It's Yamor Time!! Part 1: Proyecto Coraza

Even though last year was my first year attending Yamor festivities, I found myself looking forward to the celebrations this year. The festival officially runs from August 31- September 9, but there are events throughout August leading up to the main events. I already wrote in a previous post about my involvement in the filming of a promotional video, although I didn't appear in any of the clips I found online (https://www.facebook.com/pg/yamor2018/videos/?ref=page_internal). No luck yet obtaining a copy that contains my shots but that’s ok.

The first Yamor event I attended was Proyecto Coraza on August 24. It was a fashion show and mini music festival. One of my friends from the market actually called me that morning to tell me about the event because she thought I'd want to take lots of pictures! Bless her heart!!

It turned out to be a pretty cool event, and she was right. On my way to that event, I discovered a tea shop that I posted about on Facebook, so it was an all-around good day! At the event, I sat next to a girl from France who has been living in Quito for two months and has another month left. She didn't speak any English and I don't speak any French, so we ended up communicating entirely in Spanish, much to the confusion of the locals around us, who clearly expected the white girls to speak English. It was nice to have a conversation just for fun while we waited for the event to officially kickoff. At a few different points in the conversation, she asked me to say something in English and commented on how she loved hearing it and how well I spoke English. I laughed and told her I hoped it was good, since it’s my first language. It was neat to talk to someone in a similar situation – a foreign white girl living with a local family and working on their Spanish – and I enjoyed her observations and her questions about my research. Thank God I still love talking about my research. I think the day that stops, I’ll be in big trouble!

I wasn't the only one who enjoyed myself. The 2018 Yamor Queen and a local politician (if memory serves correct) can be seen dancing here. Below, you can see some of the biggest pan pipes I've ever seen. I genuinely don't know how one trains to play those!

The event itself glasses for many, many hours. Speeches started somewhere around 4 p.m. and the music started around 4:30. They alternated between musical group and girls modeling clothes from local stores. I was excited to see my friend and owner of Etnia gallery in one of the important seats, and even happier that his clothing was featured in the fashion show. The culmination of the event was the professional music group, Proyecto Coraza, consisting of both mestizos and indigenous men and women. The group was certainly high energy and a fusion of rock and more traditional indigenous songs with some techno thrown in for good measure. For me and for Cristina (who came to the event later), the highlight of Proyecto Coraza was the violinist. In addition to playing the violin, she constantly sang along even though she wasn’t mic’ed, and served as an unofficial hype (wo)man. They actually had an official hype man whose job from what I could tell was to push buttons on the computer and give out CDs and poster to promote the band. It was a fun day getting to do something a little out of the norm.