This is the third post of an ongoing series about La Danza de los Santiagueros. In the first post I discussed Santiago and his son, Callintsin. Last week I wrote about the Santiaguero dancers, their masks, and other costume elements. Today I will describe the masks and related equipment of the Pilato dancers and that of their leader, Pilato el Presidente, using the work of one carver. Next week I will look at masks of Santigueros and Pilatos by another carver.

To very briefly review and then elaborate on some points that I have made in the last two posts, this is a dance that writers tend to describe as an alternate form of the dance of the Moros y Cristianos, a dance that is about events from the past. However this dance is not about historic events, instead it portrays a patched together and largely invented history that is meant to camouflage its apparent hidden purpose, which in my view is to complain to God about the exploitation and injustice that the Indians of Mexico have experienced at the hands of the Spanish and to ask God for relief. It is the Pilatos and their leader who are demonized in this dance, but the dancers used such labels to disguise their intention to criticize the Spanish.

Here is a mask of Pilato El Presidente, the leader of the Pilatos, that was carved by Manuel Antonio Castañeda of San Antonio Rayón, Puebla. In my book I speculated that this mask represented the Pilato character in the Negritos dance, but now I realize that I have seen about ten masks carved by Manuel to be worn by Pilato dancers in the Danza de los Santiagueros, along with one Santiaguero mask, and this scowling mask; apparently Manuel only carved masks for the Santiagueros dance. This Pilato is depicted as an extremely menacing figure. He can be presented as either menacing or with a serene smile.

This carver has such a dramatic style. This face seems inflated and yet sagging.

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This week we will examine the masks and other costume elements that are worn by the Santiaguero dancers.

I should begin with a brief discussion about names. This dance can be called the dance of the Santiagos or the dance of the Santiagueros. Either of these names seems to mean “a follower of Saint James, or Santiago.” Therefore the mask worn by one of these characters can be called a Santiago mask or a Santiaguero mask. I prefer to speak of Santiagueros and Santiaguero masks to avoid confusion, because “Santiago mask” can be easily misunderstood as a reference to a mask worn by Santiago himself. This ambiguity leads sellers and collectors to think of all Santiaguero masks as having been worn by Santiago, even though this character rarely wears a mask in contemporary performances.

Last week I included a dance photo of Santiago. Here is another Santiago, preparing to dance, in the town of Zoatecpan, Puebla.

As usual, this Santiago has an elaborate hat and costume, he wears a wooden dance horse at his waist, and he does not wear a mask. In one hand he carries a wooden cross, which is barely visible behind the horse’s head.  He would carry a wooden sword in his other hand, but this dancer hadn’t picked up his sword at the time of the photo, as the dance hadn’t started.

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In recent posts you saw masks for the Hormegas dance, a variant of the Danza de los Santiagueros. I thought that I might as well proceed to the Santiagueros dance itself.

The Dance of the Santiagueros and the dance of the Hormegas are examples of Mexican Indian dances that pretend to be about one thing when they are really about something else. Indians in Mexico have long used such dances to express political and social complaints in a disguised form, initially in order to avoid conflict with religious and civil authorities and more recently to complain and vent about situations of economic and social injustice in their communities. James C. Scott described such strategies in his book, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (Yale University Press, 1990). Later Max Harris applied Scott’s ideas to dances in the Americas in his book Carnival and Other Christian Festivals: Folk Theology and Folk Performance (University of Texas Press, 2003). I devoted an entire chapter to a discussion about such layers of meaning in my book about the Sierra de Puebla. I will begin this post with a mask and related props. Later I will explain how the ideas of Scott and Harris can be applied to the Dance of the Santiagueros.

The Dance of the Santiagueros has three groups of players. Santiago Caballero (Saint James on horseback), who is said to be the reincarnation of Saint James the Apostle, is usually depicted as riding a white stallion; he and his mount may stand alone or they may be accompanied by Santiago’s invented son, Callintsin, whose principal duty is to guard his father’s wooden horse from harm. There are two other groups of dancers, the Santiagueros and the Pilatos, and the relationships between these three entities prove to be mysterious and interesting.

Although Santiago occasionally wears a wooden mask, it is more usual for Santiago and Callintsin to dance without masks, but they do wear characteristic helmets, they carry wooden swords, and of course Santiago’s wooden horse is the most important emblem of his powerful position. Traditionally the Indians have treated Santiago’s horse as if it were a living saint, although this is not something that they describe in such explicit terms. Each year guardians are appointed to house the horse; they must offer the horse fresh food and water each morning. Here is one of those horses. It was found in the area of Papantla, Veracruz, in the mid-1980s, and was accompanied by a helmet and a mask to be worn by Santiago.

Ropes or straps suspended the hoop of the dance horse from the dancer’s shoulders. This horse is 34 inches long and the hoop is 15 inches in diameter.

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As I noted in last weeks post, to make sense of la Danza de Lakapíjkuyu and la Danza de Lakakgolo one must turn to a pair of legends, so I will briefly repeat them. Until the birth of Jesus, the world was dark, but at the moment of his birth an extremely bright star appeared (Christ and the sun were born at the same time). There were people and animals who apparently understood that the light was a gift from this newborn baby, so they gathered around him. The animals included the Oso (bear), the tlacuache (opossum) and the piskuyus (garrapatera birds). They danced for Jesus and he immediately stopped crying. Also the piskuyu birds spread their wings over the infant to protect him from the dust and wind. However a second version states that human visitors came dressed as animals, some to worship the infant, others to rob or kill him. Suddenly the sun rose, and in its light God judged the visitors. Some were permitted to remain and worship and they are represented by the  Lakapijkuyu dancers. Others were transformed into the animals that they were portraying, then they went to find refuge in the wilderness (monte). They are said to be represented by the Oso (bear) dancer and the “viejos” in the Lakakgolo dance, who dance to commemorate the veneration of those visitors. At one time the Lakakgolo dance included representatives  of all those visitors whom God had banished, but later the “Matarachín” and his Viejitos were given a dance of their own (discussed in my post of 09/08/2014).

The masks in the Lakapíjkuyu dance represent the faces pf the Piskuyu birds. The most remarkable masks in la Danza de Lakakgolo are those of bears. Here is an example that was carved in about 1990 by José González Hernández, of Comunidad Morelos, in the Municipio of Coxquihui, Veracruz. Vernon Kostohryz obtained this mask from José in 2005.

As you can see, this bear mask has an articulated jaw, meaning a jaw that is movable. Because it is attached with rubber bands, which can stretch, it tends to bounce when the dancer moves. The dancer must peer through the open jaws in order to see. This mask is 19 inches long, 11 inches wide, and 9 inches in depth.

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In anticipation of Christmas, I want to tell you about two dances associated with this season in the Sierra de Puebla, la Danza de Lakapíjkuyu and la Danza de Lakakgolo. Here is a mask from the Lakapíjkuyu dance.

This lovely old mask was carved by José González Galindo of Coxquihui, Veracruz in about 1980. In last week’s post, his son was the carver of the Mickey Mouse mask.

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Please Note A New Feature Available in the Header—The Index to Mask Photos and Related Topics. For example, if one looks under “Tigres” there will be a listing of dates when Jaguar mask photos were presented.

My book about the masks and puppets of the Sierra de Puebla was officially published in September of 2012. During the five years that led up to this event I had made repeated visits to mountain towns in the Mexican states of Puebla and Veracruz in order to observe dances, meet and photograph carvers, and buy interesting masks. I promised to bring to each carver, dance leader, or representative family member  that gave me assistance in my research a copy of my book when it was finally available. Therefore, my wife Lucy and I traveled to this area on December 6, 2012 for the purpose of giving away about seventy books; we flew back to Pennsylvania on December 16. It was during that trip that I became interested in the Mujer de las Cebollas character that I wrote about in my post of November 17, 2014. Now I am writing about that trip because it occurred at this time of the year, exactly two years ago.

The first visit on the tour was to the workshop of Silverio Ochoa Martínez, in San Juan Xiutetelco, Puebla, a town near the city of Teziutlan, Puebla. Silverio had confided to Carlos Moreno Vásquez that he had long doubted that he would ever see this book appear. He was delighted to have been mistaken. It is always interesting to see what Silverio has been carving, so I took this photo.

We see Silverio holding a feather headdress that he has just completed, along with a Pilato mask, as the headdress is to be worn by that character in the dance of the Santiagueros. There are additional feathers on the workbench as he was making a number of headdresses. On the wall you can see a variety of interesting masks by this carver. I was most puzzled by the oriental looking mask above Silverio’s head; he said that this was his invention. The mask on the right with green around the eyes and  a knife in its teeth was described as a “pirate.” Obviously Silverio is a very talented carver. Most of the visible masks are traditional and are used in local dances.

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In about 2006, when Vernon Kostohryz and Carlos Moreno Vásquez were searching for old masks in the area of Filomeno Mata, Veracuz, they met an elderly man who had a mask that he wanted to sell; he had danced with this mask for many years. He told them that this mask had been used in the Hormegas dance and that the carver was Benito Juárez Figueroa. This was the mask that introduced me to this remarkable carver, who was born in 1910 and died in 1994, and to the Hormegas dance, a variation on the dance of the Santiagueros. It is obviously old and heavily used, with one coat of paint over another in two or three layers.

The eyes, brows and mustache are carved in low relief and the lips are carefully shaped.

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In December of 2010 Carlos Moreno Vasquez and I visited the Olintla home of the owner of the masks for the Hormegas dance. The owner was not there at the time, but a relative was kind enough to retrieve the dusty masks from their storage place above the rafters and I was allowed to take photos. However, the relative felt that she lacked the authority to grant permission on behalf of the owner for their publication. Later the owner sold an Hormega mask to Carlos which was similar to two others that I had seen earlier and photographed; evidently it had also been part of the group. In contrast to the others, this one was freshly repainted. After considerable study, Vernon and I concluded that there were four masks in that Hormegas dance set that had definitely been carved by Magno León: a mask of Pilato Malo (Bad Pilate/Pontius Pilate), two of the dusty old Hormega masks, and the newly repainted Hormega mask, which shared many but not all of the features of the other two.

I added the freshly repainted Hormega to my collection and later I commissioned Carlos to make a special trip to Olintla for the sole purpose of buying or trading for the Pilato Malo mask, which he successfully accomplished. This means that I have two of the masks by Magno León from the Olintla Hormegas dance group to show you today. I will compare Magno’s carving style for these Hormega masks to the styles of two other carvers, Benito Juárez Figueroa and  Leopoldo (“Polo”) Cortez González. You will have the opportunity to see that the work of these three is quite similar, but yet each one’s style can be distinguished from the others by careful observation of their back designs.

I went to great lengths to obtain this mask because it is so interesting. Despite the title of the dancer who wears this mask—Pilato—this is actually a mask of Satan disguised as Pilato. The clue to this is his ears. From the masks in an earlier post, we know the typical design used by Magno León to carve human ears, but this mask has the ears of a goat, conforming to the European Christian formula to depict the devil. Although this is evident from the front, it is more obvious in the side view. Otherwise, as you will be able to see for yourself, this is a typical example of a high end mask by Magno León, with finely carved hair and beard, arched vision slits with rounded ends, relief carved eyes, his typical nose with a groove underneath, and a carefully sculpted lower lip. Despite the flaking paint, this is a very fine mask.

The goat’s ears are very large, extending down to the margin of the beard.

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PLEASE NOTE SOME NEW OPTIONS IN THE BLUE BAND AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE THAT WERE INTRODUCED SINCE THE LAST POST—Ask or Tell About a Mask, Privacy Policy, and Contact Me. The Ask or Tell option provides a convenient mechanism for you to upload interesting mask photos, either to ask about or to illustrate a comment. Contact Me opens a dialogue without the photo option. Privacy Policy is the usual Internet boilerplate that we all know only too well.

This post now ends with an addendum.

Last week I introduced you to the masks of Magno León, highlighting a number of features that tend to distinguish his masks from the work of others. There you may have noticed that a particular carver’s masks will share some features and not others, and that two masks by Magno will rarely be identical. Today I want to present some anonymous masks that I would attribute to this carver, based on overlapping features.

During a trip back to the Sierra de Puebla in  December, 2012, I became particularly curious about a mask that was said to be worn each year during Carnaval (or Mardi Gras), in the small mountain village of Zapotitlán de Mendez, Puebla, by a dance character known as La Mujer de las Cebollas (the Onion Woman). When I passed through Zapotitlán in the company of Carlos Moreno Vázquez we questioned everyone that we met about this figure and we searched unsuccessfully for an example of her mask.

Here is what we were able to learn. The Mujer de las Cebollas character was modeled on rural farm women who lived in remote communities; they visited such towns as Zapotitlán on market days to sell their produce. But since this was a character in Carnaval, her vocation was only the beginning of the story. The dancer who played the Mujer was invariably male, but he wore the mask of a smiling old crone. He portrayed her as irritable and sensitive, prone to swing her broom in the air as she pursued children whom she experienced as disrespectful. Naturally such a character invited provocation from the mischievous, setting in motion an endless and entertaining chase. Obviously the Mujer de las Cebollas was a Carnaval clown.

Six months later I received a message from Carlos; he had found a wonderful old Mujer de las Cebollas mask, one that had been danced for about fifty years or more in Zapotitlán. He had also obtained the mask worn by this character’s husband. He believed that these had been carved by Magno León. As I will demonstrate, this impression can be easily validated by comparing the design details of these two masks to the reference standards described in last week’s post.

For those of you who watched the dance video of the Danza del Tigre in Xochistlahuaca, Guerrero, in a recent post, it will be apparent that such clown couples—a Viejo and a Vieja (an old man and an old woman)—are stock elements in the dance dramas of Mexico.

Here are those two masks, beginning with La Mujer de las Cebollas. Looking at the face of this mask one sees Magno’s usual relief carved eyes with arched vision openings. But because this is a character mask rather then the more refined face of a Huehue, the rest of the face is rather different from those we saw in the last post. From the side view, the usual ear design is present.

The wart on the chin was created with a bead that was nailed to the face.

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In September of 2012 I published a book—Mexican Masks and Puppets—that was meant to honor the master carvers in a remote area of Mexico called the Sierra de Puebla and to link these carvers to their heretofore anonymous masks. One of the most talented and exciting of those carvers was Magno León. Today  I will discuss the initial group of masks that served as my introduction to this carver. This will provide us with the necessary information to discuss three additional masks by this carver in next week’s post; these came to my attention after my book was published and were identified as his work based on the earlier documented masks.

Traveling in the Sierra de Puebla in March, 2010 with Vernon Kostohryz and Carlos Moreno Vásquez, we discovered a remarkable anonymous mask. It appeared to have the sagging face of a dead person, reminding us of characters in old horror films such as the Ghoul, played by Boris Karloff in the film of that name in 1933, or perhaps some other role played by Lon Chaney. On reflection, this mask didn’t seem to duplicate any of those faces; instead it was an original creation by some unknown artist. The mask was said to have been danced for Carnaval (Mardi Gras) for more than fifty years. Here are photos of this Ghoul mask.

Note the strange sagging eyes, as if the person is barely awake. Of course you can’t miss the aged surface of the paint.

This is an expressionless or vacant face, mysteriously drained of human feeling.

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