Los Posadas
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Las Posadas is a Mexican festival that re-enacts and celebrates Mary and Joseph's journey to Bethlehem.
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[edit] Overview
Lasting from December 16 through December 24, the festival of Las Posadas is a Mexican tradition that allows their culture to make the Christ story their own. Throughout Mexico there are many interpretations of Las Posadas, which loosely translates to “the journey,” but ultimately it is a celebration that reenacts Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem. “Ritual portrayals of the days prior to Christ’s birth have existed from the Middle Ages, and piñata-like food distributions to children can be found elsewhere as well. But the Mexican people have combined these two features, elaborated on them, and institutionalized them to the point where they have become symbolic to Mexico itself” (Brandes 259).
[edit] The Festival
Each of the nine days of celebrations involves a lot of planning and financial responsibility. Many small villages will take part in order to allow all parties to “cooperate” appropriately. The first and last nights are the two most important banquets of the celebration. The first night also involves twelve piñatas; young boys are blindfolded and then try to break the piñatas using a long pole. A cord rigs the piñata that is controlled by and adult male, and only when he wishes is the child able to strike the pot and break open all the goodies from inside. Those who are celebrating then form a procession line that goes to several of the small villages in the area. The procession involves a lot of singing; from village to village different parts of the story are enacted. There are parts for selfish innkeepers and shepherds, and the female singers pay tribute to the Virgin Mary in their narratives. Song is a very important part of the festivities. There are many different chants and verses that occur on all of the processions throughout the nine nights. The involvement of song makes the celebration an easier concept to grasp, as well as allowing the culture to pass it on orally.
[edit] Related traditions
Some traditions in Mexico have branched off as a result of the festival of Las Posadas, there is also a play called “Shepherds Play,” in which Las Posadas only represents the first act. The play is actually twelve acts long and corresponds to the epiphany season of the Catholic Church. (Pearce 84) “It is important to recognize that the posadas are a manifest effort at dramatizing the events that occurred during the days prior to the birth of Christ. The only source of concrete information about these events, of course, is the Gospels” (Brandes 277). Religion has such a freedom of interpretation around it, and is often embraced by many families in many different ways, therefore; it plays into a family’s and culture’s folklore. The idea of folklore is that it motivates and involves an entire culture through tradition, Las Posadas indeed accomplishes this goal.
[edit] German studies
Folklore often becomes part of a society as a way of preserving or reinforcing values and beliefs in a culture. “Folklore was considered to be the cultural trappings of the country- its stories, beliefs, traditions and rituals- not the wars won, paintings created or churches built. The nationalist approach to folklore studies placed the emphasis on examining a ‘dying culture,’ a culture scholars assumed was being consumed by the educated people of Germany, in order to reinforce a sense of shared identity. The Germans were the first to look at folklore studies in this way, but these nationalistic impulses extend to countries other than Germany as well” (Sims and Stephens 22).
Essentially, Mexican culture collected the ideas and ceremonies associated with the Christ story and were able to make them their own. Because the only written documentation about how the Christ story actually occurred is within the Gospels, there is a lot of room for interpretation. Similar to the original German ideals, Las Posadas is able to bring villages that would normally separated and self-occupied under a shared sense of identity. The celebrations that these villages put together force each of them to work as a group both socially and financially. This allows for a village that may typically receive less support to gain some form of outreach by those around them. At its best, Las Posadas is a great example of the nationalist approach to folklore, bringing religion, personal tradition, and village unity, to remote parts of Mexican culture.
[edit] References
- Brandes, Stanley. “The Posadas in Tzintzuntzan Structure and Settlement in a Mexican Christmas Festival.” The Journal of American Folklore. Vol. 96, No. 381. (1983), pp. 259-280. JSTOR. 3 March 2006. <http://links.jstor.org/sici?>.
- Pearce, T.M. “The New Mexican ‘Shepherds Play’.” Western Folklore. Vol. 15, No. 2. (1956), pp. 77-88. JSTOR. 3 March 2006. <http://links.jstor.org/sici?>.
- Sims, Martha and Stephens, Martine. Living Folklore: An Introduction to the Study of People and Their Traditions. Utah: Utah State University Press, 2005.
