Festival of Saint Isidore and Festival of the Yokes in Andagua

Nearly every May is the Festival of Saint Isidore (Fiesta de San Isidore), the patron saint of farmers, and otherwise known as the Festival of the Yokes (or Plows) (Fiesta de las yuntas) in Andagua. In May 2016, I attended the festival, with this post a brief account of the day.

In recognition of San Isidro the community holds mass at the chapel in his name. The chapel is perched at the east edge of town, with the valley floor disappearing to meet Lake Andagua below and setting in relief the distant mountainside. A large cross stands next to the chapel and path, and is freshly adorned with flowers from the recent festival of the crosses. There is a stone pathway that descends into the valley cut through by a recently constructed road as it winds down the hillside. The valley below is a mosaic of stepped terraces curving throughout the landscape creating spectrum of greens, yellows and browns, and dotted by trees. It is an impressive human-modified (anthropogenic) landscape; a testament to the deep pasts and human work continually transforming the landscape. The stone path offers a direct, steep staircase down into the terraced valley, though it quickly dissolves into the road, reappearing as traces here and there along the way. Such stone paths continue to traverse the valley, varying in their histories, and remaining extent and uses.

Leading the mass, a Franciscan monk recounts Saint Isidore’s antiquity and while he was a man of many occupations, foremost, he did not own his own land, and thus worked as a hired hand for a wealthy landowner.

Like Saint Isidore, most of the community of Andagua is dedicated to maintaining and working the valley's terraces. So on the celebration of this saint, the community of Andagua pays homage to the beasts of burden who provide for them and with whom they share the fields.

The tangled Spanish colonial legacies of plants, animals, ideas, practices (e.g. “cultures and religions”) pre-Hispanic pasts inform and are transformed through contemporary and historical traditions. Today there are three sets of yuntas (6 bulls, 2 bulls for each plow), and community members often comment on the dwindling numbers of yuntas. Now much of the community uses a shared tractor that can descend into the valley with the wide roads that wind down the valley.

Following the mass, the band struck a resounding note, the crowd gathered, and following the bulls leads (in turn wrangled by pairs of men), the observers walked along the dirt road between stone homes with thatched roofs to the plaza, where they returned the figure of San Isidro to the church and prepared to dance late into the night.

The celebrations also involved drinking beer from bull horns and sharing chicha (corn beer) (the vessels for choice beverages, most often alcoholic, are an important feature in festivals and ritual practices for all different cultures throughout the world and history, and exemplified in the pre-Hispanic Andes with the use of k’eros and other vessels). The festival continued through Sunday and Monday, with more yuntas involved.