Tom Graves / Tetradian

I’m sorry, I just can’t laughing at the absurdity, despite the lack of sleep. It’s full moon in Tepoztlan – a small ‘pueblo magic’ town about 60 miles or so to to the west of Mexico city – and boy, do I know that it’s full-moon here…

Yep, I have to say it – this town is crazy. But the right kind of crazy, perhaps – a happy kind of crazy, for the most part. My work for this trip is all but done here – a great workshop on the Labyrinth model of the skills-learning process yesterday evening, an identity/business-model workshop for an NGO today – but I’ll certainly be sad to leave here tomorrow.

The town square is usually invisible, hidden beneath the stalls of the market, with only the fountain discoverable seemingly by accident in the midst of the maze. For the past few days, though, it’s been cleared – I’ll admit I had no idea it was such a large open space – for a whole bunch of assorted ‘happenings’ vaguely centred around the town’s own centenary of its involvement in the last ‘viva la revolucion!’ a century ago. And that seems to have triggered even more not-so-quietly-joyous craziness than usual.

Sitting in the open square for a late breakfast we were interrupted by a small local equivalent of a mariachi band – one portable drum-kit, one trumpet, one rattle-player. Loud. My colleague’s toddler-age son wanted to join in – he’s all but obsessed by drums, he can hold a one-two-two-one-two-two beat consistently for at least a couple minutes before his attention wanders off to something else, which for a sixteen-month-old is pretty close to amazing – he jigged on the spot, and (this being Latin America) he was promptly invited to play the drums too. Enraptured. Then in the midst of that came a mad procession, looking like something only a bunch of hippies could cook up, with wafting incense-burners, various Inca-type figures, various mythical figures (including Pancho Villa, of course), most of them high up on stilts, some of them doing a synchronised kick-dance across the square to blaring music from the town band. But it wasn’t just a bunch of hippies – it was something that came from the town itself, in response to, well, just something, I guess.

Likewise when I walked back into town later to do some last-minute shopping before the evening’s work, I heard more loud blaring from the town square. Anyone interested in processes of ‘emergence’ should see – and hear – something like this. Without warning, the square was suddenly filled not just with a seemingly random mixture of brass-bands playing at least two different tunes to slightly different rhythms in a raucous yet infectious energy, but also with ‘chinelos’ – a particular tradition of dance and costume parodying the arrogance of the Spanish overlords. Heavy black wrap-round ‘dress’, a high crown-like headpiece with dangling jewelry, a mask with a European-white face, staring eyes and upcurved pointed beard, and tabard with beautiful tapestry/beadwork panels front and back. Dozens of dancers, appearing from either side of the square and from anywhere within the rabbit-warren of the market off to the side, mostly men (though difficult to tell with the masks, of course), some children too in their own costumes, all shuffling to the beat in a strange mincing walk/dance, moving slowly around the square, other ordinary-dressed families joining in, all preceded by a guy wildly waving a local flag. Two or three times round the square, then it stopped as suddenly as it had begun, the dancers just wandering off into the crowd. Most of the costumes looked newly-made, but apparently some had been handed down through the families for at least a couple of centuries. Bizarre – yet also an interesting form of quiet rebellion, in the times from which the tradition arose – and a proudly held tradition at that.

The one big downside of Tepoztlan’s craziness is its inordinate love of loud noise. Particularly thunderflashes – wheeee-flash-booom! Which is why I didn’t get much sleep last night. Someone perhaps only a house or two away was still letting them off at 1:30am. I woke up again at 3am, to be greeted a few minutes later by another enormous explosion close by. And since the bright moonlight was bathing the town and the hills all round, the cockerels started crowing with the all-night dawn. And some other raucous bird that from the sound I guess was some variant on a peacock. And just after 6am – still before dawn – the whoosh of firework rockets followed by, yes, more enormous bangs. Then the drumming started from up the road… well, you get the idea.

Right now it’s perhaps a few minutes before dawn proper, when the sun comes peeking over the sill of the mountain-ridge directly in front of me in this office where I’ve been staying. The peak of Popocatepetl is just visible over another part of the ridge, the plume of the volcano just visible from this distance as a small white cloud drifting with the wind towards Mexico City.

An amazing place. I’ll be back here if I can.

But right now it’s getting close to the time when I need to pack up and be gone.

Sun up. Time to get to work. Another day in Tepoztlan.

And here I was thinking that it might actually be quieter when I got back to Guatemala… wrong!

Turns out I’ve arrived here on El Dia Del Diablo – literally ‘The Day of the Devil’, which is an early part of the Christmas-season celebrations. It’s the day when they burn the Devil in effigy, to celebrate his defeat by the soon-to-come Christ. And yes, English folks may well recognise a certain resemblance here to the now-almost-forgotten tradition of the burning of the Guy, because, yes, it’s firework-night. Which means even more bangs and firecrackers than usual. A lot more bangs and firecrackers…

First warning of this was when some kids started letting off seriously big firecrackers just down the street (which in a country already overly awash with over-used guns seemed somewhat irresponsible, to say the least). Then when I went out for a walk at lunchtime (yes, I’m getting a little braver than my last trip here, though all the guys in the office still reminded me “a cuidado!” before I went out of the gate!) I noticed an indigenous woman not with the usual tortillas or junk children’s-toys but a huge table of fireworks. Something going on, methinks. Finally a struggled sort-of-Spanish conversation elicited the information that it’s El Dia Del Diablo. At which point everyone in the office went off to their various celebrations, leaving me literally in the dark.

Didn’t take long to find out what it meant. The guy from across the street hauls out a large cardboard box containing a smiling bright-red effigy, taller than the rather pudgy daughter who was sort-of assisting him. And when his other children finally turn up – the two elder boys from setting off their own bangers just down the road apiece – he sets fire to it. In the middle of the street. With cars wandering past. Various fireworks follow – one almost landing on my head as I watch from the balcony above the street. Casual madness, if all in a very everyday Guatemalan style.

I’m an habitual people-watcher, I fear, so the most interesting part for me was the family dynamics. Father, big and loud, pandering to his three podgy, pouting princess-daughters – aged from about six to ten, I’d guess, each posing with their hands over their ears in play-acted fear, and crying and stomping their feet immediately they didn’t get their own way in even the most trivial of matters. Three boys, one of them perhaps also six, and hanging around vaguely with the daughters, the two elder ones perhaps twelve and fourteen, off doing their own explosive thing. (Some of the fireworks seriously dangerous – they experimented putting a huge thunderflash into a plastic drainpipe as a crude mortar, but it blasted the drainpipe to pieces. Yikes…) Mother standing around, wandering off, being social with the neighbours, barely interacting with the father at all. And a thin quiet girl, perhaps fifteen, much darker skin – hence presumably indigenous rather than one of this family – standing there in the garage doorway with a hosepipe, quietly putting out the blaze at the end, quietly tidying up the amazing amount of mess, all but shut out of the fun, unacknowledged and ignored by all the others. The maid, I suppose, which seems a bit of a surprise in this relatively lower-middle-class suburb – though with six children in the family the mother would certainly need some help. Yet interestingly she was also the only one who noticed me, shared a smile in the dark as I videoed the scene from above. Another person who lives the life of the Outsider. Nice.

Fortunately it seems to be an early-evening thing – most of the flashes and bangs have eased off now, leaving only the ever-present roar of the traffic on the periferico. Who knows, I might even get a good night’s sleep for once!