During the first days of May, the county of La Union (department of Arequipa), commemorates the anniversary of its political creation. The week of celebrations, coincides with the blessing of crosses that protect the Andean communities. Both events, generate an atmosphere of unusual revelry in the provincial capital, called Cotahuasi, a welcoming and calm town that takes its name from the deepest canyon in the world.

Who organizes the revelry?, Who forms the first train of boxcar dancers?, Who gives the precursory turn? Who begins the tap dancing that pulverizes the gray chains of apathy and routine, in an adobe town and wooden balconies that sleep early and wake up with the deceiving brightness of the dawn?

Who is it: the dancer that invokes the ancient gods with the whistling of his scissors and the acrobatics of his steps, the wingless Ángel that destroys his throat and jumps really happily in the illuminated scenario; or the teacher-queen that dazzles her colleagues, surprises her students and irritates their mothers, with her grimaces and splendid sovereign smiles.

Is it the icy breeze that tempted to heat the body or the seductive blinks of the Cross of the South in the flooded firmament of stars?. Are all of them accomplices and allies ?... or, are none of them maybe, and a spark that arises from the bombards and fireworks that take off from cane castles and gunpowder or the musical notes orchestrated from the antipodes of the luminous scenario.

"Was the wine... ", asserts the driver of a van that challenges the cliffs.. "The reveller or rambler", asks or completes the sentence, a passenger with a bitter expression who has suffered the havocs of the bad night... "that wasn't so bad after all", explains with proverbial roguery, while dying of laughter and slapping his hand down on his neighbor's seat, waking him up from his nightmare of drunkenness.

Confused, the neighbor lifts an imaginary glass: "Cheers, my friend!, he proposes before falling asleep again, without a care for the spluttering, the hiccups and bellows of the motor. "Yesterday he danced like a spinning top; today he sleeps like a log", philosophizes irreverently the passenger with the bitter expression who begins to remember the events of the nights disbanded for the festival of the crosses and the anniversary of the political creation of the county of La Union (Arequipa).

	Of dancers and queens