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1 Beheading the Moor (Zacatecas, 1996) Each year in late August several thousand Moors and Christians invade Zacatecas. Dressed in brightly colored uniforms and armed with swords, scimitars , and arquebuses, warriors from European history clog the streets of a city that was once the silver-mining capital of colonial Mexico. Music from a dozen welldrilled drum and bugle corps orchestrates the invasion. In 1996, scurrying to and fro along side streets that intersected the main path of the parade, I saw the Twelve Peers of France battle their eighth-century Turkish counterparts in a massed sword fight that moved slowly across the sloped square of Santo Domingo. And I saw Moorish infantry from the naval battle of Lepanto (1571) fire arquebuses into the air as they passed the exuberantly detailed facade of Zacatecas’s baroque cathedral. Above the caption “They’d said they wouldn’t burn powder in the city center but in the end they did,” a newspaper photograph the next day displayed the evidence: a crowd of Moors, raised arquebuses, and clouds of smoke.1 The soldiers are members of the confraternity of Saint John the Baptist, whose unifying mission is the annual staging of an extraordinary theatrical spectacle known as the Morismas de Bracho. Officially, the mock battles, religious processions, secular parades, fireworks displays, and saint plays tell three interwoven stories: the martyrdom of John the Baptist, commemorated by the church each year on 29 August; a legendary crusade of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers of France, said to have taken place in 770 and to have had as “its sole purpose the rescue of holy relics” captured by the Turks;2 and the historical battle of Lepanto (1571), in which a Christian fleet under the command of John of Austria decisively defeated the Ottoman navy at the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth. The tradition of morismas, which has its roots in late medieval Spain, is believed to have arrived in the region of Zacatecas in the early seventeenth century.3 At the physical heart of the morismas of Bracho is a small chapel, dedicated to John the Baptist and set in a scrubby basin of the hills of Bracho a couple of miles northeast of town. Behind the chapel, to the west, is a dusty parade ground or plaza, well over a hundred yards long and forty wide. From its center rises a single tree, at whose foot the climactic execution of the Moorish king takes place. On the western slope overlooking the square stands the stone facade of a castle. To the north of the chapel is an open area, joined to the parade ground by a small stone bridge over a dry stream bed (“We used to have a little water for the battle of Lepanto,” one of the actors joked). Below the chapel, to the east, is a second parade ground, equally dusty but shorter than its companion. To the south, during the fiesta, is a makeshift 3 market of food stalls and fairground booths. The chapel itself boasts a paved forecourt , enclosed on two sides by covered arcades. The hills rise most sharply, after a brief drop into a wooded valley, to the east. The action of the morismas spreads out from the several acres of open space around the chapel to the high peak of the eastern hill a mile away and two or three miles along the road into the center of the city. It is perhaps the largest “stage” I have ever seen. When I first arrived at Bracho, merchants were erecting stalls, workmen making final repairs to the castle facade, and custodians cleaning the chapel. Inside the chapel were two statues of the Baptist, one above the altar and the other on a pedestal against the south wall. The latter’s feet and calves were worn from the kisses of pilgrims. Hanging on the opposite wall was a carving of the crucified Christ, painted blood running down his pale limbs. Dominating a poster advertising the morismas was a picture of the martyred John the Baptist’s head being presented to King Herod on a platter. Sacrifice and decapitation were to be the central motifs of the fiesta. The fiesta began, late on Thursday afternoon, with the “washing of John the Baptist.” The statues of the Baptist were placed in front of the altar, where two couples lovingly cleansed every inch of the images with cotton balls and hand cream. Then the congregation filed up...

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