Roots and Feria: Sugar Barons and Conquistadores, Indigenous Tribes and Beauty Queens

FERIA DE LA CAÑA DE AZUCAR

Santiago de Cali was founded in 1536 by a bypassing Spanish conquistador, Sebastian de Belalcázar whose statue still stands, horseback and ironclad, looking over the city from a vantage point on the Avenida Circunvalar. He came from the south, having started out from the Viceroyalty of Peru and following the ancient Inca roads crossed the border to the viceroyalty of Nueva Granada with a small warband, founding cities on his way, He had just founded Popayán and was on his way north to meet up with the other conquistadores and join them in their search for El Dorado, the Golden One.

There were native tribes living in the area: the Calimas with beautiful golden handicrafts, the Yanaconas of the mountains, originally from the south (they're related to Incas), the ferocious Jamundies of the River Lilí Valley and the settlement grew very slowly at the beginning. The Spanish and the Criollos who moved in the area were struggling until at the beginning of the 18^th century the sugar cane started to be grown in the fertile soil of the valley and with the cane came the economic prosperity. The area around Cali had agricultural importance the soil being of top quality and lots of other foodstuffs had been grown and continued being cultivated both in the lowlands and on higher elevations: cotton, rice,corn, vegetables and fruits; this was the first place where I saw a pineapple field too. But the backbone of the Cali economy was to be the intensive cultivation of sugarcane and the sweet smell of cane juice impermeated the very air the caleños breathed. Cutting cane is a backbreaking job and the poor populace of the countryside around Cali was employed at the fields: even today you can drive up the road to Palmira and beyond northward and see men carrying machetes going to the fileds, in small groups, at the first break of dawn. After being cut, the cane is transported in ”cane trains”, carts loaded with cut cane and hitched to each other and finally to a tractor that pulls them and transports this cane to the sugarmills where the juice is pressed out of the cane and the sugar is processed. The brown sugar is pressed into blocks of panela, a staple in the Valluno kitchen and all over Colombia. The leftover (bagazo) is used in making paper or burned to fertilize the fields. There's smoke hanging over the fields at certain times of the year, after the harvest from the cane fires.

The Sugarcane Fair or just the Feria of Cali as the festival is also known will forever be part of my Christmas memories. It started on Christmas Day, with Horse Parade, when people mounted their horses dressed up as Spaniards or mestizo cowboys would ride on a prearranged route, usually a main street or throughfare. Beautiful horses from the country clubs and outlying fincas, people all dressed up and perhaps a few aguardients under their belts already; it was a pleasure to watch. (The horse parade had to be suspended lately, because of the drunkeness and disorder, animal cruelty and abandonment; several horses had been flogged to death and left to die after the drunken riders had gotten off them...this is part of the loathsome legacy of the drug cartels in Cali.)

The next day there would be the beauty queens parading through the city in carrozas or decorated floats: I was mesmerized to see so much colour and decorations, such tropical splendour and lavishness. It was this year that the Cali newspaper started printing colour photographs and I used to clip them out and send them with my letters to my mum and sisters.