The Posadas in Tzintzuntzan Structure and Sentiment in a Mexican Christmas Festival

Abstract

FESTIVALS LIKE CHRISTMAS, which are celebrated in countless countries and associated with an immense variety of folkloristic tradition, inevitably trace their significance to some common source. Christmas derives its widespread distribution and meaning, of course, from a critically important religious event, the birth of Jesus Christ. Even if we discover, as some scholars have (Count 1948; Miles 1912), that versions of the Christmas holiday were present in Classical Antiquity and earlier, we would be hard put to claim that the winter solstice and pre-Christian rites associated with it penetrate to the consciousness of many people in the Western world today. By contrast, there is good evidence that, despite the secular overtones that Christmas has acquired in many societies, the ultimate sacredness of the celebration remains prominent in the minds of most individuals. This explains why non-Christians who observe the holiday often do so with a deep-seated sense of ambivalence (Matz 1961). Nowhere can Christmas be understood without reference to its crucial religious origin. At the same time, variations in the way the holiday is celebrated undoubtedly derive from conditions that have special national or local significance. Such is the case with the Mexican posadas, a Christmas celebration that reenacts the Holy Family's journey to Bethlehem and that invariably includes the breaking of pinatas. To be sure, ritual portrayals of the days prior to Christ's birth have existed from the Middle Ages (Margetson 1972) to contemporary times (Carcer 1944; Fortun 1957; Speroni 1940) in places other than Mexico. And pifata-like food distributions to children can be found elsewhere as well (Almerich 1944). But the Mexican people have combined these two features, elaborated upon them, and institutionalized them to the point where they have become symbolic of Mexico itself. The mere existence of the specifically Mexican term posadas to designate these special features of the Christmas season indicates their importance to Mexicans everywhere, whether within or outside the country.1 It is therefore discouraging that Mexico, with its 70 million inhabitants and