It’s Festival Season!

In Otavalo, they celebrate the Festival de Yamor, a festival to honor all the gifts they receive from the harvest of corn… foods like choclo (corn on the cob) and mote (hominy),  as well as traditional drinks such as chicha (fermented corn juice).   This float represents the many gifts from the corn harvest.

In all the parades, the Ecuadorian flag is prominent. The yellow in the flag represents corn or gold, depending upon who you ask.  Both are important products of Ecuador.  The blue represents the seas and the skies, while the red represents the blood lost in  the many battles for their independence.

If you ask anyone why they love the festivals, they will probably tell you that they love watching the dancers.  An average parade is 3-4 hours long, and the vast majority of it is various professional or non-professional dance groups giving their rendition of traditional dances.   Their costumes, often handmade, are incredible!

This group performed The Bomba, a traditional dance of the Afro-Ecuadorian cultures.   Yes, he’s dancing with a decorated bottle on his head.

The brilliant colors at these Andean Festivals are amazing!

There’s also a lot of music.  Some of it comes in the form of huge speakers in the back of pick-up trucks leading the dance groups down the street.  But local school bands, or civic employee bands are also featured.  I love this photo because it shows that the traditional daily wear of Indigenous people is considered part of the official uniform in school and work.  In Ecuador, Indigenous people always wear their symbolic clothing with pride.

Some of the clothing that the Indigenous wear is machine made, but most of it is  hand woven and hand embroidered.  Always stunning!

In some of the smaller parades, autonomous communities represented themselves by carrying a sign announcing their pueblo (probably somewhere high in the mountains), and they carried gifts of appreciation to Pachamama for their successful harvest.

The variety of headwear is always interesting.  If I was to guess, I think much of it was born from the necessity to keep the intense sun off of their heads.

I would bet this man has been dancing in this parade his whole life!

The Spirit of the Huma (with his two faced mask representing positive and negative energies)  is always a prominent feature in every Indigenous parade.

These large clay puppets are designed and made by artists in this area,  so they were also featured in the festivities.

Ecuadorians celebrate all kinds of arts and dance in their culture so I also spotted cheerleading teams, break-dancing groups, martial arts clubs, roller-skating clubs, gymnasts, and hip-hop groups.  If it’s musical with movement, it’s big in Ecuador.

This was definitely the funniest thing I saw.  First, the man standing on the left had this costume that made it look like he was being carried by another little man.  Then, some other guys taped a chicken to an electric cart, but made it look like the chicken was pulling him.  I know, I know.  It was so cruel to the chicken!  But don’t worry, I’m sure the chicken was his dinner that night anyway.

The craziest thing I’ve seen is “Vaca Loca”!  Literally, “Crazy Cow”!  The evening starts with a big music concert.  Then they set fire to a giant bamboo structure that is saddled with fireworks.  As each section explodes, it ignites the next section to create a huge long-lasting display of pyrotechnics.

Finally, the top part of the structure sets off fireworks into the sky.

At the same time, a man starts running around the base carrying a giant  structure of exploding fireworks.  He’s supposed to be the “Crazy Cow”.

As you can see, there’s no safety barriers or guidelines in these festivals.  Ecuadorians love their pyrotechnics and it’s your problem if you don’t stand back far enough.

This is Mama Negra, a representation of the Virgin from many cultures.  She arrives on a horse  wearing an elaborate costume and carrying dolls to represent her children.   She shares “her milk” from the squeeze bottle onto the crowd.

The street was alive for hours as the parade wound its way through the streets of Latacunga and up a steep hill to a symbolic cross at the top.

These characters are the Huacos. They grabbed people from the crowd to cleanse them with palm fronds and bones, supposedly preparing them for the coming of Mama Negra.

At the end of their cleansing, they’d spit Chicha (a sweet, fermented corn drink) into your face. My friends, Ava and Ashley, experienced the whole treatment, so I started running away every time I saw the Huacos coming!

Ice cream, cotton candy and caramel apples are favorite festival foods. But it’s not a festival in Ecuador without the large fried pieces of pig skin!

One of the most amazing parts of Mama Negra was the number of communities or families who created and carried an Ashanga.  This is their offering to Mama Negra, and it always included a whole pig, other traditional meats like cuy, full bottles of liquor and varieties of fruit.  It is so heavy, men had to take turns carrying it up the street and then resting it on a stool.  Watch the videos and you’ll get the idea!