Purepecha Indians in Mexico Mark Catholic Holidays Their Way : Heritage: Nowhere is the uneasy coexistence of the two traditions more evident than in the celebration of the fiesta, when the religious commingles with the profane.

As he sped along a bumpy country road in his Volkswagen bug, the Rev. Salvador Avados Baca, the Catholic priest in the Purepecha Indian town of Tarecuato, took up a familiar theme.

“At heart, the Purepechas haven’t accepted everything brought to them by the missionaries,” he complained.

“They do things without taking into account the priest and the norms put in place by the Catholic Church,” he said. “Instead, they follow their own customs.”

Nowhere is the uneasy coexistence of Catholic and native traditions more evident in Mexico than in the celebration of the fiesta, when the religious commingles with the profane. Saints dance on the shoulders of sinners and Indians drink to their conversion after the Conquest, while the priest looks on disapprovingly.

In one such festival in Tarecuato, located in central Mexico, Purepecha Indians from the great Tarascan Indian state have turned the Catholic fiesta of Corpus Christi into something uniquely their own--the village’s most important holiday.

The Catholic holiday, which dates from the Middle Ages, celebrates the Eucharist, or the transformation of the wafer and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ. It has been celebrated by the Purepecha Indians since missionaries established themselves in the area in the 16th Century.

When the Catholic Church changed the date of the holiday, Indian villages in the Tarascan Sierras simply ignored the mandate, and many villagers bitterly oppose Avados’ efforts to impose Catholic orthodoxy on their festival.

“There has always been a huge preoccupation within the Catholic Church about whether these people are getting the message they want them to have or whether they are following pagan, dangerous traditions,” said anthropologist Andrew Roth of El Colegio de Michoacan.

With many traditions, he said, “it’s hard to figure out what part is Purepecha, what part is Catholic, and what part is the result of misunderstanding between the two.”

Avados says the church wants to allow villagers to celebrate their traditions as long as they don’t lose sight of the larger religious meaning of the holiday.

In Mexico, fiestas reveal the rural traditions of the country’s villages, as well as their adaptability to change. Men dance in animal masks that tell centuries-old stories, while children hide behind plastic Ninja Turtle disguises.

Among the large Catholic population, saints define the days and weeks. Each craft has its saints, and even thieves and prostitutes pray to their patrons. And each town celebrates its own patron saint, sometimes for days.

In the town of Tarecuato, the entire village gathers for a three-day celebration each year in the main square in front of the church. Women dressed in brilliant costumes dance in a stiff two-step as the men slowly circle after them. Competing musicians blare brass, then answer with bass and guitar. And revered old women, or ancianas, dance in and out of the church barefoot, wearing crowns of woven bougainvillea.

“The fiesta is by nature sacred,” wrote Mexican poet Octavio Paz, “and above all, it is the advent of the unusual. It all occurs in an enchanted world: Time is transformed to a mythical past or a total present; space, the scene of the fiesta, is turned into a gaily decorated world of its own. . . . Men disguise themselves as women, gentlemen as slaves, the poor as the rich.”

Many Americans are familiar with Mexico’s Day of the Dead celebration, the Mexican equivalent of All Saints’ Day or Halloween, with its macabre and gaily painted death masks and pilgrimages to the cemetery with flowers and picnic baskets. Less familiar are many other religious holidays, each with its own colorful traditions.

There is, for example, the feast of the Virgin of Guadalupe on Dec. 12, and the week of festivities re-enacting the journey of the Holy Family from Dec. 16 to 24.

In Tarecuato, a town of 6,000, Corpus Christi is celebrated by each craft. Woodcutters, honey gatherers, bread makers and merchants display and give away replicas of their wares, literally celebrating the fruits of their labor. The priest disappears, and the guilds and village councils, who organize the festival over an entire year, take over.

“Friar Daciano Jacobo [the town’s venerated 16th-Century Franciscan missionary] looked for a way for the people to give thanks to God, and had them do so through celebrating their work,” said Amelia Cayetano Urbano, a Purepecha villager. One of the greatest honor in towns like Tarecuato--and the key to future positions of authority--is to be chosen to help organize the fiesta. A waiting list stretches to the year 2004, one villager said.

Those in charge--the cargueros-- are rewarded by keeping images of saints from their neighborhood chapel, or their guild, in their home for a good part of the year. Once in the homes, the saints are worshiped and visited by the whole village--to the chagrin of the village priest.

Next year’s cargueros are chosen at this year’s festival. Then, they begin the complex rituals of friendship and kinship that are part of raising the huge sums of money to put on the celebration.

“What you see here is the festival, but beneath it is a whole series of deep and profound relationships between people”--relationships that may be impervious to the influence of the church, said Carolina Rivera Farfan, an anthropology graduate student at El Colegio de Michoacan who is studying the town.

“This is very strong and it won’t change easily.”