Carnaval!

Carnaval, in a nutshell

While I did learn a more detailed history of Carnaval in my Dominican Folklore class, what it I believe it basically boils down to was this:  The Spaniards brought over their tradition of celebrating Marti Gras before Ash Wednesday.  As colonization went on and all sorts of Taínos, Europeans, and African people were living together, they agreed, despite their differences and conflicts, that Marti Gras was great, so they all participated in it every year and created a great blend of music, dances, and costumes.  Then, at some point, someone said, "Man, this Marti Gras things is great.  But you know what would make it even better?  If we celebrated it for the entire month of February!"  And, thus, Dominican Carnaval was born.  Carnaval is a little different in every town, with unique traditions and characters that people dress up as year after year, and last week I was lucky enough to see Santiago's version.  (I did not, however, bring my camera.  So all of these pictures are from Miranda and Stefanie, to whom I am most grateful.)

The ride grounds, with a little of the parade visible behind it

Santiago's Carnaval is held every Sunday until Lent starts and is centered around the monument, the main landmark in the center of the city.  All around the monument, the grassy spaces and streets were full of booths selling freshly fried empanadas and yucca balls, booming music stages, families with kids dressed as Spiderman and princesses, cheesy carnival rides, and card tables where people pulled 2-liters of pop and glass bottles of rum out of plastic coolers to make and sell mixed drinks.  There were also tons of men and boys dressed as lechones (Santiago's version of the Carnaval demons).  They wore masks and colorful suits and, if they weren't in the parade, spent their time running around smacking people's butts with vejigas, which are strings attached to what used to be dried and inflated pig bladders but are now (usually) balloons or plastic balls.  While a lot of the lechones are young and have bad aim, some of them are rather zealous about swinging their vejigas around, and they can sting, as we found out on multiple occasions.

This is a lechon, with vejiga and whip

After getting out of our concho, weaving our way through the ride area, and stopping to look inside a booth selling temporary tattoos of everything from butterflies to Che Guevara, we stumbled upon the center of Carnaval: the parade.  We watched, mesmerized, as group after group of lechones danced past us, dressed in paper mache masks with curved snouts that looked like duck bills and brightly colored costumes with all sorts of bells, beads, and bits of metal hanging off of them.  As they went, they rhythmically bounced their feet and swayed their hips to blaring reggaeton music while using one hand to shake those pig bladders and the other to whirl their gigantic whips in huge circles over their heads and then crack them loudly against the ground.  (The point of the whips is just to make a noise, not to hit anyone, but given how close everyone was standing and the fact that half of the lechones were 6-12-year-old boys, I'm shocked I only saw one lechon get clipped with one on the top of his horn during the parade.)

Probably exactly what the Taínos were like

Between clusters of lechones came groups of people representing different dance schools, boy scout troops, or groups that get together every year just to perform in Carnaval.  Some of them were really professional, with coordinated dances and costumes that reflected everything from the indigenous people's rituals to modern politics.  Some groups were decked out in the very traditional Carnaval style, with lechones wearing masks made just like they were in the 1800s and limping as they walked (because, the story went, the devils were on earth because they'd fallen from heaven and, during the landing, they'd hurt their legs).  One group performed a reenactment of one of the battles for Dominican independence, complete with fake guns that clapped and smoked when fired and a mobile brick fortress that people dressed as 19th century soldiers stood behind and aimed from.  Other groups were not quite as organized, such as the numerous sets of little girls who walked by shaking their booties in an enthusiastic but not very coordinated manner.

Enlordodos

There were also all kinds of other characters joining different groups or weaving in and out of them independently.  There were diablitos, men who paint their entire bodies from toes to eyelids with a greasy black paint and run up to you, threatening to touch you unless you give them money or protest enough, and enlorlodos, who do the same thing but cover themselves in a tan mud.  There were a few renditions of Death, complete with long black robes decorated with cobwebs and frogs.  There was Nicholas Denden, a man dressed as a bear in a mangy, furry costume that must have been...wait for it...an un-bear-able in all of the heat of the bright sun and huge crowds.  (I do apologize.)

An imitation Robalagallina

There were also imitations of Robalagallina, the most famous character of Santiago's Carnaval.  Robalagallina was started by a man who dressed up as a woman with a gigantic fake butt and chest, and he performed her every year until he died.  He is super well known in the city - there is even a statue of Robalagallina near the monument, on the same level as the statues of a famous baseball team, and just below the ones honoring the heroes of the Dominican independence movement.  Seriously.  Santiagans love Robalagallina.  While there are many copycats, the legacy is being officially continued by a man who were were lucky enough to see today (although he's waiting until later in the season to unveil his full costume and was in plain clothes today).  Even without it, however, he was recognized and treated like a celebrity - when he walked by us in the parade, people started screaming and rushing towards him to get pictures. 

A dancing, limping lechon

The parade seemed to go on and on - we watched it for at least three hours, and arrived when it was already in full swing.  For much of that time, we stood in the shadow of a huge green stage covered by a gigantic canopy advertising Presidente beer.  Although, like a lot of the Carnaval grounds, it smelled a little too strongly of sweat and spilled Presidente, it was a great spot to be in: The speakers alternated techno and reggaeton music with dozens of repetitions of the same peppy and festive song about Carnaval, and each group that came by would take their time crossing the stage, dancing and showing off their costumes.  Sometimes they were accompanied by a pickup truck carrying huge speakers that blared their own music loud enough to drown out that of the stage; sometimes, the families of the participants ran alongside them dancing and waving their arms.  The groups weren't spaced with quite the same precision as, say, the nightly Disney World parade - some groups would be so close together that belly-dancing preteens would come dangerously close to getting whipped by limping lechones while other times there would be pauses so long that we thought the parade was over. 

Posing for photos

This parade was also less formal.  If you walked up to a lechon you were particularly impressed with, he'd almost always be happy to stop and take a picture with you.  In fact, during a particularly long stretch without any groups, a man standing near us hopped up on stage for a few minutes to show off his (very impressive) break dancing skills while the people all around the stage cheered.

It was absolutely unlike anything I had seen before.  I also somehow can't see anything like it taking place in the US....I'm thinking a holiday whose main focus is dressing up like devils, letting little kids wave around whips, and smacking people in the butt with imitation pig bladders would present a few too many liability issues.  Here's a video of it, in an attempt to better show what it was like.  (Skip to the 1:30-2:00 mark, which has best representation of the lechones' dancing and also features the song that was playing approximately 65% of the day.)

Eventually, we were able to tear ourselves away from the parade long enough to explore the rest of the festivities (and get whacked in the butt several more times).   We found ourselves back among the carnival rides, facing this one.  We had a dilemma.  On the one hand, this was a slightly rickety-looking ride set up temporarily for a carnival where, judging by the fact that one of the main attractions is waving around huge whips, safety is not the number one priority, in a country where no one sues anyone (and, therefore, there would be no one to get money from if the whole thing toppled over and crushed our limbs).  On the other hand, it did appear to be a ride made in the US, following US standards...it looked super fun...we hadn't heard any warnings about rides here...and we couldn't pass up the once-in-a-lifetime chance to go on a Dominican carnival ride.  So we watched it closely several times, observed zero problems, decided we liked those odds, and bought our tickets. 

This view, more or less.

When our turn came, the three of us got squished into one cage/seat with a bar that came right to our stomachs and a grated door that the operator latched shut.  The ride itself was one of those ferris-wheel-like things that have the seats that swing and occasionally flip upside down, and as it was loading people, we had an amazing view.  We'd gotten on it right at sunset, so we could look out and see the entire city light up by the redish-purple sun: the Carnaval parade close to us, stretches of houses behind it, and the mountains surrounding them on all sides.  It was an incredible view.  Then, the ride started.  It was a little faster and rougher than most of the rides at, say, Valleyfair, and the moments of being whipped around and seeing the dry, packed dirt ground beneath us, coming towards us far too quickly, were terrifying.  Most of the time, though, we were laughing and thoroughly enjoying our situation - spinning and catching glimpses of the beautiful scenery in a beautiful country as strains of "Carnaval...Carnaval...Carnaval...Te quiero...Lalalala" came blasting from the parade.

After that, we walked back towards the parade, ducked under the barbed wire fence that blocked off the grassy spaces between the steps leading up to the monument from dogs (but not people, of whom there were dozens sitting and walking all over it), and headed down the slope to find a place to sit and watch the end of the parade.  As we were sitting down, I accidentally slipped a little on the dry, packed-down grass and kicked loose a rock that tumbled down the hill, rolled up a little branch, soared off the branch, and landed right in middle of the back of a man in a fedora hat sitting below us.

A man who was shaking his hips and dancing on these stilts

He looked back at us, I waved apologetically and called out "Lo siento!" and he, noticing we were foreigners, came up and sat down beside us.  He asked us if this was our first time at the parade and what we'd thought of it, and when we told him we loved it, he started telling us all about the history of Carnaval, which traditions they've stopped doing and which are still going strong, the names of the different characters who walked past us, and the differences between Santiago's Carnaval and the one in La Vega.  He seemed to agree with most of the people here: While La Vega's Carnaval is more organized, has more money and energy put into it, and is objectively better, Santiago's is more creative, accessible, and spontaneous.  At some point, he mentioned that he was a visual artist who came to Carnaval every year to take pictures to base paintings off of later, and he got out his Blackberry to show us some photos of his finished paintings.

They were incredible.  He had a huge range of subjects and styles - realistic outlines of the Dominican countryside, surrealistic people, trees, and buildings melting into weird and interesting shapes, and a few abstract pieces with really beautiful color combinations.  When he'd shown us most of his gallery on his phone (and an adorable picture of his baby nephew), he reached into his messenger bag and pulled out a stuffed file folder, explaining that he also taught art classes and had some of the sketches he'd been doing there as examples inside.  He flipped through them and we oohed and ahhed - even though they were rough sketches, they looked just like the parts of the country that we've been to.  Kelsey told him that she's in an art class now and hopes that, by the end of the semester, she'll be able to sketches even half that well, and he smiled and said it wasn't that hard.  He found a couple of blank pieces of paper among his pictures and rested them on top of his file folder.  Then he rummaged around in his bag, found a charcoal pencil, and used a pocket knife to sharpen it. 

I love love love this picture!

"Okay," he said, "what do you want to see?"  We started listing our favorite parts of the countryside - the huge palm trees, the rivers, the little houses - and he sketched them all out, explaining as he went: "Here's lines for perspective, so this house is the right amount smaller than this one...I'm shading this side because the sun's coming from over there...You've seen people riding on burros, right?  I'm adding one here..."  And, in a few short minutes, there was a sketch that somehow managed to look just like the tiny towns surrounded by huge fields that we've driven through every time we've left Santiago.  When he was done, he flipped it over and scribbled "Dedicado a Anna de el artista Ofemil - muchas bendiciones" (dedicated to Anna by the artist Ofemil - many blessings), then added his email address and full name so we could find him and his gallery on facebook.  He then turned to Kelsey, asked what else he should draw, and drew another scene of a small town by the mountains, this time featuring a woman balancing a fruit basket on her head walking home from the river.  He signed it to her on the back, smiled, and told us we should hold on to them for when he's famous someday.  We thanked him profusely and told him we certainly would, and that we'll make sure to stop by the booth/cell that he has in the colonial-jail-turned-art-gallery that we're going to visit on a field trip for one of our classes. 

Then, it was time to head home, so we thanked him again, carefully rolled up our sketches, and headed off to find a taxi, gushing about how much we loved Carnaval.

Fun fact: At home, I discovered my sketch looks eerily like a painting on my host family's wall.