Have you ever had one of those “cows in front of Carrion” moments? Where you walk out of an air conditioned, modern department store and come face to face with 3 or 4 enormous cows blocking traffic? It’s these kind of situations that I find myself in over and over again in Central America that make living here so interesting, moments when you feel unsure whether you are living in an Americanized modern culture or an isolated village frozen in time 100 years ago. I believe these contradictions are a part of what makes life here so hard, and leads to people with barely enough money to eat spending half their income on the latest Hollywood fashions, but that is an issue for a different post. This one is about Jews and partying.
This week I was in La Ceiba, the city near where I used to live on the Honduran coast, for Semana Santa, or Easter week celebrations. When I first got here La Ceiba seemed like an incredibly poor undeveloped place, yet after living far out in the countryside in a much less modern city, being in Ceiba was like being back in New York City. I sat on an escalator in the mall fascinated as if I was in Times Square for the first time, overwhelmed by all the glamorous well dressed people and the clean, well ordered stores.
After leaving the mall on my first day there I went to Wendys, binging on the American consumerism that has been so far away from where I am. In Wendy’s in La Ceiba the menu is almost entirely in English yet pronounced as you would pronounce the words in Spanish (Bacon Cheddar con Frosty sounds a little ridiculous in Spanish). There is free wifi, and a clean bathroom, and it is like a little slice of America packaged up and thrown down in the middle of a poor country.
Walking out of the air-conditioning of Wendy’s into the scorching heat, I saw a group of men approaching me wearing terrifying, ugly masks of creatures with distorted figures. They wore ragged clothing and carried plastic pitchforks, and went up to cars and pedestrians asking for money that was supposedly going to charity.
I overheard someone nearby shouting at their child. “MIRA! VIENEN LOS JUDEOS!“ Look! Here come the Jews!!
Welcome to Central America.
Apparently this is nothing unusual here and something similar happens in towns and cities all over Central America and parts of South America, where there are also traditional burning of the Jew ceremonies on good Friday. I remember watching Borat and his description of a “running of the Jew” ceremony in Kazakhstan, and how it seemed so prosperous and over the top in our modern, globalized world. And yet here I was witnessing the exact same thing, right outside of a Wendy’s with wifi access!
Being an American Jew I really had no idea how to react to this. Honduras is a country with virtually no Jews apart from maybe 10 or 15 families in the capital, and it is obvious that this is not anti-semitism within any type of context, nor anti-Semitism that will ever lead to anything. Although it likely happens around Easter time because of the idea of the Jews having killed Jesus, I doubt most people in the community are aware of that part of it, and just view the Jew as some kind of abstract boogeyman.
No one in the country is likely to ever even have met a Jew unless they lived in the States or were near a Jewish Peace Corps volunteer who actually went through the trouble of explaining it. I have not really talked about my faith with most people here except close friends because you are either Catholic or Evangelical, and bringing up the concept that other religions exist will generally just confuse people and lead nowhere. Yet I can’t imagine that anyone who knew me and could tell that I was a normal human being would hate me based on being Jewish in Honduras, because I (hopefully) bear no resemblance to the creatures that paraded through the streets.
It seems like the “Jews” are simply dressing up like we would for Halloween, and that they are actually doing a positive thing by raising money for charity. The Spanish were just generous enough to give the colonies an ugly stereotype with no context that they could use to use in the celebration in addition to all the other great things they did for these people. Yet even so, it obviously plays off a stereotype and image of the Jews that has led to persecution and death in many other parts of the world, and based on that I found the image depressing, despite feeling no ill will towards the people who dressed up as Jews. It turns out one of them was actually a close friend from when I used to live there. And its funny, all the time I knew him I never recognized that he was Jewish too until he took his little Hispanic mask off and revealed his true face!
Anyways, Easter Week in most of Honduras correlates with both the driest and hottest part of the year. Being a predominately Catholic country, everyone (besides the lower class workers who never ever have a day off) takes the whole week off to celebrate the Resurrection or whatever else they feel like celebrating. The correlation of this week off with the extreme heat leads to everyone who can afford it flocking to the coast. Generally in La Ceiba, a less conservative part of Honduras where not everyone is strictly religious, you are either with Jesus or with the sinners, with very little middle ground. You don’t find a lot of Hondurans who go to the pub Saturday night and church Sunday morning, either you’re with Jesus and don’t drink or you’re against him. Within this context, we had the choice to either drink and dance on the beach for the whole week or go to church for the whole week. I really would have loved the cultural experience of Easter week church services in Honduras, but due to fears I would be burned for being a Jew I regretfully had to go with the sinners this time. Due to my journalistic need for cultural immersion, I felt like I really had to go all in to get the full experience, something I really wish my 3rd graders could understand as I recover slowly and they are wild as ever.
A long section of the beach in La Ceiba is lined with bars, discos, and little places that serve up any kind of sin you could ask for in its purest form. Yet for Semana Santa, the beer company Salva Vida set up a huge tent that overshadowed almost everything else. It was a two story open air structure that fit a few thousand people and had a stage in the middle, and around the sides there was a closed off area away from the music that led up to the beach. Salva Vida is the biggest beer in Honduras, and the producers basically undercut all the other bars to sell directly to the consumers for this week, selling beers for about 60 cents while the other bars needed to take a cut themselves and sold for 90 cents to $1.50. Another La Ceiba blogger whose post on Semana Santa I will attach below wrote that this meant that no money was staying in the Ceiba economy for the event. I guess you can’t really argue with that, but it’s that old consumer gain/producer loss paradox from economic class, and in this case I saw a lot of consumers who seemed to be gaining quite a bit from the low beer prices.
The same blogger also wrote about how much violence Semana Santa drunkenness leads to, but I actually was very surprised at the event by how peaceful it was. There were thousands of people wandering the streets until the sun came up, in a country that many people advise you don’t go to because it’s allegedly so unsafe to even take a bus, and in 5 days of staying out late I only saw one fight and never felt unsafe for a minute. Someone in Boston weigh in on the comments page, how many fights do you see in a given night going out drinking on Bolyston Street? It is kind of strange because, while there were police officers around, it seemed like very few for the amount of drunk people around, and they weren’t really around at all except when an incident occurred and they came in for a couple minutes to pound on whoever was involved pretty brutally.
I also was very surprised at how little cocaine and prostitution I saw in the areas where the main partying was going on. I’m sure either could have been found with very little effort, but it wasn’t in your face in the way it often is in touristy parts of Central America, with every other person asking if you want to buy coke or are looking for a girl.
I talked to missionary friends who are totally against drinking in El Porvenir, a more rural area with a far more incompetent police force than was present at the event in Ceiba. The beach there gets flooded for Semana Santa, and they said that they were very pleasantly surprised at how family friendly and safe it was there. Of course, family friendly or not I have to question the parents who take their 3 year old kids to a disco until 3 in the morning. But this is Honduras, I guess those kids have to start dancing early or they’ll fall behind.
For me Semana Santa was interesting in really getting to see an entirely different class of Central Americans that I usually haven’t interacted with. Most tourists who could afford to get to the coast were university educated people from the capital or from Guatemala City who seemed to have a different outlook on life in many ways from the more campesino Hondurans I have had the most contact with. I think interacting on the dance floor is a good example of this. Normal Honduran discos are paradoxically very conservative yet in a sinful, sexual type of way, with no one ever dancing by themselves. Guys stand around the edges looking for girls, then buy them a drink and begin to dance in a very precise, exact way, and anyone who deviates from the rules won’t last very long there. In Ceiba’s Semana Santa, there were people dancing freely without these rules, in ways more similar to in an American bar where people aren’t afraid to look like idiots. It seemed like a much more open environment than I am accustomed to in Honduras in other ways too. People were dressed very liberally and in a variety of ways, and I saw actual hippies for the first time in Honduras. I also met openly gay people, which in most social circles in Honduras would be absolutely unheard of.
So I’m afraid I have to disagree with that popular La Ceiba blogger on this one. Obviously La Ceiba’s Holy Week doesn’t have very much to do with Easter or Jesus, and yes people drink and party to excess; although certainly not more than on any American university campus on any given weekend. But most Hondurans live in unbearably hot, dirty, miserable places where this time of year you can barely breathe through clouds of dust and exhaust hanging in the dry air. It seems like having a week to take a break, go to the beach, and be excessive or sinful isn’t really the worst thing that can happen at this miserable time of year. Of course, this escape from the painful reality of life only applies to the upper middle class and elite of the country, and the poor generally stay in their slums and cardboard houses dreaming of the year they can afford an Easter week trip to the coast. Yet you can’t blame the Semana Santa excesses for that reality. This may sound crazy, but I would actually put more blame on the kings and conquistadors who destroyed a new land in an obsession with gold and created this bastardized hopeless society only to exploit it in the name of some righteous, holy, pious organization that burns Jews for Easter. You know, like the Catholic Church! Don’t mind me father, I’ll be right over here with the sinners if you need me.
