Praying to Progressive Gods: The Liberating Role of Violence – Luis Rodríguez

Praying to Progressive Gods: The Liberating Role of Violence

LUIS RODRÍGUEZ

Every May, the denizens of La Esperanza make their way along the dusty road that winds around arid hills to the recently planted field that serves as the border between their town and the rival town of Rancho las Lomas. On a cool afternoon, men and women of all ages take turns to fight a member of the opposing side until blood is drawn; each drop being offered to Tlaloc in exchange for a drop of rain, a corporeal sacrifice by two towns that would ensure a wealthy harvest in the coming year. This bloody ceremony to the Aztec rain god seems something the Spanish conquistadors would have found in Mexico hundreds of years prior, not a festival that takes place within a modern context. The anachronism is heightened as the celebration occurs in one of the most crime-ridden and violent states of the country. However, the festival’s yearly occurrence in various towns along east Guerrero and the seemingly euphoric attitude of the participants seem to counter the violent nature of the entire event. The violence is ritualistic in its purpose while allowing for an element of catharsis to be enjoyed on both sides, erasing the differentiation of “some others from other others” (Ahmed 47) that allows a circulation of hate in a society, all the while achieving a sense of independence and equality. This bloody ceremony not only serves as a way for the native farmers to “renew contact with their people’s oldest, inner essence, the farthest removed from colonial times” (Fanon 148), but also as a way to elevate women from just a “signifier for the male other” (Mulvey 7) towards an equality with their male counterparts on the battleground. Through the cathartic violence carried out in the festival, the participants achieve a liberation from themselves, from a weighing colonial past, and from typical gender norms.

No purer liberation from the traditional has existed than in the form of the carnival studied by Mikhail Bakhtin. An element of carnivalesque underlies the whole Aztec rain festival and comes close to Bakhtin’s conception of the ideal

carnival, at least as it existed before a “narrowing down of the ritual, spectacle, and carnival forms of folk culture,” (33) after medieval times. The festival’s highlight is the extraction of blood for offering, but the townspeople also enjoy the event with a bountiful feast made from slaughtered cows and turkeys, as well as a mezcal drunkenness that permeates the population. These feasts are “the second life of the people, who for a time entered the utopian realm of community, freedom, equality, and abundance” (Bakhtin 9). Every member of the community participates in the preparation of the meals, the decoration, the dance, and the other rites that form part of the larger rain festival. The sacrifice of blood for rain attracts a sense of freedom, a “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order” (Bakhtin 10). In La Esperanza, the violence of the people provides the excuse for the very carnival that liberates the common man from the proceedings of the regular order.

Despite the carnivalesque characteristics of the event, the dual contexts of one of Mexico’s most criminal states as well as a 21st century setting beg the question, “Is there a place for ritualistic violence within a modern context?” Affect theorist Sara Ahmed proposes that violence can come from hatred, as a “means by which the identity of the subject and community is established” (58). The reason for the event would then be a mutual hatred between the two rival towns, but this is not what is observed. As a ritual, both bands come together to perform an ancient ceremony, an established and previously agreed-upon commitment. Affect theory could look at why the two sides are battling each other and establish hatred “in the negotiation of boundaries between selves and others, between communities, where ‘others’ are brought into the sphere of my or our existence as a threat” (Ahmed 51). Yet, no boundaries are to be negotiated and no threat is imminent to either side. Adversaries will often shake hands and laugh after a match, wiping away all negative emotions after the fight with a shot of mezcal. The reconciliation afterwards breaks the circulation of hatred, impeding the creation of a surplus value that would then be “distributed across a social as well as psychic field” (Ahmed 45). It would seem like affect theory has serious limitations, yet Ahmed’s ideas about hatred highlight some other, more hidden aspect of the use of violence in the festival. Perhaps the motive for the participation of the people in the use of violence does draw on hate, but only when it “operates

at an unconscious level, or resists consciousness understood as plenitude” (Ahmed 44). Built up emotion in the unconscious of individuals sets the stage for violence to be the expression of hatred. Within the context of the carnival which occurs yearly but briefly in the people’s lives, all-out fighting will be acceptable and cheered on. Troubles the participants create and carry throughout the year can be released through ritual fighting, allowing for a cathartic experience through which, by the end, no hateful emotions persist. Through socially sanctioned violence, a person releases built up emotion from a year of arduous labor, providing a commonsense justification for the festival that celebrates violence yearly.

The cathartic nature of the violence in the festival not only allows for individuals to free their unconscious, but it has the capacity to liberate an entire race of people. For most of what was New Spain the indigenous people were prohibited from continuing their traditions and rites, including what the Spaniards saw as a “horrifyingly alien custom of human sacrifice [that] remained an unsettling obstacle in the minds of the European observers” (Dodds Pennock 2). The imposition of Spanish rule crushed attempts of praying to any other deity than the Catholic God, and thus, any acceptance of human sacrifices and festivals that celebrated them. The indigenous inhabitants were convinced that such sacrifices were a regression into barbarism, through the cultural alienation explored by postcolonial theorist Franz Fanon (149). Centuries of colonial rule over the Aztec rendered them powerless and effectively reduced their heritage and customs to only a handful of followers. Yet, as another postcolonialist scholar, Achille Mbembe, points out: “it is precisely the situations of powerlessness that are situations of violence par excellence” (133). Perhaps, then, it is not hatred between the participants but a hatred of the colonizers which led to the re-establishment of the violent festival. A twist on affect theory of hatred finds that it is not the feeling of “againstness” between two groups that leads to violence between them. Rather, the establishment of a differentiation between the colonizers and the colonized is what allowed for the latter to return to violent customs.

This twist directly contradicts the imposition of colonial rule and its teachings. The reclaiming of culture that Fanon describes to be essential for

a national identity serves two roles: to return to a past that “was not branded with shame, but dignity, glory, and sobriety” (148), as well as producing a “differentiation between ‘us’ and ‘them’” (Ahmed 48) which allows for a return to the practices of human sacrifice and violent rites now performed by the people of La Esperanza. The catharsis of violence between the Spanish and the Mexicans had to wait until the period of decolonization for its expression in the form of the Aztec rain festival, liberating the participants by allowing them to return to their culture and heritage. By allowing them to establish an identity for themselves.

The liberating force of violence proves to be a powerful tool for the oppressed, and this may also be the case for the women of La Esperanza. During the Aztec empire, women served only one important purpose: to be the bearers of new life. “Childbirth was a fundamental experience in the life of every woman, an occasion for femininity to be shared and celebrated” in Aztec society, and the only role of politico-social importance a woman could ever aspire to was that of a midwife (Dodds Pennock 42). The image of a woman purely as the vessel used to bring forth new life is understood by feminist theorist Laura Mulvey as man’s imposition of the deep-rooted union between a female and “her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning” (7). Yet, in the reclaiming of the past by the people of La Esperanza, women have gained the opportunity to fight alongside men as part of the sacrificial ritual. Not only are women participating in violence, but they take on another typically male activity and join in on the drunkenness of the town. Through this “alignment” between the genders and through the use of violence, women establish an identity for themselves (Ahmed 58). In the carnival, men and women all help to prepare the food for the feast, and the women are allowed and encouraged to drink and fight. This celebration, from the dinner table to the battleground, dissipates traditional gender roles and places women on the same level as men. The once-a-year occurrence of the carnival is what allows for the catharsis to be achieved in the fighting, as this is a unique opportunity for women to behave in an unwomanly manner and release themselves from the limitations of their gender which are enforced the rest of the year.

The legacy of the Aztec empire leaves behind a question for societies in the present: is there a place for ritualistic violence within a modern context?

The case of La Esperanza consistently shows that through violence, a form of catharsis is achieved as unconscious emotion is released into another body in the fight. This catharsis is also the result of centuries of colonialism as a response to the oppressive colonizers that prohibited the continuation of traditional Aztec rituals, especially human sacrifice. The hatred that births the violence of the rain festival does not refer to the inter-town rivalry, but maybe it is the differentiation between the Spanish and the Mexicans in the period after colonization. This period of the postcolony when the festival is recalled as a way to build a national identity has also allowed for women to achieve some sort of equality with their male opposites in the context of the carnival. The violence is not a response to the crime-ridden state of Guerrero, nor is it a senseless exchange of punches. Violence takes on a heavy cultural, religious, and social significance, which not only allows for a break from the laborious norm, but encourages the formation of a unique identity and plays into progressive gender understandings. And perhaps even a drop of blood will bring a drop of rain as well.

REFERENCES

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Second Edition. Edinburgh

University Press, 2004. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and his World. Translated by Hélène Iswolsky.

Indiana University Press, 1965. Dodds Pennock, Caroline. Bonds of Blood: Gender, Lifecycle and Sacrifice in Aztec

Culture. Palgrave Macmillan Limited, 2008.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox, Grove

Press, 1961

Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. University of California Press, 1957. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, Issue 3, 1975, pp. 6-18.