Mexican Culture: Cohetes (Firecrackers or Rockets)

The Casa Mariposa—the house we rent—is located on a bay in Lake Pátzcuaro about a mile equidistant from the pueblos of Tzurumútaro on one side and Estación (Old Railway Station) on the other.  Across the bay a couple of miles away is the pueblo of Ihuatzio.  At the head of the bay is the Island of Janitzio made famous by its Day of the Dead celebrations (el Día de los Muertos).  

You may well be asking what these pueblos have in common, and why they are important to us.  If you were to stay with us for a couple of days, you'd be likely to discover the answer at various times of the day, night or predawn as the silent countryside is broken by giant firecrackers—rockets.

Essentially communication devices, the unmistakable sound of Mexican rockets are an integral part of Mexican pueblo life. Churches in the pueblos around Lake Pátzcuaro don't have bells, so cohetes are used to announce each pueblo's fiestas, often beginning at 6:30 AM to summon the faithful to 7:00 AM Mass.

Our central location makes us default aficionados of the art of the cohetero (man in charge of lighting the cohetes). We have yet to learn, for example, why we have sometimes heard cohetes in the madrugada (predawn) hours—even at 3:00 and 4:00 AM. Reed says they announce Mañanitas (Morning Prayers), but for me, it's a mystery!

But in the meantime, Reed and I have had a more immediate rompecabeza (head-breaker, or puzzle) to solve. For the past two years, we've been invited to share the fiesta of Corpus Christi in Ucazanaztacua, the pueblo of an indigenous friend. We have been touched by this High Mass celebrated outdoors.

Incense, music, and the devotion of the faithful create a rich experience of the sensuality of Mexican culture: our eyes feast on the colors of traditional Purhépecha dress, our ears are calmed by sounds of the priest's chant and people singing, and our senses are heightened by the fragrance of smoldering copal (incense).

Although we are not Catholic, we understand the symbolism of the Mass, so we have been baffled to understand why, at the sacred moment when the priest elevates the Host and, through the miracle of Transubstantiation, this wafer is believed to become the Body of Christ—why it is at that precise moment that the cohetero sets off several rockets in a row.

What has been equally baffling is that the priest—standing at an outdoor altar no more than twenty feet away from the cohetero—is seemingly unfazed by the noise of the rockets firing. Similarly, the faithful don't even seem to blink. Recently, we discovered why. Before the arrival of the Spanish, Mesoamericans beat huge drums to announce the start of their rituals in order to assure that the gods were paying attention to their actions.

It seems cohetes are used today for the same purpose: to make sure that God/s is/are paying attention. I've made this comment before, but it bears repeating:  it is one thing to read about the prevalence of religious syncretism, where Christian rituals and beliefs rest on top of millenia-old indigenous rituals and beliefs, but it is entirely different to experience it first-hand.

The Chinese invented gunpowder, so it's fair to assume that the first Mexican cohetes—whose traditions date back nearly five hundred years—were brought to Mexico from China by the Spanish.

Poking around for more information about cohetes, I came upon this delightful, first-person description written for MexConnect by a US expat living in San Cristóbal de las Casas (Chiapas, Mexico). Here's the link: Cohetes: A Mexican Tradition.