If you had been up really early and felt inclined you could have gone recently to the San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, webcam and seen four Cape Codders—Wellfleetians to be specific– standing in the pre-dawn dark in front of an impressive little cathedral waiting to join a religious pilgrimage.
Travel is said to be an educational experience but the main thing you learn seems to be how resistant another culture is to being known, penetrated. But sometimes you learn something about where you came from that might never have occurred to you had you never left home.
We are told this traditional “perigrinacion”, toward a shrine to our lady of something in the mountains to the West will swell to thousands over the next nine days. There seem to be at least hundreds of Mexicans here in the city’s main plaza at this godawful hour. There are fireworks, which seem to punctuate almost any occasion at any time of day or night (and without regard for those still sensibly in bed). There’s pre-Conquest Indian dancing–the dancers half naked despite the 45 degree chill– to loud, vaguely threatening drumming. The relationship of the dancing to the Catholic ritual is not clear to this paleskin.
We are not actually part of the pilgrimage itself. We are here as part of a contingent of 100 or so to walk against domestic violence, a problem here as elsewhere. We will wait until the main procession has proceeded before tagging along at the end. We”ll walk three hours to make our point; the real pilgrims will walk nine days to make theirs to the ultimate authority. These are not tri-athletes or ultra marathoners, just people: families with children, middle-aged people, ancients.
There is much about this scene that’s not clear. In fact I’m not sure what I’m seeing or feeling here, beyond the obvious, that it’s an impressive display of faith. It’s hard to imagine any number of fellow Americans getting up so early except to score tickets to a rock concert. Some Mexicans do this year after year. Many have, we’re told, made promises to do it after receiving, or hoping to receive a blessing, such as a healing of a loved one. It’s a deep-running current.
In the dark I wonder if what we are seeing is a sort of democracy of religion. Mexicans, a large percentage of whom are Catholic, flock to these pilgrimages the way Americans flock to the polls at election time. But, it would seem, with much more fervor, much more faith.
And that democracy of religion seems directly related to traditional hopelessness and widespread cynicism about the political democracy, an attitude that seems understandable given Mexican history. Since the Conquest 500 years ago, until–possibly– the last decade or so, despite various revolutions, the great majority of Mexicans (a much smaller portion of Mexico’s 99% are middle-class) have been systematically impoverished when not virtually enslaved and a corrupt government seen as more part of the problem than part of the solution.
There is legal separation of church and state here, but if our country is founded on our political institutions, here “la fe” is the more profound layer, the mainstay of a traditionally mistreated people who have gotten little comfort from government. It’s the layer where the people live, how they survive.
We may be cynical about our government these days, but a lot of that comes from dashed hopes (why hasn’t Obama gotten more done? why is Obamacare getting off to such a bumpy start? Why is Congress so dysfunctional?). At least we have known hope. And despite all the shortcomings of government, of what we call “politics,” we have in our history much reason to hope, achievements such as Social Security, Medicare, civil rights legislation, a justice system we still mostly count on. Without such hope, religion might be less confined to churches in our country too.
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