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The Mysterious Matachine
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17038 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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8 / 1990 |
3,079 Words |
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Jerry Sinkovec
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For nearly three hundred years, the Matachine dancers of New Mexico have performed their ritual dances in honor of the various saints' feast days. No one knows for certain how or where the dances started or what they mean, but there are several theories. In New Mexico, both Hispanics and Pueblo Indians dance the Matachine. A few other tribes - the Yaqui in Arizona and the Tarahumara in Mexico - perform the dance, but no Hispanic groups outside of New Mexico do the Matachine.
The name Matachine is itself enigmatic, adding to the confusion about the origin of the dances. For some time it was thought that it had come from an Arabic word Mudawajjihin, which can mean "those who put on a face" or "those who face each other.” Either meaning is applicable to the Matachines of New Mexico.
One theory is that the Matachine developed from the Morisca dance brought to Spain by the Moors during their occupation from the eight through the fifteenth centuries. In Paul Nettl's Musica En La Danza, Moriscas are described as sword dances found in Europe where there was a tradition of the historic struggle between the Saracens and the Christians.
Descriptions of the dances performed during the Middle Ages by the Matachini of Spain, Matacinio of Italy, and Matachins of France bear similarity to those performed by Matachines today. These medieval dancers were masked buffoons dressed in motley garments, with colored ribbons on their shoulders, bells on their legs, and gilded morions on their heads. In their left hands they held bucklers to protect their heart, and, in their right, swords. They enacted battle mimes, making passes at each other swords. They were first mentioned in Thoinot Arbeau's Orchesography Lengres, published in 1588. Some think that the palma used by the Matachines has replaced the bucker and the gourd rattle the sword.
Captain Bernal Diaz Del Castillo, the diarist for Cortez, wrote The True History of the Conquest of Mexico in 1568. In it he relates that "one part of the city [Mexico City] was entirely occupied by Montezuma's dancers, of different kinds, some of whom bore a stick on their feet, others flew in the air, and some danced like those in Italy called by us Matachines." If this is a true account, and it Diaz had been familiar with the Matachine dances, then the theory of the dances coming from Spain to Mexico would be incorrect because the Aztecs were already dancing the Matachine at the time of Cortez encounter.
This would lend credence to the Taos theory, so called because it has been propagated by an old Taos Indian, who claims that his people learned the dance from Montezuma when he flew up to their pueblo on an eagle and that they have danced the Matachine for four hundred years since. It is known that runners traveled from Mexico to the area that is now New Mexico wearing eagle feathers on their arms to indicate that they were official messengers of Montezuma and therefore not to be harmed. Hundreds of years of oral history might have changed eagle-feathered messengers of Montezuma to Montezuma arriving on an eagle. The Taos Indians have only on masked dance, and that is the Matachine.
More generally accepted, however, is the theory that the Matachine dances were brought to Mexico by the Spanish and then to what is now New Mexico by the colonists accompanying the Spanish explorer Juan de Onate, who was
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