Performing the US Latina and Latino Borderlands

Arturo J. Aldama,Chela Sandoval,Peter J. García

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780253008770
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Artes escénicas

In this interdisciplinary volume, contributors analyze the expression of Latina/o cultural identity through performance. With music, theater, dance, visual arts, body art, spoken word, performance activism, fashion, and street theater as points of entry, contributors discuss cultural practices and the fashoning of identity in Latino/a communities throughout the US. Examining the areas of crossover between Latin and American cultures gives new meaning to the notion of "borderlands." This volume features senior scholars and up-and-coming academics from cultural, visual, and performance studies, folklore, and ethnomusicology.

ACTO TWO

Ethnographies of Performance:
The Río Grande and Beyond

SEVEN

Performing Indigeneity in a South Texas Community: Los Matachines de la Santa Cruz

NORMA E. CANTÚ

It’s a brisk morning in early March 2009 in San Antonio, Texas, and the annual women’s march celebrating International Women’s Day is about to begin. We will march past the Alamo, past San Fernando Cathedral, past the hotels and businesses with early morning tourists and local patrons. The march will go from Travis Park to Milam Park—Anglo names for spaces that in the old days were called “plazas.” A young girl no older than twelve, dressed in a long brown cotton skirt and a red blouse with a red headband across her forehead, holds an eagle feather. She will do a water blessing before the march begins. Her father, who also has a red headband and is wearing a white cotton shirt and pants, beats a flat drum solemnly. The crowd of a couple of hundred people hushes solemnly and listens to her soft song. She dips the feather in water and sprinkles the ground. Some of us face the four directions as she sings her blessing prayer in a language we don’t understand. Could it be Coahuiltecan? That was how Fabiola, one of the organizers, introduced her—as a member of the Coahuiltecan nation. But pretty much all vestiges of the many dialects of that language that were spoken in South Texas for centuries are gone. Erased. Only scraps survive, mostly in old prayer books; the Christian prayers used to indoctrinate the native people paradoxically remain as testaments of the old language. As a child, I went to “la doctrina” to learn the Catholic prayers—in Spanish, of course. But I also went to see the matachines dance to the beat of the drum. In this chapter, I focus on the latter, the folk religious dance tradition of los matachines, as I interrogate the indigenous identity we as Chican@s identify and disidentify with in the particular area of South Texas.

In a number of other writings, I have described the fiesta de Matachines (1993) and analyzed the traditional ceremonial dress (1995) and aspects of the celebration (2009). Here, I look at the performance as a ritual of recovery of what has been all but erased, our indigenous identity answering key questions about our Xicana/o selves as a way of inserting the indigenous into the Chicana/o identity.¹ I ask, how does this clearly indigenous celebration, the matachines, reconcile with the Christian elements of our identity? And why do the dancers, who don’t necessarily define themselves as Indigenous, continue to dance dressed as Indians? How can we reconcile the obvious identification of this sector of Laredo with “lo indio” and the ostentatious and clearly constructed and imagined “Indianness” of the Pocahontas celebration that occurs as part of Laredo’s celebration of George Washington’s birthday?

I begin with a few anecdotes and recuerdos to situate my discussion along a theoretical continuum. Then I offer a brief historical overview and finally analyze the elements that hearken back to that indigenous existence, markers of a certain indigenous origin, because I believe it will be useful to understand the fiesta and how it figures so prominently as an indigenous act within a hegemonic narrative that seeks to invalidate it.

ARE WE INDIANS OR NOT?

One of my former students, a Chicana Comanche, went to graduate school in the Midwest, where she thought she would at long last be welcomed by the indigenous groups; her experiences in Laredo had forced her to hide her Comanche origins, only cautiously claiming a mexicana identity while hiding her father’s indigenous teachings. Instead, she found that indigenous groups in the Midwest questioned her authenticity, and she was discouraged from identifying as Indigenous. As a “detribalized Comanche,” as she says it, she is not enrolled in any government list, mostly because, as her father explained to her and her siblings, he was not going to have a piece of paper tell him who he was.² Many others in Texas have done the same; they grew up as Mexicans but were really Kickapoo or Lipan Apache. No doubt such subterfuge was an act of survival.

Browsing through the children’s books section recently, I found an attractive publication that claimed that “There are no Indians in Texas.”³ I was disheartened to see such a claim in a book intended to teach children about Texas. Scholars like Ines Hernández Ávila, Ines Talamantez, and Patrisia Gonzalez remind us that there have been Indians in Texas for many generations. As Gloria Anzaldúa claims, “this land was Mexican once, / was Indian always / and is. / And will be again” (25). Other Chicana scholars who are both Indigenous and Chicana or who seek to identify with their indigenous past have written about this nepantla state that my student experienced. In the 1990s, I participated in various gatherings of the Indigenous Women’s Network at Alma de Mujer, a retreat center in Austin, Texas. The groups included a mixture of Chicanas and Indigenous women, and everyone recognized that in the Chicana mestizaje lay vestiges of an indigenous past. Not all the Chicanas identified with that indigeneity, but for others it was reclamation of an indigenous past that had been denied them and virtually erased from their consciousness. Yes, we are Indian, we Chicanas. I ask that you keep this in mind as I now turn to a discussion of the origins of the matachin group in Laredo and situate their existence within the mestizo world that is Laredo.

A HISTORY AND DEFINITIONS

The generic term “los matachines” refers to a religious dance tradition that dates back to the conquest of México and that can be found throughout the Américas (Romero). The tradition, a blend of European and Indigenous dance elements, made its way into the US Southwest and the South as the Spanish brought indigenous groups to the area from México as part of their colonizing project. Scholars such as Sylvia Rodríguez, Peter García, Claude Stephenson, and Brenda Romero have studied the tradition in New Mexico. Romero has researched the tradition as it appears throughout the Américas; other scholars have sought a root origin to the tradition (See Harris, Stephenson, and Treviño and Gilles); in my mind, the evidence is inconclusive, and the search for the origin is ultimately only an attempt to privilege either the Indigenous (Treviño and Gilles) or the European (Harris).

Three main types of matachin dance traditions exist: de la pluma (of the feather), de la flecha (of the arrow), and de la palma (of the palm, or trident). De la flecha is the one danced by the group in Laredo that is the focus of this paper; the Coahuiltecan tribes of the area were the likely first dancers. In general, the matachin dance consists of music, dance steps, particular dress, and instrumentation. It also includes a deep religious or spiritual devotion to a particular saint, such as San Lorenzo in Bernalillo, New Mexico, or the Virgen of Guadalupe in many of the groups in the South and elsewhere where Mexican-origin Latinos from Texas or northern México live, such as in North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas.

In the Coahuiltecan matachines tradition, the dancers generally wear red nagüillas, skirts made of two flaps of red velvet fabric, adorned with carrizo, reed cane, and vests displaying sequin-embroidered images of the Virgen, the Holy Cross, or other religious items as well as the dancer’s last name or the group’s church affiliation. Many of the December fiestas honor the Virgen de Guadalupe, whose feast day is celebrated on December 12; the dancers wear long pants under their nagüillas, especially in areas where the temperatures are colder than what they are used to in México or South Texas. While red and yellow predominate, some groups choose blue or other colors associated with the devotion of their particular saint. In Guadalupe, Arizona (a suburb of Phoenix), for example, they wear blue in honor of the Virgen de San Juan. In the past, huaraches, leather sandals, were the required footwear, but nowadays dancers can wear boots or even tennis shoes to perform the intricate and strenuous foot-stomping dance steps. Headdresses called cupiles or coronas are common; some dancers still don a hat with a long fringe covering the face to lend a semblance of anonymity. The cupiles, adorned with bits of broken mirror or colorful beadwork, are sometimes only worn by the capitanes or the monarcas, the dance captains or monarchs, the leaders.

In northern México, groups dance to one or more drummers; in New Mexico, the violin is essential, for the music is more European; in South Texas, the accordion appears to be the most important musical instrument. There are over fifty sones (tunes) recorded, but not all groups dance to the same tunes. Most groups have a repertoire of no more than five or eight tunes; these include specific ones for dancing a greeting and a farewell as well as a tune to be played and danced to when the group goes in procession.

PERFORMING IDENTITY

While the tradition exists in Greater México,⁴ recent immigrants from Texas and México have brought the matachines dance tradition to places where it had been heretofore unknown, such as the Raleigh/Durham area. But in New Mexico and in south Texas, the tradition has been passed down from one generation to the next for over a century.

Barrio de la Santa Cruz

Every year, on certain weekday evenings in early April, in a working-class barrio of Laredo, Texas, known as La Ladrillera (the brick factory) along the banks of the Rio Grande, a group of children and a few adults gather to rehearse the dances, or sones, that they will perform for the fiesta of the Holy Cross on May 3. Throughout this discussion on the fiesta—both as performed in early May for the Day of the Holy Cross and in mid-December in honor of the Virgen de Guadalupe—I emphasize the significance of the survival of this folk religious celebration. José Limón’s (1994: 178–179) observations of other events are useful here, as the prevailing matachines tradition can be classified as the expression of “postmodernity, the cultural logic of late capitalism.” The same can be said about the Pocahontas celebration that forms part of the community’s larger and much more ostentatious community celebration around George Washington’s birthday (Barrera 2009). While I acknowledge this other presentation of indigeneity in the community, my focus is on the matachines, because the questions of identity and the connection to the indigenous past of the community appear more clearly manifested here. Because the fiesta adheres closely to what it has always been—a religious folk tradition firmly rooted in what I consider a private world, and not the public world of the community like the Pocahontas celebration—an analysis of its “cultural logic” must include the many threads that weave its rich tapestry.

I begin with a cursory discussion of the Holy Cross celebration, presenting the elements found in the fiesta as they appear in chronological order. I follow with a description of the matachin dress—the construction and the materials used in the naguilla (skirt) and chaleco (vest). Equally significant are the accoutrements carried by the dancers—the flecha and sonaja. My discussion further looks at the changes in construction and preparation of the once-essential elements of the traje—the huaraches and the corona. I explore some of the practices that are concomitant with the tradition, including the preparation period as well as the annual “dressing” of the cross. The private world of the matachines exists within a small segment of the community, but it is in constant contact with and affected by outside, often Anglo, hegemonic forces. Yet the fiesta remains true to its religious, social, and cultural values and worldview. The Santa Cruz and Virgen de Guadalupe fiestas do not occur in a vacuum; I contextualize them withi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction Toward a De-Colonial Performatics of the US Latina and Latino Borderlands
• Acto One Performing Emancipation: Inner Work, Public Acts
• Acto Two Ethnographies of Performance: The Río Grande and Beyond
• Acto Three Nepantla Aesthetics in The Trans/Nacional
• Acto Four (De)Criminalizing Bodies: Ironies of Performance
• List of Contributors
• Index