The most oddly surreal parade I have ever seen took place in Cofradia, Cortes, Honduras, on Friday, September 15th, 2006. It was the annual Honduran Independence Day Parade, and involved a nearly mile-long route that stretched from a public school, on one of the secondary streets in the town center, to the central park, winding past the Catholic Church and numerous small businesses on the way. Most of the schools in the town of Cofradia participated, many of their students grudgingly showing up at six a.m. to get into loose formation with their classmates. Our school, San Jeronimo, was chosen to be the first segment in the parade, which befit its prestige in the community I suppose. Stiff penalties were enacted by our school director for students who did not show up and fulfill their patriotic duty by marching in the blinding heat, in a semblance of order, for almost 5,280 feet.
At six a.m., the heat was already stifling. Throngs of students, parents, teachers, administrators, and lesser citizens were already gathering around the Escuela Laura, like milling sailors waiting anxiously to board their tramp steamer and set off on an unknown voyage. Many kids from the different grades at our school came in some sort of costume that their moms had been meticulously getting them into since four in the morning. There were little campesinos with straw hats, painted on mustaches, dirt-flecked knickers, and threadbare sandals. There were diminutive maquiladora workers dressed in dull blue shirts and stay-press pants, looking the model of authoritarian fashion sensibility. About five boys of different ages were wearing bright soccer costumes, and were careful not to don the exact color combination of one of Honduras’s five major league clubs and cause a potential controversy (wearing the wrong colors could cause them to get stoned along the route by irate fans of rival teams). There were girls in pure white dresses and ostentatious flower garlands around their heads, wearing enough makeup to choke Tammy Faye Baker. One young woman from our sixth grade class had on a construction workers outfit, and with her slightly masculine facial features could have been one of the guys in the Village People. The kindergarten and preparatoria kids had on appropriately kiddy costumes-bumblebees, clowns, dinosaurs, and so on, and most of these costumes appeared to be 120 degrees inside. The kids not wearing costumes came in their school uniforms, which were no doubt freshly washed and ironed.
We waited around for another eternity or so, and realized that another school was forming ahead of us, shattering the necessary illusion of our prestige. We were growing impatient. It was now six-fifty and the sun was breaking through the few lingering clouds to make our lives really miserable. Our students were clearly ready.
At the front of our column, a rose-bedecked flatbed, pulled by a strong truck, contained all the kindergarten and preparatoria kids, by now probably suffocating in their cute little bumblebee outfits, their two teachers holding their breath that these youngsters would not spontaneously revolt, the children’s earnest but mostly clueless mothers hanging by the sides of the flatbed, urgently pouring water into their offspring’s mouths.
Behind the kinder and preparatoria vehicle, the school band was set up in its special band formation, dutiful like sentinels, ready to show off its skills. Cymbals clashed, triangles jangled, and drums banged. Our band had been practicing for the past three weeks, and three weeks ago it looked like they may not be able to get it together to participate in the parade without embarrassing the hell out of the school. A special miracle worker band director was brought up from Tegucigalpa to whip these Bad News Bears into shape, and as the days went by, an unfocused and disheveled motley crew of juvenile musicians slowly and surely became the New York Philharmonic. Seeing our band looking so serious and confident out here in pre-parade land, I began to think that, despite whatever else could go wrong this morning, at least our music section will knock the crowd dead.
Behind the band, in not quite so organized rows, were the students wearing traditional costumes, a large banner announcing Honduran pride at the front of their segment. Behind the costumed students was a chaotic aggregation of students from grades first through ninth, who were arranged in four rows according to height rather than age, the tallest at the front, the shortest at the back. Standing at the stern of this potential Titanic and surveying the scene, I suddenly realized that only about half of our students bothered to show up for the parade and display their patriotism in the blinding heat. I hope they all had good excuses, because when the tally was made of the absentee pupils, I had little doubt that our school director, normally a stern and very proper woman, would possibly lose all self-control and have a complete fit.
All of a sudden, at the exact moment when the parade could have turned into a riot rather than being a parade, someone, somehow, at the head of the line, ahead of the school that had gotten to be before us, signaled that the parade should start. So we all began marching, sweat dripping off our faces like Pulphanzak Falls, marching in a slow and seemingly purposeless way. Small crowds had gathered along the sides of the road, to watch us and cheer us on, or so I thought. What soon became apparent was that these observers were only half-interested in being spectators, just like our pupils, for the most part, were only half-interested in being participants. It was nearly impossible to keep the younger kids from veering sideways, running into each other, and hitting and kicking their neighbors. It didn’t help that mothers would suddenly show up from the amorphous crowd and begin to follow, if not fully join, the parade, forcing water down their kids throats and wiping their brows with Kleenexes. These mothers would or could not help the teachers and I in our vain attempt to get the kids to march in an organized and logical way, rather than at whatever pace and direction each individual tyke decided.
Up ahead, the band played on, contradicting the chaos at the rear with their cadenced bursts of musical delight. The transition between tunes was effortless and the whole thing was quite rhythmical and exemplary. I could not see the kinder and prep kids on their rose car very well, due to the hazy heat, but I imagined they hated every bit of this exposition, and could care less about its purpose.
After the first ten minutes of the parade, I began to have the distinct feeling that this was less a parade than a military drill, in which stopping for no particular reason was a constant thing. I realized that, every few minutes, the whole long stream of burning bodies, from front to rear, would pause in their tracks, with no obvious justification. This was certainly not a flowing creek, it was more like a boat going through a series of locks. Why did we keep stopping? Did herds of cows keep blocking the way? Did martians spontaneously land every three minutes to commune with the parade goers and stop them in their route? Why in the hell could we not keep going?
This parade was quickly turning into the March to Bataan. I felt like Alec Guinness’ character in the David Lean classic, “The Bridge on the River Kwai,” who kept his head up and spirits high while leading his troops through the arduous task of building something for someone else. I wanted to remain confident and believe in this parade, but it was clear that most of the participants and spectators felt like they were doing this for someone or something else, something abstract that, if meditated on long enough, might not even be worthwhile. What is patriotism anyway except, as Dr. Samuel Johnson once wrote, the “last refuge to which a scoundrel will cling?” And what does independence signify for a country like Honduras, one-seventh of whose people live in the United States, and whose history of being plundered and ignored is not exactly insignificant?
We wound past the Catholic Church, stopping at least three times before we were past the building. I could practically hear the kinder kids crying out now from their flower car, the band played on nobly, the costumed and non-costumed kids paid no attention to how they were marching, their over-attentive mothers kept getting in the way. The teachers were becoming increasingly frustrated by their failed attempts to get their kids to march how they thought they should march (we did not really ask why they should march this way). Pretty soon, this whole lumbering mass made it to the central park four blocks on, where everything came to a near permanent halt. There were more citizens packed into the park than at other places along the route, and for a moment, they cheered and actually looked excited to be watching us, which had an effect on our students, who became more cheerful and positive for the moment.
Up ahead, at a grandstand, the mayor of Cofradia was telling anyone who would listen, through an extremely loud microphone, that it is important to be proud of Honduras, to recognize its contributions to world civilization. It was important to respect the physical environment, and to not throw trash. Meanwhile, from where I stood, I could see at least five people chucking garbage on the ground. I spotted a slew of folks waving little paper Honduran flags, but if I asked them to name five things that Honduras has contributed to world civilization, I wondered how many of them could name five. I heard the mayor mention the name of our school…un buen ejemplo…and other such gratuitous words that may or may not be supported by firsthand knowledge (I had never seen the mayor visiting our school, or talking with our Director or Parent’s Association). Suddenly, in the middle of all this torturous halting and empty words from on high, some random song lyrics came into my head:
“under the hot sunshine we meet
and then dream of a white sand beach
i love my city…my beautiful city
i enjoy my city…because it’s very pretty.”
The lyrics are from “Pretty City,” by the unusual reggae singer Eek-A-Mouse, known for his repetitive, high-pitched murmurs in between lyrics. Ten minutes later, our school was told it could officially disband, and the most oddly surreal parade I have ever seen came to an end.
