Christian festivals and dark revelations.

• Author: Mujica, Barbara
• Position: 3 books on Latin America - Book Review

Carnival and Other Christian Festivals: Folk Theology and Folk Performance, by Max Harris. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003.

What do the processions of Catalonia, with their fiery dragons and papier-mache dwarfs, have to do with the exuberant celebrations of Saint James the Apostle in a small Puerto Rican town? Both have their roots in ancient Spanish folk theology. In this fascinating overview of Spanish and Latin American folk festivals, Max Harris demonstrates the dynamism and durability of medieval folk beliefs and demolishes some widespread notions of the origins of popular celebrations. He unearths the "hidden transcripts" or "markers" in these festivities, showing how peoples used folk celebrations to resist authority. Illustrated with gorgeous four-color and black aim white photographs, the book is both a serious piece of scholarship and a Feast for the eyes.

Harris describes a variety of folk festivals in luxurious detail. Narrated in the first person and full of anecdotes, Carnival/reads more like a chatty travelogue than an academic treatise. Yet it contains a wealth of historical and cultural information that reveals solid research. The book is divided into three parts. The first, "Days of Saints and Virgins," explores feast day celebrations in different parts of the Spanish-speaking world. It includes chapters on the festival of San Antolin in Huesca (Spain), the patron saints of Manresa (Spain), the fiestas of Saint James in Loiza (Puerto Rico), and the complex and surprising representations of the Virgin Mary in Mexico. The second part, devoted to Corpus Christi celebrations, depicts spectacular, sizzling spectacles in honor of this holiday--nearly forgotten in North America, but still beloved of many other areas. The third depicts carnival festivities, not only in Spain and the Americas, but also in Belgium. In spite of these groupings, the author is quick to point out that there is often no clear line between one type of festival and another. In many places Corpus Christi or carnival celebrations merge with festivities in honor of patron saints or the Virgin.

Harris offers the fiestas of Saint James in Loiza, Puerto Rico, which boasts the oldest parish church on the island, as an example of how shabby scholarship has led to a misunderstanding of certain folk festivals. One of the first colonial settlements in Puerto Rico, Loiza had a large concentration of Africans who were brought to work in the mines and then in the sugar plantations. Ricardo Alegria, who studied the fiestas in the 1940s and 1950s, advanced the notion that the traditional image of Saint James (Santiago) on horseback caught the imagination of Loiza's blacks. It reminded them of similar images of the Yoruba god Shango. The belief that the festival is of African origin has endured, suggests Harris, perhaps more for political reasons than because evidence supports it.

Yet, Harris argues, the black population of Loiza was probably Bantu, not Yoruba. "The devotion to Santiago in Loiza," he writes, "has nothing to do...