Pax Nortona – A Blog by Joel Sax
From the Land of the Lost Blunderbuss
Mexico City 3
Posted on January 24, 2003 in Photos
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Until this century, the Indian character of the Mexican nation was denied. Much as in the United States, color betrayed class. The country’s indigenous heritage was often denied in her institutions such as the government and the Catholic church. Mexico behaved, like many products of colonialism, like a carbon copy of its European forebears and pretended that the native Americans did not exist.
Things began to change after the 1910 Revolution, that terrible period when several antagonists fought for control of the nation. An indigenous renaissance began and swept the country’s intellectuals and artists into new expressions of what it meant to be Mexican. Artists such as Diego Rivera incorporated ethnographic themes into their murals. They went into the countryside to meet the people of the land; read the work of anthropologists on contemporary indigenous groups who had held out in the mountains and the forests against Europeanization; and examined the intricate creations of civilizations now dead. Out of this came a new sense of personal and national identity. Art historians pointed to the colonial baroque churches and noted that the faces in the stone were made by Indian artists. Though they had worked using European templates, they had also brought their own traditions to the work at hand.
Outside the Templo Mayor, a group of dancers gathered atop a painting of the famous Aztec calendar stone. Their dance resembled many I had seen at native American festivals: they formed a circle around the drummers, then moved clockwise and counter-clockwise around them, sometimes coming towards the center en masse, sometimes rushing out beyond the confines of the marks on the street.
A man and a woman circulated among the crowd, soliciting donations in a large cup. A few of the dancers laid out blankets on which they displayed museum replicas, jewelry, fetish items made of armadillo shells, and fantastically erotic paintings showing tanned Aztec warriors carrying off whitish maidens.
A similar scene repeated itself outside the Museum of Anthropology. Here Los Voladores de Papantla entertained an amorphous crowd with a reenactment of an ancient ceremony whose participants were said to be mimicking the flight of macaws. The dancers climbed a prepared pole until they reached a square platform at its top. Then, as one of them beat a drum, they fell backwards and began to circle around, like maypole dancers unconnected to the ground. The ropes stretched longer with each cycle. Each dancer, except the drummer, held out his arms like a scarlet icon of St. Peter at his martyrdom.
While they spiralled, another of their number went through the sparse circle of tourists collecting donations. Our guidebook stated the dilemna of both the dancer and the compassionate member of the audience: what was sacred had become profane, but there was no better way for these to make a living or for the custom to be preserved.
What is that thing at the end of the series? It’s the fountain at the National Museum of Anthropology. It represents the Tree of Life. Does not the spray from the center remind you of the volandores coming down to earth? The great themes of life and nature repeat themselves in many contexts.
And the series will continue, of course!
