Veracruz

Last Sunday I met 7 other members of my Ethnomusicology class (plus our teacher and his girlfriend) at 7 AM in the cloudy, deserted cold of early-morning Puebla. We all loaded into a large red van and drove to the town of Tlacotalpan, Veracruz, the coastal state just to the east of Puebla. The town was holding its annual festival of the local Son Jarocho music, which has been named Patrimonio Mundial (world patrimony)!

We arrived in the afternoon and wandered around to all the town parks, which were littered (well jam-packed would be a better description) with tents in which people who had come from all over the place were camping. We were unable to find a spot for our 10-person tent in any of the parks, so we knocked on the door of a big house with a big walled-in yard and basically asked if we could set up our tent in the yard and stay for a few days. We were warmly received and made our temporary home!



Once the parks filled up, people pitched their tents in whatever space they could find. The whole town was one big, happy, musical, well-fed Hooverville.


Later that day we watched a parade through town of tons of people in traditional costume on horseback, we ate tamales de elote (like a regular tamal, but with whole-ish corn kernels in the masa), listened to hours of traditional Son, and topped off the night with toritos, a creamy alcoholic drink which comes in flavors like coconut, peanut (my favorite, of course!), caramel, chocolate, and several different fruit flavors.

The forum in which Jaranero music is played is called a fandango, which seems to be a large group of people who get together and jam. These sessions include instruments, singing, dancing, and of course drinking, and last well into the night/morning. Groups can perform on stage or can wander around. The tent cities were pretty well stocked with dueling jaranas!



This was my favorite group, La Familia Utrera. They were amazing. Sometimes Son Jarocho (that's what the genre is called) tends to be sort of yelled more than sung, but this group had its shit together. Not only that, but the songs they sang were not just the same traditional ones you heard over and over, but new and different. There's one sad one that translates loosely along the lines of "I won't sing of my sadness at the fandango, because the fandango is happiness. Call me llorona (a woman who cries too much) but just let me cry."



Sisters, two of many young performers at the Jaranero festival with their jaranas, resembles a guitar but has a sound all its own. There seems to be a big emphasis in continuing this art form by instilling it in the youth of the society. Seems to be working; people of all ages performed together!



The next day we basically did the whole thing over again, with more exploration of the festival. There were also several temporary markets, plenty of men on horseback, vociferous shrimp vendors, carnival games and rides, dancing, hippies from all over the world (seriously I have never seen so many white people with dreds wearing sandals and baja hoodies in my whole life; it was like Ithaca in Spanish), and all manner of delicious food! There were also rows of really ripe portable toilets, or you could pay 5 pesos in almost any restaurant or store to use their bathroom. Showers cost 20 pesos, but after so much humidity and dirt it's SO WORTH IT.




So their were games for the kids and for the -ahem- kid in each of us. This is my classmate Rodrigo, letting his inner child beat the socks off of me and Camille.

Tlacotalpan is not a huge city, so after the first two days we were all a little cabin-feverish. The cure? Impromptu road trip. On Tuesday we hit the road to Catemaco (which in Nahuatl means "the place of burnt houses"), a pueblo about an hour's drive from Tlacotalpan. Along the way we stopped at some incredible water falls called the Salto de Eyipantla, got soaked in the spray, which felt amazing in the humid heat of the coast. Then in Catemaco we went for a boat tour of the lagoon there, at 300-some-odd meters above sea level, the lagoon is a relatively pristine nature preserve. There are, however, various businesses thriving on its shores. We all got mineral facials, for example, then all got to pay a few pesos for the privilege to wash the mud off our faces in a mineral spring. There is also an island with monkeys on it! It's a small piece of land (like the size of a small house) with 5 or 6 macaques, but it was still cool! After our boat tour, we hit a fondita for some awesome food! I ate estofado, which is basically chicken cooked with tomatoes, onions, peppers, olives, and spices. It was very delicious!




The waterfall, view from the top. BREATHTAKING.



The lagoon of Catemaco. The picture really doesn't do it justice; it was incredibly beautiful! I recommend to anyone planning to visit Mexico that they swing through here and enjoy this rare gem.




Getting mud masks in the jungle! It felt nice to be pampered after a weekend of porta-potties and sleeping on the hard, wet ground, but I'm not sure it made any of the magical changes in my complexion that the lady promised.

We returned Wednesday, sunburnt, exhausted, and completely (at least in my case) sick of listening to Jarocho music. All in all a seriously awesome field trip!


This is my classmate Camille, from Quebec, while we were at the waterfall. This is my favorite picture of this whole trip (and possibly my whole time in Mexico) because her facial expression basically sums up my feelings about my experience here.