Sendero de maravillas. A trail of marigold petals has been laid out for el Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead), leading to the door of a home in Zinacapan, Puebla. Photo by Geoff Winningham.
Featuring striking images by Houston photographer Geoff Winningham, Mexican Fiestas presents a vivid chronicle of the historic and diverse traditions of Mexican festivals-deeply rooted expressions of the country's religious and cultural heritage. Beginning with his first trip to the state of Michoacán for Día de los Muertos, Winningham's work spans decades, documenting a wide array of festive traditions in villages throughout Mexico, highlighting how these celebrations unite communities through centuries-old traditions of art, music, dance and worship.
ARTIST STATEMENT
In order to appreciate the cultural importance of the popular fiestas of Mexico, one must go back to the 16th century, to the years immediately following the Spanish conquest, when the indigenous religious celebrations of the Amerindian civilizations of Mesoamerica began to fuse with the Catholic rites of the Spanish conquerors. Beginning at that time, over five centuries ago–and continuing to the present day–Mexican fiestas have served as living reminders of the country’s turbulent history, as well as celebrations of its religious and spiritual foundations.
Through music, dance, art, and storytelling, Mexican fiestas have passed ancient knowledge and customs from one generation to the next, while providing platforms for artisans, musicians, and performers to showcase their talents, thus ensuring that cultural legacies continue to flourish and evolve in the modern world.
The elaborate costumes, masks, and rhythmic dances of the Nahual people of Zinacapan, Puebla, the vibrant music and intricate artistry of the Day of the Dead celebrations in Oaxaca and Michoacán, the solemn processions and ceremonial rituals of the penitents at Atotonilco, Guanajuato, each offers a window into the soul of Mexico.
In 1983, I drove across the border from Texas into Mexico for the first time, where I discovered a New World at my doorstep. Fascinated by the culture, amazed by the diverse beauty of the landscape, and enthralled by the fiestas I witnessed, I traveled for almost a year, exploring and photographing virtually every region of Mexico. A year later, I returned on another driving trip, specifically to see and to photograph the famous celebration of el Día de los Muertos (the Day of the Dead) in the region around Lake Pátzcuaro.
Shortly after that trip, a Mexican photographer friend gave me a copy the Calendario de Fiestas Populares. Published by the Mexican Office of Popular Culture, roughly the size of a large Bible, the Calendario is a unique volume, listing over 7,000 traditional fiestas with historic roots, located in every region of Mexico. Each of these fiestas is celebrated annually, some in cities, but most in villages so far off the beaten track that the Calendario includes maps, guides for those who wish to find and observe these remote celebrations. Since discovering the Calendario, I have traveled to photograph several hundred fiestas in 22 Mexican states.
The most famous of these festivities, the Day of the Dead, is now widely promoted by the Mexican government, bringing more tourists to those celebrations each year. Still, most Mexican fiestas are barely known beyond the tiny villages in which they are celebrated, and many are struggling to survive, as their rural communities face the eroding effects of television, internet, and the migration of their inhabitants from their homes, often across the US border, in search of work.
In addition to the historic and cultural importance of the popular fiestas of Mexico, there is another, more profound reason that fiestas have continued to exist and seem certain to survive as an essential part of Mexican culture.
Writing in In the Eye of the Sun: Mexican Fiestas, the eminent Chicano writer Richard Rodriguez observed:
On the day of the fiesta, everything is different. . . On any other day of the year the will of God may be hard to decipher, harder to bear. Why has God allowed a drought to wither the fields? Why did He allow our mother to suffer with cancer . . . there are no answers.The fiesta impersonates a divine motive. If not an answer, the fiesta supplies a droll rhyme—tears become sequins. The pleasure of the fiesta is that for one day the link between heaven and earth is certain. The air in the early morning seems different, sweeter. The sky hangs at a slant unlike any other day of the year.
I offer the photographs in this exhibition as a visual record of the Mexican fiestas I have witnessed, as personal memoir of the trail of marvels that I have followed across Mexico over the past forty years, and as a love poem to this beautiful country and to its people, who have welcomed me so generously.
Mexican Fiestas is a traveling exhibition by Humanities Texas, the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, created in collaboration with Houston photographer Geoff Winningham.