Photo Courtesy Paula  Valentine

The Taos Fiestas combine the Sacred and the Mundane

By Larry Torres, Associate Professor, UNM-Taos

What place could be more sacred than the heart of a community? The life center of Taos is right in the middle of the plaza where its residents gather once a year to celebrate their local culture. Smells of cotton candy meld with those of church incense. Squirts from water pistols compete with sprinkles of holy water.

Las Fiestas de Taos is a community celebration honoring its two patron saints, Santiago and Santa Ana. The annual event invites the local population to put aside their labor for two and half days and to bask in the leisure of the holy days. Young girls stroll clockwise and young men go counterclockwise each hoping to meet that special someone with whom to share the holiday. Both traditional folk and modern music blares out from the gazebo in the middle of the plaza and, rapt in moments of shady leisure, Taoseños are wont to forget, if for the moment, the two saints that are being honored.

The original Spanish colonists established their first church of San Jerónimo at Taos Pueblo. Padre Antonio José Martínez then changed the seat of ecclesiastical power to Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe in Taos proper in the early 1800s. But the festival that honors Santiago and Santa Anna seems to transcend both of these historical facts. The first day is dedicated to Santiago, who is the patron saint of Spain. On that day, men used to ride on horseback through the plaza in their finest livery, "encatrinados" as they were called in their fancy attire.

Popular tradition holds that James had preached in northwestern Spain when the area was still known as Finis Terre, or the End of the Earth. . It was to this area that the body of the Apostle of Spain was returned by two of the nine converts he had made in the area. The exact spot of the tomb of the martyr was lost for over 800 years. A hermit named Pelagius had a vision of the site of the burial place. The field that was uncovered was aglow with the light of a star, Campo Estellae, in Latin. The local bishop declared the bones to be "the authentic relics of St. James." Again, the tomb was lost for a thousand years and rediscovered in the late 1800s.

The second day of The Taos Fiestas is always dedicated to St. Anne. On this day women were wont to ride in horse-drawn carriages. Mothers and older sisters would hold tightly to the hands of the children and everybody marveled at the mystery of St. Anne, who is the perfect example of motherhood.
 
Joachim and Anne had been married both childless for twenty years. In those days to be without child was thought to be a curse since the couple was not contributing toward the birth of the promised Messiah. Anne wept not only because she was still childless at the age of 44, but also the gossip around town was that her husband had abandoned her.

They were both visited by the angel Gabriel who told them that they were to be the parents of the girl who would one day be known as “The Immaculate Conception.” From opposite directions they both ran to the city gate where Joachim planted a chaste kiss on Anne’s cheeks and that marked the moment of Mary’s conception.

The fiestas as they are celebrated today really were merely a socio-economic ploy dating back to the 1930s. But they are the inheritors of the old Taos Trade Fairs that date back to the Comanche and Spanish accords two centuries earlier.

Visit www.fiestasdetaos.com for more information.