Holy Week Tradition Still Strong in Taxco

Eliza Hughes
©3/30/2002 TheNewsMexico.com - (now defunct)

As the early morning hours of Good Friday wore on, 
hundreds of worshippers - some with bloody backs and 
necks rubbed raw from carrying bundles of thorns - 
continued to walk barefoot through the streets of 
Taxco in a procession celebrating the sacred Christian 
holiday. 

The old silver mining town of Taxco, located about 200 
kilometers south of Mexico City, is famous for its 
Holy Week, or Semana Santa, traditions and rightly so. 
As the sun went down and the full moon rose, the city 
came alive in a scene straight out of medieval times. 

Crowds gathered along the streets as members of a 
centuries-old brotherhood began their annual 
procession of penitence. Some of the men, wearing 
nothing but black hoods to hide their identity and 
long black skirts held in place by rope, carried 
100-pound bundles of thorn-ridden zarza branches on 
their shoulders for hours. 

Still others displayed their faith by carrying 
five-foot crosses and stopping every 15 minutes or so 
to whip themselves with disciplinas, or ropes embedded 
with nails. They subsequently picked the skin and 
dried blood out of the nails to maintain their 
sharpness. 

"Contrary to what most tourists believe, the men are 
not punishing themselves for having committed a 
horrible sin," said Michelangelo Martinez, a 
25-year-old who participates in the procession every 
year as an assistant. "It is a very personal promise 
between the man and God and it could be that he is 
doing it for the health of his family, or for any 
reason, really. Nobody knows but the penitent and 
God." 

Alberto Perez, whose job it is to make sure the 
worshippers are capable of continuing the procession, 
added, "The members of the brotherhood prepare all 
year for this moment. They go on retreats twice a year 
and have many meetings. Not just anyone can be part of 
the tradition." 

Women are not excluded from the procession. Some young 
girls, dressed in white, carried candles in front of 
images of Christ while others, covered from head to 
toe in black, walked through the streets hunched over 
with their ankles chained together. 

For some the procession is a reflection of faith and 
for others it is the continuation of a local tradition. 

"Mexico is a country full of different customs and 
although I don't agree with inflicting pain on 
yourself in the name of God, I believe the tradition 
should be preserved and respected," said 44-year-old 
Yolanda Burgos, a first time visitor from Mexico City. 
"The participants are doing what they are doing out of 
faith." 

And although the age-old tradition now passes in front 
of Internet cafes and is immortalized by scores of 
videotape-recording tourists, it remains a serious and 
integral part of Taxco. 

"Some people think the processions should be stopped 
or toned down because the penitents are pretending to 
be martyrs like Christ," a local merchant said. "But 
if the tradition is stopped, there goes the fun and 
draw of Taxco during Semana Santa."

My Olympus C3030z and two 64meg SmartCards were broken in (and about to break a bit more!) my mini-tripod and extra Nimh batteries and charger were tucked into an aluminum Haliburton case that would be opened for inspection four times before reaching Taxco, at sunset by autobus on Ash Wednesday while a dramatic rainbow graced the sky.

I lucked out when I checked in with Doña Gloria, as her modern bungalow apartment was available for a reasonable $200 a month. The processions would pass very close by 'Las Estacas' on their circuit back to the Ex-Convento and the big Wednesday Christos procession would pass right in front of my house on Calle Reforma. 

Now I needed to practice some night flash photography and learn to cope with the very high daytime contrast range that the whitewashed houses presented. The Oly allows some preset contrast adjustments that I made and I learned to use the bracket feature to help cover the contrast range. The period between Lent and Easter is filled with fireworks each Friday night in a different churchyard each week. The fireworks 'castillos' are a Mexican tradition and the 'torritos' that come out afterwards defy rational description. When I returned one night after getting up close to the action I noticed three newly burnt holes in both of my shirts. Fireworks photos are a mostly luck dependent gig, so being able to blast away with over 160 high quality jpegs on the two 64mb Smartmedia cards was great. The converse of course is that at approximately 700k each the jpegs were rapidly filling my small hard drive, right up to FULL a few days before Palm Sunday. Panic! I needed to get 1.2 Gigabytes of photos off my hard drive and onto CDRom disks.

Good fortune and the Virgen de Guadelupe assisted me and by borrowing a Zip disk and enlisting the help of Ian at NetX Internet Cafe, who provided a Win2000k machine with CD-Rom drive, for many hours of moving data at 100megs a crack onto his CD burning computer. Thank You Ian! I now had a double set of CDR disks and could send a set home safely via UPS. Cost $7.50 for 1+dupe disk, very reasonable and a lifesaver too!

The processions begin with a small one on Palm Sunday afternoon. Ending on Easter Sunday evening when the resurrected Christ is returned to Santa Prisca. Highlights include the Christos Procession, this year it contained forty seven different ones, the Virgens Procession accompanied and carried only by virgins, the Trial of Christ by the Romans, the Three Fallings of Christ on Friday, and the Resurrection in front of the Santa Prisca at midnight Sunday morning. The Penitentes that flagellate themselves and the Animas carriers are members of brotherhoods and with their assistants suffer the agony of the festival. It ends with the final return procession to the Santa Prisca Parroquia.