The Return of Moctezuma: Oaxaca's "Danza de la Pluma" and New Mexico's "Danza de los Matachines"

Abstract

Specifically, Wachtel has in mind the widespread folk dramatizations of the Spanish conquest of indigenous America. But the Spanish, too, brought with them to the Americas their own trauma of invasion and armed resistance. For nearly 750 years, Moors had occupied parts of Spain. The year 1492 was not only the time when Columbus landed in the Americas; it was also the year in which the Spanish forces conquered the last Moorish stronghold of Granada. The intermittent Spanish reconquista may have been the theme of festive drama since as early as ii5o (Alford 1937:22122), and both the small-scale danzas de moros y cristianos and the large-scale fiestas de moros y cristianos were brought to the Americas by the conquistadors (Warman Gryj 1972; Harris 1994). The American folk performances to which Wachtel refers are, at least in part, an adaptation of the Spanish tradition. While in many cases the two sides that engage in mock combat in Mesoamerica still represent Moors and Christians, in others they dress as Aztecs and Spaniards or, in a reference to the French invasion of Mexico in I862, as French and Mexican armies (Gilmoor 1943:25-28; Harris 1993:io8-19). But the theme of Moors and Christians cut two ways in the New World. For the Spanish colonists, it offered an opportunity to celebrate the victory of Christians over "heathens" and to draw parallels, favorable to Christianity, between the defeat of the Moors and the defeat of the Mexicans. For the indigenous Mexican performers, the fact that the Spaniards finally drove out the invading Moors suggested instead the dramatization of a future reconquest of