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The Americas 60.1 (2003) 87-108



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Introducing La Reina del Carnaval:
Public Celebration and Postrevolutionary Discourse in Veracruz, Mexico*

Andrew Grant Wood

[Figures]
For days no one sleeps and the streets are a vivid labyrinth of veracruzanos dancing their huapangos and bambas, strumming harps and guitars and singing happily.

—Terry's Guide to Mexico

It is impossible to have social relations without symbolic acts.

—Mary Douglas

Following the revolution of 1910-1917, a new era took shape in the port of Veracruz, Mexico as residents (porteños) took to a variety of recreational pursuits that included baseball, social dances and, increasingly, film. No one activity proved more significant, however, than the revival of Carnival in 1925. That year, members of the Veracruz railroad workers union (Alianza de Ferrocarrileros) along with a coordinating committee made up of representatives from various community associations organized the first public celebration of Carnival in nearly five decades. 1 Assembling just outside the union hall on the afternoon of Saturday February 21, 1925, hundredsjoined in an afternoon parade that circulated through the central city. Carrying assorted musical instruments and noisemaking gadgets, an enthusiastic throng engaged in a hunt to capture a ritualistic [End Page 87] "enemy of the people" known as Mal Humor. 2 After members of the procession seized their prey, a tribunal headed by King Juan Carnaval tried the offender and sentenced him to death.

As revelers gathered a few hours later, several honking automobiles led a parade which featured the condemned Mal Humor followed by a military band and a popular chorus of the king's subjects dressed up as devils, witches, skeletons, Roman soldiers, mad scientists, musicians, mimes and other costumed characters. Moving along Independence Avenue, the procession grew more numerous as it picked up hundreds of residents on the way to Ciriaco Vázquez Park where organizers ceremoniously put their victim to a ritualistic death. Following this, the nearly two thousand people who formed Juan Carnaval's entourage made their way back to one of the city's main intersections near the main plaza. There, porteños celebrated the official start of the three-day festival by jubilantly dancing and partying long into the night. The arrest, judgment and execution of Mal Humor on the first day of Carnival represented a purging of "unhappy" elements from the local environment and the unification of Veracruz society joined in festive communion. 3 Yet this edition of the traditional pre-Lenten festival would prove somewhat different than previous celebrations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries precisely because of the changing nature of the Mexican State and civil society in the 1920s.

As was true across the nation, encouraging identification with the new social order after the Revolution required much more than official pronouncements. In Veracruz, civic leaders faced an especially difficult challenge in that the city had recently suffered foreign invasion, civil war and a wave of bitter labor strikes. Thus as thousands anticipated the crowning of Carnival Queen as well as the many parades and dances scheduled for the raucous weekend, festival promoters worked behind the scenes to realize a social production they hoped would help reintegrate the Veracruz community. In the process, they blended traditional elements of the festival with fundamental aspects of new national ideology to create a ritual synthesis that downplayed social conflict and contributed to the legitimation of postrevolutionary power. 4 [End Page 88]

Festival Production in Historic Context

With a growing export economy and relative political peace under the autocratic leadership of President Porfirio Díaz, local leaders had endeavored to transform Veracruz into a modern city during the last decades of the nineteenth century. At the center of this urban renewal effort, the English firm of Sir Weetman D. Pearson vastly improved the port facility to increase commercial capacity. In the process, Pearson's men built breakwaters to protect the Veracruz harbor as well as new walls and docks. They deepened the channels to 33 feet below sea level to accommodate larger ocean-going vessels while erecting three new piers to provide...

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