by Walter Hodges

Consider the Mexican ox. At three-years-old and about 4.5 feet at the tip of the horns, an average ox carries a gentle disposition in their heart, a desert-scorched toughness in their gut, and around 2,500 pounds on their frame. Farmers often use them to plow their fields under a relentlessly brutal Mexican sun. These four-legged earth movers work incredibly hard for a living, but for as long as anyone in the community of La Talega can remember, in May, there is a fiesta, and, for a few hours, in a manner of speaking, the oxen get to celebrate.

Every year, the community of La Talega, twenty minutes outside of San Miguel de Allende, gives thanks to its patron saint with an all-day religious fiesta that features multiple events, including a mass in church, a huge concert, and the Blessing of the Oxen, to grace the upcoming planting season and future harvest. On fiesta day, a group of citizens get together and put giant headdress costumes on six pairs of oxen, and then go out and plow up a cornfield. Depending on your background, this is not something you see every day, or maybe even once.

The costumes rise from the neck yolk up into the air and are made of tree branches, paper flowers, bread, a necklace of fruit, a whole pineapple balanced on their head, and a full bottle of tequila strapped to their horns. The first time I saw this celebration, it froze me in place. I'd just never thought about the possibility. I do love Mexico, in part because of these incredible moments that seem to appear out of nowhere. In a country sometimes defined by frustrating contradictions, when you see stuff like this, you also have to consider and celebrate how on earth you got here from there, and once here, why would you ever want to leave and go somewhere else?

Nobody celebrates, and pays homage to their history, ancestors, and saints more than Mexicans. One theory behind the idea of fiestas is that traditional Mexicans celebrate so often because the rest of life can be so hard. For the average Mexican, the hard part may have some truth to it, but I don't think it's the reason they celebrate. I think it's much more positive than all that. I think Mexicans celebrate because spiritually they need to in order to live their lives fully. It's built into them like an extra heart that beats only to help them complete the circle of life. And to be fair, it's also a great excuse to let loose and have just one more tequila or mezcal. The honored Mexican poet and author Otavio Paz describes fiesta as "an experiment in disorder, reuniting contradictory elements and principles to bring about a renaissance of life."

The Mexican fiesta is a Spanish and Catholic tradition, dating back almost 500 years. We can't count, and nobody even attempts to keep track of the numbers of fiestas. But when you consider the Church currently recognizes over 10,000 saints worldwide, and every small town in Mexico celebrates one or two of their own patron saints yearly, you begin to see the scope of it. Patron saints are celebrated in what's called Fiestas Patronales. Compared to national holidays, government-inspired celebrations, and big-city marketing-driven festivals, small-town Fiestas Patronales strike close to the central core and the glorious madness of real Mexico. This stuff isn't promoted by the government or the travel web sites. You gotta search, but it's there.

The Fiestas Patronales in La Talega is a celebration to honor San Isidro Labrador — the patron of poor farmers and bountiful harvests. Living in Spain around 1100, he was a hard-working day laborer who came to represent the united image of common farmers everywhere. San Isidro is now honored worldwide, and in La Talega, this year's all-day multi-event fiesta took place on May 24, as always before the planting of the fields and the start of the rainy season in June.

A month before the fiesta, the preparation for the Blessing of the Oxen begins with the construction of paper flowers and ornamental headdresses. Nobody knows exactly when this tradition started, but Remedios and Consuelo Valle have created the flowers and headdresses in their homes for the past 35 years. Their mother, Doña Dolores Espinoza, now 97, helped make the decorations when she was young, and her mother made them before her. It's been that way for generations.

The forms for the headdresses are made with small, flexible tree branches from the desert tree called pirul, sort of like a vine maple in the US. The branches are bent into various shapes that resemble the frame of a curved stained-glass window, and then tied together with twine. Remedios and Consuelo made the flowers by hand from pieces of brightly colored crepe paper, a special glue, and wire. One week before the celebration, they assembled the massive headdresses and tied the flowers to the tree branch frames using whatever colorful designs they personally wanted to create. The astonishing finished decorative pieces stand around five feet tall and look like nothing else anywhere else.

On fiesta day, about 50 horsemen rode the cobblestone road into town and gathered their horses in front of the church, as a mass in honor of San Isidro Labrador took place inside. At the same time, the plowmen led their oxen from a corral, less than a kilometer away, to the large field that would soon be planted with corn. Somehow, with two cowboys trying to control the pair of oxen with ropes on each side, the yunteros managed to lift, position, wrestle, adjust, and finally tie the headdresses vertically to the yoke frame between each team of two oxen, who actually cooperated, in an oxish kind of way.

The headdresses stretched five glorious feet up from a yoke which was already four feet off the ground. The yunteros then draped huge necklaces of large oranges and small bread loaves strung together with heavy twine around the neck of each ox. A large bottle of tequila was then tied between their horns and hung loosely on their foreheads, so it bounced between their eyes when they plowed the field in tandem. I've had people doubt my telling, but that's the truth, the bottle of tequila bounced between their eyes.

After the mass in the church, the priest, José Manuel Briones, in a white robe, led a procession down a short dirt road to the cornfield. The parade included a Sinaloa banda of music, a woman carrying a small statue of Saint Isidro, another woman carrying a small toy statue of a symbolic pair of decorated oxen, all those guys on horses, a few stray dogs looking for food, at most a gringo or two, and just about all of the townspeople. An unimpressed dust-scruffy looking black cat sat in the sun and looked down on it all from the top of a tall brick wall.

The oxen take all this stuff on with a humbleness that can only be described as Mexican. The plowmen gathered their oxen teams with their flowered headdresses. Each team walked out into the field to ceremoniously plow the ground on this fiesta day as they have done for maybe two hundred years. For as long as anyone in La Talega can recall, it has been so. There was a moment when I stopped taking photos and notes and watched a team of decorated oxen and a 68-year-old grandfather plowman named Jerónimo Ríos plow the field. His family traveled to watch and support him.

Having never seen anything even close, the whole scene was stunningly mystifying. I let out a deep breath, shook my head, and stared at the furrowed ground as though an answer might be found looking in that direction. Tránsito Guerrero Mejia trained his oxen for three years so they could celebrate fiesta, carry the headdress-costume on their heads, and plow this field with style and grace, and that's exactly what they did. The good people of La Talega treated this entire "theatrical" event with respect, honor, devotion, and passion. They treated it as though it were all written down somewhere in scripture.

Father Briones walked up to and faced the six assembled teams of decorated oxen. He carried a bundle of small leafy tree branches in his right hand and with it repeatedly doused water from a Home Depot bucket full of water straight into the faces of each team of oxen. The water hit those oxen's faces, and they stood fast to their marks in the center of the dirt cornfield stage. After the Blessing of the Oxen, right there in front of heaven and the whole town, Father Briones raised his arms, looked up into a cobalt blue sky with tufts of white, and speaking loudly so everyone could hear him, offered a prayer to Almighty God for a bountiful harvest and good fortune for the hard-working farmers of La Talega. It was time for a celebration. It was time for new growth. It was time for a "renaissance of life."

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Walter Hodges is a retired commercial photographer and writer from the Seattle, Washington area. Walter spent over 50 years on assignment traveling the world as a corporate and industrial photographer before retiring to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, in 2019. He currently writes and photographs stories about underpublicized aspects of Mexican culture, as well as interesting profiles of average Mexican citizens

Website: photography, writing, blog
hodges.walter@gmail.com

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