Mexico 2002: Free-market Economy

Mexico 2002

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Stories, Observations, and Miscellany

Here Comes the Bride

We'd been intending to travel to Mexico for a while, so when Oscar called us some months back and told us that Karol, his sister, was getting married, we thought that was the perfect excuse to make a trip. In due course an elegant invitation arrived in the mail. Per the invitation, the wedding was set for 8:00 on a Saturday evening. The reception was to begin at 10:00pm and, as Oscar explained in a follow-up call, it was scheduled to go till 4:00 in the morning. 400 people were invited. It seemed clear that this was not likely to be like other weddings we'd attended.

We arrived in Mexico a few days before the wedding to give ourselves time to acclimate and to avoid being a last-minute bother. This gave us a chance to meet the groom, Juan Carlos, and chat with everyone at least a little — forget talking to the happy couple on the Big Day — and to watch a few of the last-minute arrangements.

In the days leading up to the wedding, the doorbell seemed to be ringing constantly announcing delivery vans with yet more wedding presents. Many were from Liverpool and Palacio de Hierra, two upscale department stores, and the gifts were often beautiful housewares. Oddly (to us), even the fanciest presents weren't wrapped in the sense that we think of at home; instead, they are packaged for display. For example, many of them are arranged on a flat piece of board, often black, with a printed card pasted onto the board telling you that this was a present from such-and-who. The whole business was then often wrapped in plastic and shrinkwrapped. The presents happened to be in a room at Tomás's house, but it was easy to imagine them laid out in a salon for people to admire. I was amused to note that there were a number of blenders. Some wedding customs seem to be universal.

Tomás works in the theater and knows a lot people in the business. He was able to arrange for a professional makeup artist to come on the day of the wedding to do hair and makeup for the bride, her mom, and Lucia. We didn't witness it, but apparently the woman made short work of dolling up the girls, and the end result was fabulous. Karol had arranged to be ready a bit early so that she and Juan Carlos could do some photos. They repaired to a nearby park while there was still light. They made such a handsome couple, in fact, that some passers-by stopped and asked whether it was a model shoot. Nope, just a particularly good-looking pair.

The wedding itself took place in a church close by. For Erica and me, the wedding was one of those strange experiences — familiar, but with everything a little bit out of kilter. We could follow the priest easily — he had a clear, mellifluous delivery that was wonderful to listen to — but when it came to the liturgy, we were thrown for a loop. The rhythm was right, but we didn't know the words in Spanish, so we were left hanging at all those points in the mass when the congregation is expected to respond. ("And also with you.") But no matter. We did enjoy the vaguely antique Spanish in which the mass is said, equivalent to a service in English that might include "thou" and "thee" and forms like that.

Another small difference for us was the music. The processional started with Elgar's "Pomp and Circumstance #5," which is, of course, a march for just such events. But we Americans associate it with a somewhat different processional, namely the one for graduation. The processional continued with the Mendelsohn wedding song, and later, the recessional was accompanied by Wagner ("Here Comes the Bride"). Backwards from our custom, in other words. I asked someone later about the order, and they said it was the usual for them. One of those small cultural differences. The music was provided by a string quartet and a woman who is an operatic soprano. Worth the price of admission alone. ;-)

Much of the wedding ceremony itself was familiar ("Do you, Juan Carlos, take this woman ..."), but there are some customs that were new to us. In addition to the ring bearer, there is a padrino ("patron" or "best man") who keeps coins that the groom gives to the bride as a sign of his intent to support her. There are also three madrinas who carry three bouquets: one for the bride, one to be tossed, and the third one to be offered to the Virgin. At one point in the ceremony, the couple kneels at the front, and two members of the bridal party placed an ornamental rope around them — a lazo, where we get "lasso" from, I guess — that goes around each of them separately but is joined in the middle.

We had suspected that this would be a formal affair, and our pre-wedding inquiries confirmed that people dress up very nicely for an event like this. I had to scramble a little before leaving Seattle to acquire a suit. It's been so long since I had to wear something that nice that all the candidates in my closet had had plenty of time to shrink. Even so, I was surely the least elegantly dressed man at the wedding. The men all wore tuxes or dark, well-cut suits. And the women! Not only did the girls in the bridal party have fancy gowns, but so did pretty much every other woman in attendance. Think prom, but with grown-ups; there were satin dresses and spaghetti straps and swoopy skirts. And there were the furs. We're so unaccustomed to seeing fur-lined coats and wraparound stoles these days that it was a bit of a surprise to see so many ladies complete their outfit with one. As we later discovered, things did not become more casual as the evening wore on. As far as we could tell, none of the men removed their jackets at the reception, nor did any of the ladies take off the shoes that must surely have been killing them by then.

The reception was held at a banquet facility, in a huge room with 50 or 60 tables, a wide stage, and a generous dance floor. Things were getting settled when we arrived around 10:00pm. We found our way to our table and chatted with various folks while we waited for the dinner portion to begin. We were a little surprised, therefore, when the band started up and the bride and groom went onto the dance floor for their first dance, followed by the groom's father and bride's mother and the rest of the permutation of people who engage in that traditional event. About then I realized that it was only ten o'clock; this was Mexico, where dinner starts late.

Dinner did arrive later and I had a bit of an opportunity to say hello to some of the more far-flung friends and relations, including people who had known my grandparents and my mother. (People like to remark on how much I look like my Opa.) Conversation was a little difficult, however, because not only were we conversing in a hybrid of three languages, but the band was going full blast the whole time.

The band. The band consisted of seven instrumentalist and four singer-dancers who took the front of the stage. They started off with some dance tunes for the older set. But as we discovered, the band could (and did) play practically anything. Over the course of the night, they played salsa, danzón, jazz standards, Frank Sinatra favorites, ABBA, the soundtrack from Grease, Village People, Shakira, and dozens of other tunes that obviously were popular in Mexico, since half the people would sing along.

Most remarkable was that they didn't stop. It's not that they didn't take a break; they didn't even pause between songs, and the whole set was just one big medley. They played without a breath from 10:00 at night till 3:00 the next morning. While the music went on, the singers would change costumes and launch into a new set of tunes. To keep things lively, they would occasionally toss party favors out onto the dance floor — balloons, pom-poms on little sticks that people would wave in time to the music, cowboy hats, masks, and big handfuls of bright pink confetti. And people danced and danced and danced. Young people, old people, everyone got out and boogied, as couples or singles or gangs, with conga lines snaking around the floor or everyone doing a line dance. It was ... a party.

There was a break for the traditional bouquet and garter toss. For the bouquet, the couple stood on chairs and joined hands to form a bridge. The eligible women (the "parade of virgins," we snickered) formed a conga line and danced underneath the bridge and around the floor to a tune that's apparently just for this occasion, before gathering up at one end and snatching at the bouquet as it arched its way toward them. Then the men did the same for the garter. I rather liked that the ritual was a little more formal than just herding the girls into a corner and heaving the flowers at them. Formal, but still fun.

At 3:00 they served chilaquiles (tortilla hotdish, sort of). Erica and I, lightweights that we are, finally bagged it at 3:30 and caught a ride home with a passing cousin. The report was that the reception proper wrapped up at 4:30. A large contingent then repaired to Tomás's house and carried on with the party. Karol and Juan Carlos left around 8:00 for the airport and their honeymoon in Jamaica. The last guest finally departed around 10:00 in the morning. And thus, fourteen hours later, the wedding came to a close.