The sidewalks and plazas in the historic center of Santiago de Queretaro were overflowing with pedestrians on a recent Sunday night, evidently a typical Sunday evening. Our host, Clyde Ellis, and his neighbor led us past a plaza where families were lined up to see an exhibition of National Geographic photographs, through the plaza with the dancing waters and past the one where a younger set was gathering for contemporary pop.
Although stopping frequently to greet other neighbors encountered along the way, they were intent on the goal – Destination Danzón. And, having lingered at great length over a late lunch, we were late.
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Banda de Musica de Gobierno del Estado already was swinging into the first set of the Tradicional Serenata Dominical, and dancers were sashaying around the plaza. Selections included “New York” and Glenn Miller’s “De Buen Humor,” or “In the Mood.”
Cha-cha-cha transported me instantly back to the days of Sunday tea dances in Virginia Beach. The tea dances, inappropriately named as brown bags clothed bottles of bourbon and gin on virtually every table, were held outdoors across Atlantic Avenue from the old Cavalier Hotel. The huge round dance floor was roofless and surrounded by a double-decked gallery perched directly above the beach, so close to the ocean her hurricane-driven waves periodically would drag almost the entire structure out to sea.
I would watch my parents and their friends cha-cha-cha-ing around the polished wood dance floor to the big band sound of bands such as the Lester Lanin Orchestra. Cuban music was king, as the island was a popular vacation destination for ships cruising out of Norfolk.
One Sunday in particular came to my mind. I must have had new clothes, never before worn by my older sisters – a rarity. A starchy crinoline belled out the skirt of my smocked, puffed-sleeve dress, and lacy white anklets emerged from the top of shiny black patent leather Mary Jane shoes.
Longing to join the glamorous adults twirling on the dance floor, I remember dancing with one of the columns supporting the upper deck of the gallery. The mother of an older man – probably 8 years old and the only other child there – persuaded her son to ask me to dance.
The boy commanded a rather spirited lead at a pace restrained only marginally by the beat of the music. For a grand finale, he spun me around under his arm so fast I twirled out of control like a top, the slick soles of my Mary Janes flying out from under me as I landed plop on my bottom amidst raucous laughter from onlookers.
The dancers of Queretaro were well beyond my league as well. They greeted each number enthusiastically, although the band held out playing the even first danzón until the second set.
The danzón originated in Cuba but was exported to Vera Cruz, where it flourished and spread. Dancers pair off on the floor but refrain from taking the first steps until an orchestral cue on the fourth beat of bar four of the paseo, a cue much too subtle for me to catch until after the banda had played several. Tunes on the programa in Queretaro included “Siboney” and Gonzalo Bravo’s “La Negra,” and the evening closed with a spirited marcha, “Queretaro.”
Did we join the dancing Queretanos?
I am positive I could have danced with a lamppost on the plaza all night without the mister even being tempted to cut in to salvage my reputation.
But just as well. Despite awkwardly suffering through a season of Mrs. Sadler’s cotillion, my dancing skills have improved little through the years.
A six-year-old piled up in a crinoline pouf on the floor might be cute, but the woman she evolved into a half century or so later would not.
Note Added on March 24, 2012: Just noticed that the Instituto Cultural de Mexico in HemisFair Park is exhibiting photographs by Cristina Kahlo, “Tiempo de Danzón,” through the end of April.
Note Added on March 31, 2012: And a friend just emailed me that Salon Mexico if offering a danzón lesson from 7 to 10:30 p.m. on Friday, May 11, at the University of Incarnate Word.
The Italian hill town of Assisi might be overrun by tourists and pilgrims, but the stories of the miracles of Saint Francis manage to bubble up through the clutter. The saint’s holy cards often depict him surrounded by fluttering brown sparrows, but they fail to convey some of the richer stories.
I mean stories such as how Saint Francis threw himself naked upon a rose-bush as punishment for impure thoughts only to have the thorns miraculously fall off the bush so as not to prick him. Bet he was thankful for that one. But I understand a naked man hugging a rose-bush might not be deemed appropriate for a holy card. My favorite Saint Francis miracle was his taming of the fierce killer wolf terrifying the residents of neighboring Gubbio.
On the holy card that is part of a digital collage (“¡Qué milagro! Four bullets in the back and alive to give thanks 25 years later.”) I donated for SAY Si’s annual Small Scale art sale, I felt compelled to add a few extra birds to better illustrate the claim that birds would stop mid-chirp to listen to Saint Francis’ sermons and, of course, to add a tame-looking wolf.
But what sent me digging up this holy card was a photograph from the side chapel in the Parroquia Purisima Concepcion in Real de Catorce, a former ghost town now a mecca drawing both tourists and pilgrims, in much the same way as Assisi. The walls of the entire chapel are covered with retablos, pictures and stories often painted on sheets of tin, left in gratitude by the beneficiaries of miraculous interventions by Saint Francis, affectionately known as Panchito. One retablo that caught my attention was left by Jesus Espinosa Diaz de Leon in 2006 to express his gratitude to Sr. San Francisco de Asis for saving him from bullets fired into his back on the streets of San Luis Potosi in 1981.
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The rich interior of the Parroquia in Real de Catorce reflects the origins of the town itself; the workers mining the veins of silver running through the mountains signed a commitment in 1779 to donate silver toward its construction on a weekly basis. Real was so wealthy, it not only had a palenque for cock fights but an opera house. There was such an abundance of silver, the town had its own mint coining reales. To make the town and its silver more accessible, an engineering marvel of a tunnel almost 1 1/2 miles long was carved through one of the surrounding formidable mountains in 1901.
With the silver seemingly played out, the town died. Colonial buildings began to fall into ruin, and it probably would have become a complete ghost town were it not for Panchito. Some time after the Mexican Revolution, word spread throughout the country about miraculous cures of humans and animals believed to have been granted following prayers to St. Francis of Assisi. The statue in the parish church began to attract pilgrims. Particularly on his Feast Day, October 4, they jam the tunnel and overwhelm the town to pay tribute to the patron saint of merchants, animals and ecology.
While the town has undergone a revival caused by curious travelers, there is another revival many are eyeing with distrust. New technologies now make it possible to extract more metal from the surrounding mines, and in a wonderful series of posts on Huffington Post, Tracy Barnett reveals in words and photos that the Huichols are displeased. She describes a February 6 all-night ceremony involving the sacrifice of a calf:
Soon the maraka’ate assembled and the plaintive wail of the Wixarika fiddles began to ring out in the darkness. The chants of the maraka’te rose on the wind; the ceremony had begun.
All throughout the long night these priests of ecology, as Liffman called them, sang their entreaties to the spirits that inhabit this place, an improvisation of melodies from different villages and different eras in time. They conducted their ancestral dialog with Grandfather Fire, an intermediary between the maraka’te and their deities. The sacramental peyote they had hunted in the desert the day before was working its magic.
Maybe, if the Huichols combined their dialogues with Grandfather Fire with prayers to Saint Francis of Assisi in his role as the patron saint of ecology, the potent powers would unite to spare the land from more intrusive mining.
This is an absurdly long-winded approach to suggest you take advantage of SAY Si Small Scale art sale to build your collection. More than 200 artists have contributed works to the silent auction. It will be impossible to view them all before they start disappearing off the walls during the final party on Friday, March 23. So consider going online quickly and purchasing tickets to the preview party on Thursday, March 1, or stop by SAY Si between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m. Monday through Thursday or 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Friday and Saturday until March 23. And then it will be too late.
Added on March 9, 2012: This post needed a soundtrack – Gretchen Peters’ “Saint Francis.”
Postcards from Barton Springs 