At Puerto Escondido, a Oaxacan fishing village on the Pacific coast that now nets more tourists than fish, people start arriving a few days before Palm Sunday. The rich ones pull up in sport utility vehicles to fill the good hotels along Playa Zicaleta. The campesinos also come, packing the family into farm trucks and making the long drive to the beach. These trucks are parked everywhere: high sides roofed over with blue tarp, and beds strewn with mattresses, cook stoves, coolers and clothes. Invariably the farm trucks have sprigs of red flowers and portraits of a favorite saint lashed to the grill.
Good Friday. The town beach is jammed with partying Mexicans, drinking, laughing and rolling in the sand. Midmorning and the sun already feels as heavy as water. Another group of tourists straddle the Rocket-Dog, a 15-foot bright yellow banana-shaped float that is towed by a powerboat around the harbor. Their squeals sound like gulls cries coming ashore with the waves. Several times a day, paragliders spiral to landings on the beach while girls in bikinis gallop along the hot sand on rented horses.
In the 1920s, Mexico was caught up in a wave of anti-religious fervor. Churches were burned or padlocked and priests exiled. At Puerto Escondido one might conclude that the revolution is nearly complete. But in the quiet streets that terrace the hillside above the bay, a bell is tolling and a crowd gathers outside the town's only church. Inside the modest stucco building every seat is filled, children peer in from the doorway while Indian women in coarse black skirts and embroidered blouses chat in the courtyard.
A thump silences the crowd and a small boy steps from the church striking an enormous bass drum in a slow cadence. He is followed by a band of townsmen playing a loose dirge of saxophones, clarinets and trumpets. At last the priest emerges followed by a statue of Jesus Christ borne aloft by six men and a gurney. The villagers fall in behind their Savior, swaying and singing in response to the priest's calls, as the procession moves along the cobbled streets to the meeting place.
In the North this ritual is called the Stations of the Cross and it marks Christ's passage along the Via Dolorosa. In Oaxaca the tradition has an added element of drama -- Christ is reunited with Mother Mary in a procession known as El Encuentro.
After the trumpets of the Savior's entourage have faded in the distance, the women of the town bear up a statue of the Virgin Mary draped in flowing aubergine robes and capped with a crown of gold. They too are preceded by a band and acolytes spinning wooden noisemakers as they set out to reunite Mary with her son on a hillside far above the bay. -- Rob Cummings
