A Dance With Three Claimed Origins

Where the matachines dance came from is genuinely unsettled, and the three main answers each have real evidence behind them. The first traces it to the Spanish moros y cristianos, the mock combat dances brought from Iberia in which Christians defeat Moors, carried to the Americas by missionaries as a teaching device; the ranks, the wands and the figure of the bull would then all be European. The second reads the dance as substantially indigenous, pointing to pre-conquest Mesoamerican dance in ranks with feathered headdresses and rattles, onto which a Christian narrative was later fitted. The third holds that neither account works alone and that what exists is a genuine colonial fusion, made in the Americas out of both, which is why the dance is danced by Hispano and Pueblo communities alike and belongs fully to neither tradition.

The dispute is not settled by the sources available, and the atlas records it as debated. What is not in doubt is where the dance is now performed: through northern Mexico and up the Rio Grande into New Mexico, in Hispano villages and in a number of the Pueblos, and in Yaqui and Tarahumara communities further west, each with local variation in costume, tune and figure.