This article first appears in Volume 39: Ritual.

Sleepy

Sleepy
it might seem, but the rural town of Pedasí on Panama’s
Azuero Peninsula has been an open secret for years, with its
world-class surf and mellow ambience proving enticing to visitors.
But look closer at its dusty streets and you’ll see past the squat,
concrete constructions to the typical quincha houses. The latter
sit at the heart of a cultural revival – one using just mud, hay
and music to transcend the gulf between generations and the
country’s past and future.

Leading this cultural resurrection is the junta de embarre – a
form of house building whose name loosely translates as “mud
meeting”. Started some centuries ago to help newlyweds build their
first homes, it draws on the abundant materials at hand: sand from
the peninsula’s kilometres of unspoilt beaches and hay from its
hectares of lush farmland. But the most critical resources are the
builders themselves, who come from the local community and are
motivated not by money, but by the shared purpose of building
someone else a home.

A local using his bare hands to build the mud home, left,
and a child helping.

Many have little experience, some can barely walk alone, but
everyone from gleeful toddlers to wizened grandparents links arms
and ventures shoeless onto a plot of earth to slap their feet and
dance their way through the slurry, churning soil, sand and water
into mud. Drums add a festive atmosphere and a rhythmic backdrop to
the work, and are the catalyst for women, mud- slicked and hoarse,
to raise their voices into a cacophony of song. Ruminating on
age-old topics, these sometimes comical, often bawdy
call-and-response songs follow the rules of tamborito, an
African-inspired Panamanian folk music that is not far off a
yodel.

Into the melee, mud stampers armed with distilled sugar cane,
known as seco, slosh it into any open mouth, while attendees
scatter and then churn hay into the mixture. The perfect
consistency achieved, armfuls are gathered and slapped onto a
waiting wooden frame, to be left to dry in the beating sun and,
finally, topped with clay roof tiles.

The muddy act of junta de embarre unites everyone from kids
to village elders.

But the junta de embarre isn’t just about house building, and
its near disappearance is a familiar story for rural communities
around the world. As young people migrated to the cities, they took
with them the possibility of new life-blood pumping into a ritual
that only the eldest members of the region remembered. Revival came
in an unusual form. In 2017, a group of entrepreneurs in Pedasí,
including the now tourism minister, Iván Eskildsen, created Barro
Fest, an annual event that binds together – much like the water and
earth of the junta de embarre – the traditional and the modern: an
indie music festival with a muddy, community-bonding junta de
embarre at its heart.

The festival has since become itinerant, moving to different
parts of the country each February to allow more towns to reconnect
with their ancestral heritage. However, raucous, music-filled junta
de embarres continue in Pedasí. Book through a local tour
operator, then join the townspeople, young and old alike, to stand
shoulder to shoulder and stamp your way through the mud, carrying
cultural tradition with you as you go.

Discover more stories from the Ritual
issue.