It is the time of year that the pueblo looks forward to and reminisces about the most.
But fiesta here isn’t just a one-day deal. No, depending on the size of the town, the fiestas range from a few days to an entire month (apparently, Guayaquil, the largest city in Ecuador, has fiestas for the entire month of July).
Also, the term fiesta can mean a lot of things, depending on the specific activities each town or neighborhood has planned. But there are a few staples of most every fiesta.
Pilsener — the most popular beer in Ecuador. For the fiestas of Batanes that I attended last week, the town council bought 960 liters of beer. In fact, you couldn’t even buy bottled water at the tienda — it was Pilsener or Big Cola.
Baile – Dance. But Ecuadorian dancing is a bit different than the American version. First off, your not supposed to look at the person you are dancing with. You just have to maintain the appearance that you. Also, it seems to me that you can’t do anything that looks like you are dancing either. Stepping from side to side and moving your hands a bit counts. I would describe the dancing level here as closer to the Joe Cornell, pre-bar/bat mitzvah circuit dance classes than the Thriller video.
Bingo – Apparently, the fallback fundraiser for any charity in Ecuador is Bingo night. And this holds true for the towns as they try to raise money for their fiestas. Some towns mix the dance and Bingo by breaking into dance party for 15 minutes between each bingo game. Much like the disco breaks in Zohan.
Election of the reina (queen) – Pretty much every event, fiesta or not, has some sort of beauty pageant involved. It could really be anything, from kicking off the soccer season to a meeting of small banana growers to a small meeting of banana growers. Sometimes, there are photos in the newspaper of taxi company and the reina of said taxi company. I would love to see beauty pageants organized by New York City cabbies.
Mass – This is a very Catholic country, and every town has its patron saint. The town’s fiestas typically fall on the day in which you remember that saint. In Batanes, those saints are San Roque and Santa Marianita, for example.
Then, there are other activities that are common in fiestas, but not necessarily the staples.
It is not uncommon to have a bull-ring, parades through the town, cock fights, or a soccer tournament. But this all depends on the size of the town.
Now, a bit about my first foray into the fiesta frontier, which was Friday.
The weekend kicked off with what everybody in attendance thought was going to be a traditional Bingo night. Each family brings a prize for the prize box, and boards cost $1.00.
To ensure that the boards are certified, I think there is a stationary store in each town that is in charge of Bingo board certification. They print the Bingo boards, number them, and write the date and time that the boards are valid for. This will prevent Bingo fraud, which was a horrible problem in ‘80s.
Well, I bought my Bingo board and sat around with my host family for the weekend. I did my best pre-Bingo trash talk, saying that they could have all the luck in the world, but I am a very skillful Bingo player. I broke down my strategy and told them that I liked to call my Bingo board “the answer sheet.”
They moved the church pews out into the town square, and the entire town gathered for the big event. The Pilsener was flowing (the school kitchen doubled as the bar). Everybody was having a good time, even though my Bingo skillz didn’t quite live up to the pre-game hype. I wouldn’t quite say that I didn’t win, but that I merely ran out of time.
Whereas a sandwich maker might be a common prize if this were an American Bingo game, the ceviche maker was the most common prize. In fact, one six-year-old won two ceviche makers.
But if there was one problem with this bingo night, it would be that the MC didn’t really have a good vibe for the audience. From my perspective, in the church pews, the crowd really just wanted to play bingo. But the M.C. thought he was more of a DJ than an M.C. and insisted on playing extended sets of dance music between bingo games. The crowd was going restless, to say the least. Then, as the bingo game crept up on four and a half hours and the clock his midnight, I would describe the crowd as restful. To compound his lack of understanding of the crowd’s desire, he decided to play several games of ‘first to fill the entire board’ wins. Well, this requires that one draw close to eighty numbers (Standard Bingo rules in Ecuador call for 100 numbers, I seem to remember fewer numbers in the standard American version. Also, there was no Jerusalem Pizza in Batanes.)
Well, after the Bingo game, we all returned home to rest ahead of the fiesta’s big day (The Bingo is more of an opening ceremony)
Saturday morning, this started slowly.
They rechalked the lines of the soccer field, and vendors started showing up. I guess, because it’s the fiestas and there are a lot of people concentrated in a small space, that vendors figure it would be a good opportunity to sell their goods. Vendors came with bags full of everything. Someone was selling toys and agricultural equipment (if you have the sudden urge to a tank to apply your pesticides, this guy has it). Another woman had your entire wardrobe in her sack.
Behind one house in the town square, I heard a lot of clucking and wanted to know what the fuss was about. I walked down the steps and saw a ring, surrounded by a bunch of chickens tied to the fence — they were getting ready for the cockfight.
I’ve never seen a cock fight before and don’t really agree with the whole premise of having animals fighting each other (although I do think that the chicken has a much better chance of surviving this encounter with another chicken than that same chicken has at surviving his or her experience in the slaughterhouse).
Apparently, the first cockfight of the afternoon was free. Because after I watched the first match on the undercard, they started asking me to bet on this. Well, all moral issues aside, I have no idea how to predict who will win or how long the match will last. It’s not like the NCAA Tournament where, if you don’t know anything else, you at least know the team’s mascot. In cockfights, they’re all chickens. So I ducked out of there after one match, as much because of my moral issues with the sport as I have no desire to throw away money like that.
Apparently the two teams of chickens came from two different trainers in nearby villages. And judging by how one of them celebrated after his chicken took the first match, there is quite a rivalry between these two. I like to think that cockfighting chicken train like sumo wrestlers, coming from a dojo-like setting where they spend all their time preparing for the big moment and that it is as much of a religious and cultural activity than anything else. But judging by the trainers fanny pack and the way he was treating his ‘athletes’(?), this was all about the money.
(insert diatribe about how there was a time where cockfighting was about something bigger than money. That is was about respect and tradition and culture. Now, everybody is cutting corners, feeding their chickens steroids and other performance enhancers)
The one match that I did watch lasted for about 30 seconds. The two chicks jockeyed for position for a few seconds before one of them pounced on the other and poked the other’s eye out. (I have a picture of this cycloptic chick, but I don’t feel the need to share on this blog)
After the cockfight, the soccer tournament started. The municipality fielded a team for this competition, because it was the weekend and the striking employees didn’t have to be at the picket lines. And the municipality played its match as if it were standing at the picket lines, dropping it 8-2 to the hosts.
Because of the difficulty we had in getting to Batanes without a reliable means of transit (two hours on two buses (one of which only leaves once a day) and a half hour walk through three rivers), we decided to return with the municipal employees because they were going straight back, which only takes about an hour.
I was sad to leave before the dance, but I am sure that I will have plenty of opportunities to attend more dances during my stay here in Ecuador. Because there are only 140 residents in Batanes, I don’t think they attend a reina, but they did have a mass to remember their saints.
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