Northern Mexico Events

The northern calendar is dominated by one extraordinary set of ceremonies in the canyon and by the ranching year elsewhere.

Raramuri Semana Santa — Holy Week, March or April

Easter in the Copper Canyon villages is the Raramuri’s most important observance and is unlike Catholic Holy Week anywhere else. Over several days, communities divide into two groups — the pariseos, painted white and associated with Judas, and the soldados who defend God — and enact a struggle for the world’s order through processions, drumming and dance that runs day and night, ending with the burning of a Judas effigy. Maize beer is brewed and drunk communally, and the whole thing is a fusion of seventeenth-century Jesuit teaching with older belief that has evolved into something the missionaries would not recognise. Some villages accept visitors, others do not; go with a community guide, do not photograph without explicit permission, and do not treat it as a spectacle.

Rarajipari ball races

Held through the year in canyon communities: teams kick a wooden ball along mountain trails for distances that can run well over a hundred kilometres, with betting and drinking around the course.

Yaqui deer dance — Easter, Sonora

The pascola and deer dancers perform through Holy Week, the deer dancer wearing a real deer’s head and gourd rattles.

Day of the Dead in the north — 1 and 2 November

Observed more soberly here than in the centre and south: graves cleaned and decorated, families spending the day at the cemetery, and far less of the public spectacle that has grown up around the festival elsewhere. In the mining towns of Zacatecas and Durango the cemeteries fill with candles, and the observance is domestic rather than staged.

Feria de Durango and the ranching fairs — summer

Regional fairs with charreria, the Mexican horsemanship tradition that is the national sport and is taken most seriously in the north.