The Pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of the Lord of Qoyllur Rit'i: The Walk Experience by Zoila Mendoza (review)

This documentary by the Peruvian anthropologist Zoila Mendoza is a great contribution to the archive on the Pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of the Lord of Qoyllur Rit'i, the largest pilgrimage in southern Peru. An average of fifty thousand Quechua and mestizo believers from villages, towns, and cities gather each year around a Catholic temple located at the bottom of the QollquepunKu and Sinakara glaciers. This feast takes place in the months of May and June. Most of the visual archive, including photo essays and documentaries, has addressed the days of celebration at the sanctuary. To my knowledge, Mendoza's documentary is the first one that covers the pilgrimage per se and the events that occur at the sacred place. Mendoza focuses on the walking to the sanctuary, a practice that is vanishing in the Andean world. Nowadays, most of the pilgrims travel to the village of Mawayani by truck, bus, or car, taking advantage of the trans-Amazon highway. Then they walk only five miles from there to the sanctuary. Mendoza's documentary is the result of interweaving footage from three separate pilgrimages of residents of the town of Pomacanchi, Cuzco. The pilgrims travel on foot eighty-five miles in three days and two nights from their town to the Qoyllurit'i sanctuary. However, they return by truck.

Mendoza's main goal is to demonstrate that the specificity of Quechua people's cognitive processes is related to listening and physical activities, and so the best way for them to honor the Lord is with dance, music, and a pilgrimage. In fact, the travels of the people from Pomacanchi center around Kachampa, a masculine dance troupe, or comparsa. The dancers, who represent Incan warriors, perform in several places at the points of departure and arrival of the pilgrimage. With different steps they follow the beat of a band of two Andean flutes, a snare drum, and a bass drum. The four musicians play a song called chakiri wayri most of the time. Also important is the participation of the ukukus, characters who are part human and part animal and who maintain order and are in charge of the group's safety, providing a connection between the natural and human worlds. They practice their own rituals to the glaciers. Few women accompany the comparsa, and when they do, they are responsible for taking care of the men who are also the porters of the food, firewood, pots, customs, flags, emblems, images, and sleeping bags.

Zoila Mendoza is the director, producer, camerawoman, and narrator of the documentary. In several scenes, she documents a cultural practice in which elements of popular Catholicism and contemporary Quechua religion are easily perceived. The pilgrims start at, go to, and return to Catholic churches; they also believe in Christian notions of sin, forgiveness, and suffering. But on their way to the sanctuary, they worship the sunrise and sunset, and perform rituals at sacred locations called apachetas. When they arrive at their destination, the ukukus and dancers enact the yawar mayu (river of blood) ritual. In brief, this cultural syncretic practice combines Catholic worship from the colonial period with a pre-Columbian native cult celebrating water as the source of life and death. After observing the pilgrimage three times, Mendoza concludes that there is a strong unity of sound, sight, and motion in the Andean world, opening up new avenues for social science researchers. At the same time, she subtly urges us to study the pilgrimage before it drastically changes. It is a race against the modernization of Andean society and the effects of global warming, as each year the glaciers are smaller.

The documentary is an appropriate length for classroom use, short enough to also allow for discussion in the same class. It addresses issues of Andean music, dance, and religiosity. It also addresses topics such as cultural change, capitalist modernization, global warming, and...