76 images Created 17 Feb 2016
Mexico. The devils of the Judea Cora
The Judea Cora, the less known Mexico’s Holy Week, is the more complex and spectacular manifestation of the Cora cosmogony. The Cora, an indigenous people living on the Western Sierra Madre in the Mexican state of Nayarit, are famous for their rituals still permeated of an impressive cosmogony considered by many antrhopologists one of the more interesting of the Latin America for its syncretism mixing their traditional religion with the Christianism. Those rituals are difficult to document because the Coras don’t like any kind of visual recording. In a climax of violence, reputed by many anthropologists the heart of the ritual itself, the Judea, the “infernal militia”, establish a kind of reign of the terror seeking to kill Jesus Christ. For four days and four nights the village of Santa Teresa del Nayar lives in a wild-eyed atmosphere with many participants often uncontrollable for the unbridled use of alcoo. Hundreds of borrados, men painted in black, red, and white, struggle with wooden swords while in the church are celebrated ceremonies from which the catholic priest of the village is excluded, until the Holy Friday when after the dead of Jesus Christ finally all quietens.