A rural Mexican school creates an annual tradition
Staff and students sweep me up in the excitement of their first Christmas parade
After two weeks as the new student, I’d become the pet of the Grade 6 class at el Colegio Patria in the poor rural pueblo of Las Varas. Whenever I arrived at the school, my classmates greeted me with enthusiastic shouts. They lost all shyness about asking for help or explanation, we played games on the classroom floor at recess, and they threw my name into the Christmas draw.
The Grade 6 room was on the 2nd floor of the school. From the balcony outside the classroom door, I could look down on the central courtyard and checked on the daily progress of the preparations for Christmas. The word on everyone’s lips was desfile.
“Desfile?” I asked Armida, one of the school’s directors.
A parade, she explained. “We’ve never done this before. We want to give the kids something to remember.”
At first, the main activity in the courtyard was the transformation of a giant globe into a massive head of Santa. A few of the fathers had welded metal bars into a sphere for a geography project on the theme of reduce, recycle, reuse. The children covered the sphere with countries and continents made of recyclable material.
Canada was created entirely of leaves, the United States was a colourful construction of states made from crinkly bags of cookies and potato chips, Mexico was a dense mass of chilli peppers, and the oceans surrounding the land masses were waves of bottle caps from empty 50-litre water jugs. I don’t know if any political commentary was implicit in these choices.
In the courtyard, the globe itself was now being transformed, and everyone worked on the project. Mothers brought in yards of fabric, students sewed swatches of red onto the sphere between classes, teachers matted cotton for Santa’s beard and cut a giant pair of felt glasses to ride on his nose.
I’d seen a few Christmases in Mexico by this time and I knew that the season in villages and towns started mid-December with the Posada Navideña, a series of nine parties symbolizing Mary and Joseph’s nightly search for shelter on their way to Bethlehem.
The first school party I attended had been a free-for-all with cokes and chaos and blaring hiphop. This was during the year in which two appalling teachers taught in Chacala’s primary school. I watched the kids perform some impressive break dancing on the filthy classroom floor while the teachers sat on the curb outside and smoked. No piñatas, no Christmas deco’s, definitely no holiday inspired music.
The following year, a wonderful teacher arrived at the school and the Christmas party improved. Maria de Jesus had all the kids sitting at their desks making cards for one another while carols played on her computer. She nixed the previous year’s soft drinks on grounds of health and held a democratic vote to establish the flavours of agua de sabor (flavoured water) and the types of pizza to be served at the party. It was all impressively egalitarian.
Maria de Jesus had also arranged games and a piñata, into which she poured the limited number of candies she would allow. She even slipped in a short lesson on the custom’s traditional meaning.
“Piñatas,” she explained, holding up a sphere with seven glitzy cones that ended in streaming tassels, “symbolize the distractions of evil. The seven cones represent the temptations of the seven deadly sins. When you smash the piñata, you conquer the temptations of evil and release the sweetness of a pure life. Listen closely to the words of the piñata chant.”
Dale, dale, dale, (Hit it, hit it, hit it,)
no pierdas el tino; (do not lose your aim;)
Porque si lo pierdes (Because if you lose it)
pierdes el camino. (you will lose the path.)
This interpretation seemed lost on the kids, for whom the sweet release remained a release of sweets.
All these previous Christmas celebrations paled in comparison to what was shaping up at el Colegio Patria. Excitement rose daily as we neared the night of the parade.
“You must be at the school at five,” the kids insisted, “Las cinco en punto. Five o’clock sharp.” And so I was, just in time for the predictable period of Mexican waiting around. The parade commenced just shy of seven, which allowed me plenty of time to admire every innovative costume and to witness the astonishingly chaotic assembly of the floats.
Darkness descended at six and the night turned an inky black. All the last minute preparations taking place on the pot-holed street behind the school were lit by the glow of cell phones. The kids ran between a ragged line of trucks and tractors and quads hooked up to a variety of carts and trailers outfitted with hay bales as makeshift benches. Swags and wreaths and flashing lights powered by generators hung from every float. The generators spewed fumes into the street and over the children.
Wired with excitement, the kids hopped on and off the floats waiting for the parade to begin. No one appeared particularly impatient. Armida and Lety, the school’s two directors, and parents and teachers and volunteers and students from previous years ran from one float to another, sweating in the night’s humidity, plugging in cables, coaxing kids back into their wagons, adjusting costumes, and doling out water to keep all the young participants hydrated.
Just when it looked as if everything were ready to go, one of the loud speakers cut out and a set of lights faded to black. I watched two dads, one of them with a lighted cigarette dangling from his lip, pour gasoline into the failed generator. Somehow Mexicans get away with this stuff. The generator roared to a start and the float’s Bethlehem creche lit up like magic.
After a few more false starts, when the extension cords strung from truck to truck kept snapping, the drivers got the rhythm of the parade and it began to make its stately way toward the centre of town.
Las Varas doesn’t have much in the way of night life — no movie theatre, no bowling alley, no discos, no clubs. Spectators waited for the parade as if it were the major event of the season, lining the route three people deep. A cheer went up as the first float rounded the corner.
The Olmec-sized head of Santa, lit from within like a glowing benediction, came into view. The lead truck was a master work: huge reindeer horns wired to the roof, Christmas music blasting out of the massive speaker strapped to its front grille, the giant Santa glowing in its bed.
Next came a Jeep outfitted as the North Pole. It was completely, and I mean completely, covered in white felt. Manuel, the school caretaker, peeked through a thin slit in the fabric to see the road. Every now and then, the snow parted and Manuel popped his head out to wave at the crowd.
A nativity scene was pulled by a John Deere tractor, all buffed and gleaming for the occasion. A radiant Mary beamed at the crowd, surrounded by kids dressed as barn animals, including two of my Grade 6 compatriots sweltering in woolly sheep costumes.
The fifteen floats, arranged grade by grade, wound through the streets of the town and the children were greeted like visiting heroes. In turn they waved and smiled, flinging candies into the crowd.
Parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, sisters and cousins and neighbours filed in behind the parade as it passed, following it back to the school for the traditional Christmas treats of churros (donut-like figure 8s, fried in vats of boiling oil then dipped in sugar), buñuelos (sugarcane cookies doused in a caramel cinnamon sauce) and steaming ponche de fruta (hot punch made with piloncillo, an unrefined sugar, and chunks of fruit).
The Christmas concert commenced about 10, after another round of delays, and I’m told it didn’t end until 2 am. In Mexico, there’s no need to end a good party, especially when you’re giving kids something to remember.
This is the 13th story in the weekly publication A Remarkable Education: Lessons Learned in a Mexican Rural School. The next instalment tells the story of the founding of el Colegio Patria.
The previous story describes my discovery of a rural school willing to pilot an online experiment using the Khan Academy to teach math.
Starting in the winter of 2009, Diane Douglas volunteered three years in the two-room school in the fishing village of Chacala, north of Puerto Vallarta. Since 2012, she’s been working to improve online learning at el Colegio Patria, a remarkable rural school in the poor, agricultural town of Las Varas.
