The Matachines Dance - (Southwest Heritage) by Sylvia Rodriguez (Paperback)

About the Book

In this book, Rodriguez explores the colorful, complex, and often enigmatic Matachines dance as it is performed today. In the Upper Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, the Matachines is the only ritual dance performed in both Indian Pueblos and Hispano communities.

Book Synopsis

The Matachines dance is a ritual drama performed on certain saint's days in Pueblo Indian and Mexicano/Hispano communities along the upper Río Grande valley in New Mexico and elsewhere in the American Southwest. It derives from a genre of medieval European folk dramas symbolizing conflict between Christians and Moors. Spaniards brought it to the Americas as a vehicle for Christianizing the Indians. In this book, Rodríguez explores the colorful, complex, and often enigmatic Matachines dance as it is performed today. In the Upper Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, the Matachines is the only ritual dance performed in both Indian Pueblos and Hispano communities. There, the dance involves two lines of masked dancers, a young girl in white and her crowned, masked, male partner, a bull, and two clowns. Accompanied usually by violin and guitar, these characters enact a choreographic drama that symbolizes encounter, struggle, and transformation-resolution. In this classic, prize-winning ethnographic study, anthropologist and native New Mexican Sylvia Rodríguez compares Indian Pueblo and Hispano Matachines dance performance traditions to discover what they share, how they differ, what they reveal about specific communities, and what they mean to those who continue to perform them with devotion and skill.

From the Back Cover

The Matachines Dance - "the beautiful dance of subjugation", as Sylvia Rodriguez calls it - derives from a genre of medieval European folk dramas symbolizing conflict between Christians and Moors. Spaniards brought it to the Americas as a vehicle for Christianizing the Indians. In this book, Rodriguez explores the colorful, complex, and often enigmatic Matachines dance as it is performed today by Pueblo Indians and Hispanos in New Mexico. Previous studies of the Matachines dance dealt mainly with its origins, distribution, and descriptive details. Rodriguez's work instead focuses on the larger cultural, ecological, historical, and political-economic setting within which each community's performance is organized. She analyzes observed behavior, incorporates native explanation, and interprets the dance's symbols in attempting to discover what the dance means to those who perform it and what its performance reveals about the people who do it. For both Indians and Hispanos in New Mexico, the dance is not merely an archaic survival but an ongoing way of coping with and commenting on the history of ethnic domination as it continues to unfold in the upper Rio Grande valley.