Loud music, a conglomerate of silhouettes of legs moving with great rhythm over rustic tiles of vivid colours, the invasive smell of a banquet about to be served, prepared by a network of expert cooks gathered in a house's kitchen. You are a child surrounded by your cousins and siblings, who, depending on their age, boast of their new toys or introduce their new partners. You do not yet know the importance of the cultural event you are experiencing, nor how it will help shape your identity as a Latin American. What you do know is that tonight you will probably end up sleeping between two chairs pushed together that will serve as your temporary bed while your parents continue chatting and dancing all night long.
The fiesta, under the RAE's definition, is a "gathering of people to celebrate something or have fun." However, bringing this concept to the field of semiotics, and drawing on Umberto Eco's contributions to this field, we can propose the fiesta as a system of signs and communicative processes full of meaning. The fiesta is not just a celebration; it is an event in which messages and ideas are transmitted through words and through an entire system of elements where, from food to dance, everything has cultural and social value.
In the case of Latin America, this value is high because, as Claudia Macías Rodríguez states in her article La fiesta: preservación de la cultura popular en América Latina (2008):
"While Latin America is a reality that is lived and is the object of study across all areas, what identifies the nations that comprise it as autonomous entities are their roots, roots that manifest themselves in traditions and customs that have passed and been preserved from generation to generation thanks to various social phenomena, among which the fiesta stands out as the ceremonial ritual par excellence."
In Latin American culture, a fiesta goes from being an event to becoming a celebration of collective cultural identity, where at the same time it seeks to reproduce and transmit that identity to new generations through elements such as dance, food, and customs. This helps create the individual's cultural identity and how they develop within their environment, which in most cases is populated by people with the same cultural framework. For example, if an adult invites another to dance a genre like merengue, they will use the practical and cultural knowledge learned when they were taught that as a child at a family party by an aunt, their siblings, or their own parents. Likewise, a person may have a gastronomic connection through that dish their grandmother used to prepare on December 24th and may reproduce and transmit that same knowledge to other generations in the future.
Leaving aside the concept of the Latin American fiesta as something familiar, there is also the Latin fiesta as a third place. Further removed from theoretical and practical generational transmission, there is the Colombian rumba, the Mexican peda, or the Argentine joda. The Latin fiesta, as a third place, flourishes between adolescence and early adulthood, as in any other part of the world, and also, as in almost anywhere in the world and especially at younger ages, it sometimes ends up becoming a courtship ritual through dance.
At the same time, this space represents a different system of signs, as the dynamics among participants change. It is no longer a place where salsa, merengue, or boleros proliferate; instead, more youthful and urban genres such as reggaeton or trap take centre stage, clearly also depending on where the phenomenon is analysed.
That is why it is normalised and even important for a young person's development in Latin America to go to parties during their adolescence, as they learn to play their role. No longer in a safe learning environment like a family fiesta, but in a social setting surrounded by strangers that presents the challenge of using the tools given to them by their family together with their own identity.
This is where the cultural identity created from those family fiestas becomes important, because without them we would not have the practical knowledge to navigate that specific social environment.
Aristotle once said that man is a social animal who needs to belong. Beyond that, as that apocryphal quote attributed to Charles Dickens goes, man is also a creature of habit. An animal that learns through repetition and is capable of feeling what is inherited as their own because it is part of their origin. Even in the Caribbean, where salsa flourishes, the importance of cultural preservation and transmission is explicitly heard in iconic songs such as Moreno soy by La Sonora Ponceña, which contains verses that say:
"I am dark because I was born of the rumba
And the flavour I inherited from the guaguancó
My mother is called the rumba, my father is the guaguancó
That is why I was baptised in a spring of flavour"
The fiestas allow us as a people to dance to the same rhythm, transmit our identity as Latin Americans to the next generations, and create a safe space where we can all celebrate our customs and origins. Just as that child, at the beginning of this column, who ended up sleeping between two chairs, will eventually end up sleeping in a wooden casket where they will meet the end of their life, but not of their legacy, which will continue to be remembered by their loved ones between fiesta and fiesta. And there they will be, once again lying in the living room of a house, where they will be remembered and will be part of their final fiesta.