No Chocolate Bunnies

The only thing here that's remotely like an Easter at home is the basket of "eggs" on our coffee table - brightly colored onyx eggs that I bought at the Ciudadela market. Easter here is not chocolate bunnies and egg hunts! Many of the neighborhoods, towns and cities stage passion plays on Good Friday. We went to one in Iztapalapa that has been staged for 165 years. At least 1000 penitentes (many of them young boys) walk, carrying crosses, barefoot on the hot asphalt until the blisters on their feet scream for bandages. These precede Jesus - portrayed this year by a young man serving an 18-year prison sentence - who carries a cross weighing 90 kilos for 4 kilometers, enduring whiplashes and other faithfully represented events from the Biblical story - Veronica wipes his face, he stumbles three times, Simon helps bear the cross - until he finally reaches a hill (after passing Judas hanging on a tree) where he and his cross are hoisted onto a huge cross. By this time he is pretty bloody. After he gasps for breath for many minutes, a Roman soldier actually pierces his chest with a lance, and it's over. The whole thing is just so very exact in details that you cannot skip over the crucifixion and get right to resurrection the way we do. No empty crosses here!

In the Spanish-speaking world, Easter is Semana Santa (Holy Week); since the vast majority of Mexicans are Catholic, many of the ceremonies and events of the week are similar to Catholic observances in other parts of the world, but with an unmistakable Mexican touch. Every Friday of Cuaresma (Lent) we got empanadas de vigilia, delicious pastries stuffed with fish and seafood, from the corner bakery. Dulce told me that on Palm Sunday, Jesus rode into her parish on the donkey which is the IPN (our school's) mascot. On Good Friday, the most solemn of days, we emerged from the metro in Iztapalapa to fight our way through amusement park rides that we found obnoxious but children were enjoying immensely. Next was a street market with stands selling everything imaginable. Later, I heard a rooster crow and thought, "How quaint to hear this in the city." And then I saw the sign advertising the sale of gallos de pelea, fighting cocks. Finally, we reached a church where people were lined up in order to pass by a tableau of Jesus' trial.

In the plaza in front of the church, vendors sold trinkets, crosses, jewelry with angels bearing Jesus' image, and also bread and bunches of chamomile: bread for the people to take home to symbolize that they would have sustenance in the rest of the year and chamomile (a plant with small daisy-like flowers) to represent - because of its resemblance to the sun - the presence of God in their homes. Beside the main entrance to the church, people walked by an altar to La Virgen de los Dolores, the Virgin Mary weeping over the body of her slain Son, and touched the body with their chamomile bunches. I took no photos; somehow it just didn't seem right for me to intrude as a tourist here.