Colombia is a country of beauty pageants. There are beauty pageants for everything, festivals, meetings, cities and so on. Beauty queen of the sea, of the ganaderia, of the neighborhood, of the flowers festival… there’s no end to the list.
Of course, the Barranquilla Carnival is no difference, in this festivity there is not one but two beauty queens. One is called the Queen of the Carnival and the other is called the Popular Queen of the Carnival. The difference? the first one is elected by the junta of the carnival, the group that runs the official festivities, the other one is elected by a public contest form girls from the city. Usually the queen is part of the small circle of families in power, the popular queen comes form middle and lower class neighborhoods. The Reina del Carnaval and the Reina Popular are both at the stage, they are presiding everything, from concerts, declarations, parades and all kinds of festivities; both know very well their place, depending on the nature of the event , the people attending and the hierarchy of the queens(the official one is always more important). In the “Batalla de Flores” (most important parade in the carnival, one is on a big float, the other one is on foot. Guess which one is walking on the street in the parade.
These figures are the materialization of the society’s ideals towards women, beauty, desire and also about social structure, class differentiation, and racial issues in Colombian society.
The figure of the cumbiambera also serves as an icon of femininity and restages the myth of mixture of the birth of Colombian population (a love story between an African men and an indigenous/white woman) this myth is also underplaying racial conflicts that are very often mixed with social and class conflicts. Those issues get played in the skin, in the bones, in the muscles… in the tiny differences between movements, the use of space, the oscillation of the hips…
I want to look at the role of this three figures of the carnival, its election, behaviors, actions, movemenst,,,, and find how these ideologies about beauty, race, class and gender get staged, danced, dressed, constructed, reinforced and perpetuated every carnival and what hey can tell us about the Colombian society.
Of course, the Barranquilla Carnival is no difference, in this festivity there is not one but two beauty queens. One is called the Queen of the Carnival and the other is called the Popular Queen of the Carnival. The difference? the first one is elected by the junta of the carnival, the group that runs the official festivities, the other one is elected by a public contest form girls from the city. Usually the queen is part of the small circle of families in power, the popular queen comes form middle and lower class neighborhoods. The Reina del Carnaval and the Reina Popular are both at the stage, they are presiding everything, from concerts, declarations, parades and all kinds of festivities; both know very well their place, depending on the nature of the event , the people attending and the hierarchy of the queens(the official one is always more important). In the “Batalla de Flores” (most important parade in the carnival, one is on a big float, the other one is on foot. Guess which one is walking on the street in the parade.
These figures are the materialization of the society’s ideals towards women, beauty, desire and also about social structure, class differentiation, and racial issues in Colombian society.
The figure of the cumbiambera also serves as an icon of femininity and restages the myth of mixture of the birth of Colombian population (a love story between an African men and an indigenous/white woman) this myth is also underplaying racial conflicts that are very often mixed with social and class conflicts. Those issues get played in the skin, in the bones, in the muscles… in the tiny differences between movements, the use of space, the oscillation of the hips…
I want to look at the role of this three figures of the carnival, its election, behaviors, actions, movemenst,,,, and find how these ideologies about beauty, race, class and gender get staged, danced, dressed, constructed, reinforced and perpetuated every carnival and what hey can tell us about the Colombian society.
No comments:
Post a Comment