La Mama Negra

The mountain and the Virgin

Latacunga stands at 2,860 metres in Cotopaxi province, eighty-nine kilometres south of Quito and twenty-five from the volcano it is named after. Between 1698 and 1798 earthquakes destroyed the city four times. The Virgen de la Merced is venerated there because she is said to have stopped an eruption of Cotopaxi in 1742; the residents proclaimed her Advocate and Patron of the Volcano and pledged an annual fiesta in her honour. That fiesta — also called La Santísima Tragedia, the Holy Tragedy — is what the city has done about it ever since: a procession that is indigenous, Spanish and African at once, and has never been asked to choose.

The National Institute of Cultural Heritage declared the Fiesta de la Mama Negra, also called the Fiesta de la Capitanía, part of Ecuador's intangible cultural heritage on 31 October 2005.

Who walks

The Mama Negra herself is the centre: face painted black, riding a horse, and spraying milk over the spectators from the saddle. Behind her walks the ashanguero, described as her husband, carrying the ashanga on his back — a heavy frame loaded with food and liquor.

The Ángel de la Estrella goes ahead in white wings, speaking religious verses. The Rey Moro, the Moorish King, carries the Hispanic part of the inheritance. The Abanderado works the flag, and the Capitán holds the senior rank, tied to older structures of authority. The huacos perform cleansings on the participants. Around them come the camisonas, the cholas, the payasos and the yumbos.

Two fiestas, not one

They are genuinely separate. The September one, on the 23rd and 24th, is religious and belongs to the vivanderas — the women who sell in the Pichincha, La Merced and El Salto markets — together with the Asociación de Devotos y Donantes: their thanks to the Virgin for favours granted. In recent years the comparsa has gone out once a day rather than twice, morning and afternoon, so that it does not finish in the dark; the route runs a little over four kilometres and pauses at El Calvario to pay honours to the image.

The November one is civic. The municipality organises it for the anniversary of Latacunga's independence on 11 November 1820, and it is the bigger of the two — in 2025 the parade ran 3.1 kilometres over four hours, the sixty-first edition. In the weeks beforehand the city publishes the calendar of jochas, one evening for each of the principal characters in turn.

The day of the parade moves. It has been the Saturday before 11 November in each of the recent years that can be checked — 4 November 2017, 4 November 2023, 9 November 2024, 8 November 2025 — including the years when the eleventh was itself a Saturday and the parade went out a week early. The municipality announces the date, and that announcement, not the pattern, is the thing to go by.