On a Thursday evening in the gymnasium of the Boys and Girls Club in Salinas, men and women take off their shoes and begin tying colorful headbands around their heads. Women slip on skirts or loose tunics with thigh-high slits. Men keep their gym shorts on and don similar, but shorter, skirt-like pieces with waist-high slits. They all tie thick leather bands, embellished with tree nut pods, around their ankles. The pods sway and rattle with every inch of movement. That rattling is the first sign this is not a ballet practice.
With a few pounds of a drum, the Calpulli Yaocuauhtli begin practice. BOOM-BOOM-BOOM, the drums sound off like thunder.
The dancers flood the middle of the gym. They jump, circle, and pound their bare feet into the floor and push their hands into the air, jutting out knees and elbows. Each dancer’s geometry seems to take up space that expands and contracts at will.
It’s a powerful display of energy. It’s also choreography from the 14th century. The tradition’s roots are deep: the dances are transmitted by oral tradition, seeing and doing. In addition, no one modern-day nation can claim the dances. At its peak, the Aztec Empire’s influence spilled out of Mexico and into other countries of present-day Central America.
Irish Tapia (Ayauhtimani in Nahuatl, the Aztec language) is a founding member of Calpulli Yaocuahtli. She says knowing the empire covered such a huge area is important in a community like Salinas; though the population of the city is majority Latino and the Spanish language is ubiquitous in the city, cultural and generational fractures still exist.
“Chicano youth can view themselves as different from their Mexican parents, and [Salinas] residents claim all types of identities and nationalities,” Tapia says. “We want to bring the community [together] around our shared culture.”
They believe if Latinos go back far enough into the past and begin to understand the unifying vastness of the empire, they can find a shared identity. The dancers don’t linger too long on the particulars of ancestry: “We’re open and and accepting of anyone,” says Carol Ruvalcaba, another founding member and one the most celebrated female Aztec dancers in California. “That’s what the Aztec culture is about.”
Ruvalcaba says some Aztec dance groups only accept men, or exclude LGBTQ+ members. It’s a mindset she says is out of sync with Aztec culture, instead reflecting more contemporary machismo. She points to a young boy and a woman with white hair. “He has special needs, and she’s 75,” Ruvalcaba says. “They’re both welcome here.”
As for LGBTQ+ members, they were often seen in Aztec culture as magical. They embody duality, a concept in Aztec culture that sees women and men as equals. Having characteristics of both genders, Ruvalcaba says, is “like hitting the gold mine.”
Transcending rigid gender roles has also been important in the choreography. Here, there are no gender-specific moves, like in ballet or hip-hop. Everyone does the same moves. The group is taught by Ruvalcaba, who has 23 years of experience.
She learned Aztec dance from her ex-husband (also the Yaocuahtli’s head drummer), Victor Juarez, who’s a native of Mexico City. He began his dancing career and subsequent affiliation with Aztec culture because he couldn’t quite connect with his parents’ Catholicism. “My parents really tried,” says Juarez, “but they failed.”
In Mexico, Juarez found teachers who taught him all sorts of choreography that honored different spirits or elements like water or fire. The dances were just the beginning of his immersion. He learned how to weave leather and carve instruments. But the Aztec culture wasn’t just confined to Mexico.
When Juarez moved to the U.S. he found groups in New York and Los Angeles. Practices were prevalant in bigger cities, with a small but active dancing community. The group was tightly knit; dancers would even drop into other groups’ practices, if they were far from their own.
But these practices were far from Salinas, and that presented an oppourtunity. Within a year of meeting in a Bay Area practice in 2006, Ruvaclaba, Juarez and Tapia founded the Salinas group. Ten years later, they have 45 active members. “There are so few people who can teach this,” Tapia says. “It’s really up to us to train the next generation.”
It seems that they’re on track. As the tempo of the drums increases, Tapia’s 1-year-old daughter picks up a shaker and runs into the crowd, joining the dancing.