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Origins
With some variations and few facts about its prehispanic origins, Carnaval’s existence was first noted in the 19th century. An invaluable testimonial was printed in the local newspaper La Lechuza, the first account of a carnaval in the city.
On the eve of the French invasion in 1864, Ignacio Ramirez, a local seer, made reference to carnaval in a letter he wrote to Guillermo Prieto: “. . . and famous is the lavishness with which the fiestas of carnaval are celebrated, even more brilliant than those of Merida, and which only Guaymas can occasionally match . . ."
In the last decades of the 19th century, Carnaval had become a fiesta more grotesque than gracious; the women hurled perfumed flour and cascarones (hollow eggshells) filled with glitter; the men threw flour, ashes and dyes. At the same time the dockworkers and the market workers formed sides and engaged in rowdy, rock-throwing street battles.
In the last decade of that century, the major civic festivity was the Fiestas of May, organized by the troops to celebrate the triumph of General Ignacio Zaragoza over the French at Puebla. That celebration was a true carnaval born as an expression of joy over the triumph of the national army.
But it was in 1898 when a committee of civic leaders headed by Dr. Martiniano Carvajal organized a procession of carriages and bicycles “to eradicate the immoral flour and replace it with the pure and more restrained confetti.”
Legitimized and institutionalized by the powers-that-be, carnaval entered a modernized and milder state. The town accepted the change from flour to confetti and a more refined form of official carnaval disorder.
It is curious but not strange to note the international makeup of Mazatlan society at that time. The first committees of citizens to organize carnaval, working alongside the locals, were an Irishman, a German, a Spaniard and an Italian.
And from those beginnings the carnavals came to pass, the Plazuela Machado was its beating heart, and the pulse of Mazatlan’s people can be taken with a stethoscope of carnavals to this day.