global212

From the varied license plates emanating from the zocolo, migrants from all parts of the U.S. were back for the three day festival in San Juan Mixtepec. The contemporary and the traditional are everpresent as older woman with their robozos walk hand in hand with their young children and grandchildren, who sport t-shirts with interesting English phrases like "squeeze me". The mixing of the religious and the nonreligious make for a curious combination, where everyone participates in the carnival, a big evening dance and fireworks at 5am. The afternoon church mass honoring the patron saint and the mayordomo (who paid for the fiesta) is followed by a street party, where beer and tapache, a fermented fruit punch, flow. Then, friends of the mayordomo descend for the ceremonial ritual dance with their chickens, decorated with multicolored ribbons before going to the field by the river where the chickens are strung up and left to dangle above, before getting their heads cut off by horsemen with swords - all in honor of patron St. John the Baptist, who as the story goes, was...beheaded.