El Danze De Los Viejetos: Dance Of Old Men

El danze de los viejetos / dance of the old men

People do not take into account the impact that colonialism had on Mexico and Mexico’s culture of dance and music. The merging of Indigenous tradition and European culture left a strange mark in Mexico, where both those diverse cultures were combined into its own Mexican identity. There is no bigger example of this than the traditional Mexican dance, of the state of Michoacán el danze de los viejetos or in English the dance of the old men. What the dance used to represent pre and post the conquering by Spain is radically different, since Mexico itself changed through colonization. The dance of the old men is still being danced now but the original meaning and what it represents now has changed,

The people that lived in the region before the Spanish came to America were called the Purepechas. As the article, “Purepecha – Tarascan Indians” states that the Purepechas ruled the region of southern Mexico in the Michoacán, Jalisco state regions of Mexico and they were never conquered by the Aztecs, the P’urpechas also had their own religion music, and dances (Purepecha). One of those dances was the precursor to the old man and it held a deeply religious theme for the people of Purpechas. According to the Purepechas website on the article “La Danze de los viejetos” in Mexico the origin of the dance was of the religious ceremony to their old gods where one had the mask of a young person, while three other dancers had old men masks, there had to be four dancers because the number four was important to their culture (La Danza). The dance was dedicated to the universe and life as the number four was the most important aspect of the dance since each dancer represented, Mercury, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and the colors, red, blue, black and yellow, yellow representing corn the most important vegetable in Mexico (La Danza).The dance consisted of the four dancers dancing in a circle while one of the dancers, In particular the one with the young mask dancing ecstatically while the others surround the dancer. The roots of the modern dance are ingrained in the original purapaches dance, as both the original and the modern version have a lot of things in common. After the fall of the Purapaches empire in the hands of the