the most vibrant of their transplanted traditions is chayraq, or carnival. In this spectacle of cultural catharsis and regeneration, Carlos Ivan Degregori finds that everything--politics, local disputes, even poverty and hardship--is material for play, invention, parody, and denunciation.
CHAYRAQ!
Carlos Ivan Degregor
It's the last Sunday in March, late summer, but a leaden sky hangs over the three or four thousand Ayacuchans who fill the Yuli Recreation Center in Lima's Vitarte district. Guitarists tune and dancers tug last ribbons into place. From the stage of the cement amphitheater, the master of ceremonies pleads for order from the crowd, made up of maids on their day off, artisans, wealthy merchants, workers, housewives, schoolchildren, babies, the underemployed, and momentary visitors to the capital. The grand parade of comparsas competing for the Gold Tambourine is about to begin.
More than fifteen minutes go by before the organizers from the Federation of Ayacucho Migrants impose a precarious order. "Beer, chicha de jora, and mouth-watering pukapicante," ' touts one of the organizers from the stage, as a phalanx of young spectators with cassette players, boom boxes, and even a few video cameras push forward to record the event.
Santiago de Pischa district opens the competition. At the head goes a flashy green standard with gold flecks and a coat of arms with a fish and a key. One bearer features a Penn State University T-shirt, yet others wear ponchos and felt hats, reflecting the cultural hybridity that has always characterized Andean traditions. Paraders follow as overloaded as eqeqos,2 adorned with prickly pear, corn cobs, grenadines, and sugarcane. Women boast black Huancayan shawls and skirts embroidered with flowers, and offer chicha from clay jars to fellow revelers. In addition to the usual chorus of tambourines, whistles, and flutes, many of plastic or aluminum, the Santiago de Pischans play other instruments: guitars, mandolins, violins, ringers, cowbells, and burro Jaws.
Others follow across the stage. Ocros. Quinua. Acocro. Each carries a quille, a long plank dangling with flowers, streamers, grapes, apples, corn, potatoes, bananas, flour pastries. Behind the costurmes overflow with imagination and symbolism. There are wizened elders, fat merchants, and some dancers, animallike, have even donned deer heads with flowery horns. Others wear thick lambskins as wool wigs, or blackface. For wild unorthodoxy, all would be the envy of any Liverpool punk.
Indeed, during carnival, identities change, order inverts, hierarchies collapse. It's supremely democratic, as the world turns upside down. Mercilessly satirized are the macho father and the priest, traditional power symbols in a patriarchal society.
And so, a gyrating priest leads San Juan Bautista comparsa. He is a mock Franciscan with frog-eyed glasses, face whitened with talcum and crude cross in hand. He sprinkles holy water with a little bundle of grass, pronouncing solemn blessings. Suddenly, he drops the cross, chases after a pretty dancing girl, and wrestles for a kiss. At last he throws the girl over his shoulder and carries her away, then whips her until she kneels to kiss the cross. "Qarqacha cura--son-of-a-bitch priest," the crowd laughs and yells.
In Acocro's comparsa, the eventual winner according to the panel of judges, two men stand out. They are the tallest and most muscular, yet dressed and made up as women, as comadres. One fusses over the simulated baby on her back, a little blonde doll that she now and then favors with a nip of cane liquor. The other flirts with the crowd, hitching her skirt to the highest allowable level, in gender bending that exuberantly transgresses expected norms.
Throughout, the masculine and the feminine grapple with each other in unexpected ways. Men and then women from the upper, or hanan, and lower, or hurin, neighborhoods of Ticllas square off in a kind of Grecoroman wrestling, where the first to fall loses. Then, a man takes on a woman. The woman wins, this ritual violence a burlesque inversion of everyday life where the feminine so often loses. The crowd roars, as the old mountain themes of women warriors, "effeminate" men, upper and lower reappear and reembody the tensions of division, domination, and union between the sexes in Andean history.
It is those from Ocros who begin throwing things at the crowd. Their captain, in a rabbit-skin hat, flings baby powder, which floats in the air like silver. Then an older woman reaches for apples slung over her back in a carrying blanket, launching them from the stage. Subsequent comparsas throw not only itching powder, but also an avalanche of fruit: corn, custard apples, and prickly pears fly over the crowd. A papaya explodes on the head of a young spectator. Susa flings a duck, Acocro a chicken. The only nonhuman not thrown into the crowd is the colorfully harnessed Ticlla burro.
Acocro are deserving winners. Their organization is old, a mutual society founded in 1967. Along with Quinua, the winner of the first Gold Tambourine, they are also the largest delegation. Muleteers and transvestites, besides men disguised in corn, a ghost spirit of the mine in a hard hat, old folks, and effigies to burn. Acocro does everything: inviting the judges to a plate of pukapicante, as well as first-row spectators, lucky them. An oldster tries to whip one of the transvestites, who fends him off with her purse. They unleash a real bombardment of fruit on the crowd. A big apple gets me on the arm. During it all, the music and dancers twirl tirelessly around the stage, leaving a trail of streamers, impudence, talc, and happiness. The crowd surrenders, and the master of ceremonies screams, "We can't abandon these customs, Peru's pride."
"Kachkaniraqmi-- I still exist," goes a poem byJose Maria Arguedas. Ayacuchans say something similar with this festival. With all its latent violence and stiff contradictions, it reflects an unbearable desire to be, in the wake of a war that claimed so many loved ones and the persistent grind of want and racism in the big city.
Dusk falls. We get ready to leave and, moving away from the stage, enter the kingdom of beer. Drinking is by the case, the pilsener on the ground in the middle of groups that surely will drink to the end. Meanwhile, the children of migrants parade between the carnivalesque circles of those who have already taken the stage, young blades carrying walkmen, with unlighted cigarettes dangling from their lips, and teenage girls in shorts and blouses, hatching plans for the night.
An old woman out of a Breughel painting tries to smear my face with a sticky green liquid.
"Huamanga llaccta, ancha sumac llacta-- City of Huamanga, what a beautiful city," comes the master of ceremonies' voice from far away. And so it is.
1 Chicha de jora is a fermented corn beer, and pukapicante, an Ayacucho specialty, is a stew of beets, potatoes, garlic, peanuts, and pork. ( and by the way delicious....)
2 Eqeqos are good-luck dolls, laden with miniature replicas of houses, shoes, money, and other desired goods.
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