Easter Sunday in Mexico City

I'm down in Mexico City for a mini-vacation and to see my friend Fay Ray who is here for a month doing an art residency. Strangely, the New York Times Travel Section did a story earlier this month on visiting Mexico City during Easter so I was well-equipped with a laundry list of must-see devotional events when I got off the plane.

On Friday, we took the subway to visit the Villa de Guadalupe north west of the city center. The Virgin of Guadalupe is a beloved and pervasive saint here in Mexico. She is believed to have appeared shortly after the Spanish conquest before Aztec peasant Juan Diego. She left her unearthly imprimatur on Diego's cactus-fiber cloak, which is kept in the massive round Basilica, shaped for maximum viewing. The Guadalupe complex gets as many as 20 million visitors a year many with hopes of having their illnesses cured.

It was Good Friday and there was a service going on inside the basilica, with thousands of families taking it in. Outside, amid people screaming in cell phones and children eating Flamin' Hot Cheetos, small family groups approached the basilica on their knees, crawling across the square and up the steps, seemingly oblivious to those around them.

At around 3 o'clock, the show began with a Via Crucis procession, wherein a group of actors and religious personnel carried out a mock crucifixion. It was unlike any religious event I've seen in my travels to five of the world's continents. Several thousand people gathered around a large sort of swing set contraption where three, very heavy looking crosses hung from a sturdy system of ropes and wires. Two soft-chested men in loin clothes were hung up on each side of the center cross, whilst a long-haired gentlemen wearing a crown of thorns was beaten by some men dressed as gladiators. The whole thing was wired up nicely and the women playing hookers and nuns wore microphones that blasted screeching sobs throughout the whole square. It lasted a long time, but they finally got the man in the crown of thorns hung up on the wood cross and he was covered in red paint. A gladiator with a microphone wrapped around his spear kind of stabbed the man playing Jesus who then gave a speech.

The crowd was quiet and mostly riveted. It was high decibel and gory and hard to watch. Fay and I slunk away after 20 minutes of screaming and moaning. "I guess that's what they call living religion," I said to Fay. We went to the market and bought neon colored Virgin candles and went had a beer.

It was Good Friday but it was also Friday night and therefore fight night in Mexico City, where luchadores, the masked wrestlers, are superheroes. We arrived last minute, were promptly conned into expensive tickets that were somewhere in the rafters. The crowd was easily 20,000, with every inch filled with rapt luchadore lovers. It was a blur of fluorescent spandex, firecrackers, midgets in capes, and lots of girls in stiletos and bikinis for no specific reason. The audience was equally passionate and captivated and it was hard not to see parallels of the passion play and the wrestling match.

Here's a snippet from a NY Times article on April 12, 1898, entitled "LION AND BULL FIGHT; Easter Sunday "Sport" in City of Mexico Witnessed by American Colony."

CITY OF MEXICO, April 11. -- Five thousand people witnessed a cruel and bloody fight between two African lions and Mexican bull on Easter Sunday. The spectators included the whole American colony and many notables. Many ladies were present.

The NY Times article described this as a weekend event to visit but we, very sadly, could not find it.

"Although the church officially shuns this celebration, at one church in Cuajimalpa, on the southwest outskirts of Mexico City, actors representing Judas are dangled from the tower and whacked by townspeople as if they were piñatas, then switched for papier-mâché figures just before they are thrown into a bonfire. In some working-class parts of the central city, the Devil figures are replaced with effigies of presidents, mayors and other so-called political traitors."

By

Claire Hoffman

 |  March 23, 2008; 4:21 AM ET  |  Category:  Under God
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