Carrying the Word: The Concheros Dance in Mexico City

Foreword

xi In December 1998, I was one of a reported 6 million pilgrims and other visitors who made their way to the Basilica of Guadalupe in the northern suburbs of Mexico City to celebrate the annual feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe (December 12). Over a three-day period, the huge atrium in front of the basilica was packed with dance groups from all over central Mexico. As many as thirty groups performed at a time, often competing with one another for physical space and musical audibility. By far the most popular, in numbers of both participants and watching crowds, were the Mexica dances. Men (and, to a lesser extent, women), in costumes loosely based on pictures of Mexica warriors and dancers from the old codices, performed to the loud and insistent rhythm of huehuetl and teponaztli drums. Similar in underlying form, but clearly different in conception, were the danzas de los concheros, whose quieter music was played on conchas, stringed instruments made from armadillo shells or, in some cases, from gourds. The Concheros have been around much longer in central Mexico, but on that feast day outside the basilica they were fewer in number and tended to draw smaller crowds than the noisier and more flamboyant Mexica dancers. (There were, of course, many other danzantes besides.) I knew about the Concheros, both from having seen them dance elsewhere and from reading (among other things) Martha Stone’s classic At the Sign of Midnight: The Concheros Dance Cult of Mexico (1975). I had seen the Mexica dances, too—I first watched a small group dance, to prerecorded music, in F o r e w o r d F o r e w o r d xii Chalma in January 1972—but I had never seen so many Mexica in one place before. Moreover, I had not yet read any coherent explanation of the Mexica dancers’ intent or popularity. For understanding, I later turned to an article by Susanna Rostas, one of many published while she was working on Carrying the Word: The Concheros in Mexico City. Rostas’s article confirmed my sense that the Mexica dances had developed from those of the Concheros, that they were performed for the most part by urban mestizos with a New Age sensibility, and that they embodied, as Rostas called it, a kind of “invented ethnicity.” I relied heavily on Rostas’s article when I wrote about this aspect of the Día de Guadalupe festivities. It is therefore with considerable pleasure that I have responded to the unexpected request to write a foreword to her book. Carrying the Word is an important and much-needed study of the Concheros and their relationship to the newer Mexica dancers who (unlike the Concheros) aggressively invoke an imagined and revindicated Aztec past. Rostas’s book updates and, in many ways, moves far beyond Stone’s At the Sign of Midnight. Stone’s work is dated, not because she was an amateur (but very observant) ethnographer, nor because her work is “anecdotal,” as Rostas puts it, rather than rigorously scholarly, but because the danza de los concheros itself has changed so much since the twenty-five-year period (ca. 1945–1970) during which Stone studied and took part in the dance. One of the great virtues of Rostas’s book is her close attention to the fluidity of the dance, to the changes in its social organization and modes of performance, to its part in shaping the nascent Mexica dance, and, in turn, to its own capacity to be influenced by the Mexica’s dancing (while still largely dismissing them as inauthentic and ill-disciplined). Rostas is an acute participant observer. She danced frequently with the Concheros group of Santo Niño de Atocha. She attended its vigils and other religious and social rituals. She sat through sometimes tense organizational meetings. She talked at length to members of the group and, rather than trying to homogenize their responses, has been careful to allow individual differences of interpretation to remain. To my mind, one of the more surprising developments that she uncovers is the apparently easy movement of some dancers between the Concheros dances, which are distinctly Mexican in character, and imported Sufi dance traditions. Both, according to the explanations offered by some of the more middle-class Concheros, emphasize the embodied transcendence reportedly possible for the initiate during the dance. This is language that I suspect was not much used by Stone’s informants fifty years...