Max Harris

Wisconsin Humanities Council

University of Wisconsin-Madison

222 South Bedford Street

Madison, WI 53703

USA

(email: mrharri1@facstaff.wisc.edu)

Saint Michael and the Sins of the Carnival Virgin:

The Roots in Rebellion of a Bolivian Morality Play

Oruro squats high in the Bolivian altiplano, striking many travelers as "a mean, forbidding town, hugging the bare hillside," where "all is grey monotony even in the noon sunlight of a bright winter day." At 12,144 feet above sea level, Oruro can be bitterly cold at night even in the summer months. Lacking the encircling snow-capped mountain peaks of La Paz or the rich artistic heritage of colonial Potosí, it has little to offer the visitor by way of compensation.

Since Inca times, Oruro has been a mining town. Unlike its wealthier sister Potosí, it failed to transform its temporary prosperity into permanent architectural glories and so has the air of a boom town that never quite made the grade. Depleted of its silver by the end of the Spanish colonial period, Oruro in the late nineteenth century became the hub of Bolivia's tin-mining industry. By 1947, the metal content of the ore had declined too far to support commercial interests and the government took over the mines. In 1985, at the insistence of the International Monetary Fund, the nationalized mines were closed. Some have reopened under private management, but falling prices have limited profitability. Unemployment hovers over the town like a persistent cloud.

Enclosing the entrance to an ancient mineshaft, in the side of the hill that steeply elevates the western edge of town, is the Santuario del Socavón (Sanctuary of the Mineshaft), a large, partially whitewashed stone church. On the wall behind the main altar is a fresco of the Virgin of the Mineshaft, a pale-faced, dark-haired virgin of Spanish mien. Once a year, on Carnival Saturday, the sanctuary is packed with tens of thousands of costumed devils, savages, and blacks, who throughout the day remove their ornate and terrifying masks and kneel to pay her homage.

Oruro's Carnival is also the feast day of Oruro's Virgin. Originally the Virgen de la Candelaría (the Virgin of Candlemas), traditionally honored on 2 February, she is now known locally as the Virgen del Socavón (Virgin of the Mineshaft). Legend has it that on the Saturday of Carnival, in 1789, a bandit known as Nina-Nina or Chiru-Chiru was mortally wounded in a street fight in Oruro, perhaps by the father of a girl with whom he was eloping. In his dying, the amorous bandit was comforted by the Virgen de la Candelaría. Some accounts say that a life-size image of the Virgin, painted on the wall of a deserted house, had been the object of his weekly devotion; others report that the painting miraculously appeared on the wall of the bandit's own abode after his death. The story adds that a troupe of masked devils first danced in honor of the Virgin in the next year's Carnival. The present sanctuary, built to house her image, was completed in 1891.

Behind this legend of the Carnival bandit lurks another historical reality. During the Great Rebellion of Túpac Amaru (1780-1782), which spread south along the Andean highlands from its starting point in Cuzco (Peru), Oruro survived its own brief but bloody revolution. Exacerbated by fears of imminent Indian attack, tensions in Oruro between the majority Creole population and the minority ruling class of peninsular-born Spaniards or chapetones erupted into a full-scale uprising. On the night of Saturday, 10 February 1781, a date still commemorated as an augury of independence in the name of Oruro's main square (Plaza 10 de Febrero), a mob of several thousand Creoles set fire to the house of a Spanish shopkeeper, killing eleven Spaniards and five black slaves. A hastily-organized Sunday morning procession of the Holy Sacrament failed to calm the situation, which further deteriorated when some 4,000 Indians entered the town, armed with shell-trumpets (pututos), slingshots, and nooses, "to defend the Creoles." The Creoles welcomed their temporary allies, but must have watched with mixed feelings as the Indians danced around the charred Spanish corpses, inflicting further wounds with stones and knives. A procession of the Holy Christ of Burgos was no more pacifying than its predecessor.

For several days, the Indians roamed the town, firing their slings, sacking houses and churches, and killing any Spaniards they could find. One terrified Spanish man, dressed in women's clothes, hid among a group of praying women, but was betrayed by his shoes. He was stripped and killed. More Indians arrived, swelling the occupying army to as many as 15,000. On 14 February, an order was given by the leading Creoles that everyone in the town had to dress like Indians and chew coca leaves. The men wore unkhus (small ponchos) and monteras (native flat-topped hats), the women aksus (woven shawls) and baize polleras (skirts). The members of the Creole cabildo (council) dressed more importantly as Inca royalty. Only the clergy was exempt. During a parade celebrating the new mode of dress, the participants shouted "Viva Túpac Amaru!"

On 15 February, a messenger arrived in Oruro, claiming to be from Túpac Amaru himself. In the name of the Inca rebel leader, the envoy instructed the Indians to respect churches and clergy, to do no harm to Creoles, and only to persecute chapetones. Moreover, he assured the Indians of imminent victory: Túpac Amaru would enter La Paz "by Carnival [por Carnestolendas]." Enticed by individual payments from the Oruro treasury and by orders of their own caciques (chiefs), the Indians began to return to their villages. Before they left, they rampaged through the town once more, whipping Spaniards and Creoles alike for petty offenses. By 16 February, Oruro was comparatively calm. Of a population of some 5,000 people--of whom about 50 had been Spanish--27 Spaniards, 13 black slaves, 1 Creole, and 1 Frenchman had been killed. The Indians launched further attacks on Oruro during March and April, but the Creoles and remaining Spaniards united to repel them.

The messenger's promise that Túpac Amaru would enter La Paz "by Carnival" is striking. In 1781, Carnival Saturday fell on 24 February, placing Oruro's uprising almost exactly halfway between Candlemas and Carnival. Much of what happened in Oruro during the six days of Indian occupation was, if one disregards the terror and the loss of life, remarkably carnivalesque. Religious processions dueled ineffectually with secular parades. Europeans and Creoles imitated Indians, chewing coca leaves and exchanging their own clothes for Indian costumes. Ambitious Creoles dressed as Inca royalty. A Spaniard resorted to cross-dressing in a vain attempt to save his life. Thousands of armed Indians (paradigmatic wild men from beyond the boundaries of urban society) roamed the colonial city streets, overturning existing hierarchies of power. Thomas Abercrombie suggests that this temporary overthrow of colonial rule, rather than the romantic legend of the dying bandit, was "the first dance of 'Carnival Indians' through the streets of the city."

Carnival itself followed closely on the uprising. Astonishingly, by 19 February most Orureños were "thinking only of games and drunken revelry." Few details of the festivities survive beyond a carnivalesque redistribution of wealth. "Throughout Carnival," one witness grumbles, the city markets were full of "robbers" selling looted gold and silver back to its owners or to "cholos [hispanicized Indians] and mestizos," who made the most of the opportunity to "inherit" precious metal at a steep discount.

By 1784, it was "customary" to "rejoice, dance, play, and form comparsas [companies of masqueraders]" for the city's Carnival. That year, one large comparsa of 300 members mocked ruling class fears that there would be a fresh uprising "during Carnival" by singing mischievously:

Courageous Orureños

Are noble-hearted folk

Who never have intended

To fashion new revolts.

The Spanish corregidor (mayor), reinstated after the rebellion, walked behind the comparsa, watching carefully and refusing it entry to the main square.

Arrests of those implicated in the uprising began in 1784 and continued through 1791. Judicial proceedings lasted until 1801, when a general amnesty was granted to surviving fugitives and prisoners. Mining production, already in decline by 1781, came to a complete halt after the uprising. It was against this background of judicial retribution and economic decline that, on Carnival Saturday 1789, the Virgin of the Mineshaft is said to have appeared to the dying bandit. Her cult may have emerged as an alternative to that of the Virgin of the Rosary, whose image in the Church of Santo Domingo was so venerated by the chapetones that the rebels of 1781 had wanted to behead it. The Virgen del Socavón, by contrast, favored Creoles, Indians, miners, and bandits. She also appears to have tolerated indigenous deities or "devils." By 1790, if the legend is correct, Oruro's miners had moved Candlemas to Carnival and added indigenous gods, masked as Christian devils, to the week's festivities.

A generation later, an archangelic warrior was summoned to defeat the devils. In 1818, according to credible oral history, Oruro's parish priest Ladislao Montealegre composed the Narrative of the Seven Deadly Sins, a dramatized "moral tale depicting the struggle between Saint Michael and the Seven Deadly Sins." Although he may have wanted to redirect the remembrance of rebellion into more virtuous channels, Montealegre seems instead to have furnished an enduring public transcript for the devils. Despite alternating periods of "decline and prosperity" in the nineteenth century, the devils and their morality play are now flourishing. Several thousand devils dance through the streets of Oruro each year before the narrative is staged on Carnival Monday.

Julia Fortún believes that Oruro's supernatural street fighters are kin to the combative Michael and "twenty-three devils" who led the early fifteenth-century Barcelona Corpus Christi procession and whose Catalan descendants still dance in such towns as Berga and Vilafranca del Penedès. Like Oruro's relato (dramatic narrative), the Catalan dances often feature a diablesa (female devil); and, in a related Catalan dance, the Devil leads Seven Deadly Sins into battle against the opposing Virtues and an angel. Although Fortún has found no documentary evidence of historical influence, her thesis is inherently plausible.

But, if the iconography of the morality play derives from Catalan sources, the durability of Oruro's Carnival is rooted in its recollection of the 1781 uprising. Not only does the entrada (entry) of the Carnival masqueraders visually recall the "entrada of the Indians"--as an eye-witness described the indigenous invasion of Oruro--but the names of some comparsas and of the streets and squares through which the entrada passes make explicit the remembrance of rebellion. Two of the comparsas, "in homage to the Revolution of 10 February 1781," are named after Sebastian Pagador, one of the Creole heroes of the uprising. So is the street where the entrada starts and which it crosses a second time on its way to the Plaza 10 de Febrero.

As a fixed historical referent, the uprising allows for a shifting series of contemporary hidden transcripts. Initially, Oruro's Carnival played on Spanish fears of a renewed insurgency. After 1825, when Bolivia gained its independence from Spain, Carnival was free to celebrate the uprising as a precursor of liberty, while simultaneously creating an alternative world in which the indigenous miners and their gods again ruled the streets before succumbing to the pale-faced Spanish Michael. The latter impulse seems to have gained the upper hand, for by the early part of the twentieth century the members of Oruro's elite had distanced themselves from the actions of the comparsas, organizing private parties for their own families and denouncing the festivities of the street as a "mixture of paganism and superstition" that furnished only an "absurd repetition of past epochs." Today, the professional classes dominate Oruro's Carnival and the national government markets the entrada, with its festive representations of multiple ethnicities, as "a metaphor for the national unity of Bolivia." For some, however, the Carnival's recollection of rebellion still acts as "a reminder . . . of the necessity for revolt when the historical conditions are appropriate."

The Narrative of the Seven Deadly Sins is no longer staged by miners but by the Gran Tradicional Auténtica Diablada Oruro, formed for the purpose in 1904 by a guild of butchers. When I saw the play in 2000, it was performed early in the afternoon of Carnival Monday in the Avenida Cívica, a broad parade ground permanently lined with bleachers just below the Santuario del Socavón. Montealegre's text, substantially modernized in 1945 by Rafael Ulises Peláez, had been further streamlined to intensify the action. An audience of several thousand watched from the bleachers and the slopes of the hills beyond; hundreds crowded onto the paved parade ground for a closer look. Devils marked out a playing area at the parade ground's northern end.

A trumpet heralded the action. Saint Michael and an unnamed companion angel entered the circle. Each wore a silver-colored mask with pink eyes and a winged helmet, a white tunic with a pink cross sewn across the chest, a long-sleeved blue undershirt, a blue and white cape, white gauze wings, white trousers banded with blue at the ankles, and white shoes. Each clutched a plastic shield and a sword, from whose handle dangled three handkerchiefs in the Bolivian national colors of red, yellow, and green. Lucifer approached. Seated astride the shoulders of an assistant and wearing a huge, black, fanged and horned mask, he towered over the angels. A thick, black wig flowed over his shoulders. Dressed in a heavy, sequined cape and trousers, and flourishing a demonic trident in his gauntleted hand, he roared out his challenge to Michael. Lest the audience forget, Lucifer summarized his origins in proud rebellion against God and his enduring intent to destroy all Christians. His words, otherwise inaudible beneath his mask, were broadcast over loudspeakers.

Slipping from his assistant's shoulders, Lucifer accosted Michael, who scraped the ground with his foot like a bull and boasted of his own power as "titan of the heavenly militias." Another actor, dressed as a condor--in a beaked mask and real condor's wings--danced between them, flapping his wings and grounding the action in the Andean world. After an exchange of vaunting speeches and ineffective angelic sword thrusts, Lucifer was joined by Satan (in an enormous bug-eyed mask), who assured the watching "demonic hordes" of certain victory in the battle for "unwary human hearts." Michael threatened both devils with judgement, which, he said, would have to take place outside "the temple of the Virgin of the Mineshaft, the patroness of the miners of Oruro" because "devils cannot enter the temple. They cannot profane that holy place with their infamous presence." Michael's boast was, of course, relativized by the audience's awareness that thousands of devils had already gone inside the temple to visit the Virgin on Saturday. Lucifer and Satan knelt in token submission to the archangel before running off to join the circle of watching devils.

Lucifer and Satan were followed, one by one, by the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Avarice, Lechery, Anger, Gluttony, Envy, and Sloth. Masked and costumed as ferocious devils, the Sins took turns to challenge Michael and to boast of their transgressions. Stage hands planted flares that filled the playing area with variously colored smoke, so thick that at times the actors briefly disappeared from view. Condors wafted through the colored clouds. Avarice admitted that, in his eagerness to accumulate wealth, he had engaged in "unjust oppression." Anger removed his mask and flung it to the ground, where Michael crushed it with his feet. Gluttony asked the archangel for food and wine. Sloth, clutching a beer bottle, could barely make it into the arena. Supported by two white bears--traditional figures of local mythology--he slipped and slurred his challenge to Michael.

The text implied that the Sins were being "humiliated," forced to confess their iniquities before retiring to the depths of hell, "conquered" by Michael's "power." But the performance suggested otherwise. The Sins remained loud and defiant throughout, all but Sloth (who had to be helped) running out of the playing area undeterred. After the Sins had retired, Michael invited the crowd to name the opposing Virtues. The loudspeakers roared out the answer: Humility, Generosity, Chastity, Patience, Temperance, Charity, and Diligence. As each Virtue was named, the contesting Sin ran across the playing area.

One Sin remained: China Supay. Once played by a cross-dressed man, China Supay is now acted by a young woman in a pale-faced mask with short horns, big blue eyes, and long eyelashes. She wears high boots and a short skirt, conspicuously baring her thighs. Supay was one of the more mischievous prehispanic deities of the region, demonized by the Spaniards. China Supay is his wife. She entered the circle laughing. "I am the temptation of the flesh," she announced, "symbol of human perdition." Michael and his companion angel retreated before this object of lust. China Supay offered not the least pretense of submission. Instead, she confidently assured Michael, "Pure angel, I can tempt you and carry you to hell." Once she had left, still laughing, Michael shouted after her, "You'll never tempt me." The band struck up. The play was over.

In an influential essay on Oruro's Carnival, Abercrombie has argued that the morality play embodies an ethnically charged message of renunciation. For its mestizo performers and audience, he believes, the Sins represent "the savage condition of the Indian who lives in each of us." Sensuality in particular is located, for the mestizo male, "in the bodies of indigenous women." The play invites its audience to renounce these temptations, "for the sake of God and country," by "attending to the example of the Virgin's renunciation of sexuality." This strikes me as too simple a reading of the performance. While Abercrombie accurately reflects the prejudicial view of Indian sexuality advanced by colonial clergy, he neglects the possibility of a hidden transcript more suited to the play's historical origins and Carnival context and he trusts the clerically scripted word more than its good-natured performance.

Certainly the relato, when I saw it, enacted a virtuous Catholic public transcript of victory over sin, but this was challenged by a number of contrary factors, both in the performance itself and in its larger Carnival context. During the performance, none of the devils died (as they do in some kindred Catalan dances). They ran off, physically unharmed. In two other plays that followed the relato--one a dance drama of flirtation, seduction, challenge, and death modeled on the traditional Andean tinku or ritual battle, the other an indigenous dramatization of the arrival of the Spaniards and the death of the Inca Atahualpa at the hands of Pizarro--characters died dramatically and at length. By contrast, the performance of the narrative--whatever its text might have proposed--allowed the devils to survive their confrontation with Saint Michael. This was especially clear in the case of China Supay. The "temptation of the flesh," whose defeat is required by Abercrombie's reading of the play, didn't even go through the motions of kneeling to Saint Michael. She left still laughing.

In folk theater, the relative splendor of the costumes often signals a hidden transcript of sympathy for the textually defeated. Several observers have commented that Saint Michael seems "pallid and emasculated" compared to the fearsome devils that oppose him. Although he more or less held his own during the relato itself, claiming at least as much playing time as the Sins, Michael was visually outshone and vastly outnumbered during the dancing that filled the parade ground immediately before and after the play's performance. While Michael and a few supporting angels danced up and down in pale blue and white, hundreds of devils cavorted in a wild array of colors splashed liberally across their high boots, skin-tight trousers, beaded capes and tunics, thick gloves, long wigs, and--most memorable of all--their monstrous masks.

Oruro's devil masks have developed, over the course of the twentieth century, from fairly conventional horned and fanged masks, made of molded plaster, into some of the most complex headpieces in the festive world. "Bulging, billiard-ball eyes studded with bright artificial stones and huge grinning silver teeth, hideously pointed, leer grotesquely out of an exuberant tangle of horns and ears and tusks, painted in a wild cacophony of colours, and crowned by a three-headed viper or other misshapen reptile." The masks are now fashioned of lightweight molded felt, layered with successive coats of a glue and plaster mix. The protruding eyes are made of painted light bulbs. The triple-headed serpents, dragons, and lizards that crowd the surface of the mask in a fantastic rococo fecundity are--like the mask's long and twisting horns--constructed from cones of cotton cloth or cardboard, soaked in glue and plaster and filled while wet with grit, sand, or sawdust. Some masks are crowned with whole stuffed condors. No two masks are alike.

Dancing with the devils was an almost equal number of China Supays in short skirts and high boots. Provocatively, they swung their hips and twirled their skirts, revealing yet more flesh. The odds were stacked against the virtuous archangel. The audience's eyes were on the devils' masks and the China Supays' thighs. Winning the aesthetic war in performance is a common folk means of challenging an officially scripted defeat.

It was not only in the massed dancing immediately before the play that the conventional forces of virtue were outnumbered and outclassed. "Saint Michael wins the relato up at the church," a street vendor had told me on Friday evening, "but here, in the streets, it's like hell itself, there are so many devils." The Carnival's gran entrada de peregrinación (grand entry of pilgrimage), a parade of all the costumed masqueraders, began at 6:00 a.m. on Saturday in the northern suburbs--"near the old Indian settlement"--and ended five miles later at the Santuario del Socavón at about 5:00 a.m. on Sunday, only to begin all over again an hour later. While any single comparsa of "pilgrims" took only about five hours to cover the parade route, masqueraders filled the streets for almost two whole days. Of the fifty comparsas that took part in the parade, five of the largest were diabladas (companies of devils). Music for the diabladas, as for many of the other comparsas, was provided by a series of brass bands marching between the comparsa's different squadrons. The "pilgrimage" was loud, boisterous, colorful, and sensual.

Insofar as the male devils represented the mortal Sins of Christian tradition and their female counterparts enacted a specific invitation to lust (or at least to appreciate the female body), a carnivalesque inversion of conventional religious morality clearly ruled the streets during the two days of the entrada. It is another common strategy of Catholic folk performers to concede the virtuous triumph of the Church at the close of a fiesta in exchange for a prolonged expression during the fiesta of those sensual aspects of human nature ordinarily condemned by the Church. Devotion to the Virgin sanctifies the transgression. It was for just this reason that the street vendor preferred Oruro's Carnival to its more famous counterpart in Río de Janeiro. "Río's Carnival has no religious dimension," he told me. "It's just a pagan festival, full of half-clothed women."

But Oruro's devils represent more than the Deadly Sins of Christian theology. They also recall the indigenous gods of the region. Guillermo Delgado has suggested that the devil masks have their origin not so much in European images of the demonic as in indigenous representations of deified llamas. The latter, he observes, were traditionally represented with "rounded, bugging eyes" and ears that extended "until they seem[ed] to be transformed into horns." Other scholars have identified the devils with the local god Huari or Supay, who resisted and survived colonization by both the Incas and the Spaniards. Now known as Tío (literally Uncle, but possibly an ambiguous corruption of the Spanish díos [god] or diablo [devil]), Supay's underground power is still acknowledged by Oruro's miners.

On Carnival Friday, in the mines, ch'allas (offering rituals) are made before an image of the Tío. The squat, caped statue resembles that of a conventional Christian devil, with red mask, thick gloves, and three-pronged pitchfork. Indigenous miners acquiesced in the early Catholic identification of Supay with the Christian devil, drawing comfort from the power of "the enemy of their enemy." Tío still rules the underground realm of the mines, insisting that the offensive name of Jesus not be uttered there. Offerings to Tío involve the smoking of cigarettes, the chewing of coca leaves, the sprinkling of liquor, and the sacrifice of llamas. The llama's blood is sprinkled on the mining machinery and its heart is buried beneath coca leaves at Tío's feet.

Manuel Vargas identifies "Lucifer leading the dance of the Devils" with Supay and suggests that the dance recalls "Huari's fight against the Quechua [Inca] empire." Other scholars, noting the European origin of the relato's text, suppose Supay's foe to be Spanish rather than Quechua. The local origin of the dance in the aftermath of the 1781 rebellion strengthens this argument. Given the prolonged tensions between Oruro's miners and the national government, one might also speculate that the red, yellow, and green handkerchiefs, hanging from the bellicose angels' swords, denote a more recent adversary. There is no need to choose. Folk theater in the Americas often collapses successive historical enemies into a single dramatic representative. By identifying the Christian devils with their own demonized Supay or Tío, the miners who first staged the diablada found a way of bringing their gods to the surface once a year to enact resistance to whatever forces threatened their way of life. Today's Carnival invasion of Oruro advances both from the edge of town near "the old Indian settlement" and from Tío's underground domain. The fact that the script of the relato accords Saint Michael the victory reflects the historical reality of subordination rather than the sympathies of the performers.

It was not only the devils who represented the indigenous world in the entrada. Nearly half of the comparsas presented folkloric versions of rural Indian dances. Some imitated the llama herders of the high altiplano "with steps dictated by long tradition, drawing circles in the air with their slings, the lips on their masks pursed in an eternal whistle as if herding hundreds of llamas." Others staged choreographed versions of the indigenous martial art of the tinku, whirling their slings in mock combat and, during halts in the parade, wrestling on the ground. A group called Suri Sicuri bore enormous circular feathered headdresses, worn horizontally, that touched the ground when the dancer bent at the waist. From time to time the driving rhythm of drums and tarkas (wooden flutes) or zampoñas (Andean reed pipes) offered an alternative to the brass bands. Few of these comparsas were individually as large as the diabladas, but the cumulative effect of the dramatized indigenous presence was impressive.

These folkloric dances were performed not by Indians but by university students and other educated mestizos. Abercrombie makes much of this, arguing that Oruro's Carnival expresses the deep-seated ambivalence of Bolivia's urban professional elite towards the country's rural Indians. On the one hand, because Bolivia's urban elite sees the country's indigenous heritage as a legitimate source of national identity, the dancers "seek authenticity in their dress and choreography," basing their performances on careful ethnographic research and the advice of living "informants." On the other hand, because Bolivia's urban mestizos have been taught to regard themselves as culturally and economically superior to the country's Indians, the dancers distance themselves from their indigenous models and express the "hidden Indian" within by exaggerating the dance's sensuality and aggression.

There is some truth to this. Playing the part of a less sophisticated or more exotic "other," whether it be a black, a Moor, a Plains Indian, an Aztec, or an Andean warrior, allows the urban masquerader to express aspects of his or her own character ordinarily suppressed both by the Church and by polite society. Even so, imitation of the other can be complementary. Unlike the mestizos of Mexico City who try (and fail) to recreate prehispanic danzas aztecas at the Basilica of Guadalupe while ignoring and marginalizing contemporary indigenous dancers, those who lead the folkloric comparsas of Oruro honor indigenous heritage by learning from living tradition bearers. Moreover, female sensuality is restrained in these comparsas. The women in the "authentic" Indian dances wear much longer skirts than the pale-faced, blue-eyed China Supays. The tinku women whirl their slings aggressively, but their polleras reach their ankles. When the female llama herders twirl knee-length skirts, they reveal only several layers of petticoats.

Abercrombie's equation of "Indian" dances with primitive sensuality and aggression is more germane to the comparsas that imitate Tobas. Generally regarded as the least "civilized" of Bolivia's Indians, the Tobas live in the Gran Chaco of lowland south-central Bolivia, straddling the border with Argentina and Paraguay. In 2000, there were three Toba comparsas in Oruro, each composed of several hundred male and female dancers. The men wore tall feathered headdresses, long colored skirts, and masks locked in fierce grimaces and decorated with war paint and nose plugs. Many brandished spears. The women wore short skirts. Some added only halters, baring midriffs as well as thighs. The dance steps, characterized by great bounding leaps and massed forward surges, were intended to recall "hunting and war dances."

In the context of the whole Carnival, however, the prolific representation of Bolivian Indians, be they dignified as "folkloric" or exaggerated as "savage," expresses much more than the "hidden Indian" within the urban masquerader. The unimpeded passage of so many exuberant Indians, many of them armed with slings, through the streets of Oruro during the two day entrada recalls the indigenous invasion of the city in 1781, insinuating a barely hidden transcript of resistance into the public transcript of Spanish Catholic triumph signaled by the twin victories of Saint Michael and Pizarro. Many Orureños--as a waiter in my hotel put it--feel "betrayed by a national government that has shut down the mines and now pours all its money into promoting agriculture around Cochabamba." Frustrated, they readily identify with the celebrated attempt of local Indians to recapture Oruro from the powerful outside forces that impoverished and marginalized them.

So, I do not believe that Oruro's Carnival dramatizes the defeat of indigenous peoples and their demonized sins. I'm not even sure that the public transcript does so with any real conviction. Consider, in this respect, the juxtaposition on Carnival Monday afternoon of the Narrative of the Seven Deadly Sins and The Death of Atahualpa. The latter play, even in its written text, challenges the former's Spanish clerical interpretation of human sin and demonic temptation.

The Death of Atahualpa was performed, shortly after the morality play, by a group called the Hijos del Sol (Children of the Sun). Marching the length of the parade ground, the group was led by three bearded Spanish soldiers in colonial armor, two carrying swords and one an arquebus, and by a Spanish friar in a black cassock bearing a Bible and a cross. The soldiers represented Francisco Pizarro, Diego de Almagro, and an anonymous king of Spain, while the friar was named Hernando de Luque. Some forty Inca lords and ñustas (princesses) followed in ornate cloaks and feathered headpieces. Among them was Atahualpa, the Inca ruler who, despite providing a vast ransom of silver and gold, was executed by Pizarro in July 1533.

Throughout the play, the Indians spoke Quechua and the conquistadors spoke Spanish. The text, its original almost certainly composed--perhaps as early as the sixteenth century--by a native Quechua speaker, embodied "a beautiful and painful indigenous interpretation of the conquest." Atahualpa and the Incas were noble, generous, and dignified, peacefully welcoming Pizarro and placing themselves and their wealth at his service. Pizarro and the Spaniards were aggressive, impatient, proud, and greedy for precious metal, repeatedly denouncing the Indians to their face as "barbarians." For their part, the Incas privately described the strange-looking Spaniards as a great red crowd of thick-necked, "bearded enemies . . . ; on their heads three-pointed horns like those of a stag tossing tossing; faces pressed together like white flour; knotted red beards divided at the jaw-bone like those of billy goats." Within the world of the play, this was nothing more than an effort to describe the foreign in terms of the familiar, but in the immediate context of its performance it recalled the masked, horned, and sometimes bearded Sins.

The malevolence of the Spaniards was especially evident in their manipulation of mutual incomprehensibility. Almagro presented Atahualpa with a written order in Spanish, purporting to be from the king of Spain, commanding the Inca to submit to Spanish rule on penalty of death. Understanding neither Spanish nor the concept of a written language, the Inca consulted his advisers, who puzzled over inscriptions that seemed to them like "spread rooster claws" and "a mass of black ants." Almagro reported to Pizarro. "These barbarians do not want to obey." When Pizarro's querulous attempts to communicate with the Indians in person also failed, he deemed Atahualpa's execution justified. Luque obstinately offered Atahualpa a Bible, which the Inca ruler examined briefly and returned. "To me," he responded, "it says absolutely nothing."

The ñustas mourned Atahualpa's death, tearfully pleading for his revival. Three members of the ruler's family took turns to predict the future of the Spaniards in language deliberately reminiscent of God's biblical curse on Adam: the Spaniards would gain their livelihoods "by the sweat of their brows" and whatever small amounts of silver and gold they might "take from the ground" would "return to dust." Spanish military and religious might could not have been more clearly identified with the paradigmatic human capitulation to demonic temptation and sin. The play closed with the king of Spain rebuking Pizarro for having taken the life of "a great king, perhaps even stronger than I." As the play's editors remark, it was a conclusion that, by tactfully exonerating the Spanish crown, "avoided conflict with the colonial authorities."

The Death of Atahualpa unequivocally sympathized with the Incas, portraying the Spaniards as prime examples of the sins of pride, avarice, anger, envy, and sloth. The play's "depiction of the Spaniards," Vargas observes, "is diabolical." The Inca play thus directly challenged the public transcript of the preceding morality play, offering an alternative, retrospective reading of its moral. If the public transcript of the first play identified the demonic Sins with the Indians, the second performance openly reversed that judgment. In Mario Unzueta's 1945 account of a fiesta in Toco (Cochabamba), the comedia of "Saint Michael" and "a legion of devils" immediately followed the The Death of Atahualpa, allowing the diabolic sins of the comedia to be identified even more clearly with the Spaniards.

We should remember, however, that folk plays are rarely about the past alone. In earlier years, some of the Spanish soldiers in the Oruro play wore "present-day army uniforms." The national colors still hang from Saint Michael's sword. In terms of the present Bolivian situation, the retrospective reading of the relato called to repentance the successors of Pizarro, protected by government policies, who still exploit miners and indigenous campesinos for personal power and profit.

In 1942, when Ena Dargan saw The Death of Atahualpa in Oruro, it was performed twice on the Sunday and once again on the Monday of Carnival. In the 1970s, when June Nash saw it, the audience was still "enthusiastic," cheering and clapping the Incas and "roundly" showing their disapproval of Pizarro. Unfortunately, this was not the case in 2000. The play suffered from not having adapted its presentation to the much larger audience it now draws. The actors' speeches, unamplified, were inaudible at anything but close range. Their delivery was hampered by an invariably declamatory style and a dependence on hand-held prompt sheets. The performance lacked the visually inventive stage effects that had engrossed the audience of the morality play. As a result, some of the more distant members of the crowd grew restless and reverted to the popular Oruro Carnival pastime of hurling water balloons at one another. Some of the balloons landed in the middle of the dramatic action. The actors pressed on but they were clearly frustrated.

The Death of Atahualpa was not the only Carnival presentation to point the finger of sin at white colonial mine owners and their successors. The most crowded of all the comparsas during the entrada had been the five morenadas (companies of blacks). Rank upon rank of morenos (blacks), even more numerous than the devils, had danced noisily through the Carnival streets of Oruro on Saturday and Sunday. Many reappeared during the march past of comparsas that framed the dramatic presentations on Monday. Most observers agree that the morenos represent African slaves imported to work in colonial silver mines or vineyards.

"Many of the older miners" in Oruro, Nash reported in 1979, "speak of stories they heard from their parents, who saw the brutality of the caporals [overseers] exercised to an even greater degree against the slaves than against the Indians." One seventy-year-old miner told her "that Indians of his parents' generation would bury the dead bodies of slaves thrown out of the mines when they died." Because of their inability to endure the Andean climate, African slaves proved more profitable to their owners in the vineyards of the tropical lowlands.

Early moreno masks, with their black skin, flattened noses, and thick, red lips, were simple caricatures of African features. More recent ornamentation sometimes obscures the African referent. The dancers carry rotating ratchet noisemakers--some made from the carapaces of quirquinchos (armadillos)--whose abrasive rhythm recalls "the steps of their chained feet" or "the sounds of the cranks turning the wine presses." The morenos are encased in tiered costumes of hooped and beaded cloth that suggest--to the uninitiated--mobile wedding cakes but represent casks of wine or the heavy burden of mined silver. In either case, "the rich and heavy costume is not wealth for themselves, it is for their master."

The Carnival critique of colonial slave masters is unintentionally directed back at Oruro's elite (many of whom are themselves dressed as morenos) by the lavish display of gold and silver that precedes each comparsa, whether a morenada or not. A vehicle richly decorated with brightly-colored cloths and hung with an abundance of gold and silver cups, plates, and other utensils drives ahead of the dancers. For the duration of the parade, these ostentatious displays of wealth are designated "offerings to the Virgin." They are, of course, the inherited fruit of colonial mining and, perhaps, a distant memory of the Carnival redistribution of wealth in February 1781.

Originally an Indian representation of the cruelty inflicted on blacks by a privileged elite in the name of commercial profit, the morenada is now danced primarily by "doctors, engineers, auditors, lawyers, . . . dentists," and their families, who alone can afford the expensive costumes. The young women of the morenadas wear short skirts and low-cut tops. Indicative of the degree to which the morenada may be losing its social conscience is the outgrowth, beginning in the 1970s, of several independent squadrons of caporales, young men and women who crack their whips and strut their stuff in sequined pants and the most revealing skirts of all, transforming brutal overseers into photogenic dancers.

Nevertheless, amidst the glitter and the gold, the message of the morenada is still legible in performance. It is neither the Incas of the past nor the rural Indians of the present nor the impoverished miners placating the Tío who are guilty of the mortal of Christian theology. It is those who have exploited them.

When they reached the end of the parade route on Saturday, the morenadas--like all the other comparsas--climbed the steps of the sanctuary, removed their masks, and made their way (mostly on their knees) up the nave to the altar rail. From about noon on Saturday until the early hours of Sunday morning, the sanctuary was filled with waves of black slaves, ornate devils, highland Indians, lowland "savages," and scantily clad young women. Men who had borne heavy masks and hot costumes the full length of the parade route sweated profusely. Women in high-heeled boots hobbled painfully and dropped to their knees with relief. Tobas, armed with all the regalia of paganism, knelt before the altar. Panoplies of feathers, cornucopias of masks, and a wild profusion of colors brightened the church. Brass bands and indigenous tarkas and zampuñas filled it with music.

At the altar rail, each group of pilgrims was met by one of several friars, who delivered a brief speech, welcoming and blessing the dancers. The Santuario del Socavón did not give the impression of sacred space controlled by clergy. Rather, it seemed that the pilgrims permitted the friars, through their speech of welcome, to save clerical face by authorizing popular devotion to the Virgin. After each blessing, the ranks of pilgrims passed to the right of the altar, the group's band immediately striking up a folk hymn to the Virgin as if to reaffirm popular ownership of the proceedings. The pilgrims passed a statue of Saint Michael set in a niche of the sanctuary wall. None that I saw paid it the least attention. For all that he might win Monday's staged battle against the devils of the relato, the archangel was of no importance at this culminating moment of the entrada. The Sins, the devils, the blacks, and the Indians belonged to the Virgin.

Passing counter-clockwise around the enclosed altar area, the pilgrims knelt as they arrived at the narrow walkway separating the back of the altar area from the southern wall that bears the sacred fresco of the Virgen del Socavón. Tightly packed, carrying their masks but still in costume, the kneeling pilgrims shuffled past the Virgin, faces raised to gaze in adoration at her image. This was no distant and generic Virgin. This was the Virgin of the Mineshaft, who had comforted a romantic bandit in his dying, who took no offense at the miners' placation of the underground Tío, and who now blessed the slaves, the savages, the peasants, the demonized, and even the flawed middle class who, sanctioned by Carnival, had displayed their own otherness. Each comparsa had paraded its own image of the Virgen del Socavón, but the fresco on the wall was the original from which all the reproductions drew their power. As they stood, the pilgrims turned to face the Virgin, backing out through a door near the altar with their eyes still on her image.

I saw no evidence of renunciation. The Tobas, the tinku, and the llameros had danced freely in the circle immediately outside the church. So had the devils and the China Supays. Even as they climbed the steps to the sanctuary, the female caporales had swung their hips, unembarrassedly twirling their skirts and showing their panties. Although the dancers had unmasked inside the church, they had done so not in renunciation of their role but to gaze freely on the Virgin and to receive a more personal blessing from her. This passage through the sanctuary was no forced surrender to a moralistic church, but a voluntary act of gratitude to a Virgin who over the centuries has shown mercy to the sinful and the demonized.

Sunday's reiteration of the entrada offered further proof that the blessing of the Virgen del Socavón requires neither renunciation of the flesh nor repentance for rebellion against repressive authority. Sunday's parade was noticeably more relaxed than Saturday's had been. Devils, slaves, and savages tied colored balloons to their masks. Carnivalesque figures absent on Saturday--a caricature of the President of Bolivia, for example, or a man in a tight skirt dancing a comic rumba--appeared on Sunday. The sanctuary was closed. The friars were resting. The Virgin had blessed the celebrations and the masqueraders needed no further license.

The blessing of the Virgin extended to feasts and offerings rooted in Oruro's indigenous heritage. Carnival Tuesday was a family day. Some teenagers drove through the streets in pick-up trucks, hurling water balloons at any pedestrians foolish enough to be out and about. But most Orureños were indoors, eating in extended families and offering ch'allas to Pachamama (mother earth). Nash describes a domestic ch'alla to which she was invited in the early 1970s: "The family bought a sheep, which they slaughtered for the meal, reserving the blood, and prepared six barrels of chicha [fermented maize drink] which they served with liquor and beer. They bought a prepared mesa, or table offering, for the Pachamama, which consisted of the fetus of a llama, q'oa [wool], and sugar wafers sprinkled with confetti." The father poured chicha over the bricks in the center of the main room, in the center of the outdoor plot, and in the four compass directions. Guests poured further offerings to Pachamama before they drank. As they did so, they invoked the Virgin, for this gratitude, too, she had blessed.

Augusto Beltrán, commenting in 1962 on the exuberance and satire of Sunday's entrada, acknowledged that by Sunday "the occasional tourist might suspect" that Oruro's Carnival had lost its religious moorings. After all, he admitted, the previous year's parade had included such festive innovations as cabezudos (big-heads), tightrope walkers, and an allegorical float that declared Oruro "the stepchild of Bolivia." But Beltrán denied any impropriety, arguing that the increase of "joy, beauty, and wit" was firmly grounded in "the religious foundation" of Oruro's Carnival. "Christ, the son of Mary," he reminded the sceptical tourist, had said, "I have come that they may have life, and may have it abundantly" (John 10:10). It is a startling gloss of the dominical saying, but one that is full of insight into both Carnival and Christianity. The joyous celebration of embodied humanity and the strong critique of oppressive social hierarchy, characteristic of Carnival in Oruro as elsewhere, is grounded not in pagan resistance to Christianity but in the very heart of the Christian story, the incarnation of deity in the life-affirming, fully human child born to Mary.

Bibliography

--. El 10 de Febrero. Oruro: La Patria, 1906.