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Matachine Aguelo: A Life Outside the Theater, The

Western Folklore, Winter 2001 by Steele, Thomas J

Some years ago, I came across a copy of "Los `Aguelos' de Nuevo Mejico" [The 'Aguelos' of New Mexico], an interesting and informative article about a disciplinarian figure in the Hispanic villages which the premier New Mexican linguist and folklorist Aurelio Macedonio Espinosa (1880-1958) published in a Spanish journal upwards of half a century ago (Espinosa 1945:71-78; see also Steele 1992, which is largely a translation). Not only had it never been translated, it had rarely been noted by scholars except in a posthumous volume edited by his son Jose Manuel Espinosa (1985:247-48). As I examined it, I began to wonder not only if the Aguelo (Abuelo, Grandfather) of the New Mexican Matachine dance might perhaps be the source of a masked whipper figure that Espinosa mentions among the Pueblo Indians. I also wondered if the Spanish name might have been the source of the numerous Native American names themselves-tsave yoh, chaveyo, and so forth; that is to say, if all of them were not identically the Spanish phrase los abuelos, though of course altered upon entering into the different indigenous languages.

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THE MATACHINES OF NEW MEXICO

Perhaps best described as a mimed morality play, the Matachine or Matachina dance of the Hispanics and Pueblo Indians of New Mexico has always featured an Abuelo or Aguelo (Grandfather) figure. He stage-manages the dance by marking out the dance-area with the butt of his whip, tying up any part of a dancer's garb that comes loose, cueing any dancer who forgets his steps, and making jokes. He also participates as a dancing mime along with several good characters (El Monarcha, La Malinche-a young girl wearing a First-Communion dress-and ten or so matachines or principal dancers), and one evil character, El Toro or Torito, a young boy dressed as a bull. Within the dance the Aguelo directs the action, and he often interprets it with burlesque and satirical inversions that can vary from Hispanic to Pueblo, from place to place, from one year to the next, and even from one day's performance to the next. The Aguelo wears a grotesque mask and somewhat bizarre old man's clothing, and he carries a whip and a knife. He occasionally makes menacing moves toward members of the audience, especially young boys who are drawing attention to themselves and away from the dance, and he fights with El Toro toward the end of the dance, pretending to castrate and kill it (Champe 1983:12-15, 91; Rodriguez 1996:26-35). There is considerable variation of performance within the wider tradition and an almost total subjectivity in interpretation-or to be blunt, in the commentators' projection of their own political and sociological preferences. A thorough comparison of the Matachines and the bullfight might be quite revealing.

Villages normally perform the Matachine Dance in the context of sacred time, often the December 121 fiesta of Our Lady of Guadalupe and the nine days ending on Christmas when the villagers perform "Las Posadas" and "Los Pastores." The appearance of the Aguelo in the Matachine Dance reminds the inhabitants both of pueblos and of Hispanic villages, the children especially, that the Aguelo exists apart from the Matachines dance, that he has "a life outside the theater."

HISPANIC CHILDREN

In the Spanish villages of northern New Mexico, on Christmas Eve or some other night within the ceremonial context of Christmas, the Aguelo was sure to visit all the houses with children no older than eleven or twelve. The adults had begun to warn the children-indeed, to tease and even taunt them-with the Aguelo's impending arrival in the home.

The children firmly believed that the Aguelos were preternatural beings who lived in the mountains and came down annually for the visit in question. In the early hours of the day when the Aguelo's visit was anticipated, the children went out to look for any wisps of smoke on the horizon that might suggest that he had awakened and was cooking breakfast before beginning his journey to their village.

When he finally did arrive, the Aguelo announced his presence by banging on the door, and everyone cried, "The Aguelo! Here comes the Aguelo!" They immediately opened the door to him, and he entered-a figure deliberately designed to be frightening. He was usually clad in a homemade costume of brain-tanned deer or pronghorn skins-gamuza, the clothing of the wise elders of the village-along with a wool serape which he doffed as he entered the house. He wore either a horned mask or else a wig and a hood to set off the uncooked wheat tortilla of white dough (masa) that was plastered onto his face (Kutsche and Van Ness, 1981:107-08; Beck 1987:32-37; Padilla 1994:15; Rodriguez 1996:79; Garcia 1999:50,54, and 116). In Pena Blanca and Santa Fe, the Aguelos wore black clothing, masks of masa, buffalo horns on their heads, and a horse's tail, traits that suggest European domesticated plants and animals combined with beings of wild nature. In Abiquiu in the Chama Valley and in Placitas near Bernalillo, his mask was made of an animal's skin, often cowhide, hairy side out, soaked and molded to fit the wearer's head. There were litde slits for eyes, a huge beaked nose, a thin little mouth, and great flapping ears. His trousers of deerskin were slit into ribbons to look like so many tails. He wore a coton, a tail-coat of cotton cloth made by weaving strips of cloth into material, a garment out at the elbows, short-waisted in the front, and much longer in the back where the two tails almost reached the knees. The aguelo occasionally rounded up the unruly youngsters of the town, picking one to grasp his coat tail and ordering the rest to march along, each hanging to the child in front of him, and thus they marched through the village, pausing now and then to "dance the dove"-do a simple children's jig that consisted of a slow monotonous dance rhythm, moving body and head from side to side either solo or with all the children joined together by holding hands in a circle while El Aguelo reviewed them to make certain that all the feet were dancing out an act of contrition and a firm purpose of amendment. Finally, the Agi/elo always carried a Spanishstyle whip called a chicote to whip the bad children. It was a strap of tanned cowhide attached to a short wooden stick, and it often hung from one wrist by a lace of leather (Ortiz 1969:161n11; Hill 1982:306-07; Rodriguez 1996:76, 109; Cordova 1997:37-46).

Matachine Aguelo: A Life Outside the Theater, The

Western Folklore, Winter 2001 by Steele, Thomas J

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