Holy Week

 

I just returned from a whirlwind weeklong tour of southern Ecuador, which I will write about in my next post, but first I wanted to share a bit about Semana Santa (Holy Week) here in Cotacachi. Holy Week is very important culturally throughout Latin America, but for me this year I was struck by how unreligious the whole thing seemed, at least in a strict sense of the word “religious.” We did not attend mass once, and there did not seem to be much internalizing of the story of Holy Week. There were religious processions throughout the week, and a dramatic reenactment of the passion in the town square, but that was combined with a commercial fair for promoting leather products and other local businesses, and Magui spent almost the whole time cooking and selling food as part of that fair. I found myself contemplating both the story of Jesus casting money-changers out of the temple, as well as my conviction that the distinction between sacred and profane is a false dichotomy. I certainly think we do a disservice to ourselves if we refuse to recognize the sacred in the everyday, even in the more “profane” aspects of the quotidian, such as economic transactions. But there was something decidedly uncomfortable for me about the commercial aspect of Holy Week in Cotacachi. It was a really positive week overall, however, and the importance of family and tradition was abundantly clear.

making Fanesca

There is a tradition of making a soup called Fanesca during Holy Week, particularly on Thursday. I got the opportunity to participate in the whole laborious process at Magui’s house, starting Thursday morning. It is made with approximately 12 ingredients, now said to be in honor of the 12 apostles. Many people think that making Fanesca is an earlier Indigenous tradition that was later syncretized with the Christian tradition of celebrating Holy Week, but the origins of Fanesca are unknown. In this spring season here in the northern Andes, the corn and beans are still fresh and young, but are just starting to be dried for use throughout the summer, [for example, the dried corn will be used to make the traditional fermented corn beverage (chicha) for Inti Raymi (the summer solstice and festival of the sun) in June]. Fanesca makes use of all these fresh, tender beans and grains, incorporating chochos (lupine beans), habas (fava beans), choclo (sweet corn), zapallo (squash), mellocos (a small, soft tuber), and arvejas (peas), among others. The soup is traditionally garnished with a hardboiled egg, fried plantains, little fried bread dough balls, avocado, and cheese. It is also generally made with salt cod, added towards the end, and often optional. I found the introduction to this recipe for Fanesca to be a good description! Anyway, Magui’s fanesca of course turned out fabulously, and we got to enjoy it by around 1:30 pm. I wasn’t there from the very beginning, but I think the whole process started around 6 am, and so took about 7 hours. 

Habas, ready for us to peel

Fanesca!

It is a very thick hearty soup, so I went home and napped after that, and was awoken by a surprise invitation (most invitations here are surprises, in that nothing is ever really planned ahead) to go visit Rodrigo’s mom way up by Lake Cuicocha. I sleepily stumbled downstairs and we all piled into the truck—probably about 14 of us. There we had another version of Fanesca, made my Rodrigo’s mother, and all sat around the fire eating. We stayed until late into the night, talking, laughing, and eating. That night I really felt home with my family here. Especially as we drove back down to Calera in the cold rainy night, and I held the sleeping Kairik on my lap, it felt like a family trip with my biological family. I remembered myself as little Kairik, soundly asleep in the warm car with my family, on the way back from some long event. Only now I was the one caring for a sleeping child.

Friday morning we woke up early and Inés went to work on getting me ready for the day. That is to say, she dressed me up in an anaku, the traditional outfit of Indigenous women in this area. She had announced her plan to do so for Viernes Santo (Good Friday) a few days earlier, and it would be a lie to say that I did not assent with delight. I had been secretly hoping someone would ask me to wear an anaku all along. She helped me slip the silky embroidered blouse over my head, wrapped the double woolen skirts around my waist, fastened them with a tightly wound, wide red sash—the mama faja—topped with a thinner sash that matched my blouse. She tied a wool fachalina (shawl) around my shoulders, wound my ponytail up tightly in a cinta (embroidered ribbon), and wrapped my wrists in coral beaded manillas, which are meant to protect the women. Traditionally, they were made of real coral, but now they are just reddish beads. We put on my walka (gold necklace) and gold earrings, and my alpargates, and I was ready to go. 

in my anaku

with my family at the cemetery

All dressed up, we went to the cemetery in Cotacachi to sit at Inés’ family plot with some of her siblings. Like on the Day of the Dead, we had food with us, and people would come by with little plates of food for us, and we would give them something in return, often bread and bananas. After a bit, we left, and started walking around to watch the religious processions. At that point, I lost my family, and ended up spending the rest of the day with various friends. Overall it was a really fun day, and I really enjoyed being dressed up elegantly in anaku. Multiple people stopped me on the street to tell me how beautiful I looked and asked to take a photo with me, which I obliged, so there are a few strangers out there with photos of themselves with a gringa in an anaku. I suppose that is not something that one sees everyday here. I stayed in Cotacachi into the evening to see the nighttime processions with the saints. My (Indigenous) friend Paúl’s perspective on that spectacle was that it made him uncomfortable because it felt like an ongoing display of colonialism. He pointed out that the only people you see laboring under these heavy wooden saints are Indigenous, and that he felt like symbolically it reminded him that the Indigenous are still oppressed by the legacy of colonialism and divorced from their own culture and religious traditions that were forceably taken from them. I thought his analysis of the symbolic aspect of this tradition was really insightful, and I was reminded in that moment that the actor who played Jesus in the reenactment of the passion earlier in the day had also been quite White.

reenactment of the Passion

processions

On Saturday Mary and I went to the sprawling Otavalo Market for one last shopping trip to pick up sentimental things for ourselves and gifts for others. I am most happy about the coral beaded manillas that I bought for myself, which I have been wearing ever since. They are supposed to protect you, and when I look at my wrists, and think of all the Ecuadorean Indigenous women whom I have come to love, who wear these beads around their wrists everyday, I really do feel a sense of protection and solidarity with them.

In contrast with the U.S., Easter Sunday itself was basically a non-event. Inés’ mother had surgery on Saturday for appendicitis, and we went to visit her in the hospital in the morning. Other than that, Mary and I brought a little of our own celebration to La Calera. We made the kids an Easter basket, and had planned an Easter egg hunt, but it was pouring all day, so we abandoned that idea in favor of simply letting them paw through the basket in search of treasures. We found a basket in Magui’s outdoor kitchen, cleaned it up, filled it with fresh grass, stickers, notebooks, crayons, Clementine oranges, hardboiled eggs, mini bananas (called oritos), mini apples, and little candies. The kids loved it, especially the stickers and the notebooks.

kids with the Easter basket