ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the role of Cuetzalan's fiesta in a translocal configuration of identities. It shows that how the fiesta is popularly conceived within an evolutionary scheme, before proceeding to show how this conception is structured by and activates settler versions of local history, which feed into contemporary local politics and social reality. The chapter examines how the ceremony becomes ritually bracketed in space and time, how these ritual brackets anchor and structure the activity, and how the social setting is calibrated to frame the event. It analyzes the huipil ceremony, the constituting event of the huipil fair. Signaling in-group identity through linguistic competency, was an attempt to direct the potential harms of the phrase toward the frame of the event. A mestizo view of self and indigenous society is reflected in popular accounts on the town fiesta.
