The Cora Easter Week / Semana Santa in Santa Teresa Nayar , Nayarit Mexico April 2006- The evening before the festival began some Cora were out in the street , the Centurions and Capitan prayed, body painting started and the battle began, processions.Bob Freund 1/23/2007
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After the procession is over there is an interval when the battles and dance begins this last a few hours until the transfer of power from the town council to the Centurions and the Captain. During this ceremony there is a prayer session inside the church by the towns leader while the Capitans and Centurions wait outside . Then the town elder cede power to the Festival captains. From that point on the town is completely under control of the centurions. At that point the festival is in full swing. The dancing to flutes and drum which had begun earlier in the day now picks up and more and more Jews and devil start to arrive.
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mass
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Transfer of power complete
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Nealer in a beam of light
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The Cora dance has a number of different steps which when in a group seems like a battle march and when they challenge another person to a duel there is a specific procedure that seems to be thread challenge, and fight and then retreat, these moves you can see in the video. The opponents take turn striking the “sables” ( battle axes), some with different degrees of force. I was told that even though these fights were “mock” sometime people can settle scores or get bad feeling out of their system. In terms of injuries , there are many injuries to hands and during the coarse of the next few days lots of men have their hands wrapped with cloths due to injury and bleeding. At least 17 men were taken to the clinic and 1 was evacuated to the hospital some 90 kilometers away. It was interesting to watch the captains and other men converge on a pair of fighters to back them off from hurting each other. The lesson of this to me was that community rules are enforced by the community. Some times the knot of men gathered to stop a fight would be up to 50 men. The guy that seriously injured the other fighter was restrained by the captains and was taken away and put him under house arrest.
At this point the men take over the square and continue to battle all night to the sounds of drums and flutes. There are flute of all sizes and some are made from Plastic tubes and sound like didgeridoos from Australia.
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Sables in action
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Swinging a battle axe
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Fire in the night to ligh the

festival

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