Choreographer Amanda Piña discusses her research in the streets of Matamoros for the development of the piece “Frontera | Border,” indigenous roots, and the political and social power of dance.
– June 15, 2022
In Endangered Human Movements, Mexican-Chilean-Austrian choreographer Amanda Piña explores traditional dances and forms of movement that have existed for centuries but are now threatened with extinction. Asphalt N° 10 presents the fourth part of the long-term project, Frontera | Border – A Living Monument.
The choreography is based on a dance from the El Ejido Veinte neighborhood in Matamoros, Tamaulipas, on the border between Mexico and the United States. The area is dominated by violence and drug trafficking. Here, young people perform the “Danza del Ejido 20 de Matamoros” on the streets—a dance originally invented by the Spanish to represent the victory of the Christians over the Moors. During the colonization of Latin America, it became a racist propaganda tool designed to highlight the difference between whites and non-whites. The indigenous population was forced to embody the “Moors,” while the Christians represented Spain. Over the centuries, this “conquest dance” evolved into a form of resistance against colonial and later neoliberal forces.
Here, Amanda Piña writes about her research in the streets of Matamoros for the development of the play Frontera | Border, indigenous roots, narco-poetics, and the political and social power of dance.*
Rodrigo de la Torre, the lead dancer of Danza del Ejido 20 de Matamoros, likes to use computer games as a metaphor to explain how the dance should be performed in the streets of Matamoros:“At the beginning of ‘La Matraca’ (‘machine gun sequence’), you’re like a race car with a full tank. Like in a computer game. During the sequence, the fuel is used up and at the end of the sequence, the tank is completely empty. You have to conserve your energy during the dance: If you exhaust yourself during a sequence, you’ll be dead at the end every time you’ve given your all. That’s why we run after the sequence to refill the tank. After so many tanks have been emptied and refilled, we end up like ‘mariguanos’ (marijuana smokers) without having smoked; the dance is like our drug.”
Rodrigo uses powerful metaphors to describe the dance. It is practiced in a border area where the violence resulting from drug trafficking, militarization, and American media culture is omnipresent on a daily basis. (…) This dance does not take place in a theater, but on the streets and squares, and it is not work in the sense of a “professional” activity. It could be understood as a ‘traditional art form’, but categories such as ‘contemporary’, ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ do not even begin to describe its complexity. In the course of this dance, which is practiced only by male members of the working class, something emerges that lies outside the tradition and the modern or contemporary canon of Western art. (…) In the dance sequence ‘La Matraca’, the visualisation of the rhythm of a firing firearm serves as an example of the construction of a new mestizo physicality. (Note: Mestizo is the term used to describe the descendants of Europeans and the indigenous population of Latin America. It is considered racist and discriminatory. However, as there is no alternative term, it is still used in certain contexts.) It is a form of resistance against a violent border context, the paradox of globalized neoliberal capitalism, in which the circulation of capital and goods meets the stagnation imposed on the bodies of ethnically defined people.
“Something really bad must have happened to these men to make them dance like that.”
– Leonor Maldonado, filmmaker and choreographer
In her book Borderlands / La frontera: The New Mestiza, Gloria Anzaldua writes: “In the ethno-poetics and performance of the shaman, my people, the Indians, did not split the artistic from the functional, the sacred from the secular, art from everyday life. The religious, social, and aesthetic purposes of art were all intertwined.”
I would like to try to connect three things with this: the social, the aesthetic, and the sacred from the perspective of the body in the Danza del Ejido 20 de Matamoros, as it is danced today on the border between Mexico and the United States. I will then outline the central questions raised by the productions Danza y Frontera, which I developed at Tanzquartier Wien in October 2018 in collaboration with the dancers from Matamoros and Nicole Haitzinger, as well as Frontera | Border – A living monument’ commissioned by the Kunstenfestivaldesarts 2020 and the social sculpture ‘Frontera Procesión’. All these pieces were created in connection with the fourth part of the study ‘Endangered Human Movements’.
The social aspect
The men dance the Matamoros dance in their free time, most of them considering it a kind of hobby – a leisure activity outside of their work in the drug cartels or the maquila industry, the two most important economic sectors in the region. Maquila refers to the assembly factories established by multinational companies on the Mexican side of the border with the United States. This is an industry for cheap labor, where the formation of unions is expressly prohibited. Many of the dancers are members or former members of the La Maña cartel. Some prefer to work in the maquila industry, where they earn a wage of about $50 a month in 12-hour shifts. Others have emigrated to the United States in search of better working conditions, as in the case of Rodrigo. Young working-class men often work as sicarios, or contract killers for the cartels, and even if they do not, they are viewed as such by society.
“We dance to be something other than Maña, to be something other than Sicarios.”
– Uriel Soria, known as Koala, drummer, dancer, and member of Rigo’s group
Rehearsals take place in the backyard of Rigo’s house, where the men meet to dance together. The choreography is usually danced in unison, with the drummers also acting as a choir. When the dance is performed on the street, the dancers follow the hand signals of the lead dancer to know which sequence comes next. Socially speaking, the dance is a space of unity, harmony, sign language, and nonverbal communication for a different representation of working-class masculinity in public. The dance could be interpreted as a space of brotherly togetherness. In order to find their own identity, the roles assigned to the young men based on the social context at the border are performed in unison.
Aesthetics
The third influence reflected in dance is Anglo-American media culture. The portrayal of young working-class men in the media, the aesthetics of “cool” in hip-hop culture, and media representations such as Hollywood action films or computer games can all be found in dance. This desire to appear cool is also linked to the aesthetics of Chicanos. Imitating the gringo (white person) means becoming like him, devouring his cultural codes and distancing oneself from the folkloric idea of the ‘Mexican’. Against the backdrop of colonial history, this led to racially defined patterns that are still present in both countries.
“We wanted to dance and look cool in the hood.”
– Uriel Soria
When asked about their costumes, Rigo says, “We wanted to be cool. If we wore the huaraches and feathers of the Matachines dance, we would look ridiculous and the girls would make fun of us. But we still wanted to dance, and we wanted to dance like in the hood, like the bad boys, the dangerous boys we wanted to be. So we went over to the United States to buy Nikes and T-shirts and caps, and we changed the costumes and the dance to make it our own.”
This feeling of coolness can also be seen in the dance moves themselves—close to the ground, as if in hiding. Like thieves or dealers from the neighborhood hiding in the corners of the city. The low-to-the-ground pose is a stance reminiscent of indigenous dance practices, but it also picks up on African American characteristics such as “on the ground beats.” They dance like hip-hop heroes, like gangsters, like mariguanos (marijuana smokers).
The dance could be interpreted as a space for their identification with the racist stereotypes imposed on the “Indians” and “mestizos” by the folkloric representation of the nation, as well as a process of downright cannibalistic appropriation of the characteristics of the Other.
The sacred
In ancient Mexico-Tenochtitlan, the two words for dance, Macehualitztli and Netotilitztli, had different meanings. While Netotiliztli referred to simple dancing, Macehualitztli also meant to do a kind of penance. The word Macehua, the root of Macehualitztli, described a mystical dance. Through dancing, one received the gifts and graces of the deities and sacred beings that populate the world. In addition, the word Macehualli was used to refer to members of a class that stood above slaves and below nobles. Macehualli performed military service, paid taxes, and worked collectively. They could own property, marry free people, have free children, and enjoy relative freedom. They had the right to own a piece of land as long as they cultivated it, which could then be inherited by their children if they worked it in the same way. However, they were not allowed to sell it or give it as collateral for another asset, as they were merely beneficiaries of the land.
This system of land ownership, called calpulli, is the root of the Mexican ejido structure that emerged from the land reform during the Mexican Revolution. It describes a specific form of communal land ownership by peasant communities, in which the members of the community cultivate specific plots of land and maintain communal farms.
Matamoros is a working-class neighborhood built on ejido land. In the movements of the “Danza del Ejido 20 de Matamoros,” we find traces of the sacred and communal functions that dance had in pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern contexts. Communal organizations that were linked to indigenous social structures before the ejido are now affected by the neoliberal logic of exploitation, racialization, and criminalization.
As forms of resistance, sacrifice and liminality are central aspects of the dance of Matamoros, which, as a processional dance, accompanies social, religious, and mestizo pilgrimage rites to sacred sites that are now associated with Christianity. The continuity of the sacred sites and temples, which were destroyed by the Spanish and later Christianized but remained in the same locations, is well documented. There is also continuity in the dances, which were Christianized but continued to be performed in the same places and on the same pilgrimage routes.
In these processions, the dancers and drummers act as supporters of the members of the community who ask for the gifts of the deity (in this case, Catholic saints) or give thanks for favors already granted. The main deity in this case is a mestizo woman who embodies a creolization of pre-Christian female deities and the historical mother of Jesus, the Virgin of Guadalupe. “We dance for the Virgin of Guadalupe,” says another member of the dance group. “So she will protect us.”
My thesis would be that the sacred aspect of dance could be read as a form of continuity of the physiological (liminal) functions that indigenous dances had in pre-Hispanic and colonial times. These liminal functions are more resilient than the changing ideologies and power structures that dancers have had to express throughout history.
Dances on the border within Fortress Europe
The performances of Danza y Frontera are a collaboration between artists and dancers who do not come from an artistic context or from Europe, in order to create a series that takes into account the complexity and intertwining of identities in a process of disidentification.
This process describes the deconstruction of a model based on dualistic logic, such as the familiar and the foreign, the civilized and the barbaric, the modern and the traditional, the local and the migrant. In the concept of the mestiza as a border subject living in a multi-layered world, there is therefore no place for binary identifications.
As a mestiza living in Vienna and Mexico City, I am confronted with the way I am perceived and identified as Latina, as a migrant in Europe, and as a native in Chile and Mexico (I have both nationalities). These assigned identities are never complete or pure. As an artist and dancer, I am perceived as dark-skinned in Europe, while in Mexico I am perceived as a “güerita,” a pale woman. My identities are multi-layered. It is difficult to fully embody them in contexts where one is expected to be one thing and not many. In this sense, being more than one, being diverse, does not serve the forms of representation that seek to represent and embody a single perspective, for example, representing only one nation state. Being only Mexican or Austrian or Chilean.
Becoming a unity is a Western construction of uniqueness that stands in stark contrast to indigenous forms of fluid and processual identities and relies heavily on the concept of national borders. Those who are more than one, who are in flux, live within and beyond certain constructed boundaries. One is different depending on which side of the border one is on. One is always context-dependent.
The need to cross the border arises from the mere existence of a border; the impulse of people to move existed before the border. In this way, the attempt to domesticate, discipline, and normalize human movement is resisted. The figures of the “migrant” and the “mestizo” are defined by the politics of migration or colonial appropriation. As metaphors, these two figures introduce new models of representing subjectivities beyond binary logic and propose a utopia of heterotopia. The celebration of the diverse identities embodied by border subjects, beyond essentialism, finds expression in Anzaldua’s “new mestiza,” which challenges the heteronormative, patriarchal order.
By Amanda Piña
