Blacks and Whites’ Carnival

Black, then white

The Carnaval de Negros y Blancos grew out of Andean and Hispanic traditions in San Juan de Pasto, in south-western Colombia, and has spread to other towns of Nariño. Its dates coincide with ancient moon celebrations of the Pastos and Quillacinga peoples, farming cultures who danced for the moon and prayed to the sun to protect their crops.

Blacks’ Day goes back to the colonial period. After a slave rebellion in 1607, enslaved Black people in Popayán asked for a day on which they could be truly free, and the Spanish Crown granted them 5 January; the custom of playing with black paint spread south to Pasto, where it was played by the 1850s. Whites’ Day was born in 1912, when a group of tailors began throwing face powder at each other on the morning of Three Kings’ Day, shouting “Long live the whites!”. UNESCO describes how people paint one another with black cosmetics and then white talc, a gesture that symbolises equality and brings all citizens together.

Floats and the Castañeda family

In 1929 a family of settlers arriving from the Putumayo with their mules, parrots and pigs were swept into a carnival parade and cheered through the streets as “the Castañeda family”; they are remembered every year on 4 January. From the 1930s local artisans began building monumental floats of paper sculpture, and in the 1950s, led by the master artisan Alfonso Zambrano, the figures began to move. The carnival was declared national cultural heritage in 2001 and inscribed by UNESCO in 2009. In the weeks before, many homes become workshops where neighbours build costumes and floats together.