A book on the Concheros faces the challenge of how to do justice to the many dimensions of their tradition while keeping the larger cultural context in which it is situated in mind. Of how to portray as much as possible about the dances as collective enactments while also attending to the diversity of the enactors’ experiences of them. I turn first to particulars of the wider organization and the prescribed dances whose significance each dancer learns about early on. I look next at a particular mesa, Santo Niño de Atocha, with which I danced, and at the positions that...

Vigils and dances as events are closely interrelated and both are built up spatially and temporally by means of ritual framing. Whereas the last chapter looked at the personnel of the dance, in this chapter I want to detail the Conchero’s obligations by looking first at a vigil (velación) and then at a dance. Although each dance is inevitably somewhat different from any other and one vigil differs from the next, I will give an idea of the overall form of each. To begin with, not every vigil is followed by a dance just as not all dances are preceded...

Whereas the first part of this book was concerned with the context of the dance, with its organization and practice, in this part I look at the experiential nexus. Here, I develop further the theoretical position I outlined in the introduction and aim to analyze what dancers are doing while they dance and how they experience it. In Chapter 3, I showed that a vigil as a ritual has certain aspects that are open-ended and performative whereas a dance, although it can be seen as a performance, has many heavily ritualized episodes. In general, ritual and performance have been conceptualized...

In Chapter 3, I gave an overall idea of the structure and content of both a vigil and a dance as an outsider might observe these activities. Here I want to look at the words of the Concheros’ leitmotif—union, conformity, and conquest—which appear on all their standards and are used in their various interjections, as is the expression “El es Dios.” These verbal expressions aid dancers in knowing what it is they are aiming for, of how metaphorically they should set about “carrying the word,” that is, embodying the dance and its various practices. As expressions, they are...

So far I have been concerned with the dancers as subjects who by their “mode of presence and engagement in the world” actively embody the dance through time and re-present it. This chapter moves from an analysis of the dancers’ experience of what is happening to and within the body, over which the dancers have only a certain amount of conscious control, to look at what is displayed on the body, at how dancers dress themselves. As Csordas has recently argued, the body is best understood as a subject that is “necessary to be” rather than an object that is...

Only by dancing, by gaining know-how, can the enactor know the dance. In this chapter, I attend to the experience of the dancing itself. I look at why it is that people are drawn to and enter the dance and what it is about the enacting of it that catches them and keeps them coming. In Chapter 4, I looked at the process of ritualization that each enactor must perforce undergo as she enters into the spirit of the dance, focusing her attention on re-attaining its forms and on reproducing the steps and gestures in accord with their well-established patterns....

In Chapter 2, I looked at the overall organization of the mesa of Santo Niño de Atocha by placing the group in the context of the Reliquia, that part of the association to which it belongs. I said little, however, about the mesas with which it has close contact. Each dance group is devolved and autonomous but has a degree of interdependency with the other mesas in its part of the association. In terms of practice, a mesa will dance on a regular basis with certain groups but will also have a special relationship with other mesas, some of which...

Until very recently, as indicated earlier, the tradition of the Concheros has been predominantly an oral one. Entry to that “open door to paradise” achieved by means of the dance has been passed down by embodied practice from one generation to the next. The history of the dance is told in their alabanzas and remembered in speeches; little has been preserved in written form as the dancers have been largely preliterate. Not much is known then about its organization and if it existed in something like its present form before the early 1900s when the name Conchero appears to have...

In this penultimate chapter, I look at those dancers who call themselves Mexica and identify with the movement loosely known as Mexicanidad. Although some Concheros become involved in identity politics, as indicated in the previous chapter, to the temporary detriment of the harmony of the dance, the Mexica tend to be involved far more frequently in interpersonal power struggles. The Mexica dance the same dances as the Concheros but give them a different ethos, have a somewhat different perspective on their origins and raison d’être, and are much less interested in spiritual attainment. By the articulation of often-invented meanings, the...