Latest / Tales From Aztlantis / Throwback Thursday: Forging Aztecness, Danza Azteca history with Kristina Nielsen

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Throwback Thursday: Forging Aztecness, Danza Azteca history with Kristina Nielsen · Tales From Aztlantis

• 0:00
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• 0:33
  SPEAKER_04: And now on with the show.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_04: Greetings, dear listeners, and welcome to yet another episode of Tales from Aslantis, the show where we investigate pseudo history, pseudo-archaeology, modern myth, and other adventures related to Mesoamerica and the Chicano experience.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_04: We are your hosts, Curly Tlapoyawa.
• 1:26
  unknown: Dr.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_04: And Ruben Ariano Tlakatecat.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_04: Today we are joined by a guest, Dr.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_04: Christina F.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_04: Nielsen.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_04: Dr.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_04: Nielsen is an assistant professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Texas.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_04: Her research examines themes of indigeneity and historicism in Aztec dance communities in the American Southwest.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_04: Her previous research includes a study of the Maya Ocarinas that is published in Flower World Music, Archaeology of the Americas.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_04: So welcome, Dr.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_04: Nielsen.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you for joining us today.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_02: Thanks so much for having me.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_04: So it says that you uh you teach at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_04: What uh what are you currently teaching?
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_02: Well, right now I'm actually I'm on spatical, but uh the last class I taught was uh music and colonialism.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_02: Uh as we looked at uh kind of the themes of how music has been both a tool of colonialism and uh a form of um resisting and navigating uh colonial encounters um in different contexts, um, which kind of took us from you know both the Americas and um the themes that we'll talk about today, um, as well as to issues like uh repatriation of uh songs that were recorded, um, for instance, in um Southern Africa in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, so a lot of really interesting ways that um we can look at what music tells us about how these different um encounters happen and unfold.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_04: Wow, that's fascinating.
• 3:09
  SPEAKER_04: I want to take that class.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: It does sound interesting.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, one of the reasons that we connected, me and you, Christina, some years ago, um, was because I encountered your dissertation that you had done on Danzasteca the same year that I defended my dissertation, you defended yours.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um that was some years ago, 2017.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: So it's been five years.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's amazing how time flies.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: And and one of the things that struck me about your dissertation was, you know, I started reading it and I found a lot of similarities between your work and the things that you were researching and my work and the things that I looked at, and there was a lot of overlap between both of our work and uh you looked at things from uh ethnomusicologist uh perspective.
• 3:54
  SPEAKER_00: I look at it from a historical perspective, but we were kind of drawing on the same sources and kind of drawing similar conclusions based on those sources.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and so you know, I I wanted you to sort of uh take us through uh how you got started uh with dansa azteca in terms of how what interested you in researching it and and what led you to that path where you ended up doing a dissertation on on Dansa Azteca.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, uh so I think at the core of it, you know, in terms of how we uh just you know, as human beings wind up interested in in a research subject, um, at least in my opinion, a lot of really good research comes from personal interest um and connection, right?
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_02: So that you have to have like a lot of times it comes from a spot of like having that like deep personal connection.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_02: And in my case, um that connection was well, one growing up in Tracy, California, um, outside of the Bay Area and going to a bilingual elementary school.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_02: So I you know started with it, wasn't very helpful Spanish all the time.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_02: It was like learning the parts of a whale, uh for instance in Spanish, you know, as like a second grader.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but you know, having that immersion.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_02: And then uh when I was a teenager, um another one of those personal connections was having a having a Mexican boyfriend and like having that actual like personal connection to it.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_02: And and he wasn't involved in Danza or anything, um, but I was spending a lot of time in Mexico and at this time I was still pretty young and seeing a lot of things that uh kind of as I started to think about them more uh struck me as contradictory, um, and trying to kind of understand this relationship of um the the things I was seeing out in the the towns, like you know, you lived going up to Quetzalin in the mountains, you know, as like the the Pueblo Majico, right?
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_02: The the kind of the way that it's marketed to uh Mexican people from the from the cities, and this was in Puebla.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so you know, kind of seeing this marketing and trying to kind of put together these different pieces of what I was seeing there alongside, you know, my my earlier experiences.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I always kind of had that interest.
• 6:13
  SPEAKER_02: And I wound up going to um like my my history is very back and forth across the Atlantic because I'm a Danish American, so I also have grown up with kind of this kind of interesting in-between identity between the two.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I've lived both places uh for substantial chunks of my life.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: And upon graduating with my undergraduate degree and piano performance um right into a recession, I wound up moving back and being in Copenhagen.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: And I uh was at the University of Copenhagen setting in the uh Indigenous Languages and Cultures of the Americas program uh for a year.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and so through there I wound up meeting a lot of different people.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_02: And I already knew that I wanted to kind of start looking into this more deeply because it fascinated me.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_02: I didn't really know where I was headed with anything at that time.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_02: It was just something that I really wanted to learn more about.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um and from there I wound up getting accepted into the ethnomusic pro ethnomusicology program at UCLA.
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_02: And uh my first year there I uh became aware of Danza's Teka.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there were people actively at UCLA, uh, and I wound up dancing with uh the Artiaga family out in East Los Angeles, and um they very graciously um started to kind of introduce me uh to it.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um I have to say everyone I've most of the people I met through Tonsor are very, very kind um and um very open and welcoming.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um the ones that I have worked with, of course, I'm I'm sure there are plenty of people who don't want to work with me that you know is its own story.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um but you know, the the ones that I have you know talked to and that I've learned from um have all been very kind and I was kind of further drawn into some of the questions that I were seeing that were matching some of these earlier questions from experiences in Mexico that I had witnessed and just you know having this um I think those connection points where it kind of all came together around some of these central questions that I've been looking at in my research.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: You were a dancer for a while, right?
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_00: You danced with uh certain groups or my groups?
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_02: I I danced with uh uh Shuko Wat and uh Santa Anna predominantly.
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but part of my research uh and one of the things that so far I think um kind of makes it different than some of the other research and in terms of graduate research I've seen in California is that I moved but I I could kind of go between some different groups.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um and one of the things is you know, a lot of danzantes, you know, you have your capitan and you're kind of in a group, and I I so I got to experience a lot of different styles um within that.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, I going to um uh Shipitotec, for instance, with Lacero Arbisu, um going uh to Gran Tanochtiblan with Sergio Louise.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I didn't dance with those ones as much because they were further away from me and you know LA traffic is is brutal.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so it was mostly in uh Santa Ana.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I got to you know learn Danza uh predominantly with I I want to actually say Chachu, who uh unfortunately we just lost this week.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um so that's been a huge loss for the Southern California.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, that's terrible.
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry to hear that.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, uh so I I want to acknowledge him as one of my primary teachers, uh, alongside Quisalin, of course.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and uh the others that I went to, yes.
• 9:58
  SPEAKER_02: We'll be back after a quick break.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_04: Have you picked up your Mexica calendar for the year 12 Flint?
• 10:05
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• 10:09
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• 10:17
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• 10:23
  SPEAKER_04: Now, back to the show.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I guess my question really was um I was I'm trying to understand, like you you started doing dansa, you were interested in in the culture, you were surrounded by it, and you slowly begin to sort of sort of get drawn into dansa, and you decide once you go to school that you want to look at dansa um from an academic uh approach.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I was already in grad school and I was at that time kind of starting to like I had was looking at this kind of more archaeological side at first, um like the the the Maya Ocarinas um and the like that was one of my starting points was looking at this historical side.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um and then from there, as I'm doing my graduate research, I was oh, like there's a whole community, living community around these instruments and around these uh kind of practices in Los Angeles.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_02: And so you know, from there kind of seeing like, wow, there's like a common interest here and going and then realizing like what that meant and all the things that were happening there that and in some ways, like I mean, I I love uh the archaeological work too, but um I really like working with that, that human element, and that that's you know, really nice when you can ask people, whereas with you know archaeological and historical work, and especially ones where you really don't have sources when it's like you know 700, 800 um AD, like you don't really you don't have people you can ask the same way.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_02: And so um I being drawn to ethnomusicology and working on an ethnomusicology degree, uh, that was something that meant a lot to me, that I could I could talk to people and interview them and learn kind of more about how they were thinking about what they were doing, uh, which is a central part of how I uh do my research.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_04: So your story kind of reminds me of um Martha Stone in a way.
• 12:22
  SPEAKER_04: She wrote the book Sign of what is it, the at the sign of midnight?
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_04: Sign of Midnight.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_04: That's uh if if any of the listeners out there have not read this book, it's a pretty good book because it it kind of it reminds me a lot of your story where this woman who came into the world of of concerismo and and of danza and was just kind of like welcomed in and she did all of her research there.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_04: How were you um generally accepted by these by these groups?
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um I think uh I mean I think the you know people want to know that you're taking it seriously.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so there was definitely an expectation of I I remember one of my my first times with Jacoba being told, you know, you stay in the circle and you you stay until the end, um, which you know when it's like you know two hours, I mean it's tough, right?
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_02: You have to you have to get used to it, you have to get used to the bodily sensation of still going even though it's hot and uh you're indoors in this you know little space and so it can get quite hot and it's you know long and it's that's tough.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_04: You're exhausted.
• 13:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, especially as you're acclimating to it.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um but I think you know if you take it seriously uh and and you know make it clear that like this is I I care and I'm here to take this seriously and and learn.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so you know, coming with respect, of course, you know, and being respectful towards the dancers that I met.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: I I I didn't have um I didn't meet pushback, but I also I'll admit I didn't go to you know Shika Kwademok groups um where I was kind of aware of um you know I would have had conversations with um individuals where you know I I would know where I wasn't going to be welcome.
• 14:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um and I I can respect that, you know.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: I don't I think that there has to be an understanding of that, that there are places where um I'm not welcome and that that's that's okay.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_02: I don't, you know, I can accept what where the spaces that people are willing to offer for me to go into and also the spaces where I'm not welcome, you know, um that that's something that or the spaces where it's like I can go as a person to support people and it's not something where you know it's not for research, it's just to to be there to support or to have an experience with with people who I also cherish.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, as I was saying earlier, like when we connected, um, one of the things that drew me to your work, because you've mentioned that there's other umsantes and and you know who are an academia and scholars, and you've cited them in your work, and I cite them in my work as well, who um were doing stuff uh years before uh either one of us uh completed our dissertations.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, I appreciate the work that they did, but the reason why, besides the fact that our work sort of overlaps, the the reason why I like your approach is because you're kind of like me.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: You take a critical approach to the lansa.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: You you try to approach it both uh in a way that is respectful and that and that um is sensitive to the community, the dansa community itself, but at the same time, you're not shy about taking a critical approach to some of the things that are within Lansa.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I should mention here that you've had, besides your dissertation, you've had a couple of articles published over the years in 2014.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um you had one published in the Ethnomusicology review uh of UCLA, and that one's called The Role of Interpretation in Determining Continuity in Dansa Steca history.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I and I believe we kind of republished it in the Mechika Dark uh website because I just you know really liked what you had to say.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that I liked, and I'm not sure if this is exactly the the thesis, but this is this is one of the main points that that I drew from it.
• 16:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh where you state in in that article, you say that the transition from a pre-Hispanic dance into Christian dances and the recent transition from these Christianized dances into dansa, the different perspectives on these significant periods in the history of the dansa or dance contribute to its narrative and further complicate its already complex history as a pan-Indian dance style.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: And that kind of also speaks to the article that I just recently had published where I kind of trace the sort of evolutionary process of danza.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_00: And you kind of have uh a different view about this in your current article that you had published, the Forgingasticness, uh, 20th century Mexican musical nationalism in 21st century Los Angeles, where you kind of push back on this idea of taking that old antiquated anthropological view of um evolution and culture and and dance traditions.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: But so my article just kind of treats as a historical progression, I guess, is a better uh way of saying it instead of evolution of the dansa tradition.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: So, basing on that, like what is it about the dansa itself that you kind of find intriguing that leads you from this article to to your dissertation?
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: What is what is that that connecting thread with that line of argument?
• 17:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, so I think looking at how people are historicizing dansa, right?
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_02: Like, so um to to give like the in a walnut shell version um of some of one of the central core themes of what I found is a lot of it boils down to authority and the ways that people think about what tradition is, right?
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_02: So if tradition means that it has to be Meshika Azteca ancient, right, then you're gonna have one way of thinking about who you trust for everything and what that story is.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas if you're thinking about tradition in the vein of lines of transmission and being able to trace, well, this is handed down through this family, this is handed down through this family, and it's not about reaching back, it's about continuity, right?
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, then you're gonna have a very different understanding of the history um of what you're practicing.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_02: So you have a community where you know, if you go to um the Mexica New Year's ceremony and San Jose, for instance, right?
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_02: Everyone's moving, you have hundreds of danzantes moving to the exact same dance.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_02: But in terms of how they're thinking about it, of like, you know, this is Mexica reaching back, or this dance was taught to me by this person, it was taught to me by this person, or even created by this person, right?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's gonna have a very different impact in terms of how they're thinking about the history and how they're thinking about their own connections uh to it and who um what what that identity is, right?
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_02: Of like you guys have talked about you know, machine identity and and what that means versus you know some of these other ways that you can conceptualize who one is um through this line of transmission.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um so that's kind of the walnut version of uh of what I found.
• 19:37
  SPEAKER_02: About what what these stories and histories mean um to danza and danzantes.
• 19:44
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, it's pretty interesting because I see that being a danzante myself since I think like 1992 is when I first started doing dansa.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_04: Um there's a lot of people within dansa that feel like if we if we don't view it as like this long unbroken tradition that goes back to Tenochtitlan, then it's not legitimate somehow, right?
• 20:13
  SPEAKER_04: And that I think that ignores the fact that, you know, one, dance and music are very ephemeral, especially when they weren't written down.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_04: So how do you even know what what the dances would have looked like a hundred years ago or fifty years ago, right?
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_04: And then it also ignores the fact that what we look at as modern danza azteca is it's gone through all of these different transmutations and and progressions to become what it is today, right?
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_04: Being like blends of different indigenous traditions, blended with these uh Christian, basically uh theatrical events that were put on, like uh, you know, I don't know what the theater, right?
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_04: The this uh theater of conversion that was done where these dances were were formed to try to act as as tools of converting people.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_04: So it's all of these things.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_04: And then you have like, you know, the 1980s, you have Mexicayo popping off where they they I believe it was 1987 was when Choconochtlet uh reclaimed the Sokalo for danzantes to dance there in the public.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_04: And so, you know, it it's it's this ever-growing thing, right?
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_04: It it is a tradition that dates back several hundred years, but it's gone through all of these changes.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that's really the strength of it and the beauty of it.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_04: I don't think that makes it less legitimate to say that, you know, it's well, it's mixed with all of these certain things.
• 21:45
  SPEAKER_04: Well, that's how things grow, that's how things expand, and and what we have today is beautiful, and and I enjoy it.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_04: I enjoy participating in it.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that in my experience, anyway, because I was dancing with uh semanawaklama.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_04: In Mexico City, who are very hardcore Mexicayo, right?
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_04: So when I came back, that was like my whole world view was like, no, this has to be 100% Mexica.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's ancient, it's part of this unbroken tradition.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_04: And then Ruben and I, later on in life, you know, we meet, we're hanging out at ceremonies, and we're kind of like, we start questioning things.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_04: We start asking each other, like, well, does that sound right to you?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_04: How old do you think this is?
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_04: Well, why why are they saying that?
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_04: Well, that's not what I heard.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_04: And we're asking each other all these questions, and it kind of sparked this uh interest for us to really dig into it and start to pick apart those pieces.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_04: And that's what I really like about your research, is it it seems like you've done a good job of going in there and and picking apart those pieces because these are questions that that should be should be asked, and these are issues that should be addressed.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_04: You know, it it doesn't have to be antiquity does not equal legitimacy, you know, or it doesn't have to equal legitimacy, is I guess what I'm trying to say.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_02: And I think the other thing that comes into play and that I talk a lot about in my last article, right, is indigenous cultures have always been creative too, right?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_02: So the idea that any indigenous culture equates antiquity um winds up being really uh problematic.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_02: And uh so you have a number of ways that that plays out in in Don Zensteca, right?
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: Of people going and kind of trying to find um ancient songs and dances that because of some of these diffusionist models that the ZT and others kind of spread um are associated with being Mashika, even if they they really aren't necessarily.
• 23:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and you have even in the Danza community today, you have lots of people who are writing music and songs.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and many of them actually want to be acknowledged as the composers of these songs.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_02: And there's this push to anonymize them because only then can they really be connected with that past that particularly those who are seeking that connection uh can have, right?
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_02: So it winds up in effect making it so acknowledging indigenous creativity becomes almost impossible from what I can see in my research, if that's if that's one's approach, right?
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_02: Then one can only really see creativity as ending in in 1521 in a way, right?
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that that has that has consequences.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure you know people can push back on that as they want, but um if if one really wants, if if a song can't be composed, and I was just looking at this dissertation, you know, basically saying that you know all songs are pre-existing and come from the cosmos, and one can be a note of receiving them, but arguing that they're all basically pre-existing, or that um effectively uh you know, things were like are kind of like secretly embedded in things, and then you know, one unearthed them.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but anyone I think who has danced to a danza rhythm knows that many of them didn't come from songs.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_02: So many of them are things where people said, Hey, this is cool.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_02: Like we like how this looks, or you know, Florencio Yescas, who made Fuego, and you know, he choreographed it, he designed it, he, you know, and you have people today doing it saying, you know, this is the Mexica fire ceremony.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, you have other people in LA who are like, no, I remember him choreographing it.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there are people who have the notes from the research that he did um to create that uh choreography, um, but you see the story immediately shift uh and it it creates a conundrum of sorts when you know one of the founding principles of a lot of indigenous culture is that you acknowledge the person who taught you uh what came before.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and so what does that what does that mean for those who are really trying to reach back and can't um and can't do that?
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_04: And that's really unfortunate because I've seen that.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_04: I've seen people do um L'Aguila Blanca or Fuego, and they're like, yeah, this is ancient, this is uh an old.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_04: And my Capitan was always, I mean, he was one of the first dancers under Florencio Alescas here in New Mexico.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_04: So he was always sure to point out, like, I learned this from Florencio, Florencio designed this for us, he created this dance, this is why we're doing it.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_04: And he would explain to us like the purpose and and what the dance represented.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_04: But yeah, there's this whole other school of thought where it's like, no, this is ancient.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_04: And I think it's a drag because it really erases Florencio's contribution and and you know, in this thirst to appear ancient and you know, ascribe it this antiquity, we actually we lose a lot.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_04: We lose what this man contributed and the journey he made from Mexico to the United States.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_04: Like all of that gets written off just so we could say, oh no, this is ancient.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_04: Our ancestors have carried this for over 500 years.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: But I think Christina mentioned something important there.
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_00: She's saying that the kind of flip side of the argument about these songs and dances that are created in in contemporary times is that they're inspired by this notion that they already exist out there in the cosmos and that people are just pulling those pre-existing dances and songs that pertain to their specific culture from being connected to however they want to interpret it, whether it's the spirits, the animas, the ancestors, the deities, the gods, whatever.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's a philosophical principle that that describes this.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: I can't think of what it is at the moment, but it's it's an ancient idea of like everything already exists, and we're just kind of sort of um discovering it.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_00: When we discover something or invent something for the first time, it's not really we who are the ones that are authoring it.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's something that already exists, and we only discover because it already exists, right?
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like the same idea.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, isn't that kind of what you're trying to say?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_02: Uh also uh with uh your analysis Yeah, there does definitely seem to be some currents that that are pushing for that.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: I saw it published in just in 2020.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_02: So you're just kind of the same dissertation.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: I've I've read it.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: Mind-boggling in a way that sounds like a future episode.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I mean to me, my take on it is it's also very new agey, right?
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because there's a lot of stuff about the energies delivering it.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_02: And you guys had the whole thing about Amitheot and like, you know, this idea of like a the creator basically somehow connected with the Mashika, passing it along.
• 28:49
  SPEAKER_02: It's just a very um, yeah, it's a it's a take that kind of removes the the role of an artist altogether, um, aside from being some kind of vehicle for transmitting, right?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_02: So they have like that's that deliver they the actual word was an antenna.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and I you know, I I feel like they that that there has to, that people have more to them than than that, you know, and like you know, musicians who are are playing on Aztec instruments, and I've uh gotten to speak to quite a few of them.
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, they're they're artists, they are creative, they're inventive, um, they're they're finding ways to push limits with you know these instruments and and finding ways to bring them to life in really interesting ways, be it mixing them with electronics, you know, like Martinez Bina, um who's out there putting out some really interesting stuff, and uh, you know, and of course uh Javier Kiyas was doing lots of uh interesting things too.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_02: I I mean I don't I would be curious to hear what he would have thought of being called an antenna, because I think that he, you know, uh definitely saw himself as a creative, from my understanding and how people from hearing him play.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: But well, it's it's interesting that we're having this conversation because I mean, going back to what Curly just said about, you know, when we first started on this road and Mexicayo and Dansa, I remember buying this is before uh the the famous CD that came out in 2007, which uh I want to bring up as well.
• 30:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh Sotsolin, I believe it's I forget the the the name of the group who uh Mexica something, I forget Yaume.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_00: But there was it um Mexica Teokikame.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_00: There you go, Mexica Teokikame.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: But before that CD was was released, back in I want to say it was 99 or 2000 out of El Paso, there's uh Mexica community out there that we're kind of tied to uh here in Dallas.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: And um but back then I didn't know I didn't know who who had done the CD, and and they were it wasn't mass marketed like like the way the Sotoni was through Amazon, but this one like you could order it you know directly from the people that that were produced it, and I guess they were just kind of burning the CDs on their computer or something.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember uh back then I had a friend that that was when I was gung ho and you know super mexica, and I was trying to convert everyone and all my homeboys from the neighborhood, hey, check this out, you know.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: Just I call myself uh born-again mexica, right?
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm trying to proselytize, I'm trying to spread the mexica word, and I'm playing the CD, and and and one of my homies is like listening to it, and and he recognizes one of the songs that sounds a lot like uh La Guadalupe that's sung in Spanish, but it was done in in Nahuat and had been translated.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: And then he turns and looks at me and said, Are you sure this is supposed to be ancient Astric music?
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_00: Like right then, like from way back then, like you already had like those seeds being planted in my mind, like hmm, you know what?
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: I really don't know now.
• 31:39
  SPEAKER_00: And and then the answer is, well, does it have to be, right?
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_00: Right, but back then I I wasn't sophisticated enough to respond that way, but it really like that's one of the first seeds I was planted in in my mind in terms of questioning stuff.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_00: But you know, I didn't give it a second thought.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_00: I kept on trucking.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: But I'll say this because in your recent article, Forging Asticness, um, you there's a quote um that I pulled out this uh where you state um today, despite the best efforts of scholars and Mexican music enthusiasts, there are no verified examples of surviving melodies or rhythms from the mexica, which is, I mean, essentially true.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, how do we really know?
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: Uh we see the codices, and there's there's images of people who are singing beside the the people who are playing the drums and playing the flutes, and and and and you can see that they're seeing because they have the the symbol for for voice, for speaking, or for sound, but we don't know what it sounded like.
• 32:35
  SPEAKER_00: No one knows what that sounded like.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I wish I could be a fly on the wall.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, the quickacali.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the we we know that they had from from what I've read, I mean, we know that they have pretty complicated music and rhythms, right?
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, I had there's the image in the Florentine codex of the drummers being imprisoned for playing the wrong rhythms, um, which uh I've always thought that was kind of funny, having been someone who played in you know, band and the like a lot, uh you know, sort of a harsh punishment for for uh, but you know, if it's it's ceremonial and you don't get the the rhythm right, that was uh the punishment.
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_02: So which kind of points to it being complicated, right?
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_02: So that they they they probably had some some pretty complex music, but in terms of what it actually sounded like, it's really hard to know.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_02: There's um an article in a different journal or a different volume of the flower world, actually might be the same one that mine is in, I believe, where it has um some uh transcriptions from the Cantares Mexicanos.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_02: So we have texts, right?
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: That there's texts that survive, but even those in many cases, there's only a handful of them that are likely from before uh 1521, as most of them likely came in those few decades after.
• 33:55
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, but some of them are, you know, sort of survivors from Plaque de Loco who were kind of recounting and writing songs that were, you know, quite sad about what happened.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but of course, those are still from after.
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so even then, like, you know, to try to contextualize them and and not having a surviving melody makes it really hard to musically figure out um what like the to say that it's music that survives is difficult, right?
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_02: They kind of get glossed more as poetry, even then, most of what is glossed as poetry really is song.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that's one of the most frustrating things looking through the cantares mexicanos or the romances is just seeing the it'll just say like toki toki, toki ti.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_04: Exactly.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm like, damn it.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_02: And there's and there is a what I was what I was getting to is there's a guy who uh I who made uh an analysis that he thought maybe it could correspond with certain rhythms, and so he thought, but but the the end of the day, it's all kind of hypothetical, right?
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_02: That they we so we there's still so many question marks uh around it that it that it's really uh quite hard to say anything definitively.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_02: And then you know, take something like danza within it, right?
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I mean, really and the the the roots of danza, you know, is not even really exclusively from there and has a lot of Otomi influences from what my research points to.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so you know, that's been an interesting one too, where I you know, we talked about different groups and perspectives, and I remember I met with one Don Zante from kind of a little bit more out in the Mexica side, and you know, mentioned, oh yeah, I'm looking at it as pan-indigenous, and immediately right there I was like, no, we can't, there's no there's no future for us to do research or continue inquiry.
• 35:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I mean I think looking at kind of the more complex, um, the the the pan-indigenous complexities of it is part of the reason why it's so inclusive in the US, right?
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_02: That you have people who are Zapotec or uh Mishtec or from the Yucatan or Guatemala even, right?
• 36:08
  SPEAKER_02: Who are participating in it because they can bring something into it.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so that um kind of helps open up that that world.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_04: So I I have a question because this is something that's always perplexed me, and I've never been able to find an answer, and I've haven't had the time to do like the proper research.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_04: So I'm wondering if you've come across a possible answer.
• 36:34
  SPEAKER_04: But when you look at the Florentine, when you look at you know, Diego Durán's work, all of these images where they show dance and music, the the wewet, the the big drum is always played with hands, not with sticks.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_04: Like you'll see the teponastli played with sticks, but the big the tlapanwewet or the wewet is played with hands.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_04: But of course, today everybody uses the the sticks.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_04: And you know, when I was dancing in in Mexico, I'd I'd asked that question, and the way it was explained to me, and and now, you know, when I look back upon it, I'm like, well, that sounds a little, you know, it's it's very romantic, like this romanticized thing where they were like, well, when we would play the drums, they would chop off our hands.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_04: And so now we use the sticks to represent the hands that were chopped off.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_04: And I was like, damn.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, you know, and at the time I was gung-ho, so I was like, that sounds dope.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_04: All right.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_04: But then uh I believe it's the film Elis Dios.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_04: There's a scene, and it's a brief scene where you see a guy and he's playing the wewit, but he's only using one stick and he's playing a flute with the other hand.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_04: So he's he's playing the beat, and but he's also playing the flute.
• 38:02
  SPEAKER_04: And that's the first recorded image I've ever found of a stick being used for for the tlapan wewit.
• 38:10
  SPEAKER_04: And I think Els Dios was produced in like the 1950s or 1960s.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, that's the old one.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_04: Um but have you ever come across any information on when that transition occurred or why it occurred?
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_02: It's funny actually that you're asking that too, because uh Chris Garcia just wrote me, we read back and forth sometimes, and uh he's actually looking into that that same question because he's curious too.
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh I then because I I've been wondering that too, and I I always kind of assumed it kind of happened more with the Aztecation of Conchero and Danza Azteca and the need like um then was uh you know, basically trying to make it louder was kind of what I had assumed, but I have you know I haven't found hard evidence of it.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I started going through um there's uh see I have this uh instrument title doesn't run here.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_02: I actually pulled it out because I was double checking.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_02: I don't know if you're familiar with this one, and um and I was looking at some of the images, and uh it's interesting because they have pictures from the the turn of the century, and then you see kind of already a mixture of people playing with sticks and with hands um in the different pictures.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_02: And I think one of the things that could be a quite simple reason these are photos or illustrations?
• 39:33
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, these are photos of people kind of around the turn of the century.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_02: I'll see if I can if I can find one here.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but that um you know these instruments were really quite widespread in many ways, right?
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_02: Like, I mean, even down to the Maya region, because they they were widely disseminated.
• 39:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so um there would have been room for people to have different performance practices too.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_02: And then even, you know, like the drums of Malinalko, right?
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um that was being played in Malimalko up through the 1900s, um, that they were they were still living instruments and people would still um play them.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_02: Or if uh the the Temple Nasli, right, with the deer dance down in the the in the Meyer region, um, you'll still see these instruments uh getting played, for instance, among the Ramanala Chi, right?
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_02: Uh so uh it could be that it's as simple as that in terms of just different communities having their own uh performance practices.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_02: So let's see if I can show you.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_02: This is one where he's playing with his hands, he doesn't have the sticks.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_02: The next one he's playing with beaters that almost look like the beaters of the powwow drum.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: Oh wow, right?
• 40:41
  SPEAKER_02: So and these are you know taken around the same time.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_02: So yeah, that's kind of what I'm my best hypothesis, but that is still very much just a hypothesis and not anything that's concretely backed up.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, I think there's a number of people are kind of looking into that same question, and maybe we'll we'll get a a more clear answer when that change actually happened or and who is it that you said is also looking into that?
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh Chris Garcia.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_02: He's uh musician in uh Christopher Garcia, he's a musician in um Los Angeles one so I can just double check.
• 41:18
  SPEAKER_00: Well, shout out Chris Garcia.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: If you uh if you get an answer, please let us know.
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I wonder if it's something even more simple as with the reintroduction of the Wewit into Dansa, in my in the modern context, drums are always played with sticks.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so I wonder if the the mechikas that are you know beginning to reintroduce the wewet into the answer, yeah, maybe they just found it easier to to use sticks instead of using their hands to play the the wewit.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_02: Well that's uh I realized it was not it's not Luna, it was uh Pineda's who I was thinking of, who Florencio Yescas had studied with.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_02: And that um I uh he was the person who I think really kind of started to take the the the rhythms of the concerto instruments that were being played on the concha, and taking those same like you know, that that that that that that uh you know the basic strumming rhythms and then taking them and putting them on the way wave and doing them faster and louder and kind of making them a little bit more aggressive in a way is how it's been described to me.
• 42:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so I wouldn't be surprised if it was kind of just the natural extension of that because it would be hard, harder to do them faster and louder with one's hands.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I'm thinking here you could, I mean, uh I'm thinking of like uh people who play the timbal, they can do that pretty fast.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, they they have a very well-developed skill set of playing the timbales uh really fast.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: And uh, and so I don't know, maybe yeah, that that that is an interesting question.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: I'm I'm I can't wait for that article to come up.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, for real.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_04: That should be interesting.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_04: I I have a question.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_04: Um, so you you spoke about how we see the rhythms in the Mexicay in the more aggressive danzasteca style of dancing coming from concherto rhythms, right?
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_04: And you can hear it, you could hear the concerto like the real slow strumming of the concha, and then you hear that same beat played on the wewit, but faster and and more aggressive.
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_04: Have you ever come across evidence of that going the other way though?
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_04: Have from yeah, like have modern yeah.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_02: Uh I I haven't.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_02: And I think this is well, so it's also interesting to know, right?
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_02: Because with these things that have come up from Mexico and then have made their way back down.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_02: And um, one of the kind of fun examples that I'm pretty sure reflects this is um you guys cited um Rastas' book carrying the word, I think in one of your earlier episodes.
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_02: And she has a list of like here are the danzes that concerts are doing.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_02: And all of pretty much all of them have like a you know, a Spanish name and then like a Nahuatl translation, and then there's one there.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: That doesn't have a Spanish name, which is Maya Will.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_02: And the the sheep I thought that and some uh they they actually some of the members of that group tell me that they recall creating that one in the 80s.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so it's not too surprising that it already would be showing up in Mexico, you know, 20 years later when she was doing her research, perhaps.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_02: Like I think that's what happened, like why there wouldn't necessarily be a Spanish name if it only went by that one.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_02: And so having that kind of transnational circulation, right, of people also from the ZT coming up to ceremonies and going back down.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so there there are these currents.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_02: I haven't had the opportunity to go.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_02: If I think that's I think if one were gonna discover that, we'd have to go to Guadalajara, uh Mexico City in particular, and kind of see how Conchero groups that are up against some of those Danzig Azteca groups are taking that.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_02: Because I haven't seen that as much in the United States.
• 44:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I think if it were happening, and if I was gonna try to uh go and take that question, that is where I would go as a starting place to see if that makes sense.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, since you bring it up, I'm wondering, can can you talk a little bit about the connections that you have found with dansa and um how it relates to Mexican Americans, especially through the lens of the Chicano movement?
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because you've had a few things to say about that, and and I was wondering if you could share some of that uh with us here.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_02: So I think one of the things that I I keep trying to kind of remember and as well is that you know, if you think about when a lot of these things were happening, right?
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_02: Like take, for instance, just going back to talking about Mexico City and some of these um changes to Mechikaya, Mehikani that, you know, a lot of the people who are doing that are people who survived what you know, the the the wars that the civil wars that happened then, right, as some of the worst, um of the most deadliest wars that have happened in the world, in the sense that they don't really have records of how many people died, right, in Mexico uh in the 1910s, 1920s.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um and just so the perspective was very much if you kind of imagine where they're coming from, right?
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_02: Like that there's a sense of impending crisis.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_02: And I think, you know, thinking about what how how Danza was approached in the US in the 70s as well, for you know, Chicano's coming out, the Chicano movement and Salazar Park and all the atrocities that were happening, like there's also like a real sense of urgency um there as well, right?
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_02: Because there's uh there was a lot of stuff that was having to be dealt with.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so in terms of Dansa being introduced by Florencio Yescas, I mean you guys also talked about the consigna de Guatemak.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, there's also, you know, obviously the complications of um Aslan, um even though it was mostly a literary movement, also having some of that political movement as well.
• 46:59
  SPEAKER_02: And then you have on top of that like the condor and the eagle and the Americas coming together.
• 47:03
  SPEAKER_02: So you have a lot of these kind of romantic prophecy ideals coming together around also some very, very real uh traumas and um experiences that are happening on the ground.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_02: And so um Danza kind of came in at a time where um, especially when you talk to the older generation, I mean it was really kind of uh seen as a way to um go and and and complete a mission.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, Florencio Yesquez was really um on a mission to um kind of help um at a time for I mean I can also imagine like you know, sitting on the other side of the border and seeing the struggles, you know, feeling that compelling urge to go and to help um the communities on the other side.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so you know, going to different universities and teaching danza as a way to foster uh Mexican pride.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, like today we kind of talk about Mexicanidad.
• 48:00
  SPEAKER_02: I know that we're um I might come across as very hard on it in some ways because you know, ultranationalism is very problematic.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_02: At the same time, we also have to recognize that at the time there was a real, you know, people were also really trying to um coming from places where we're you weren't allowed to speak Spanish in public school and we're belittled and all of those um things that were happening too, right?
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_02: So um trying to find a way to help children to have something to grasp onto.
• 48:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so you know, you have these two sides of it.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's one of those, one of the challenges too, right, is that one has to acknowledge um that side of it as well, and and where it was the context in which these things were emerging um from a series of um real traumas in different ways, um, while also um finding ways to look at the complications that that they also uh bring up and that that stem from them.
• 48:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um so Ruben, does that kind of I know that might not be quite the direction you were going into?
• 49:02
  SPEAKER_00: Do you want to that's fine?
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: I just wanted you to say a few words because I know that you talk about it a little bit in in a lot of your work, the dissertation, uh not so much in the 2014 article, but you do kind of bring it up in your recent one uh for gymnasticness uh and how you're right, you know, Chicano, the Chicano movement was drawing upon a lot of the things that the um Mexican nationalists had pr been producing since the 1920s into the 30s, and you know, we've talked about this before on the podcast.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_00: I just I just wanted to bring out those connections that that are found within those nationalist movements, uh, because there was many, it wasn't just one nationalist movement in Mexico, you had a plurality of movements.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: So you had the Mexica, you had the you had the Hispanophiles, uh and then you had people who were kind of in between the the mestizo uh identity was kind of like the middle of the road of those two extremes.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_00: And within the Chicano movement, you had people who were taking ideas from various parts of that spectrum and coalescing them and combining them into one singular idea.
• 50:07
  SPEAKER_00: But even within the Chicano movement, you also had this sort of spectrum of ideologies that also emerge in terms of what it means to be Chicano, what does a slan mean to people or to certain organizations, and what are the goals of the Chicano movement, and how does all this you know relate back to Dansa?
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of Chiganos who were exposed to Dansa didn't take to it, you know, and that's one of the questions that I kind of look at in my own research, and you know, I I I don't I haven't specifically done a study on that, but I mean it's it's an interesting question to sort of look at.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it that if the Chicano movement, if to call yourself a Chigano at the time was a reassertion of your indigenous ancestry, of your indigenous roots, and you know, to acknowledge the fact that you are an indigenous or you have remnants of indigenous peoples within a place as a colonized people, which was part of what the Chicano movement was about, to sort of decolonize Aslan, the homeland of the Chicano people, in relation to other indigenous people as well.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't just about, oh, we're the sole proprietors of this land that we as Chicanos call a slang.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: You know, that was just our name for it.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_00: You know, other nations have their name for the land, we have the name for the land as well.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, why is it that not more Chicanos gravitated towards, I mean, they might have gravitated towards an indigenous identity or acknowledgement of indigenous identity, but not, you know, in the grand scheme of things, not many Chicanos really adopted a neo-Mexika view of themselves or went into Mexicayo traditions or did danza, and so that's that's another aspect of my research that I'm um you know I want to get into and and look at some more and and see what what I find with that.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: But I just think it's it's curious how all this overlaps um with with you know what's going on in Mexico, what's going on here, and what's going on abroad internationally, right?
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_00: Because these movements in Mexico and the movements here in the US were all sort of looking at the various decolonial movements that are happening abroad in India, in in Africa, in in uh South America, and and in Southeast Asia, for instance.
• 52:12
  SPEAKER_00: And so the entire world was quote unquote decolonizing back in the 60s and 70s.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_00: And Chicanos were saying to themselves, well, you know, we're a colonized people too.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_00: How come we can't decolonize as well?
• 52:24
  SPEAKER_00: There's just so many, so many different, you know, threads that that we can tug on when it comes to how dansa itself applies to all these different histories.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, there really are.
• 52:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's um yeah, there's so many, there's so many layers to unpack all the time.
• 52:43
  SPEAKER_02: And of course I focus on the artistic side, but that is always interwoven with the political side um and all of these other layers that um that that are just part of the uh part of the sandwich.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_02: You know, there's just there's so many, there's so many different components to it.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, yeah.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_04: I think that's one of the mistakes that that a lot of these groups, the the grupos make, these kalpoolis, right?
• 53:11
  SPEAKER_04: They call themselves kalpoolis, but all they do is danza.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_04: So they're trying to create a community, but if you don't want to dance, then are you really gonna be part of that community, right?
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_04: I mean, instead of being like, well, we're a community, part of what we do is danza, but we also try to do language revitalization.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_04: We study the calendar, we we have a piece of land that's like a communal farm, we've got ceremony that we do, we've, you know, we study the calendars, we we do all of these different things, which I think is more representative of what a kalpuli is.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_04: Instead, you have dansa groups calling themselves kalpulies, but all they are are dansa groups.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that's a mistake.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_04: Um and when I was living in uh in Fort Worth, we were trying to really expand that idea of what a kalpuli was by doing a lot of language stuff and calendar stuff, and in addition to medicine meetings and sweat and dansa, and we were and political stuff too, right?
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_04: We would go and we would participate in um in protests and and stuff.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_04: I remember uh there was one protest, it was an anti-war protest, and some of the uh like the liberal people there, the white liberals, were complaining that there were danzantes there.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_04: And their their reasoning was, well, how could this be an anti-war protest?
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_04: But the machine the Aztecs had war.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_02: As did everyone else ever through the history of time.
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, right.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_04: It's like, come on, that's that's the that's the complaint.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_04: But speaking of war, see, like how I did that segue.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_04: Um have you in your research looked into at all the participation of concheros in the cristero war?
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_04: Because I've only come across brief mentions of it, and we know that there were, you know, concheros actively participating in the cristero war, because one of the first things I was told when I when I started doing danza and our capitan was explaining to us, because we almost had like an onboarding process to become a member of our of our grupo.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_04: Like he would take you and he would explain to you all the history that he knew about where the danza came from and who taught him and the different forms of danza, and you know, is this what we do in our grupo?
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_04: If it doesn't appeal to you, you might want to go to a different grupo, but this is how we approach the danza.
• 55:48
  SPEAKER_04: So I was given this whole history lesson basically before I became a danzante, and he told me that he had learned that during the Cristero War, you know, the concerts were asked, like, you will, you could be killed for doing this.
• 56:07
  SPEAKER_04: This is a very real thing because it's so tied with Catholic identity and and and the church.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_04: Are you willing to die to do this?
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_04: And at the time, I didn't really know what the Cristero War was, so I was just like, oh wow, they were being asked, you know, is the danza that important that you're willing to die for it?
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_04: But there was like this larger, you know, thing going on around it.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_04: Um, but that's always something that's interested me.
• 56:34
  SPEAKER_04: How did the Concheros participate in the Cristero War?
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_04: Have you covered any of that?
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_02: So I've seen references to them like dancing in caves during that time.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_02: And like, and actually, I think kind of one of my theories about, you know, you read those accounts of like Danza was suppressed by the Inquisition.
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_02: I'm sure you've heard that one.
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and actually the Inquisition was very specifically targeting uh Spanish Jews who had fled to Spain, because you have to remember in 1492, all the Jews were expelled from Spain.
• 57:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and one of the things that they did was they came across the ocean, right?
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_02: So you actually had a lot of uh Spanish Jews who were among those early uh Spanish settlers.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_02: So it wasn't really with few exceptions, um, one particular being Delanda and the Maya region, they really were not targeting um indigenous practices um for the most part during that time.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_02: Uh of course, they were pushing conversion and all that, but there was also kind of this like distinction of, you know, well, you know, we are the Spanish, we're special, uh, look at these, you know, of course, quote unquote, you know, primitive people who practice these, you know, quote unquote quaint little things in their villages, right?
• 57:50
  SPEAKER_02: So they actually like having different art was actually an important part of how colonial uh structures and hierarchies were upheld, that actually the Spanish colonial powers really in some ways wanted there to be that difference.
• 58:04
  SPEAKER_02: That, you know, even if you look at the colonial era, they were not, they they were pushing Nahuatl as the lingua franca across Mexico because they didn't want uh indigenous people learning Spanish because they needed to maintain their difference, right?
• 58:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so the reason why I say this is that I think that with the Cristero World Wars and what happened and that real push underground of Conchero and how that is inscribed in popular memory of Conchero has actually in some ways kind of been conflated with earlier colonial experiences and the way that Danza tells its history.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um, that they're actually uh two, you know, pretty um, in some ways distinct experiences there, and that that's the one that's really like kind of cemented in the more recent memory of um Danza and the repertoire and kind of the histing, right?
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_02: Because people remember that.
• 58:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I haven't really looked specifically into uh conteros who are participating in the war, which will definitely be interesting because there is enough, I mean there are enough people who would have known still like who was doing what.
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_02: So that I mean that would be a really interesting project for someone to uh to undertake in Mexico, and and I hope that they um I hope that they do.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, because I really that that's kind of one of my hypotheses, too, is that how these things, how these histories are condensed, that that is one of the ways in which it winds up being really condensed because um it was such a repressive time uh for Concheros, but ironically, because of the Catholicism.
• 59:38
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so it's you know kind of shows some of the interesting parts of how things uh are histed today.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_02: But I'd be curious to hear if you think that that sounds reasonable or not, or kind of fits maybe with your experience.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I mean, that that makes sense to me, um, the way you explain that.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_04: That makes perfect sense.
• 59:54
  SPEAKER_04: And I'm glad that you said that you mentioned how because people have this misconception of the priests always going out and just like savaging people and you know, destroying everything.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_04: And like, yes, that happened.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_04: But in a lot of the cases, they were like you said, they were like, no, let them speak nahuat.
• 1:00:17
  SPEAKER_04: In fact, get more of them to speak nahuat because we don't want them speaking our languages, except for these nobles who we've taken into our academy at Latalolco, and we've taught them Latin and we've taught them how to write, because they're going to help us convert their people.
• 1:00:33
  SPEAKER_04: And, you know, we're not gonna stop them from doing their dances, but we are going to mix them up and have, you know, add Catholic elements to those dances because that's helpful.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_04: That's a helpful tool, not to crush it entirely because then you drive it underground, but to uh take it and co-opt it and mix in these Catholic elements and use it as a tool of conversion, right?
• 1:01:00
  SPEAKER_04: So it wasn't always just, you know, like you said, uh Landa uh had a hard-on for destroying things, and so did Diego Durán.
• 1:01:09
  SPEAKER_04: Diego Durán, I'm always encouraging people to read uh his writings because they're very helpful in that that guy just complained about everything.
• 1:01:20
  SPEAKER_04: So you learn how people were hiding indigenous traditions because he was like, oh, we we caught them.
• 1:01:26
  SPEAKER_04: You know, if you walk in and they're singing one of their songs, you know, the they'll see a priest walk in and they'll start throwing in hallelujahs to confuse the priest and make them think that they're that they're being converted.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_04: Or, you know, we we wanted this community to perform, you know, this feast on this Saints' Day, and they came and they petitioned us to if we could change it to this other saints' day, and we were like, oh yeah, cool, they're falling into line.
• 1:01:56
  SPEAKER_04: And he's like, But then I found out the only reason they wanted to change it is because that corresponds with you know this teteo that they were worshiping and the ceremony that they had.
• 1:02:06
  SPEAKER_04: And so you get to see all these cool acts of subversion if you read Die Ego Duran.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_04: And that guy, you know, he he more than anyone, well, him and and Landa definitely wanted to wipe things out.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_04: I think Duran described it as like rip out, rip the roots out, rip, rip the weeds out by their roots is how he described destroying indigenous uh philosophies and and ceremonies.
• 1:02:32
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I mean, that's just I think it's so hard to relate to them from today's perspective because like you think about these people and they are sincerely like seeing a world plagued in devils and like I mean, I think it's hard because on one hand, you know, we take it as like um well, you know, they were in it for the money, and there certainly was that too.
• 1:02:51
  SPEAKER_02: And there were also the people who like sincerely, like ardently believed that you know, devil and witchcraft and all this stuff.
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_02: That's just I think challenging for me to always like wrap my head around um uh as a contemporary scholar.
• 1:03:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I was gonna add to that too, um the the the especially the thought loco, right?
• 1:03:13
  SPEAKER_02: And like this idea of like Nawa sized Catholicism being what was spread out, right?
• 1:03:17
  SPEAKER_02: That already, you know, we think about the Spanish being the people who are really tasked with um tasked with spreading um Catholicism, but it was actually in many cases those you know, kind of elite uh Nahua converts early on who some of them even like you know sent their parents to death and were pretty you know insanely hardcore uh right from the get-go.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_02: And that you know, you have you know Moctezuma's uh was it her, I think it might have been even been his daughter who married uh Oñate, right, and moved to New Mexico.
• 1:03:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that you have performances uh of I mean uh Danzas de Conquista and being performed in Nahua for um or conversion theater pieces, what I meant to say.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_02: In Nahua, they're being performed for audiences that don't speak Nahua, you know, in the 1500s and 1600s as kind of part of their colonial experience.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_02: And so, you know, Nahua has this really complicated place in Mexico's history as both, you know, obviously an indigenous language, but also the primary language of the colonial experience for a lot of other indigenous communities that that weren't primarily Nawa speaking areas.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and you can kind of see the remnants of it in, for instance, you have, of course, like La Malinche and Moctezuma and those stories going up all the way up to like I found references to like the Korah up in northern Mexico, you know, doing ceremonies and having a malinche and their ceremonies, uh, and you know, Moctezuma featuring in the American Southwest as being basically conflated with Jesus and the ways in which all of these uh kind of parts of the Nahua uh experience were filtered out across uh the the Spanish colonies um through basically these these uh Nawa uh scribes and Tlataloco and priests who basically um kind of spread their history and through their lens, uh, which was this this Nahua lens.
• 1:05:18
  SPEAKER_02: So it's um kind of adds an interesting angle to uh danza as well.
• 1:05:23
  SPEAKER_02: That uh it was one of the things that I think is kind of interesting in thinking about that pan-indigenous element is that you know, actually a lot of people from areas outside of Mexico City, because some dance have told me that they get asked, like, well, why do you do this?
• 1:05:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's not like relevant to you if you're you know from if you're Zapotec, like why are you doing Danza Mexica?
• 1:05:43
  SPEAKER_02: It's like, well, they still actually in many cases like had these layers of uh novicized Catholicism that they were taught through.
• 1:05:53
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, even in that way, there's this kind of interesting um cultural connection that kind of binds people.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_02: Many different ways to it, even if they don't necessarily even if they identify very differently.
• 1:06:06
  SPEAKER_02: So it's very interesting to kind of see how those histories like kind of creep in.
• 1:06:10
  SPEAKER_04: Well, here in New Mexico, um, you know, um a lot of the colonization of New Mexico was carried out by Nahua people um who were brought up here.
• 1:06:21
  SPEAKER_04: And um it's actually how my family got here.
• 1:06:24
  SPEAKER_04: But here in New Mexico, we have what's called uh La Virgen de la Macana.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_04: And it's always struck me as weird that the danza groups here haven't really, you know, especially the uh the concheros, haven't really uh glommed onto her or or used her imagery in their ceremonies because the story.
• 1:06:43
  SPEAKER_04: Are you are you familiar familiar with the uh Virgen?
• 1:06:47
  SPEAKER_04: So La Virgen de Macana de la Macana, so in 1680, during the Pueblo Revolt, uh there were you know, Tlashcalteca, Mexica, Pure Pecha peoples present in Santa Fe at that time in the Barrio Analco, and there was a church there uh of San Miguel, and so during the Pueblo Revolt, the story is they had an image of the Virgin Mary, and one of the Pueblo warriors or somebody grabbed a Macquawit and tried to destroy this image of the Virgin Mary, and they struck it, and you know, allegedly the the Macquawit shattered, and it only left a small mark on her head, like a little scar.
• 1:07:34
  SPEAKER_04: He they failed to destroy La Virgin.
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_04: So, like the story is you know, she was so powerful, you know, and so just and righteous that this weapon of these savage people couldn't couldn't destroy her.
• 1:07:47
  SPEAKER_04: So then the Spanish, when they retreated, they took this image with them back to Mexico.
• 1:07:53
  SPEAKER_04: But paintings of it, and I think I took you to see one, didn't I, Reuben?
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_04: There's one hanging in the in the museum at at Santa Fe.
• 1:08:01
  SPEAKER_04: And um it's it's interesting because the imagery, she's standing in the middle, she's holding a macuait in her hand, and behind her you see the Pueblo revolt going on and all these other natives holding Macquawites, like putting Spanish priests to death.
• 1:08:20
  SPEAKER_04: And it it always strikes me as odd that so few uh, you know, Dan Santes, I'll I'll even ask them, like, so what do you think of La Virgen de la Macana?
• 1:08:31
  SPEAKER_04: And they've never heard of her.
• 1:08:32
  SPEAKER_04: And that's like a local story, a local virgin story that I would think the Concheros would have picked up on and used.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_04: I I've always found that perplexing that they didn't.
• 1:08:44
  SPEAKER_04: And also, shout out Ruth Bader Ginsburg because we bumped into her at the at the museum that day.
• 1:08:49
  SPEAKER_04: It was pretty weird.
• 1:08:51
  SPEAKER_00: It was really weird.
• 1:08:53
  SPEAKER_00: She kind of just zipped right past us, like with her bodyguards in tow, and we're like, wait, we kind of did that that Spider-Man meme was that we did like the ball double.
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_04: And I almost went up and tried to talk to her, but the Secret Service guy just like side-eyed me, and I was like, All right, never mind.
• 1:09:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think currently, I think the reason why Dan Santes in New Mexico don't know about Leban de la Macana, and if they do haven't done anything to try to make a connection to her, it goes back again to what we keep bringing up in terms of one of the fallacies, I guess, in in Dansa or Mexicayor in general, that you have to uh have sort of like a view of yourself or give off a perception of being legitimate through antiquity and tied to a tradition that has its roots and its origins.
• 1:09:43
  SPEAKER_00: And if you begin to mess with that that story, the main story about the origin of Dansa, uh with Santiago, you know, some call him Matamoros, I call him Mata Indios, because that's that's how some of the communities knew him as, and uh how it's tied to El Bajío, how it's tied to Querétaro, and the collapsing of time and space, you know, going back to this notion of the Cristero War and how you know there's rumors that the Concheros were involved in that, but they really weren't necessarily involved with it.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_00: But it's it's it's tied to this you know greater tradition of being in conflict and the and being part of the Christian Catholic religion.
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_00: And so, I mean, I kind of talk a little bit about that in my article, how how history just kind of gets collapsed and condensed.
• 1:10:29
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's part of that, this this idea that if you're going to accept something that's new and different from a different place, then it's gonna remove the situation of the lansa from its origins into a new place where now they have to kind of reinvent that tradition, and somehow by reinventing it, it might lose a little bit of its authenticity.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's probably why, even if Lansant is new, they could they they would probably not necessarily want to make that connection with La Virgenda La Magana because it doesn't fit into the narrative of the origin of Lansant where it comes from.
• 1:11:02
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean if you really think about it, it kind of does, because it's very similar to those ideas of Santiago, you know, appearing in the sky with the with cross uh uh and and that sort of the signal that the the battle has ended and that the Spanish, quote unquote Spanish, because most of these were Christianized Indians, are victorious.
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really the battle between Christianity and heathenism, Christianity versus indigenous spirituality.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_00: And so that story of the La Vicente de la Magana is perfectly it it aligns perfectly with the story of Dansa.
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I mean it's curious that Vantas haven't, at least in New Mexico, haven't, you know, picked up on that.
• 1:11:42
  SPEAKER_00: What do you think, Dr.
• 1:11:43
  SPEAKER_00: Nielsen?
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I'm gonna I'm gonna second Ruben's perspectives on that one, because I think he has probably more insight there than I do.
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_02: But I was also just gonna add, because I something else that um I realized I wanted to add to your question about the Cristeros war was um uh I think also you know there were certainly cancer's that were lost in that war, but from what I um know too and what I found in my research and was reiterated as really important because um Lazzaro uh Arviso told me um that um you know Florencio Yesquez told him about the the real impact of the train accident that happened in the 30s.
• 1:12:23
  SPEAKER_02: If you're all familiar with that one, um are you familiar with that one, Carly?
• 1:12:28
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
• 1:12:29
  SPEAKER_02: So they were headed home.
• 1:12:30
  SPEAKER_02: I think I believe it was from Chungai.
• 1:12:33
  SPEAKER_02: I'd have to uh double check exactly which ceremony it was, but it was it was a whole bunch of really important concheros.
• 1:12:39
  SPEAKER_00: Is this the one that Martha Stone talks about in her book?
• 1:12:41
  SPEAKER_00: Mm-hmm.
• 1:12:42
  SPEAKER_02: That one.
• 1:12:43
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:12:43
  SPEAKER_02: And they were they were um headed, I believe, back from the ceremony, and the train derailed, and the train or it collided with another train.
• 1:12:54
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not doing a very good job of telling this, but but ultimately what happened was somehow there was a whole bunch of sugar involved that then liquidized and basically like flooded the whole accident, and so it was just absolutely devastating.
• 1:13:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh I I think that the the deaths were you know in the hundreds, um, and because you know, people were just like packed in, especially because they were headed to these uh ceremonies, and so a whole bunch of uh Conchero elders were just wiped out in one accident, and that that actually had a really big impact in the tradition that you know for people like influencia yes que's generation, it was pretty much you know the whole generation of elders or a large portion of them um that was a generation before then were just basically gone overnight.
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so trying to um like what that means too, right, for a generation.
• 1:13:47
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, the Cristeros World uh war is definitely like a an important narrative, but in terms of like where a lot of the the deaths happened quickly, um that that train accident actually had uh a seismic impact, from my understanding, on um on the tradition.
• 1:14:06
  SPEAKER_02: And uh basically um for Danza Azteca and kind of the second fine of it, um, also kind of ironically opened some doors because there was there was not a lot of people to protest the same way there might otherwise have been, um, in some ways, right?
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_02: That that that older generation that um maybe was a little bit more conservative, um, you know, unfortunately, passed.
• 1:14:29
  SPEAKER_02: So there's there, it's um that's another one that I think also uh could warrant more exploring alongside.
• 1:14:35
  SPEAKER_00: Definitely, yeah, for sure.
• 1:14:37
  SPEAKER_00: So going back to Sotzolin, and in your dissertation, you talk about Sotzolin.
• 1:14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe you could, you know, uh give us a little bit of your perspective on what you found in your research in terms of uh some of the medicine songs that that are out there.
• 1:14:51
  SPEAKER_00: And and uh it's it's interesting because uh, you know, reading your dissertation, and then I came across what you have to say about Sotsolin, and then you have a quote there uh that says, Soin did a masterful job of, and this is you're quoting someone who posted a review of the CD on Amazon back in 2007, and and this is a quote Sotsolin did a masterful job of harmonizing and arranging these classic Mexica Peyori medicine songs done in both Nahuat and Spanish.
• 1:15:18
  SPEAKER_00: It makes one feel as if you're in a meeting within the sacred gardens of Wirikuta along the Wirarika, the Wichol people.
• 1:15:25
  SPEAKER_00: I highly recommend this CD for anyone who is in the Mexicayot tradition or for those who wish to familiarize themselves with the spiritual songs of the Mexica Azteca.
• 1:15:35
  SPEAKER_00: And that was me.
• 1:15:39
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh, I love that.
• 1:15:41
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, that's so funny.
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_00: I know, right?
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's crazy.
• 1:15:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I wonder if you could if you could tell us a little bit about your findings there.
• 1:15:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, oh man, that just made my day.
• 1:15:56
  SPEAKER_02: Um so I mean, I think, and I as the person who wrote it here, I mean I would love to hear more about that.
• 1:16:03
  SPEAKER_02: But um, so what I what I found, first of all, like it's interesting with the Aho Ometeo, right?
• 1:16:09
  SPEAKER_02: Like the kind of convergence of North traditions, North American traditions and and uh and uh Mechikaya the Ometeo, which you guys of course also have unpacked on here.
• 1:16:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um and one of the things that um kind of is also that stood out to me about the album and what I was looking at musically within that album, um, is the use of Peyote uh uh music tradition, particularly like the water drum and the fast beat that happens.
• 1:16:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um that's um invoking like Native American church music.
• 1:16:43
  SPEAKER_02: Uh and so you have a lot of drawing on uh Native North American music, which uh when I've talked to musicians, it's also kind of been described as like, well, then you if you lost everything, where are you gonna look?
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_02: You're gonna lick to the next closest place, your neighbors, what are other Native North American communities doing, and you're gonna take that.
• 1:17:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um so you know, there's kind of been this um perspective in in Danza that one can kind of take these other Native American cultures and draw on them and that that is Mexica.
• 1:17:15
  SPEAKER_02: The other thing, and you guys talked about Mexica and basically that whole story that you know Neva Lopez told of you know the Mexica being the center and how they you know basically taught all of the Americas culture and taught you know your culture in it.
• 1:17:31
  SPEAKER_02: I heard Carly gave this the quote about the building the pyramids in Egypt or teaching them how to do that.
• 1:17:37
  SPEAKER_02: That was kind of one of my favorite, more extreme ones in there.
• 1:17:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but if you are from that perspective that the Mexica are the umbilical core or the the the navel of uh the Americas culturally, then effectively it also is kind of translated to people believing that other indigenous cultures are therefore remnants of Mexico culture that you and it kind of draws on this diffusionist European model that, well, if you move further away, you'll find what our music was before.
• 1:18:10
  SPEAKER_02: So if you look at, for instance, the Europeans and particularly the Germans who were studying African music in the late 1800s, early 1900s, they weren't studying it because they were interested in the preserving African culture or no, they were studying it because they thought that by studying it, they were studying what their ancestors were like before, right?
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_02: So they saw it as like well, kind of basically culture evolving alongside people, right?
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_02: So it's kind of a drawing on that same model that uh that people, for instance, like the Lakota would be preserving Mexica culture, or that you can find it in these other corners um of indigenous cultures in the Americas.
• 1:18:52
  SPEAKER_02: And I know it sounds kind of outlandish, and I know a lot of people know that this is not the case.
• 1:18:57
  SPEAKER_02: However, I have had conversations with people who like wouldn't believe me that the that the Lakota Sundance was Lakota, that it was not uh the Mexica who taught the Lakota the Sundance.
• 1:19:08
  SPEAKER_04: Oh, I I've had those same conversations.
• 1:19:10
  SPEAKER_04: It's uh yeah.
• 1:19:12
  SPEAKER_02: And so you see how those myths, and like I you know, you talk about you know the MCRCA or uh the ZT or this book to people, and they have no idea what you're talking about.
• 1:19:24
  SPEAKER_02: And yet they parrot exactly what these stories are and have created these origin stories.
• 1:19:30
  SPEAKER_02: And the unfortunate thing is that many of these dancer communities are really trying to connect with Native North American Indigenous people because yes, they share a lot of interests, they have a lot of political causes that they both believe in.
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_02: They want to have these connections, they want to do it respectfully.
• 1:19:49
  SPEAKER_02: The problem is that these histories and these beliefs are gonna, you know, hold them up because I mean, I I wouldn't want to be the one to tell the Lakota that I mean you might get punched in the face and you might deserve it.
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_03: Guys, guess what?
• 1:20:04
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I think you know, it's I I mean, I hope if if my work can do help do that and help people think about how they're approaching that and how if they really if if people in these communities really want to find respectful ways to reach out, um, thinking about song choices.
• 1:20:22
  SPEAKER_02: And for instance, yeah, I have you know, Virginia Carmelo told me about if someone in Southern California is singing a bear song, uh, you know, she's Tung Va as well, so she knows you know the native Californian songs.
• 1:20:34
  SPEAKER_02: And so to have a danzante sing it, you know, in the wrong season, not knowing culturally anything about it, but just knowing, oh, this is a cool song, um, it's indigenous, I'm gonna sing it, um, but not recognizing that in order to do that, there's a whole bunch of protocols.
• 1:20:50
  SPEAKER_02: Like you want to make sure that you're getting it from the right place, you want to make sure you're doing it respectfully, you want to make sure that you're actually like, you know, building the relationships you want rather than pushing people away, right?
• 1:21:02
  SPEAKER_02: Because it can it can be appropriation.
• 1:21:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um so figuring out how you you do that, um, and and not falling into those traps of the histories that'll you know trip you up and make it a lot harder to achieve that, you know, very um, I think reasonable goal.
• 1:21:20
  SPEAKER_02: But if people are gonna go into it with those kinds of beliefs, then you know they're not gonna be able to achieve what they even want to do, right?
• 1:21:28
  SPEAKER_04: Well, one of the things that I like, and um, because you you interview KwaZalin um for your your research, and he and I are kind of doing the same thing where we are, and he's done it more than I have, but going through the the cantares mexicanos and and the the Florentine and the romances and taking the lyrics to these songs and then trying to make these songs singable again, which uh I think is you know, it's it's it's cool because it shows that, you know, we could take them and make them modern, but we but still connecting them right to the the the past and having them be something that is originally a Nawa song and that can be sung uh without co-opting or appropriating living indigenous peoples.
• 1:22:15
  SPEAKER_04: We could take stuff that we descend from and rework it and reframe it uh and make them singable again, you know, in the modern sense.
• 1:22:23
  SPEAKER_04: So had did you listen to any of his songs?
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_04: Had did they uh did he perform any of these the songs?
• 1:22:29
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, no, I've I've heard a few of them, but of course, the other challenge that's been described to me by by quite a few Don Sante's quaseline included is that those texts are complicated, yeah.
• 1:22:39
  SPEAKER_02: Um you know, and so to get uh you know your Kapuli to memorize a complicated song, I mean he's um I know he's saying like Zanyawan quite a bit, um, kind of the first verses of that.
• 1:22:54
  SPEAKER_02: Um then so there's some that you know and Chico Mostok and some of those ones were you know were being sung a little bit more frequently.
• 1:23:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but yeah, to try to get the rest of your community to know them, and then to try to get you know a broader, like broader group of people to know them is it's a tough endeavor.
• 1:23:12
  SPEAKER_02: And there's a reason why, like um trying to remember who it was telling me that like it's like nope, we do short songs because that's what people can do.
• 1:23:19
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, ometeo poche, gets alcohol, over and over and over again.
• 1:23:24
  SPEAKER_02: Like, you know, people can do that, and then you know, a right, like so the syllables like straight out of like you know, uh ceremonies, people know that's my song.
• 1:23:40
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, you can go deep down the YouTube rabbit hole of all the different renditions that people have made.
• 1:23:45
  SPEAKER_02: And I just love the all the comments, all the great YouTube and Amazon review comments, people connecting with it.
• 1:23:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um reaction videos to the song.
• 1:23:56
  SPEAKER_02: Go ahead.
• 1:23:57
  SPEAKER_02: Uh but yeah, so I mean I I I've I've heard a few, I think that that is that is a challenge, right?
• 1:24:04
  SPEAKER_02: Because I think people, even those who say, like, you know, we really want to connect with the cosmos and be an antenna or you know, all those those theories that you hear, like realize when you go and you read the cantares and like the detail and the intricacy that's there and the stories that they're telling and trying to like even like analyze the the words, right?
• 1:24:23
  SPEAKER_02: Like there'll be a word and you'll be like, it can have so many different meanings, like even like the translations, you know, you can go through Beerhurst and you can get to one reading of it, but I mean, you could some of those words like you could translate different ways, and we'll never fully know what they mean in terms of what they actually connect with and what the singers were thinking, right?
• 1:24:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I mean, I think that that what you guys are doing is is a great way to you know connect and and bring it to life in a new way and play with that.
• 1:24:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, those different meanings and it gives it a new meaning today that's really relevant.
• 1:24:53
  SPEAKER_04: Well, like you were saying with the with the songs that just have like the four words that repeat, you know, it's it's hard.
• 1:25:01
  SPEAKER_04: It is hard.
• 1:25:02
  SPEAKER_04: It takes a level of commitment that a lot of people aren't willing to put out there to learn how to speak an Indigenous language or to understand how the calendar system works or to learn a song completely in an indigenous language.
• 1:25:18
  SPEAKER_04: Like it takes effort, right?
• 1:25:20
  SPEAKER_04: And I think that um that's something that we all have to work on because like I do a lot of stuff with the calendar.
• 1:25:28
  SPEAKER_04: And what I found is most people don't want to know how the calendar works.
• 1:25:32
  SPEAKER_04: They just want me to tell them what day they were born on, right?
• 1:25:35
  SPEAKER_04: And it's as easy as that.
• 1:25:36
  SPEAKER_04: Or if people want to learn Nahuatl, they'll stick around for like a couple of classes and then realize, like, oh, wait, this is a whole language that I'm trying to learn here, and this is like hard work.
• 1:25:47
  SPEAKER_04: Can you just teach me how to like say my name?
• 1:25:50
  SPEAKER_04: You know?
• 1:25:51
  SPEAKER_04: And and so I I understand that, but it's it's getting back to what I was talking about earlier about the Kalpuli and about having a community where we can engender these things, where we all get together and try to learn stuff because it it takes effort.
• 1:26:06
  SPEAKER_04: It's it's hard work to do these things.
• 1:26:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's not well, you know, that's what the MCRCA was doing way back in the day.
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_00: They had different uh groups and organizations that were tied to the MCRCA.
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_00: One was a linguistic academy, one was teaching people about health and nutrition, one was sort of like for counseling purposes and then education in general and history.
• 1:26:31
  SPEAKER_00: So, I mean, in this in a sense, they were on the right track, they just kind of had a misguided way of doing it.
• 1:26:38
  SPEAKER_00: They were nationalistic and they fell for a lot of the pseudoscience and pseudo history that had been promoted early on by Juan Luna Cardanas and those guys.
• 1:26:46
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah, I and I I definitely I sympathize with their goals, it's just it's their approach that I have a problem with, right?
• 1:26:54
  SPEAKER_04: But you'd you had mentioned how a lot of the dansa comes from Otomi roots, and I'd heard the same thing.
• 1:27:03
  SPEAKER_04: Can you like broaden on that a little bit?
• 1:27:07
  SPEAKER_02: So there's in terms of the origin story, right?
• 1:27:10
  SPEAKER_02: There's there's several different ones.
• 1:27:12
  SPEAKER_02: Of course, there's the the one with uh the the cross descending from the sky and the chichimek, and uh and then there's also though some stories that say like that there were um uh danza communities in Tashkala at the same time.
• 1:27:27
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, in terms of the actual origins, it it gets a little messy because there are kind of different groups that were doing the same things, but if from um zooming out a little bit, I think it makes it makes sense from a broader perspective that the the danza, the conquista that were traveling, which is basically just saying, you know, these these stories of conquest, which to really condense it, right?
• 1:27:53
  SPEAKER_02: Like these were happening in Spain with the the Christians and the Moors, where it's basically like telling uh epics.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_02: Histories, which was through dance, um, and so having this these stagings where it was literally you know Christians versus the Moors being the brown people, quote unquote, right?
• 1:28:12
  SPEAKER_02: So coming to the new world, you know, translated very easily in terms of the Spanish world view.
• 1:28:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and and it's interesting because you can trace these dances of conquest.
• 1:28:22
  SPEAKER_02: They even made it to um England, where you could find the Morris dances that you know have a different form, but it's basically that same type of like dance with swords, um, which I you know got to see when uh randomly when I was in uh York uh a few years back.
• 1:28:37
  SPEAKER_02: And it was really interesting to kind of see the interplay between that and the danzistic conquista of Mexico.
• 1:28:42
  SPEAKER_02: So getting back to the question though, you see that there's a lot of these different groups like Danza Chichimeca, the Concheros, you have Arco y Flechas, you have kind of all of these, uh Matacines, Matlachines, um, different little variations that are kind of the communities kind of taking their own.
• 1:29:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so my my theory is ultimately that a lot of like danza de conquista as kind of an umbrella really gave communities a lot of weeway, leeway to do exactly what they what they wanted, right?
• 1:29:15
  SPEAKER_02: Because it's kind of just like putting uh plastering uh saint over something, right?
• 1:29:21
  SPEAKER_02: In some ways you could just say, like, well, this is now a danza de conquista.
• 1:29:24
  SPEAKER_02: We're using these same steps, right?
• 1:29:27
  SPEAKER_02: That we maybe always used, but we're just kind of re-reorienting it in a way, right?
• 1:29:33
  SPEAKER_02: So like that makes sense to me in terms of like why there would be like differences and why you'd have like Otomi influences, because also a lot of Otomi wound up coming to Mexico City in the early 1900s as well.
• 1:29:46
  SPEAKER_02: So having then that mixing with what was already happening and some of these inner pollinations that were happening quite early and that were probably were happening all the time.
• 1:29:56
  SPEAKER_02: That even you know, in the 1700s, you know, you have records from churches up kind of on the uh up uh kind of in northern Mexico where you have people who were from all across Mexico uh who are coming together and finding ways to dance and create new culture together, and already kind of having to find ways to kind of recreate what they had in their own communities, um, and and kind of bringing all these different elements together.
• 1:30:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, so that's what my research points to in terms of how these different elements have come together and why I really approach it as a pan-indigenous practice and not as a Mexica practice, even if there might be some uh Nawa elements that were part of that Catholic uh or not Nawacized Catholic education that was being disseminated across uh what was then New Spain, uh from their perspective, right?
• 1:30:52
  SPEAKER_02: Um people were always finding ways to bring themselves into it, as we always do as human beings.
• 1:31:01
  SPEAKER_04: Well, I want to thank you for coming on today, taking the time to join us on Tales from Ostlantis, Dr.
• 1:31:08
  SPEAKER_04: Christina Nielsen.
• 1:31:11
  SPEAKER_04: Do you um do you have any upcoming work or a book or anything that people can be on the lookout for?
• 1:31:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, so I'm working on um currently doing a book that draws on my dissertation and has a lot of similarities, but I've also gotten to uh talk to a few more people and get some other updates and yeah, you keep learning and yeah, so I'll be sure to share the looking forward to it.
• 1:31:38
  SPEAKER_04: And yeah, is there a social media people can follow you on?
• 1:31:42
  SPEAKER_02: Ooh, um, I'm not very good at the social media stuff, but I uh work for a project called the World Music Textbook.
• 1:31:49
  SPEAKER_02: And if you're interested in learning more about um the ways that music um kind of shows up in culture and uh kind of this pro this uh musicological, ethnomusicological approach, uh give us a follow and uh you won't be disappointed.
• 1:32:06
  SPEAKER_04: That's on Twitter.
• 1:32:07
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it's so you can find us on Twitter, uh also on Facebook, uh, and I think Instagram as well.
• 1:32:14
  SPEAKER_00: Nice.
• 1:32:15
  SPEAKER_00: Excellent.
• 1:32:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you for coming on the show, Christina, and uh for sharing some of your perspectives, your research, your knowledge, and uh having this wonderful conversation with us about dansa and all its interesting aspects.
• 1:32:31
  SPEAKER_02: So much for having me, guys.
• 1:32:32
  SPEAKER_02: It's been a pleasure.
• 1:32:33
  SPEAKER_02: And remember, folks, the truth is like medicine.
• 1:32:35
  SPEAKER_02: It doesn't always taste good, but it's always good for you.
• 1:32:40
  SPEAKER_04: Thank you for listening to Tales from Ostlantis, a project of the Chimalli Institute of Mesoamerican Arts.
• 1:32:47
  SPEAKER_04: If you enjoy the show, please consider becoming a Patreon supporter.
• 1:32:52
  SPEAKER_04: You can do this by visiting tales from Ostlantis.com and clicking support the podcast.
• 1:32:59
  SPEAKER_04: Your continued support will help keep the podcast ad free and independent.
• 1:33:05
  SPEAKER_04: Until next time, Timo Itaste.