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This week, the 90-plus-year-old tradition of building and burning Zozobra, in an effort to purge a year’s worth of worries and troubles, will be joined by Zozobro, a spinoff made by students at Tierra Encantada Charter School. Teacher Joaquin Martinez led his ninth graders in building the sculpture, which gets the match at 4:30 pm on Wednesday, Sept. 2, near the school.
What inspired you to create your own version?
In the spirit of the Fiestas, we built it, we learned all about the traditions, we did the mathematics. That frame is made of 2-by-4s, it's solid, so they brought in a couple of parents to do that. So it's the community, bringing that in, and we worked with the colors, the traditional Mexican tissue paper flowers…then we encouraged the school to write their worries and troubles down. I've got a collection of about 200 now that we're going to stuff into his shoulders.
What did you think was important about creating this opportunity for kids, in particular, to participate in this festival?
Just the cooperation; they had to design and do the blueprints and so on. Then for the school, it's important to have a place to really let go of the worries and see that sometimes we all have the same ones, so we'll have a discussion about, 'Well, what did you write down?' 'Oh, me too.' It's not so much an Oprah Winfrey show, but we get into the common worries or the common troubles, whether finances or family problems or so on, so it's an outlet to see the unity in life.
And so yours is called Zozobro, instead of Zozobra, because there's a copyright concern?
No [laughs], I don't think so, but we just thought, well, it's not really Zozobra, how about a Zozobro?
Santa Fe Reporter