Huamantla, Mexico: Festival of Flowers

 

Theodore P. Druch

"Boom!"

"What the hell was that?" I shouted to Maria, having been unceremoniously awakened out of a sound sleep.

"I don't know," came the groggy answer, "but it sounds like fireworks."

A few more booms ended the controversy. It was fireworks. But it had to be early morning. Reaching for the alarm clock resting on our nightstand, I read, uncomprehendingly, 4 am. "Wha-?"

Rushing – well wobbling is more like it – out of our RV, we did indeed see skyrockets going off in the pre-dawn blackness. And, what are those? Bright lanterns were floating up into the sky, paper balloons carried aloft by hot air produced by setting fire to a kerosene soaked rag inside.   The "Night without Sleep" had begun in Huamantla.

 

We had been traveling around Mexico for nearly a year when we came upon an old, out of print booklet about Mexican flowers. Inside was a picture of a floral celebration held on August 16 every year in the small town of Huamantla for the Feast of The Assumption of the Virgin. It looked very interesting, though we could find little about it in any of our Mexico guidebooks. We checked the map, found that Huamantla did, indeed, exist, and decided to try for it.

Huamantla is located in the mountains of central Mexico, in the State of Tlaxcala (Tlas-ka-la), and didn't have an RV Park. What's more, according to our little book, hotel rooms for the fiesta are reserved years in advance. And these are mainly for Mexicans. The outside world has barely heard of Huamantla. We hoped we could find a place to stay.

Arriving in town, we drove toward the center and stopped to fill up our gas tanks at a Pemex station next to both the cemetery and the Plaza de Toros, the bullring.

"Say. You've got a pretty big parking space there at the back of your gas station." I remarked while filling up. "Would it be possible for us to park here for a few days?"

A hurried consultation between the attendant and the owner resulted in getting us a parking spot for $2 a night. Next to the station, a little kiosk had electricity and Julius, the owner, allowed us to plug in. Total cost per night was $5 and we were parked only two blocks from the center of town.

Huamantla is a city of 50,000 people but, for two weeks a year, 250,000 visitors come in for the celebration. Streets around the town square are converted into a massive food court. Brick ovens are constructed for the baking of a special, sweet holiday bread, side streets are filled with tables and chairs, food vendors create an aroma guaranteed to spark hunger pangs in anyone, and tens of thousands of people are fed three times a day.

Next to the food court, a fair ground is set up with rides for the young. An air of festivity fills the town with light and noise, and numerous vendors sell all types of everything. In the Basilica square there are four large, inclined concrete platforms, chalk painted with new biblical themes every day for the two weeks of the festival; and each day, as well, these paintings are surrounded by huge new floral displays consisting of millions of flowers. The most popular seemed to be gardenias, whose heady fragrance filled the air for several blocks around the church.

Huamantla is also a major bullfighting center and every day several corridas are held in the enormous canvas covered bullring featuring Mexico's most famous and popular toreros. A week after the Assumption, the bulls will run wild through the streets, Mexico's own version of Pamplona.

 

Having been awakened by the noisy beginning of the "Night Without Sleep," (actually two days with a night sandwiched in between), there was no chance of getting any more rest, so we dressed and headed out to see what was happening.

The Basilica square was filled with dozens of people merrily trying to get their balloons aloft, setting the kerosene soaked rags on fire with torches, or cigarette lighters, or even matches; if they weren't careful they could set their balloon on fire, a fate which befell more than one hapless aviator. The square was a riot of color, the myriad hues and designs of the balloons picking up and echoing the brilliant floral displays, while the rising sun cast its golden aura upon everything.

The rest of the day was filled with parades; a new set of chalk paintings took shape while the flower arrangers patiently awaited their turn; and the hordes of visitors continued to gorge on the mouthwateringly delicious treats being served up by the food vendors all over town; special sweets for the fiesta, hot dogs, tamales, empanadas, chili rellenos, gyros, and just about anything else you could imagine. Children were happily laughing and shrieking on all the rides of the midway set up on the town square, and several puppet theatres, (Huamantla also being the home of the Mexican National Puppet Theater) were doing a land office business.

At 5pm, the transformation of Huamantla from a typical Mexican town into something like Disneyland begins. Bags of colored sawdust are delivered along 2 km of the downtown streets and volunteers from the city's neighborhoods maneuver giant stencils into place, filling the openings with the sawdust, moistened to keep it from blowing away in the wind. As each stencil is picked up and moved forward, another group lays down a new one and another color is applied. We marvel at the end result; magnificent oriental carpets running down the center of each street and each with a different theme; flowers, birds, mythical figures, and abstract designs all rendered in brilliant colors. The lampposts are decorated with flowers, straw, corn stalks, or crepe paper, and colored lights and helium-filled balloons are strung everywhere. By nightfall, the whole town is transformed into a magnificent kaleidoscope of light and color.

The final carpet to be laid down leads through the square to the doors of the Basilica de Nuestro Senora de la Caridad, a huge church with room for thousands of worshippers. The church square is also large enough for many thousands, among whom we mill around trying to stay warm in the frigid night air of the mountains. At one end, a raised platform carries news cameramen, televising pictures of this event to every corner of Mexico.

At midnight, a mass is celebrated and, when it's finished, all the bells of the church begin to peal, strings of fireworks rain down from the roof and steeples, and a large statue of the Virgin Mary is carried from the church on an enormous palanquin.

This is the moment that the hundreds of thousands of pilgrims crammed into Huamantla, and the lucky ones, like us, who've stood freezing for hours in the church square, have been waiting for. The crush of humanity is incredible; everyone wants to follow directly behind the statue as it makes its way through the city streets, destroying the gorgeous sawdust carpet bit by bit as it advances from block to block.

Dust to dust?

Preceding the procession are groups who perform dances along the edges of the carpet, being careful not to disturb any of it, a privilege which falls to the Virgin alone. The sky above is decorated with an endless display of fireworks and rockets as we watch, mouths agape, a spectacle that would never be allowed to take place in any city in the US. Fire codes, you know.

As far as we could tell, not a single building burned and not a single person was crushed to death, though, considering the huge size of the crowd, there may have been plenty of minor injuries.

The procession took hours to wend its way through the town, and participants often broke off long enough to grab a bite to eat from the food vendors lining the route with the fragrant aromas of roasting corn and roasting pig and roasting chicken. The festivities continued all night, though the less hardy of us crashed well before dawn.

By 8:00 the next morning every street was swept clean and every stencil was put away until next year but the celebration continued throughout the day to the wobbly enjoyment of the increasingly bleary-eyed onlookers. The grand bullfight was held, more food was consumed, and competing musicians took their places in the church square.

Local Aztec dancers in full costume, feathers and all, incense billowing thickly into the air, beat their drums in competition with the strains of Offenbach's La Gaite Parisienne played by the local "symphony," with yet a second counterpoint provided by a brass band at the other end of the plaza trying to play what passes here for Dixieland. And all the while, the sounds of another mass wafted out into the square to take their place in the general cacophony.

Amazingly, at one point, all the sights and sounds melded together and, I swear, the Aztecs could be seen dancing the Can-Can.

That night, the last night of the festival, was the time for some spectacular fireworks displays set up in the town's soccer field. Thousands of us pushed into the stadium to be awed by the nearly endless displays of ground apparatus, firecrackers, and skyrockets flying into the air one after another, after another for well over an hour.

We fell into bed weary but happy. Tomorrow we'd be leaving Huamantla for a new adventure, but, for now, we felt as though we had been privileged to experience a very private side of Mexico, one not often seen by foreign tourists; we had met only one other foreign family in the three days we'd been here.

Huamantla is one of Mexico's best-kept secrets and remains one of the highest points of our travels.

(This article is excerpted from my book, Footprints on a Small Planet, available at Amazon.com)

 

About the Author

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1939 on the eve of WWII, Theodore P. Druch, Ted to his friends, has misspent his life in various vain pursuits including an MA in Near Eastern Studies, several years as a resident at Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery in Millbrook, New York and later in an Ashram in Benson, Arizona; in San Francisco as a general contractor remodeling old Victorians (only their houses); as a neophyte computer geek helping his wife Maria in her fledgling software business; and finally, as a windblown vagabond, traipsing around the planet from one hemisphere to the other with Maria and their beloved Miniature Schnauzers Sherman and Schatzie.

Today, ensconced in a lovely house with an open atrium in the heart of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, Ted has embarked upon a new incarnation as a writer, hoping to get all the above down on paper before his ultimate eviction from the world writes an unwelcome finis to his adventures.

 

Offenbach Gaîté Parisienne Solti London Philharmonic Orchestra