El Dia de los Inocentes

The evening of January 6 was most interesting. Of course you know that is day is Epiphany, the day of the visit of the 3 wise men. Well it seems that the people of Ecuador have taken the religious day and mixed it with a holiday of the indigenous peoples and have come up with a celebration akin to Halloween. I asked my Spanish teacher what is the connection between the two events and she said that now there is really no connection.

The event begins around 4pm and I could only compare it to Springfest in Salisbury. They close several streets and food vendors begin to arrive in mass. The shops all around town begin to sell halloween masks and there are even vendors in the streets selling costumes. By dark the crowd begins to assemble. I´m not sure when the parade starts but when we got there around 8pm it was toward the end. I´ve heard that it is the college students who create the floats and I was most impressed with the quality of the floats. Certainly nothing like Macy´s parade but definitely better than any Christmas parade that I´ve seen on the shore. One float had about 20 women dressed as geshia´s with elaborate costumes and makeup. The next was a truck pulling two extensions. One extension was a trampoline and the next had the mat. One athlete would perform on the tramboline rather dramatic flips etc and then land on the mat behind. Then the next would take over. There were about a dozed athletes and they were dressed in animal costumes. The interesting thing was that there were no spotters. In Ecuador, you just take your chances and this pertains to driving cars as well. the next entry was a group of men dressed as women, which is supposed to be the most traditional part of the whole event. There was another entry with a group of about 12 people dressed as puppets, much like they do in the musical Chicago. YOu get the idea..... I was most impressed that there was a huge crowd of people, which did indeed look like a crowd for a Macy´s day parade and I only saw 1 policeman. But everyone was so well behaved. There was no mischief that I saw. By comparison I cannot imagine any community hosting a large halloween event in the US because of adolescent mischief. I know that Springfest has suffered from that. The irony is that Ecuador is supposed to be the place of caution. We had a great time and our US students dressed up as well and went to a party hosted by the family that one students in living with.