MUTATING TRADITIONS: At dawn last Saturday, a crowd of 150 gathered at the Tucson Botanical Gardens to pray for rain.
Yaqui holy woman Mary Luna called on Grandfather, the Great Spirit, and on Mother Moon and Father Sun for help. Just as she was walking around the circle, blessing each supplicant in turn with the smoke from a smudge pot of burning cedar, sage and tobacco, a huge tractor-trailer rumbled by the north wall of the gardens. The driver looked curiously over at the solemn gathering of people among the plants. Inadvertently, he had brought in a reminder of the forces that threaten to topple Luna's Mother Moon and Father Sun. Painted on the truck's side were two simple, powerful words: Diet Pepsi.
It was a multicultural kind of a Tucson day.
It began, for me anyway, in the pearly gray dawn, at the Día de San Juan ceremony. It continued on during the blazing sun of mid-afternoon, when quaint acrobats and clowns filled the huge TCC arena with their splashy hijinks and peculiar circus din. And it ended in the soft evening darkness, in a crowded auditorium at University Medical Center, as a troupe from the Indian state of Manipur performed ancient dances and songs reenacting the love tales of the god Krishna.
The strange day got me to musing about cultural survival. Each of these three celebrations has origins deep in the past. And in a world of Diet Pepsi, of an international commercial culture intent on stamping out regional variation, each is managing to hang on by adapting. But then folk rituals have always had to change in order to survive.
John the Baptist's Day has been celebrated on June 24 in the New World since the arrival of the Catholic Spaniards. For the Europeans, San Juan, the saint who baptized Jesus in the river Jordan, was associated with the life-renewing properties of water. Likely the conquerors piggy-backed their San Juan festivities onto earlier native water rituals performed by desert dwellers longing for rain. By the 19th century, says folklore maven Jim Griffith, Hispanic Tucsonans spent the day in a secular kind of way, picnicking along acequias, or irrigation ditches, and capping off the day's leisure with evening water fights.
The circus, slickly packaged and blatantly commercial though it is, has also evolved through a long history. It's a remnant of the circuses of ancient Rome, in which gladiators gladiated and stubborn Christians really were thrown to the lions. With its traveling show of low-tech acrobats and clowns and animals, it's a descendant of medieval European entertainments offered by jugglers and minstrels and dancing bears who roamed from village to village to earn their bread.
It was in the late 19th century that the circus became big business. James A. Bailey introduced the three rings, and P.T. Barnum touted his Greatest Show on Earth. These two merged their companies in 1881, and in 1919 Barnum & Bailey combined with the rival Ringling Brothers, the group that now comes to Tucson every year.
And the Manipuri dances of India, characterized by stately controlled dancing and haunting singing and drumming, go back to the Middle Ages. These elaborate classical dances developed as holy rituals in the religions that preceded Hinduism and continue to thrive in Hindu temples and homes.
At all three of the day's events, the changes accommodating today's world were almost palpable. The dances of India still have an important religious function back home, but they've been adapted for the stage, converted into art for secular audiences.
The circus has metamorphosed into a sophisticated commercial enterprise. Spliced onto endearingly old-fashioned acts like elephants standing on their toes are bizarre modern adaptations such as motorcyclists zooming inside in a beehive-shaped mesh cage. Even the ringmaster is more like a TV game-show host than a minstrel of old.
Holy woman Luna blessed a crowd of mostly whites, reconstituting a traditional Native American ceremony as a nostalgic exercise for Anglos in search of meaning.
So far, these old rituals and entertainments have survived by changing. Is there any chance they can continue to hang on, in the face of Diet Pepsi, Disney and the Internet?
"The most futile thing I can do is predict the future," Griffith says. One thing he's sure of though: As far as the San Juan ceremony goes, "There's no chance that it will persist unchanged."
But, as Griffith points out, the mutated old ceremonies continue to meet a complex variety of needs, whether for faith or entertainment or cultural identity.
"One hundred years from now we'll be doing something that satisfies those needs. The chances are excellent that it will continue in some form as long as the needs are there."
Cool. --Margaret Regan
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