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25. Dancing with Malinche (New Mexico and Oaxaca, 1993 –1994)
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237 25 Dancing with Malinche (New Mexico and Oaxaca, 1993–1994) The long popularity of dances and festivals of Moors and Christians in widely divergent cultures is due to the tradition’s remarkable flexibility of historical referent and contemporary application. The Christians can be Carolingian knights, medieval crusaders, invaders of the Alpujarra, sailors at Lepanto, New World conquistadors, or New Mexican settlers. The Moors can become Moriscos, Turks, Saracens, Jews, Aztecs, Chichimeca, or Comanches. Into the public transcript of historical conflict, various hidden transcripts can be insinuated, exposing the scars left by past traumas, negotiating current power relationships, and yearning, in Spain, for convivencia, and, in Mexico, for freedom from external rule. It is not the public transcript’s theme of ethnic and religious triumph that has retained the interest of generations of folk performers, but the tradition’s inherent susceptibility to hidden transcripts. The theme of reconquest invites folk performers to imagine resistance to the larger cultures of which they are so often a subordinate part. I have dealt more with the large-scale festivals than with the smaller dances because the early history of the tradition includes more accounts of one than of the other. In this final chapter, I will return to modern Mesoamerica, where I will concentrate on two dances: northern New Mexico’s danza de los matachines and Oaxaca’s danza de la pluma.1 Whatever the dances’ uncertain relationships may be to European matachines, Spanish dances of Moors and Christians, or precontact indigenous dances, both in their present form belong to the broad Mesoamerican tradition of dances of reconquest. When their mask is read carefully, they offer intriguing hidden transcripts. Any serious attempt to reckon with their hidden transcripts must begin with the link between the dances’ two shared main characters, Motecuzoma and Malinche. Most observers assume that Motecuzoma represents only the Mexica emperor who opposed Cortés and that the Malinche of the dances corresponds to the Malinche of the European conquest narratives.2 Otherwise known by her baptismal name of Doña Marina, the latter was Cortés’s indigenous mistress and translator. The public transcript then yields a Motecuzoma who in the danza de los matachines is converted to Christianity and in the danza de la pluma is defeated by Cortés. Malinche becomes the first native convert to Christianity, instrumental in the subsequent defeat and conversion of Motecuzoma. But just as the masks in the danza de los santiagos signal the presence of a hidden transcript, so does Malinche in these dances, for she is openly identified not as the companion of Cortés but as the “wife” or “daughter” of Motecuzoma.3 The hidden transcript knows that, in indigenous Mesoamerican folklore, Motecuzoma is the name both of a past ruler and of a “messiahlike figure” who will “defeat the Spanish and initiate a new Indian hegemony .” It knows, too, that, as the mythical daughter of the former Motecuzoma, Malinche (or her structural equivalent) must marry the next emperor and so legitimate his rule. As the necessary link between past and future glory, she is “the final hope for the resurgence of indigenous culture in the face of inevitable destruction .”4 Motecuzoma and Malinche, in their several manifestations, also embody the divine rulers of the spirit realm, Huitzilopochtli and Toci.5 Evidence for this popular understanding of Motecuzoma and Malinche is plentiful . During an armed rebellion in highland Chiapas in 1712, the summons to resist the colonial regime included the assurance that “the Emperor Motecuzoma was being resuscitated and would help the Indians defeat the Spaniards.” In 1761, the leader of an indigenous rebellion in Yucatan, Jacinto Uc, added to his own name those of Motecuzoma and of Canek, the last Maya king. The official report of the rebellion states that he was crowned “Re Jacinto Uk Canek, Chichán Motezuma, which in translation means King Jacinto Uc Canek, Little Motecuzoma.”6 In 1900, Frederick Starr came across Otomí in the Sierra de Puebla who “believe that Motecuzoma is to come again. Meantime, from him come health, crops, and all good things.” Each year, a feast is “given in his honor, of which he is believed to partake.” And, in 1835, Ignacio Zúñiga identified a dance in Sonora as a dramatization of “the passage of the Aztecs, and the coming of Motecuzoma, whom they await as the Jews await the Messiah.”7 Malinche’s link to Motecuzoma is a long-standing one. In Guatemala City...