Ferias. Every town in Guatemala has one and Chujuyub is no exception. In fact, I would go so far as to say that for its size, Chujuyub’s feria is superior to many others. The people here know how to have a good time…or what passes for a good time here in rural Guatemala.
Our feria was back at the end of January and a few weeks before this, I was approached by a friend of mine in town. He asked if Katie and I wanted to participate in the baile de disfraces (dance of disguises). He was pretty stoked about it so we agreed, never wanting to disappoint a Guatemalan or miss out on a chance for some ridiculousness. He told us he would get in touch with us before the feria to talk about getting the aforementioned disfraces.
The week of the feria rolls around and in true Guatemalan style my buddy never gets in touch with us. I seek him out mid week and he tells me we need to go to dance practice this week and that later in the week we’ll get our costumes in Quiche, which will cost around 300Q apiece. They are a bit expensive for the Peace Corps budget (I make about 2200Q a month) but we agree that it is worth it.
Thursday night comes and we have dance practice. We head up to a house not too far from mine and form lines, listen to blasting banda music and are directed by our illustrious choreographer who thinks that walking and dancing is a very complicated process. We endure almost 3 hours of practice.
On Friday we meet some people in Quiche and go to select our costumes. We choose (or rather it chooses us due to monetary and size restraints on my part) the Aztec God and Goddess. The costumes are one of a kind and while we thought that 300Q was expensive, some people paid up to 1000Q for theirs.
On Saturday we rise early and head to the covered market in town to don our costumes and dance, dance, dance. We get there and everyone is excited, getting their costumes just so and getting ready to start. It was a warm day and as we could hear Los Conejos Internacionales de Marimba doing a sound check, we knew that the time was upon us. We formed our lines and hit the dance floor….a dirt field that usually houses the market. It was not the most even surface and was very dusty. We danced for almost 4 hours, with a few breaks interspersed and around 1 pm we decided that we wanted to eat lunch and perhaps enjoy a cold beer back at my house. We peeled off our costumes and went to enjoy some beans and rice in an outdoor comedor set up for feria. After lunch we had a beer and decided that 4 hours was enough for us, even though our compadres were still dancing away. We went to pack up our costumes and were told by one of our fellow dancers that we needed to dance until 6 pm. We had already made the decision to stop dancing and this only reinforced that it was in fact the correct one.
We went back to the house and rested, enjoying a cool evening with some beers and homemade pizza. The feria took on a whole new twist participating in the dance and we were glad to be part of it, if only to say that we had done it.
Contemplating what moves will be busted once I get on the dance floor.
