Dance of the Moors and the Christians

In the Bible, the first thing God did in chapter 1 was create and by chapter 6, God destroyed.  The rest of the story is, in sum, the recurring retraction and reconciliation of God and humanity and repeated acts of ruin and regeneration.  

In that story, people experience the divine through dreams, visions, prayer, and even bushes.  Sure, people “hear” about God through prophets, preachers, and kings, but experience the divine?  That is personal, person specific.  Even in Wallingford, we talk about feeling God’s presence in “community”, which to me still sounds singular.  Perhaps instead, the divine might be felt in the space of overlapping groups.  A space that can be filled with chaos and creativity. 

The annual Dance of the Moors and the Christians in Spain is a folkloric reenactment of the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century.  Actually, this dance should have been named, the Dance of the Moors (or Muslims), Christians, and Jews.  These three groups had cohabitated the same space for 800 years, and the interplay of their cultures led to advances in art, science, philosophy, and the theological evolution of each of the three monotheistic religions. 

King Ferdinand of Aragon and Queen Isabella of Castille, sovereigns of two kingdoms on the peninsula, were married to consolidate power of what would eventually become Spain.  These “Catholic Monarchs,” as named by Pope Alexander II, did not dance well with others.   They moved to consolidate their power and expand their kingdoms.  In 1492, in an effort to create purity, they expelled the Moors in the south, forced the substantial Jewish population into ghettos and gave them four months to either convert or leave.  To assure orthodoxy of the converts and stamp out heresy, they established the Spanish inquisition, killing and torturing thousands.  This all occurred in the same year they financed Columbus’s journey that eventually led to the conquering of the “New World.”  While the Catholics were to enjoy their purged and pure Spain, they would at the same time, defile another world. 

The Spaniards viewed the indigenous population of the New World as “heathens” ignorant of God and needed to be brought, if only nominally, into the fold of Christianity.  Therefore, local beliefs were incorporated and gods were rebranded to fit within a nominal Catholic schematic.   The Spaniards brought this dance of cultures and conquest to Guatemala in the sixteenth century as a means of Christianization.  The Maya in what is now Guatemala and southern Mexico assimilated the dance into their existing cosmology, and long after winning independence from Spain, they still practice it.  

Many of you know that Solanes and I lived in Guatemala for a year while I was running a medical clinic and that we returned this past September.  I first stumbled upon this dance in our village, San Juan, at the plaza in front of the church during Semana Santa (Holy Week.)  It seemed that most of the town had gathered around the square to watch.  

About twenty men swayed and circled each other masked as blond Christians and brown Moors.  A man dressed as a black bull and a boy as a little red devil weaved in and out of the two sets of adversaries.  Costumed in bolero jackets and knickers of sequins and feathers, they looked a bit like bullfighters in drag.  The dancers were accompanied by flutes and drums and appeared to use the music as an intoxicant rather than as a cue for pace or play.  

As is the case of the dance still performed in Spain, this dance should have three partners: the Maya, the Ladinos (Spanish speaking mixed blood Guatemalans), and as we are known, the Gringos-a general term for North Americans and Europeans.  These three peoples coexist in this place: the Maya for thousands of years; the Ladinos, for close to 500 years; and the Gringos have had an increased presence for the past couple of decades.

I’ll pause here to say that I looked for scripture about dancing that spoke to this movement between parties:  I found none.  There lots of verses referring to dancing, but they were all about individuals or groups of individuals, praising big G god or other gods.  I found nothing about dancing together in that interplay with each other.  

However, the Bible is filled with stories of different peoples who share the same space, their interplay, their conquest, their conjoining.  According to the Bible, the Israelites subjugated the Canaanites and Samarians and were subjugated by the Egyptians, Babylonians and Romans.  In fact, in that same location where the events described in the Bible took place, this dance continues thousands of years later.  Meanwhile, the Bible itself, this incredible piece of world literature, is a compilation of influences from different cultures: Egyptian, Canaanite, Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Hellenistic.

The dance that goes on today between the Maya, Ladinos, and Gringos includes money, dress, language, religion, and politics. When I started writing this, I realized I had a few hours of lecture material, but I’ll try to sum it up in a few minutes.  

When the Spaniards conquered the Maya, they vanquished their religion, customs, and even their names. The indigenous given names, surnames and even the knowledge of their naming system have been lost.  As in the case of the slaves in North America, the indigenous were bestowed the surnames of their masters.  Common surnames in San Juan and San Pablo (e.g. Cholotio, Ixcaya) are Hispanicized derivations of Mayan words that described the work these people did, not who they were.  For example, the surname Cholotio is from the Mayan words for “brick makers.”  The few indigenous given names (Ixmucane, Ixquic) I have heard are from the Popol Vuh, the Sacred Book of the Quiche Maya.

How ironic that my Anglo culture would Hispanicize them as well the moment they crossed the border to the U.S., dubbing them with a label they have resisted hundreds of years.

Tzutujill is one of the 21 Mayan languages and ethnic groups.  I studied Tzutujiil a while in order to be able to communicate with patients in the clinic.  The first paragraph of the first page of the introduction of my Tzutujiil lesson book relayed the creation story from Genesis and then proceeded to compare it with the creation story in the Popol Vuh.  Why?  Why did a Tzutujiil textbook need to refer to the Bible?  What bearing does the Bible have on Tzutujiil language construction or culture?  Was this yet another vestige of Hispanicization, another way to put a mark on everything indigenous?

Though the Tzutujiil language was more prevalent, Spanish prevailed.  Spanish was the language of formal communication. The written realm of the clinic was nearly entirely in Spanish--medical records, patient forms, health education posters, meeting agendas, reports, etc.   

Tzutujiil was the language of community.  Sounds of Tzutujill were everywhere.  The staff meetings, which were conducted in Spanish, began, ended, and were peppered throughout with chatter in Tzutujiil.  The lady who came in every day at 11 to sell her homemade atole conducted her business in Tzutujiil, asking only me in Spanish if I wanted a cup. The patients received all the services in their own language, unless they were being seen by the Spanish speaking doctor and dentist. 

English was the language of control.  The organization I worked with was a U.S. 501c3 and thus had to comply with American laws and regulations.  Though nearly all the organization documents were in Spanish, the official budget was in English, as were Board meetings and minutes, grants, donor correspondence, and volunteer relationships.  As my dad used to explain the golden rule to me, “The man with the gold makes the rules.”

My office in the clinic was situated between the exam rooms of the Ladino doctor and the Tzutujiil nurse.  As the sounds of their consults wafted over the partial walls that separated our spaces, sometimes I would close my eyes and take in the contrasting sounds.  The Tzutujiil language has a combination of short and long sing-songy vowels and deep throated guttural clicks, and Spanish has short staccato syllables and rolling “r’s.”  I imagined Tzutujiil as the flute and the Spanish as the drums playing together, each with their own part.  

I wondered what images English invokes for non-speakers.  I read that the prevalence of the “sh”, “s”, and “th” sounds makes English sound hissing.  Do they see us as serpents slithering on the ground or coiled into a tree waiting to bite or to offer a piece of damning fruit?   

Language and, for women, dress are the only visible vestiges of the Mayas’ culture, and they proudly wore both.  I walked into work daily bedazzled by the blusas (blouses) or huipiles (woven tops), cortes (long wrapped skirt), and fajas (wrapped skirts and belts.)  Each village around the lake where we lived, and in Guatemala, has its own distinctive style of dress.  I heard that the Spaniards wanted each village or ethnic group to dress differently so they could tell them apart, but perhaps this rumor is merely a backhanded way of attributing the last emblem of cultural pride to the Spaniards.  Actually, the Spaniards brought embroidery and embellishment, which were adapted to local tastes.  

Ladinos distance themselves from anything that might lead them to be mistaken for indigenous and so instead prefer to buy clothes from the paca, American thrift store castoffs purchased in bulk by weight for resale, and while the purchases of  Gringo hippies and hipsters (like me) keep these art forms alive. 

Regarding religion...

So the story goes, five hundred years ago, the Spaniards came to this region and converted the people to Catholicism as a means to coerce allegiance to the crown so that they could abscond with their riches.  

So the story goes that four hundred years later, the North Americans came to convert the people to Evangelical Christianity as a means to coerce allegiance to the corporation so that they could abscond with their resources.  

Catholicism and North American Protestantism have competed over the past decades for souls and their place in society.  Each has had made its own mark on politics, filled its own niche, and both have woven in and been woven into the Mayan cosmology. 

As I mentioned before, when the Spaniards came, Christianization was another means, in addition to language and dress, of bringing the people under the rule of the Spanish crown.   Pyramids were leveled, their stones used to build churches over sacred sites.  A tall hill outside San Juan, once the site of a Mayan altar, now is topped with a cross and statue of the Virgin Mary.  In the famous market town of Chimaltenango, a Catholic church was built atop a holy Mayan site, with Indian laborers, of course, who in turn fooled their Spanish masters by incorporating Mayan symbols in the architecture. 

Deities and folk figures were remade in the image of Catholic saints.  For example, there was once a local, respected elder who lived in hiding in the mountains while organizing the resistance against the Spaniards.  When the Spaniards finally captured him, the people ran through the forest announcing mam ximoon in Tzutujiil, which means “Grandfather has been tied up.”  The Spaniards heard this as “Maximon” and then changed the name to San Simon or Saint Simon in English. 

Now, English speaking tourists buy miniature San Simon figures at gift shops to hang on their walls.  In this case, the indigenous mythologized, the Spaniards Westernized, and the Gringos commercialized.

When I was in Guatemala from 1999 to 2001, I was “officially” a lay Catholic missionary working as a community organizer for the church’s health program as part of the diocese’s social ministries.  Just a few years after the Peace Accords were signed after a brutal 35 year armed conflict, we were actively involved in political and social consciousness raising.  Out of the wars throughout in Latin America, in those years emerged Liberation Theology, a mixing of the Ladino or Metizos, Spaniards, and a bit North American theology and activism, that created a new vision.  

Padre Cirilo, the scrawny Spanish priest I worked with, looked like a figure from an El Greco painting, with his wild white hair and long pointy nose and chin. He talked repeatedly about how the “sueno de Dios” or “dream of God” was for humans to have “la vida digna” or “a life of dignity” that included access to land, education, health, and gender equality.  During the elections in 2000, Cirilo along with other Catholic parishes, not constrained by the separation of church and state doctrine held in the U.S., held forums about the various political parties’ platforms and published voter guides.   

In this second tour in Guatemala, I was unofficially an Evangelical missionary, in that I worked for an NGO with ties to the Guatemalan Methodist Church.  This organization is notably apolitical.  During the 2015 elections, if there had been any discussion of candidates and political parties at work, it must have been in Tzutujiil and not Spanish, because I certainly heard none.  

Just before election day in November, the director, an ex-Methodist minister of solid Swedish stock, and I told the staff that we prayed for peace and the well being of our staff, their families, and the country as a whole.  Punto.  We took no stand.  Meanwhile, our government, and religious groups within our country had considerable influence and orchestration of Guatemalan politics over the past 60 years.  Oddly, in that 2015 election cycle, Guatemala elected a man for president with zero political experience, right wing backing, and was famous for a popular TV show.  I smugly swore something like that would never happen in my country.  

Was the difference between the political natures of the two programs due to the time that had passed since the war, or the difference in working in a region filled with refugees and returned political exiles versus a community with an entrenched, extended clan, or the difference between the Catholics’ and the Evangelicals’ approach to politics?  I don’t know.  

Seeing and participating in a dance in another place has led me to think about the dance in this place.  When I returned to the U.S. last year, frankly, I was in shock about the dance that was happening in this country.  Maybe better said, it seemed more like a mosh pit than a dance.  

Aren’t the contentions in this land also imported from other places and have been assimilated into our schema?  Are we still commemorating conflicts and conquerings of long ago?  Are we dancing in a history we may not understand?  What do the masks and suits we wear tell us about who we are in our dance?  Are we intoxicated by the music?  Are we embracing our partners or stepping on their toes?  In this dance, where is the creation?  Where is the destruction?  

I have heard that we can find the divine in compassion, that is, when we reach out to another, put ourselves in another’s place.  While I think that is true, I propose that we can find the Creator, and the Destroyer, when we reach for another, taking another’s hand, and moving together in the same place.  

Too often we hear about culture clash, conflicts, and war.  Our world seems to be getting smaller while we are further apart than ever.  Our nations are retracting and reconciliation seems so remote.  At the same time, when different peoples come together, there is incredible possibility to make something new.  

Xajooj

¡Vamos a bailar!

Let’s dance!