4th Annual Parranda con Paranda

A Puerto Rican & Garifuna Holiday Celebration

Dec 17, 2016 @ 7:00pm

Each year we cap our Bronx Rising! series with a concert that features traditions from two of the Bronx’s distinct Latino communities: Puerto Rican and Garifuna. This year will celebrate traditions with cuernos (horns), mainly the vejigante masked traditions from Puerto Rico (celebrated at Carnaval and the Celebration for St. James), and the charikanari and piamanadi traditions (practiced by Garifuna communities in Belize and Honduras, respectively). With Lucy Blanco, James Lovell, Bobby Sanabria, Jorge Vázquez, Felix Gamboa, and other artists, the event will also include a toy drive for El Maestro’s Three King’s Day celebration. Food will be on sale.
Celebración de los Cuernos/Festival of Horns
Masks serve a variety of purposes—they can be used for play, for celebration, and for sacred rituals. The Spanish word for “mask”—máscara—tells us a lot about the nature of masks. “Más” and “cara” taken together mean “more than one face” or “many faces.” This second face transforms the face of the user—it conceals the individual’s real face and reveals another. A person may act differently knowing that their true identity is concealed. And in this form they may also take on the sacred or god-like qualities of the character in whose drama they are performing. In Puerto Rico, masks are worn for different occasions, but its vejigante masks are quite notable. The masks featured tonight are from the city of Ponce, which is on the southern coast of Puerto Rico. These vejigantes participate in the pre-Lenten Carnival festivities. This name comes from the Spanish words vejiga, meaning “bladder,” and gigante, meaning “giant,” because the maskers carry an inflated cow bladder on a stick to harmlessly hit people during the festivities. In Ponce by 1783 the figure of the vejigante was part of the costumed choral groups and masquerade balls organized during Carnival times. Today the vejigantes start their performances on February 2nd, the celebration of Our Lady of Candalaria.
Though there aremany characters and figures which are portrayed at Carnival such as the loca and the caballero, it is the vejigante that attracts everyone’s attention. The masks are made of paper maché and have an animal-like appearance with many horns and monstrous teeth. Though scary in appearance to frighten, the maskers are clowns and mischief-makers as well–dancing, singing and chasing participants with their vejiga. Folk tunes called estribillos follow the rhythms of their dances. And in the town of Loiza Aldea vejigantes are part of the July celebrations for the fiesta patronal (feast day celebration) of Santiago Apostol, or St. James the Apostle, the town’s patron saint. Devotion to St. James goes back to the 9th century in Spain. However in Loíza, as the town was isolated for a long time, the celebration has retained a lot of African motifs brought over by enslaved Africans during the colonial era.
The masks are made from coconut husks and traditionally painted in black, red, orange and white, and should have at least three chifles or small thin horns coming out of the top. Wanaragua (literally “mask”), commonly called Jankunu, is essentially a two-fold system of masked professionals that is commonly performed during the Christmas season, specifically from December 25 to Epiphany, January 6. Wanaragua is also the name of the principal dance rite of the system.
It is a unique synthesis of three cultural traditions: (1) African harvest festivals, ancestorrituals, and secret societies, (2) English mummer’s plays, and (3) Amerindian (Arawak and Carib) festivals. Charikanari, the second processional dance, features stock characters such as Two-Foot Cow, Devil, and numerous hianro (men and boys dressed as women). Two years ago at the BMHC we celebrated the wanaragua where Garifuna men adorn themselves with colorful regalia to replicate and mock British military customs through music and dance. Tonight we present, Charikanari, or “Two Foot Cow,” which is the dramatization of a hunting scene. As this masked dance begins, the observer is introduced to a two footed cow and a hunter (hunta-man) carrying a rifle on his shoulder. As the story unravels, a harmonica accompanies the rhythmic boom of the Garifuna bass drum (segundo) and the lead Garifuna drum (primero), along with periodic blasts on a conch shell trumpet.
Charikanari begins on December 26 (Boxing Day) and is especially popular among children, who are particularly fond sof everal stock characters: (1) “Two-Foot-Cow,” a man wearing cow horns, a cardboard mask, a long trench coat, and padded buttocks, (2) “Devil,” a man wearing a red devils mask, and (3) hianros, boys and men dressed as women. Occasionally the director of the charikanari group and the drummers perform responsorial songs, some of which are sexually suggestive in nature or recount comical incidents. Warini and pia manadi, now quite rare, are the names of additional rituals previously performed during the Christmas season. Wárini, the West African-centered, masked-dance prelude to wanaragua featured men wearing cardboard masks and dressed completely in dried banana leaves. Traditionally, they appeared only on December 24 and returned on the evening of January 6, signifying the beginning and end of the wanaragua season. Pia manadi, believed to be a more direct retention of the English mummer’s plays than wanaragua, featured stock characters reenacting a death and resurrection theme to the accompaniment of a drum and fife (cane flute). According to records it was last performed in the Punta Gorda Town in southern Belize in the 1970s.