Kantunilkín Opens Fair Season With Century-Old Maya ‘Primicia’ Ritual

Kantunilkín, Quintana Roo — Amid incense smoke, the roar of the voladores and the bright notes of jarana music, vaqueros, guild members and fair deputies gathered on Sunday to perform the traditional “Primicia,” a Maya ritual this town has carried out for more than a century.

The ceremony asks the gods and the town’s patron saint for the health of its organizers and residents, and seeks to ensure that the coming patron-saint festivities pass in peace, without any accident to mourn.

The day began at 8 a.m. at the Expo Feria grounds, where men and women worked side by side while respecting the customs of their ancestors. The Maya prayer leader Teodoro Canul Balam led the prayers in the Maya language, offering ceremonial foods at a rustic altar.

Following tradition, the men prepared the Noh Hua, a large sacred tortilla made from ground pepita that was carefully wrapped in chit palm leaves and placed in a pib — an earth oven heated beforehand — where it cooked for two hours.

The women worked several meters away, cooking the Choco’ob, or kool, a chicken soup prepared in enormous pailas to accompany the meal. Tradition handed down through generations holds that women must not come near the area where the men prepare the ceremonial bread, to avoid bad airs. The ingredients — masa, meat, pepita and soft drinks — were supplied by the vaqueros themselves as an offering to seek the protection of the guardians of the four cardinal points and of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception.

Around 1 p.m., while the food cooked underground, the participants blessed the bullring where the vaqueros will work during the coming afternoons of bullfighting. Once the offerings were unearthed from the pib, the group walked to the church in the town center, where members of the Consejo Supremo Maya received the sacred foods and delivered them to the patron saint through solemn prayers.

Shortly before 6 p.m., the participants returned to the fairgrounds to share and taste together all the food prepared over the course of the day.

The Primicia is the second prelude to the local festivities, following the traditional convite led by local authorities. The community is now preparing for the third and final announcement on Nov. 30, when the sacred ceibo tree will be cut and planted in the bullring, formally opening celebrations that will conclude on Dec. 12.