Blank faces of the cursed, and smiling faces of the blessed stared at me through black soot from photos on the walls of witch doctor Tito Guenpal Seba’s office.
The smell of incense mingled with cheap cologne among dozens of candles burning beside paintings of Jesus Christ. Wood carvings of a baboon and a lizard sat at the feet of a statue of the Virgin Mary.
Here, in this well-kept house (though modest by our standards), Catholicism clashed with ancient magical forces passed from generation to generation for 3,000 years.
It was partly to sample such a phenomenon that I came to Veracruz, a skinny state averaging 55 miles wide that stretches, crescent-shaped, 430 miles along the southwest side of the Gulf of Mexico.
Unlike the Mexican coastal resorts such as Cancun and Acapulco, the Veracruz area has not succumbed to the beach strips filled with ritzy hotels and boutiques. Here, a visitor still can get a flavor of Old-World traditions and see how they are changing in modern times.
With almost no understanding of the Spanish language, I relied on locals such as Spokane, Wash., transplant Roy Dudley of nearby Jalapa and English-speaking tour guide Temoc Benitez to take me off the beaten path.
Catemaco is a rural community of about 20,000 beside a peaceful lake in southern Veracruz state. It’s ringed by low, rolling mountains and plantations of fruit, coffee beans and tobacco plus a rain forest with trees up to 100 feet tall.
Founded in 1667, the area is known for its orchids and nearly 400 species of birds. Visitors ride flimsy wooden boats on tours of the placid lake, whose shore is dotted with villages and whose small islands are home to monkeys brought from Thailand to live in preserves.
While witchcraft has had a home here since the Olmecs, Mesoamerica’s oldest civilization, ruled the land 3,000 years ago, recent years have brought it new interest.
Today, Catemaco is known as the City of Witches. Tourism officials promote the local occult, especially the “Annual Convention of Wizards” on the first Friday of March, when thousands of visitors pay $20 to $500 to be rid of evil spirits or plain bad luck. Tourists, most of whom are from other parts of Mexico, stroll the streets looking for someone to lead them to a witch doctor.
It was easy even for a visitor to see that witchcraft has influenced the local business community.
Many businesses use the word brujo (meaning witch) in their names. There’s the wooden-hut restaurant called Seven Brujos and the Brujo Inn. There’s even a Brujo coffee house. Young boys, aged about 7 to 12, ran up to tour guide Benitez and me on the street with offers to lead us to a brujo for a small fee. But we wanted to see a brujo that the locals use.
A police officer pointed us toward Guenpal Seba’s home, along a dirt road just south of town. The two-story stucco house looked like a castle compared to the many single-room shanties in the neighborhood.
The outside wall had a 5-foot-tall painting of a Bengal tiger. A sign beneath it warned that we were entering the lair of a black-magic brujo.
The place reminded me that in the tiny, predominantly Mexican-American enclave where I was raised in southern Colorado, neighbors told tales of curanderos (curers) or brujos who practiced magic passed down from ancient Indian tribes of South America and southern and central Mexico.
I never really believed in witches. But stepping into Seba’s office made me rethink.
His jet-black hair was slicked back over his leathery-skinned face. A gold amulet hung around his neck.
His silver-haired mother, who greeted us when we walked in, sat by the door to keep other customers from interrupting.
Seba would “cleanse” my spirit or cast a curse for about 500 pesos, a little less them $50. A charred voodoo doll was at his side–a sign he meant business. Photographs of him doing a “spiritual cleansing” of former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo were on the wall.
“If the president comes to this guy, this place has to be the real thing,” Benitez said.
When Seba wanted 500 pesos to cleanse me of evil spirits, Benitez, who was interpreting, began bargaining. It made me a bit nervous. After all, it was my soul on the table here. In broken English, Seba countered with an offer of a speedy spiritual cleansing–and good luck–for 200 pesos (a little less than $20).
When I quipped that without those evil spirits I would have no one to keep me company, Benitez chuckled, but Seba’s face stayed like stone.
I sat facing the wall of blackened photos. Benitez stood beside me. Seba sat in a chair at the opposite end of the room as his young apprentice spread oil that smelled strongly of alcohol, first over my arms, then my legs. He then took a mouthful and spat it in my face. The oil would clean me of spirits, Benitez said.
Seba’s chants in Spanish and in some sort of Indian language were foreign even to Benitez.
There is white magic and black magic, Guenpal Seba explained to Benitez in Spanish. Black magic, he said, is the most powerful, but there are often consequences for dealing with dark forces.
“I can change my shape into any animal I wish, but doing so would mean giving my family’s souls to the devil,” he said.
The session over, we walked into the bright sun. I reeked of alcohol, and my arms and neck tingled as fresh air hit my wet skin.
Benitez suggested the tingling might be the magic at work. I told him it was the alcohol in the oil.
Whichever it was, I knew I had taken part in a tradition thousands of years old, just one of my several brushes with history in Veracruz.
– – –
“Ouch. Where’d that damn thing go?”
I wasn’t the only one spitting out those angry words.
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The topic was the local mosquitoes and how they have mastered the art of the phantom bite. Before I realized it, my legs were covered with red bumps and the offending flying insects already were long gone.
I wasn’t deep in a jungle either–I hadn’t even made it through the airport in Veracruz.
Locals quip that the mosquitoes are the real reason the Spaniards quickly headed west to take on the Aztecs in the 16th Century.
Veracruz (population about 381,000) is where the Spanish captain Hernando Cortes allied himself with the region’s Totonac Indians and went on to conquer the Aztec empire in Mexico’s interior.
Founded in 1519 by Cortes, the busy port city is a bit rough around the edges. Government buildings, three to four stories tall, were created with marble columns that are well-maintained and sparkle in the searing heat.
But many of the city’s other structures show the wear of 100 years and are shabby, with sagging ceilings and peeling paint.
By some accounts, Cortes burned his ships in the harbor to prevent his troops from committing mutiny and sailing to Cuba. Locals, however, say the conquistador dismantled them and used the wood as material for the city’s first buildings.
The diverse population of Veracruz bears a heavy Caribbean soul; its Spanish-speaking residents drop the “s” from some words, making the sounds more Cuban. Its buildings’ arches and stone walls hark back to colonial French and Spanish-Moorish styles.
Change is steady. A world trade center the size of Madison Square Garden is nearly complete across the street from the Boca Del Rio beach resorts. Government tourism officials are pushing for more resorts in the beach area, which stretches south of the city.
The dark-sand beach stretches through the southern part of Veracruz City. Though the sand feels like clay and there are few seashells, locals and Mexican tourists flock to them and eat in the fish shacks along the beach.
Some parts of the beach are dirty, littered with disposable diapers and plastic bottles.
But what Veracruz might lack in beaches, it makes up for in history, culture and nightlife.
Long regarded as the New Orleans of Mexico, the city naps after 5 p.m. and comes alive three hours later.
By midnight, its streets are teeming with foreign and Mexican tourists and sailors from around the world. Dance clubs such as local favorites Zoo and Blue Ocean bombard visitors with everything from Spanish rock and rap to techno beats played at ear-splitting levels.
The city is a favorite of Mexico City residents, just a four-hour drive away.
More Americans are catching on, said Roy Dudley, a former Spokane resident who has lived in Mexico for 28 years and runs a photo studio and makeshift tour-guide operation out of Jalapa, the state’s capital city in the mountains about 65 miles northwest of the port city.
At La Antigua, a small village northwest of Veracruz City where Cortes had made his home, Dudley and I were greeted by a mob of boys offering to show us the city for 50 pesos (a little less than $5 U.S.)
Our first stop was behind the white walls of a Catholic church, the Ermita Del Rosario Chapel, built in 1523-24. The first baptism of a Totonac Indian was in this church, and Cortes attended services at its tiny chapel.
In ruins, down a cobbled stone street two blocks from the church, is Cortes’ house. The walls of the house, built about the same time as the church, were constructed of rock from the nearby Huizilapa River and coral from the sea. Only a few of the original 24 rooms remain , but the house still attracts a steady flow of tourists. Dirt is all that remains of the house floors; locals took the tiles to use in their own homes.
Spaniards used the house for 70 years, according to Francisco Mejia, who teaches children Cortes history to pass on to tourists.
Mejia said that much of Mexico, and especially Veracruz, has had a strange relationship with Cortes’ memory. No statues pay tribute to Cortes in the state of Veracruz, although a street in the port city bears his name. Murals depicting heroism and courage are of Indian warriors rather than Spanish soldiers.
“On the good side, Cortes made the Indians civilized, ended human sacrifices and brought the Catholic religion,” Mejia said.
“Most don’t say it in a vengeful way, but many believe the conquest was not good because the Indians had to give away their culture, and many of them their lives.”
South of La Antigua, at Zempoala, the white stucco Totonac buildings (now ruins) glistened in the sun so brightly that when the Spanish first arrived, one soldier told Cortes he thought the city was covered in silver.
There are fewer than a dozen pyramids at Zempoala open to the public on a site the size of four football fields.
We encountered a group of men who practice what we’re told is the ancient art of “flying.”
They wore bright red suits with beautifully ornamented vests. The leader climbed to the top of a 70-foot-high pole and blew into a shell horn and beat a drum, turning to face the north, south, east and west. Under a canopy of dark clouds and showing little fear of an approaching thunderstorm, four flyers wound a rope (attached to them) around the pole as they ascended it. They then jumped off and swung around the pole as they descended.
The “flyers” represented the four cardinal points, and their descent symbolized rain. Each flyer is to spin around the pole 13 times as he falls to the ground. Multiplied by four, they will be 52 , the same number of weeks in a year.
One flyer said it was a centuries-old ritual started by the ancients to pay tribute to their gods.
“It’s like we’re looking back in time,” Dudley said.
In the evening about 8 p.m., the city of Veracruz’s palm-tree-lined Plaza de Las Armas came to life as sweat-drenched tourists, sailors and locals formed a circle around a 10-piece band setting up on a stage.
Men in white cotton shirts, pants and straw hats–some local aristocrats, most commoners–strolled into the square with women on their arms. The band struck up a slow, steady beat and the couples stepped lightly into danzon, a dance brought from Cuba years ago and now the city’s adopted dance.
“You are not seeing Veracruz if you’re not doing the danzon,” said one woman as she entered the dance floor.
The beat stopped abruptly and the couples stood hand-in-hand facing the horn players; some bowed and some clapped. The beat started again and the dance resumed; ever so calmly the couples stepped side to side or back and forth. It was like a waltz.” Danzon has no formal steps, but it’s definitely an art form,” said Emanuel Yarimi, 56, who comes here at least once a year from Toronto to experience danzon, then return to teach it to his dance students.
“The dance has three different movements, with the last one being quicker then the other two. The last one went on to become the cha-cha,” Yarimi said.
Between danzon numbers, other music comes from restaurants across the Plaza de Las Armas, with musicians representing every part of the Latin American music world battling it out for tips along the square.
Music from lustrous wood marimbas and harps filled the air and guitars kept pace, with quartets playing songs from northern Mexico. Mariachis with their guitars and trumpets enticed crowds at one of the half-dozen or so open-air restaurants on the plaza.
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Some may see Veracruz as the epitome of old Mexico. For me, it was a place to see and feel old and modern days and different cultures mesh harmoniously.
Under a palm tree in a soft rain, I remembered how during my brief visit a brujo had cleansed my spirit, a city’s nightlife had awakened and challenged my senses; and Spanish and Indian ruins and flyers had been my window to the past.
But when I think of the wonders, heritage and richness of Veracruz, I’ll remember danzon.
There are no steps, but one can step perfectly; the dance doesn’t stop when a mistake is made; and every now and then you have to stop and salute the things in life that keep the music flowing.