Masking the Site: The Fiestas de Santiago Apostol in Loiza, Puerto Rico

Following the lead of Ricardo Alegría, most scholars believe that the Fiestas de Santiago Apóstol in Loíza, Puerto Rico, draw their strength from a syncretic mixture of Spanish mock battles between Moors and Christians, on the one hand, and imported Yorùbá deities and masks, on the other. My research challenges that reading, arguing instead that the fiestas are rooted in the mixed soil of local tensions, Carnival, and Christianity.

Thanks to the pioneering scholarship of Ricardo Alegría and to the scale and exuberance of their processions, the Fiestas de Santiago Apóstol in Loíza are among the best known of Puerto Rico's many traditional festivals. Alegría's brief but invaluable documentary film (1949), his substantial book on the fiestas (1954), and his summary article in the Journal of American Folklore (1956) have long been the unchallenged sources of interpretation. Neither the work of subsequent scholars (Rodríguez 1991:16-17, 47-52; Ungerleider 2000; Zaragoza 1995) and film makers (Malavé 1994; Martíez Sosa 1982; Vissepo 1980) nor the elaborate programs published annually by the mayor's office in Loíza offer any evidence of disagreement with Alegría's reading. Although Alegría carefully qualified his speculative account of the fiestas with such phrases as "it would be natural to suppose that" and "it is possible to believe that" (1956:126, 130), his provisional conclusions have been accepted without question by scholars, filmmakers, and local officials. Alegría (and all who rely on him) claim that the fiestas draw their strength from a syncretic mixture of Spanish mock battles between Moors and Christians, on the one hand, and imported Yorùbá deities and masks, on the other.

Official explanations backed by uncontested scholarship can be misleading. To use a phrase coined by James Scott, they are only the "public transcript" of the proceedings (Scott 1990). The "hidden transcript," that voices dissent and motivates the repeated popular staging of the fiestas, is ordinarily embodied in signs visible only in performance. Through many years of participant observation of fiestas in Spain and the Americas, I have learned to pay more heed to the dramatic action of a fiesta and to the casual remarks of performers and audience than to the standard explanations offered to (and by) clergy, government agents, and anthropologists. I look for those details of performance that are quietly at odds with the public transcript, for it is amidst such dissonance-just because it is apt to be regarded as innocuous, garbled, or irrelevant by scholars and others in authority-that folk performers are most likely to insinuate their hidden transcript into the public square (Harris 2000: 23-25).

By Alegría's own admission, the European and African traditions, whose traces he claims to have uncovered, have no meaning for those who now take part in the fiestas. I believe that his concentration on these traditions obscured-and continues to obscure-the much more vibrant social and theological commentary to which the fiestas do in fact give lively dramatic form. By exposing the weakness in Alegría's historical argument, I hope to clear the way for a fresh reading of the fiestas that is more sensitive to their actual performance.

The starting point for my own understanding lies in a deceptively simple observation. The festivities are uniformly ascribed to Loíza, despite the fact that they happen in Medianía, some three miles east of Loíza. Or, to be more precise, they take place on the road from Loíza to Medianía, gathering strength in both numbers and vitality as they travel eastward from one to the other. The true location of the fiestas is masked by their public designation. I believe that the fiestas are rooted, at least in part, in long-standing and continuing tensions between the comparative social prestige of Loíza and Medianía.

Loíza was one of the first colonial settlements on the island. Black slaves were brought to Loíza as early as 1519 to work in gold mining and, when...