When I was twelve, I went on my first trip to Europe.
While touring Europe may not seem as exotic as say trekking around the Egyptian
pyramids on camelback, for me, a young girl from a lapsed Catholic family
living in North (and very Protestant) Florida, it was like being on another
planet. Ya’ll was part of my natural parlance, tea was meant to be served cold
with ice, and perhaps most jarring to me were the perplexing images I saw in
Madrid Spain during holy week.
It was almost 2:00 AM and I was still wide awake.
The noise and lights outside of my hotel room in Madrid made sleep impossible.
Below, on the street, hundreds of people swarmed, watching a procession of
giant statues (weighing thousands of pounds) which depicted the Stations of the
Cross (basically it was a series of statues depicting the torture and agonizing
death of Jesus) as they lowly made their belabored way down the avenue. These
statues were gory and unnerving to view. Even though I was raised a Catholic,
Catholicism in the Protestant saturated south has shed much of the outward
‘Popish’ and ritual ornamentation. Here was ‘real’ unapologetic Catholicism in
full swing.
The processions themselves were not as shocking to
me as the mass of humans walking around (all week) in hooded robes of many
colors and fashions. These robed and hooded figures loomed ominously in the
streets. Unbeknownst to me at the time, these conical hoods are known as capirotes
and are worn by penitent Catholics participating in the numerous processions
happening throughout Holy Week all over Spain. Being very young and from the
southern United states (still rife with racial tensions), my only context for
hooded figures was the
Ku Klux Klan. Needless to say, I was terrified.
Compare the two images (one of hooded penitents in Spain
and the other of KKK members burning a cross). The hooded figures look very
similar and yet what they represent is radically different. While there may be
no inherent ontological meaning in the very robes and coned shaped hoods worn
by either the penitents or clansmen, the (white) hooded figure has become a
symbol within these different contexts. Being ignorant of the vastness of
contexts in which symbols or signs can be read, can lead us to interpret a
cultural sign or symbol… not necessarily wrongly but rather inaccurately for
that particular context. This experience although kind of embarrassing is one
of the many I share with my students to demonstrate for them that symbols and
signs are not universally readable nor are they historically stable.
Eres una sinvergüenza
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