SANTA FE, N.M.-
OK, so you expect a community festival to feature the requisite fried dough, carnival rides and arts-and-crafts booths.
But a solemn processional with a centuries-old statue of the Virgin Mary, the frenzied public burning of a 50-foot-tall puppet and a pet parade with pooches in tutus?
This is indeed the "City Different."
The annual Fiesta de Santa Fe, being held this year for the 294th time, is a celebration reflective of the rich, varied–and sometimes quirky–history and culture of one of the nation's oldest cities.
It comes the weekend after Labor Day, when the hordes of summer tourists have largely cleared out. Its underpinnings are the "familia y fe"–family and faith–of this strongly Hispanic community.
"Fiestas to us is a big thing. It's all about our culture," said Sarah Duran, a Santa Fe native who will welcome home her large family–now including great-grandchildren–with traditional meals of red chile, posole and tamales.
It's a time for locals to gather in the heart of a town many feel they have ceded to art galleries and outsiders.
"You see everybody downtown on the plaza that you haven't seen maybe in a year or more," Duran said. "People that have moved away from here, they come back and celebrate the fiestas."
Fiesta-related activities go on all week, but the core of the event begins Thursday night with the torching of Zozobra, or Old Man Gloom, a monstrous marionette with a mop of red hair.
"Burn him, burn him," chant the thousands who crowd into a city park and nearby neighborhoods to listen to the awful moans of the white-robed puppet and watch the year's worries go up in smoke.
Zozobra was the invention of Will Shuster, an Anglo artist seeking to lighten up the historically religious event. That was in 1924–giving Zozobra a six-decade head start on Burning Man, the weeklong counterculture arts festival and party held last week in the Nevada desert north of Reno.
The fiesta's Saturday pet parade likewise has been drawing kids–more than 1,200 of them last year–with their pets and parents in tow since the 1920s.
Long-suffering family dogs, some in wigs or costumes, are a staple of the parade that winds through downtown. But goats, lambs, roosters, rabbits, turtles, birds, rats, cats, guinea pigs and llamas also have participated.
Sunday's Historical/Hysterical Parade is a hodgepodge of floats featuring civic or other organizations, businesses and church groups–and politicians aplenty, especially in an election year.
The Fiesta de Santa Fe was decreed in 1712 by city fathers who said it should be celebrated annually with "Vespers, Mass, Sermon and Procession through the Main Plaza."
"This is the oldest community celebration of its kind in America," said Tony Lopez, a past president of the Santa Fe Fiesta Council, a volunteer group that coordinates the events.
"It's a time for everyone in the city to celebrate our history, and see each other, and be a community," said Christal J. Benavidez, who works with Duran as a tour guide at the state Capitol and grew up just a few blocks from the plaza. "That's our culture. That's our religion."
The fiesta was established to commemorate the re-entry of the Spaniards into Santa Fe, a dozen years after a bloody revolt in 1680 by oppressed Pueblo Indians had sent the colonists fleeing southward to what is now Juarez, Mexico.
The 1692 reconquest, led by Don Diego de Vargas, is invariably described as peaceful. There was, however, bloodshed following his second expedition a year later. Indians have never found cause for celebration in the annual fiesta, although there are a few Indians in the retinue that re-creates De Vargas's re-entry.
"It's an emotional thing. … It was not a bloodless reconquest," said Herman Agoyo, former governor of the pueblo of Ohkay Ohwingeh, which used to be known as San Juan Pueblo.
Prodded by Roman Catholic church leaders–and following the release of a documentary that showed Indians upset about the way they were portrayed–fiesta organizers made a series of changes 14 years ago in the staging, script and costumes. A special Mass of Reconciliation was held, and "La Conquistadora"–the 29-inch wooden statue of the Blessed Virgin that first was brought to Santa Fe in 1625 and has a key role in Fiesta activities–was given an additional name: Our Lady of Peace.
"We haven't turned our attention to the fiesta in recent years, and I like it that way," Agoyo said in a recent interview.
