It can be said that Ricardo Fajardo Hernández, a native of La Laguna, is a “specialist” in the festivities of the Canary Islands. But not just anyone, but those in which the protagonists are animals as representations of good and evil.
Getting it was not easy. It took him years of research and trips to all the Islands to learn about some of these traditions in situ and interview 116 people, an exhaustive anthropological work based on the oral tradition that consists of a historical part, a descriptive part, a comparative part and their corresponding conclusions. . The result was an original thesis, entitled Festive manifestations of a zoomorphic character in the Canary Islands, which he presented on December 1 at the University of La Laguna and for which he received an outstanding cum laude.
It was not for less in an investigation of this magnitude and its theme, on which there is little written, among other reasons, because many festive manifestations have disappeared or modified over the years.
Therefore, the biggest complication he faced was obtaining informants. “Going to knock directly on a person’s door is very complicated when they don’t know you,” he confesses. In the case of having a tutor or someone who is a cover letter it is easier.
In many cases, his thesis supervisor, Manuel Lorenzo Perera, was a guide and in others, it was he who surprised him by finding faithful witnesses to these demonstrations that take place in Carnivals, Corpus Christi or during festivals in some neighborhoods and municipalities.
Ricardo has a degree in Philosophy, teaches at an institute and wrote his thesis combining it with his work and family. “My wife and daughter know her perfectly,” he jokes. His wife is of El Hierro origin, so he facilitated the initial field work, because many of the interviewees were known to the family.
He began at the end of the 90s with the Doctorate courses, which were followed by the thesis in 1997, publications derived from some of its chapters, and then he was affected by a change of decree at the University that delayed the presentation of his thesis. In short, he took it “with a total Canarian pachorra” until he managed to publish it.
Pigs, donkeys, snakes, dogs, male goats, oxen or the bicha, a kind of dragon with a hundred heads, are the main characters of the 52 festive manifestations of the Archipelago that Ricardo investigated and which he leaves on record so that they are not lost.
The originality of his thesis also lies in the fact that some of these popular dramatizations are not well known, as is the case of the Pigs of Sabinosa or the Caballos Fufos, which are completed with the Puerto de la Cruz snake kill, the Devils of Las Angustias, in Icod de los Vinos; the Caballitos de Tazacorte; the Diabletes of Teguise; the Rams of Tigaday, the Bulls of Tiagua, the liveries of El Palmar, in Buenavista del Norte and Los Silos, and the devils of Erjos, to name a few examples.
The researcher distinguishes between ancient rituals that are maintained, such as the liveries of El Palmar or the donkeys of Güímar. The Release of the cursed dog, a popular tradition recovered by a group of young people in Valsequillo, Gran Canaria, which is celebrated on September 29 on the night of San Miguel, patron of the municipality, emerges as a performance, public shows in which it is about to link a past and lost traditions, but which aim to attract many people. In this case, according to custom, the devil, in the form of a dog, was released from the chains by which the archangel had held him and together with him the witches and the devils came out and the struggle between freedom and repression began.
A special chapter deserves the Carneros de Tigaday, which also led to the publication of the book Los Carneros de El Hierro, a Carnival demonstration on this island that was about to be lost during the war and was rescued by a neighbor who had emigrated to Cuba and Venezuela.
“They are people dressed in sheep skins on Shrove Sunday and Tuesday who are running after the boys in authentic clothing, open-air dried sheep skins, not bought in stores or made by seamstresses. This man would cut them out, put them in the sun, take his brains out and take care of them until the day came to show them off, ”says Ricardo.
This tradition was consolidated in the 90s and continues to be maintained, despite the fact that the man who managed to recover it died in 2005.
Investigating this specific manifestation, he met Manuel Perera, who was on the island of Meridiano preparing his thesis and was struck by his rigor and dedication to his work. He told him that there were more sheep in Tenerife, “and his passion put me in my body,” says Ricardo.
The manifestation that most caught his attention and that is different from all the others is the Mataculebra, an Afro-Cuban ritual that arrived in the Canary Islands more than a hundred years ago, which was maintained at the Puerto de la Cruz Carnival until the 80s. of the last century and that was recovered by the Classroom of Folklore of the Faculty of Education of the ULL.
“It is an animal that does not exist in the Canary Islands and whose death expresses the victory over evil, which threatened the life of the community in the African towns, and the symbolic representation of the exploitation of blacks in the slave system in Cuba” explains the anthropologist, who adds that when he arrived from the Latin American country he settled in various places, such as the north of the island of La Palma and the La Orotava Valley. He assures that in La Laguna and Santa Cruz there were also representations, but they were lost and the only one that survived was the Mataculebra of Portuense because it is a tourist city in which this ritual is represented in the Carnivals.
Now Ricardo Fajardo has made a well-deserved break, although his next goal is clear: “Writing a thesis is not to have a degree and become a doctor, but rather you have to publish it so that people know it. In books with worldwide circulation or in specialized magazines it is beautiful, but the ideal thing would be to do it in the towns where these demonstrations are held so that they reach the population ”, he emphasizes.
He clarifies that festive manifestations of a zoomorphic nature in the Canary Islands “is not his legacy, but of 116 people who have given away this information that is part of the Canarian culture.”
