The Liberating Spirit Summary

Ancient Earth Religion

In his book, The Liberating Spirit: Toward an Hispanic American Pentecostal Social Ethic, Eldin Villafañe examines the role and importance of the fiesta in Latino culture. This book continues his theoretical approach with an examination of how the fiesta is played out in Espinazo in the cult of the Niño Fidencio. Villafañe describes the Latino fiesta as follows:

“The fiesta in Latin American culture and society is deeply meaningful. The fiestas patronales/patron saints (such as El Niño Fidencio), is typical throughout the Latin American world. Religious and non-religious events in the calendar year mark the occasions that are the basis of a marvelous sense of community that celebrates life through fiesta.”

Catholic theologian Virgilio Elizondo places the fiesta in an even more primal context, “The happiness and joy…is immediately obvious to outsiders. The tragedies of their history have not obliterated laughter and joy…fiesta is the mystical affirmation that life is a gift and is worth living….In the fiesta the Mexican American rises above the quest for the logical meaning of life and celebrates the very contradictions that are of the essence of the mystery of human life (Elizondo, 1983).”

It should be noted that the Mexican fiesta is based in folk-Catholicism and Villafañe describes the importance of the worship of saints.

Elizondo’s fiesta is very different from the indigenous cargo cult fiestas studied by American anthropologists in southern Mexico and Guatemala in the 1960s and 1970s. Anthropologist Waldemar Smith in his book, The Fiesta System and Economic Change, states that one distinguishing feature of the fiesta system is the extraordinary costs that families bear during their year in office in the cargo cult. “Fiesta sponsors are expected to hire ritual specialists, perform considerable ceremonial labor, and host a fiesta complete with food, drink, and musical entertainment for other members of the community (Smith,

1977).”
The labor and expense of the Fidencista fiesta is very much the same but the funds are accumulated by the materias and their followers in their hometowns and then invested in a fiesta played out in Espinazo at the Niño Fidencio’s pilgrimage site (Villafañe, 1993 and Sanchez-Walsh, 2003).
Waldemar Smith points out that: “The fiesta system (in Mayan communities) is less a cause of the Indians’ cultural and social status than a consequence of how Indians have been integrated into Mesoamerican colonial regimes. Exclusion of Indians from cosmopolitan social life, coupled with their subjugated economic position and their freedom in running their own community affairs, are the larger conditions that motivate fiesta sponsorship.”
This is exactly how I characterize the fiesta system in Espinazo, Nuevo León, a celebration in memory and honor of El Niño Fidencio. Fidencio was a barefooted kitchen boy who became a folk-saint. His fame as a taumaturge/miracle worker and curandero comes from the attribution of the people he helped and not from self-promotion. As in the description of the Indigenous fiestas above, the followers of Fidencio are themselves more often than not at the bottom of the Mexican economic scale. Additionally, they suffer from exclusion from cosmopolitan social life that is combined with their subjugated economic position.