Fiesta week in San Miguel

It's fiesta month in San Miguel and you can't swing a cat around here without hitting a guy in mariachi pants.

There are fireworks every night that require no crowd control, fire department or safety measures. Mothers simply give their kids pieces of cardboard to protect their precious heads and let them play in the rocket fire. I am told that this is an ancient custom and by the looks of it, it must date at least as far back as when the Chinese started shipping explosives and selling them at Walmart.

And boy is it colorful! Bands of native Meximericans don their ancient costumes (modified with hidden cell phone pockets), dust of the war drums and hatchets, perfect the war paint and take to the street. Every night this week they've paraded in front of my house with deafening war cries just after I have managed to drift off to sleep. It's so weird to be coming up out of a deep sleep and just for a minute think you are about to be beheaded by an Apache. If fun can be violent, the Mexicans have perfected this ideal.

And those 20ft tall puppets in the parade last week were nothing compared to the spectacle of EXPLODING effigy puppets. It seems that if Maria Guadalupe, or Maria Estaban, or Maria Martinez steals your husband and you are so pissed off that you are homicidal, you don't need a hit man or a lawsuit around here. There's a way to get even. All you have to do is wait for the feast of San Miguel. You create a detailed puppet effigy of the evil Maria (and possibly also the cheating Don or Juan because, let's face it, it does take two to tango), mount it on a 10-ft pole with some explosives and take it to the fiesta. On Saturday afternoon, all of the effigy puppets are exploded on the square in front of the church and the entire surrounding population. If a public humiliation like that doesn't say "Maria, I really hate you." (or something like that), nothing does.

Then yesterday, we were treated to a mass of horses. No, really. It was a Mass of horses. Every cowboy with horse for 50 miles around rides into town for a mounted service in front of the square and the priest comes out and throws holy water on every single one of them after the mass is done. The cowboys are as macho as John Wayne. No one smiles. Horses rear up and kick and none of the cowboys fell off or apologized to the other horses, riders or bystanders who were hurt in the process. It's pretty darn cool. I really liked that part.

These people know how to P.A.R.T.Y!