Saturday is El Día de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. A multitude will meet in front of the cathedral in Juarez to celebrate the Dark Virgin’s appearance to Juan Diego in 1531.
Here’s a piece I wrote for NewspaperTree in 2005.
Dec. 12, 2005, was a blue gray day, cold and drafty, with high thin clouds painted across the sky like a smear. I rode my bike to Juarez and locked it to a pole across from the plaza in front of the cathedral. On the sidewalk in front of the old theater men milled about wearing blue costumes with red feathers and white fringe. Cops controlled traffic and the crowd spilling out into the street. The plaza’s always full of vendors, kiosks selling belts and pirate DVD’s, tacos and wrestling masks and dried rattlesnake and aloe vera. But on the Day of Our Lady, the number of kiosks more than doubled. Vendors sold flowers, and candles, and oversize rosaries. Photographers shot pictures, for a fee, of people in front of paintings depicting Juan Diego and the Holy Mother. Old women stirred 20-liter pots of hot chocolate with long stainless steel spoons, and everywhere in the plaza people ate enchiladas from Styrofoam plates with plastic forks.
Dance troupes, matachines, performed in costumes reflecting various degrees of authenticity. Some, like the men milling around in front of the old theater, in their costumes that more than anything looked like blue sweat suits with white fringe, with the red feathered headdresses a shade that God never intended, showed a more urban orientation. Later, though, I saw men in loincloths and pheasant feathers, representing at least an effort of authenticity. Most of the dance troupes engaged in similar rituals, beating drums, shaking maracas, and dancing circles around characters representing the devil, or evil spirits.
For tourists and the culturally curious, attending the cathedral on El Día de Nuestra Señora is a more compelling spectacle than visiting the cemeteries on El Día de Muertos.
Cd. Juarez has changed a lot since 2005. The kiosks in the Plaza de Armas are gone. Dieciseis by the cathedral is a pedestrian mall. I suspect, with El Día de Nuestra Señora on a Saturday this year, the celebration will be the biggest ever.