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Sunday, May 11, 2008
Sacred Dances
By Dan Mayfield
Journal Staff Writer
Claude Stephenson has to be interested. He is, after all, the state's folklorist.
But Stephenson has a deeper connection to the mysterious Matachines dances and dancers than his job at New Mexico Arts would suggest.
“It was an accident,” he said. “It goes back 16 years. In 1992, we were featuring the state of New Mexico at the National Folk Life Festival on the Mall (in Washington, D.C.). We brought out the Bernalillo Matachines. But the Smithsonian ... decided to pinch a few pennies by thinking that a guitar player from Las Cruces could back up the Matachines.”
Not really.
“The tunes are fairly complex,” Stephenson said.
The group tried guitar players who had come on the trip, but none could match their guy back home.
“In my former life I was a professional musician,” Stephenson said. “I was a musician and I can play anything with strings.”
So, he sat down with the Matachines musicians and they went through the tunes.
“I needed somebody to accompany me, so he helped me up there. He started helping us out, and he's been with us since,” said musician Charles Aguilar of the Bernalillo Matachines.
Stephenson picked up the music quickly and sat in with the group during its performance.
“I'd listened to the tape and I have a quick ear,” he said. “So I backed them up in Washington. When we finished in Washington, they said you can't quit now. You're a member of the group. I've played guitar and violin ever since.”
For his first two years with the group, Stephenson played guitar. For the last 14 he's played violin.
Since then Stephenson, who grew up in Alamogordo, has been enthralled with the dances.
Now, for the first time, he's getting most of the state's Matachine dancing groups together for a large Matachine dance festival. The two-day event, Friday, May 16, and Saturday, May 17, at the National Hispanic Cultural Center is the first time many of the groups will have seen each other.
“I said, ‘Well maybe I should get you all together so you all could see each other,' ” Stephenson said.
Many of the pueblo dancers celebrate and dance on the same feast days — like Dec. 12 for the Virgen de Guadalupe — or they do the dances on holidays like Christmas Eve, and most dancers have never seen other groups perform.
“They're all aware of each other, but they've never seen each other,” Stephenson said.
“Most of these groups have never danced away from their home communities before. Most of these guys are dancing for sacred reasons. It's a somber, sacred thing.”
Though it seems, if you've ever seen a Matachine dance in Bernalillo or Alcalde or Tortugas, that it's a party, the dances are very religious affairs. The NHCC is setting up altars dedicated to specific saints for the dances.
Stephenson's Bernalillo group, for example dances to San Lorenzo, the village's patron saint.
“People dance because they have made a commitment to San Lorenzo, for whatever their commitment is,” Aguilar said. “I think Bernalillo differs, in that it's a yearly thing. The 10th of every month, the participants gather … at the house of the mayordomo, and the first Sunday in July, the statute and picture of San Lorenzo are united, and the second Sunday in July and all the Sundays in July, we get together and practice. Come August first, we practice every night.
“It's not just a weekend, it's the year, you know. That's how it works,” Aguilar said.
Stephenson and Aguilar said though the overall Matachine dances, and the tunes the musicians play, are similar, there are striking differences in all the different groups' dances. No two communities dance the same. Some feature El Toro, the bull, as a character. Some don't. Of those that do, some castrate the bull, some kill it.
Some feature a cross-dressing Perejundia, or Abuela character, some don't.
In Bernalillo, Aguilar said, the character used to be featured until the man who played her died. He was so good, nobody would agree to remount the role.
Though the dances are performed all over the world, though mostly in the Southwestern United States and northern Mexico, nobody can say definitively where they came from. There are records of dances in Italy and France from the 1500s, from Mexico before that, and the New Mexico traditions go back hundreds of years.
“The people of Bernalillo have been doing it since 1692. From San Juan Pueblo, they say they were doing it before Ońate, but not that much before, maybe 50 to 100 years before,” Stephenson said. “But Montezuma, when he was teaching the dance, tells them these white guys were coming. If they dance the Matachines, it will help them stay strong. There's lots of tales about this, and I don't know which to believe. At this point I've given up trying to find the origin and just enjoy the dance.”
Some say the dances came from the wars the Spanish and Moors had 1,500 years ago on the Iberian Peninsula. Others insist the dances came from the Aztec emperor Montezuma. Some say it's a traditional dance that was performed by the Aztec and that the Spanish simply incorporated it.
Likewise, even the name has mysterious origins. Did it come from a Spanish root? A Moorish word? Was it an indigenous word to the New World?
Scholars, Stephenson said, will likely never know or agree.
Regardless, the dances are extremely popular and hold cultural significance for New Mexico's Pueblo and Hispanic people.
“The origins of it are so deep in the mud that the truth could jump up and bite us, and we wouldn't know,” he said.
Abuela: Grandmother. Dance character, usually a male dressed as an old woman, who accompanies the Abuelo and provides comic relief. Sometimes called “Perejundia.”
Abuelo: Grandfather. Dancer who maintains order and sometimes provides comedy.
Capitanes: Captains. Two danzantes who stand at the head of the files during the dance.
Corona: Crown. The more elaborate headdress worn by the Monarca to distinguish him from the danzantes.
Cupil: Decorated headdress worn by the danzantes, often said to resemble a bishop's miter or an Aztec emperor's crown.
Danzante: Dancer. Sometimes called soldiers.
Filas: Files. Two parallel lines of Matachines danzantes.
Guaje: A hollow guard filled with seeds or stones with a handle that is carried in the left hand.
Malinche: The name of the young female character in the Matachines Dance.
Monarca: Monarch. The leader of the Marachines danzantes who is commonly thought to represent Montezuma.
Palma: Palm leaf. A highy decorated flat fanlike wand carried by the danzantes in their right hands and waved in time to the music.
Prejundia: Sometimes known as the Abuela.
Toro: Bull. A mischievous character in the Matachines dance dressed as a bull. Some think he represents evil.
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