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CARNIVAL in the HISPANIC CARIBBEAN SOCIETIES by Raquel

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CARNIVAL in the HISPANIC CARIBBEAN SOCIETIES by Raquel CARNIVAL IN THE HISPANIC CARIBBEAN SOCIETIES by Raquel Brailowsky Inter American University San GermAn, Puerto Rico Paper presented in an abridged form at the XVIIIth Annual Conference of the Caribbean Studies Association Kingston and Ocho Rios, Jamaica May 23-30, 1993 CARNIVAL IN THE HISPANIC CARIBBEAN A Brief Introduction to Carnival Carnival is a total event which integrates all possible festive behavior, often proposed or reinforced by traditions and explained by an infinite number of corresponding justifications. There is a significant literature on carnival which is diverse in nature and in regional distinctions. Studies view the particular event from different perspectives: as a release valve for social, or individual, tensions; as a system of ritual reversals; as a process of resistance to dominant class imperatives, or as a process of social and cultural revitalization. Carnival provides a time and space for gregarious behavior. Emotions run loose, and people have a license to ritually react almost without constraints against the forbidden and oppressive circumstances of their daily lives (Bachtin 1968, Burke 1978, Caro Baroja 1965, Da Matta 1986). The total experience is built around strong and worldly emotions which are usually controlled in the continuation of everyday life. It is during carnival that people have a right to certain behavioral licenses which draw upon these suppressed feelings. Bachtin (1968) and Da Matta (1986) demonstrated the 2 importance of laughter, pleasure, the grotesque and the erotic as central components of carnival behavior and themes. Burke (1978) finds that a major theme is aggression, which becomes institutionalized in competitive games but is also evident in the poetic forms of social protest, in open incidences of sexual harassment, and in ritualized class or group hostilities. Caro Baroja (1965) details how social control is reinstated through acts, such as the profuse use of ill- mannered jokes and insults, which project an apparent yet ephemeral social equality. The importance and attraction of carnival rests in its configuration as a total event, that is one in which all types of expressive forms become evident throughout a designated time limit. Carnival includes poetry, plays, dance, songs, games, masquerades, floats, scenography and any other activity the participants may wish to explore. "Carnival may be seen as a huge play in which ... the city became a theater without walls and the inhabitants, the actors and spectators " (Burke 1978:182). The expression of carnival, however configured by historical processes, rests on the idea of the inversion of opposites. The participants, if only for a few hours, would reverse their social roles and positions through their actions, dress and manner. At the end people would return to their established condition and manner in a 3 reaffirmation of the social structure. The chain of events called carnival is compressed into a predefined time frame, longer or shorter depending on each case, usually preceding Lent and its concomitant sacrifice and denial. This sense of time is central. Carnival breaks the temporal sequence of work since it delimits a number of days of full oblivion. Burke calls it "a time of waste" (1978:178). Carnivals performed in an urban context are also free from spatial constraints. All activities take place in the streets and plazas. It is a public event that cannot be contained in the seclusion of the homes, the Church atrium, the community center or the clubhouse. During the days of carnival, the streets, as places of anonymity temporarily devoid of laws, provide the individual with a place for reversals. It is there (or everywhere), that a person can "misbehave" and "waste time". Waste and improper behavior are, of course, elements which cannot be associated with a family and its good name on an everyday basis (Da Matta 1986:15-19). Carnival in the Hispanic Caribbean Context In the Hispanic Caribbean carnival has been studied in specific locations and in respect to multiple aspects or configurations. Some specially interesting studies are: Ortiz (1940-46) and Perez (1981) in Cuba; Del Castillo and Garcia Arevalo (1987) and Gonzalez (1970) in 4 Dominican Republic; and Vidal (1983) in Puerto Rico. The three Hispanic Caribbean islands had strong Carnival and Lent traditions. These traditions were never a mirror image of the Spanish forms, but the emotions and creativity can be paralleled as can be paralleled the processes pertinent to the existence of carnival as a social event. Spanish ethnologist Julio Caro Baroja has found that carnival, as a social event, has undergone three changes of magnitude. First, there is the development of carnival within the Medieval Christian ideology, opposing good and evil in a time allotted for each, integrating both public and personal life. This carnival is then transformed by the impact of bourgeois sectarian behavior in the form of restrictive social clubs sequestering the traditionally public creativity into a privately controlled space. And, finally, there is the modern desintegration of carnival in response to the state apparatus bureaucratizing joy and suffering in the form of national events, like sports and local politics. Considering the widespread popularity of Carnival in Spain, it was only natural that the Spaniards reconstructed as best they could this tradition in the New World. Already in 1526, the Spaniards in the settlement of Caparra, Puerto Rico managed to celebrate Carnival "...dende el ultimo de Reyes Pasta el miêrcoles de las Cenizas" ("...from the last (day) of Epiphany to 5 Ash Wednesday"). With the aid of friendly Indians they enjoyed themselves by dancing with castanets, their bodies painted with bixa (scientific name: Bixa orellana) and disguised. It seems that an effort was being made to recreate the forms known in the mainland. In this specific case the Spaniards were joined by some friendly Indians in the celebration (Llemens Torres 1969:400). This apparent sign of permissiveness is not a New World adaptation but is a reflection of the way the events were shaped in Spain where the converted blacks and Moors took a prominent part in the activities. A much different evaluation is presented in' the case of Cuba, by ethnologist Fernando Ortiz who believed that the carnival traditions known in sixteenth century Spain were not readily transplanted to Cuba because the Spaniards, who came from all over Spain, had different traditions according to the region of origin. All these different forms of festive expression did not conform a common festive mode in the colony. So that the first carnival-like expressions rooted in Cuba were associated with Church celebrations, similar to the dances and masquerades the blacks and slaves produced during Corpus Christi and other holidays (Ortiz 1955:250). It was during certain religious days that the cabildos were permitted to dress up according to "African" tradition, and parade around the city performing their music and dances. By the nineteenth 6 century, many mulattoes would disassociate themselves from the cabildos and its distinctive social and religious public activities in an effort to blend into the creole society. At this stage the comparsas became openly defamed and diminished as unwanted examples of African savagery.' In 1884, with the abolition of slavery, the cabildos were prohibited and became either Church cofradlas or mutual aid societies. In the final years of colonial rule the street festive presentations managed to survive as carnival comparsas (troupes). These comparsas should be seen as total events including large numbers of participants masked and disguised in reference to a central theme, sometimes carrying farolas (lanterns), playing drums and other instruments of high resonance, dancing in unison and singing chosen songs and refrains, followed by colorful allegorical floats. The format of these events was discussed, designed and prepared by community groups that would dedicate long hours to practice with the hope of successfully competing against each other. The really spontaneous part of the parades was the ardent participation of the public that would dance, sing and applaud in response to each comparsa. During the first years of republican rule, the comparsas became controlled by the state apparatus which proclaimed a yearly policy determining which groups paraded and the conditions and quality of their presentations; that is, manipulating and reformulating 7 what had previously been activities of popular production. 2 The street celebrations existed juxtaposed to other celebrations centered in the social clubs of the towns and cities. So that, during the first half of this century, carnival often referred to selected events closed to the general public, whose only function was to line the streets to watch the club members parade their queens and attend their dances. Great emphasis was placed on transforming the role of the populace into the passive condition of observers, defining any form of response from the public as an act of confusion or provocation. Even after 1959, when carnival became related to the celebrations of the triumph of the Revolution and was officially called Carnaval de la Libertad (Carnival of Liberty), the events managed to retain elements of popular 3 and of elite (social club) origin. 4 As a contemporary public festivity, carnival "competes" with political mass events which frequently use the elements of carnival to administer joyful, yet patriotic, commemorations. 5 Perhaps, this concise evaluation of the historical transformation of the Cuban carnival, hints at an explanation as to why, in the Hispanic Caribbean nations, the street singing and dancing activities of Carnival are not willingly seen as an element of national identity. The popular aspects of carnival have traditionally been shunned by the upper classes resulting in the rejection by the subservient information media, the government 8 agencies, and the aspiring middle sectors. Three elements are repeatedly intermingled in the diminishing perception of carnival. First, there is a matter of taste so that people either like or dislike mass events.
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