About this video:
Description:
This is footage from one of the craziest nights of my life. It was filmed on March 8th, 2010, during the Pamplonada Pirotecnia, just one night of a week long fireworks celebration in Mexico's pyrotechnical capital: Tultepec. Chances are, if you've ever bought a firework in Mexico, it was made in Tultepec. The local firework factories, families, and businesses build massive floats (approximately two stories tall) called toritos. They are made from paper maché and other materials in the likeness of a bull, covered completely and decorated with rockets, and painted up to look like any number of themes — chickens, dragons, Emiliano Zapata — there was even a Minnesota Viking torito. The creation process can take approximately three months. Toritos are quite common throughout Mexico, but they are usually much smaller and carried over the head of a single person. These toritos generally took six or more people to push them on wheels. The evening begins with the parade of toritos through the center of Tultepec. Live music, singing, chanting (usually hyping up one firework company or another), and consumption of beer and pulche ensue. The toritos are often so large that people with long poles must walk ahead of them to lift the electric and telephone cables so they may pass underneath. The parade ends as the sun sets, and one by one a torito will enter the center of the town square where throngs of people anxiously await chanting, "Fuego! Fuego! Fuego!" (Fire! Fire! Fire!) This is the point when things get crazy. They light the torito. Rockets spray every which direction as crowds of people, standing only feet away, dance and jump around like audacious madmen, in and out of careening rockets, fire, and utter chaos. During all this, the torito's patrons are pushing and pulling their creation through the masses, fearless of the flaming projectiles and sparks being launched directly above their heads. This is the epicenter of rapturous insanity. After jumping around like a Jiffy Pop kernel that has to pee, in and out of whirling missiles and through the plumes of sulphurous smoke, I was invited by some of my newly met Mexican friends to scale a building onto a rooftop by the square. Of course. From there we would have an aerial view of the incandescent bedlam. It was from that vantage point where I holed up and started filming the festivities. The footage you are watching starts with the aftermath of one of the burning toritos. As a team of firemen try to spray water on the resulting bonfire, a fresh torito is pushed into the middle of the crowd and ignited. Even from this vantage point, we were getting shelled by rockets (you can slightly see at the end of the footage the burnt shirt of a friend that got hit in the lower back during the filming). Sadly, I've no footage from the ground level, as I was too busy jumping around, covering my face, and avoiding being turned into a burnt marshmallow to take any video or photos. I will try to upload some of the better pics of the night to my flickr account sometime this week for those interested I'm fairly certain I still smell of sulfur. PS: "NO MAMES!!!"
Author:
variablek
Tags:
burning of the bulls, dancing with bulls, pamplonada pirotecnia, fireworks, celebration, tultepec, mexico, rockets, chaos, craziness, bulls, pyrotechnic festival
Duration:
306 seconds
View count:
5580