Danza De Los Tecuanes - Dance of the jaguar

Buenos días. Welcome everybody. Bienvenidos todos to our second day of our Día de los Muertos festival here at the National Museum of the American Indian. My name is Ranald Woodaman. I work at the Smithsonian Latino Center, and we do lots of work with this museum all the time. Actually, I want to recommend that you guys check out our exhibit up on the third floor Cerámica de los ancestros, appropriately titled for this weekend, Central Americas Past Revealed Now, we're about to see a great performance now by a local group called Los Tecuanes. I'm going to pass the mic over Jenny Vargas who is going to tell us a little bit more about the performance we're about to see this morning. Thank you. Hello everybody. This is a presentation of a dance of the tecuanes. La danza de tecuane es una representación de la lucha de los pueblos de Sur Mexico del lucha por sobre virir. The dance of tecuanes from the mouth of tecuane, the one who eats people is a unique and singular representation of a fight that took place in small towns in southern Mexico. Through their way of dancing the original dancers sought to scare away anything that could represent any danger to the families their belongings, or even their religious beliefs. The greatest of these dangers was the jaguar. This animal had a special significance in all Mesoamerican cultures. It was given divine attributes. For the tecuanes dancers, it was a necessity to capture and kill this fierce creature. The dance is performed not only during many religious celebrations as an expression from the dancers but is also represented at any cultural event, fair, and like today, a celebration of the dead, with th only purpose of promoting one of many traditions of Mexico. The opening piece of this presentation will start in the way it originally did. Dancers will go on in a procession to a place of adoration. They will make a reverence to their god asking for strength and guidance in their quest of going after the jaguar to hunt and kill it. Hope you guys enjoy it. The dance of the solar is a very typical dance in traditional farming villages. The dancers make movements with their feet as real workers in the field would when the sowing season would come. The dance of the sugar cane harvest is a piece that tries to represent the actions and moves needed in that farming activity. Dancers jump happily as they carry a bundle of canes sticks on their shoulders. The dance of the baker is a dance that pays tribute to traditional and appreciated offices in small towns, the office of baker. Performers dance happily around a hat that represents the basket that will contain the bread. Great, and thanks, and give it up for Los Tecuanes, who, again, are out in Manassas, are a local cultural group who perform often with us.