UC Berkeley

This dissertation explores questions of embodied knowledge, power and consciousness through the study and practice of Anahuacan ceremonial dance. Danza – also known as Danza Azteca, Danza Mexica, Danza Tolteca-Chichimeca, or Mitotiliztli, Macehualiztli and Chitontequiza – is a rich tradition of Indigenous and syncretic dance rooted in transnational movements across Mexico, Central America and the United States. Reflections are offered on the nature of danza as a human movement system and as a social, cultural, political and spiritual movement. Centered in critical and comparative Ethnic Studies, theories of decoloniality, and “theory in the flesh” (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983) this work thinks from and about danza as an embodied modality of Anahuacan science, art, spirituality and activism. Research has been conducted through transdisciplinary, scholar-practitioner methodologies: combining analysis of archival sources, secondary research and Indigenous and Performance Studies approaches to ethnography, creative writing and “research as ceremony” (Wilson 2008). Body chapters consider questions of decolonial aesthetics, poetics, ethics and philosophy of science through danza theory and praxis. Evidence demonstrates the necessity of integrating embodied, communal and ceremonial ways of knowing into existing critiques of epistemology, cosmology and cultural memory. Re-membering to relate, danza serves as a medium of intergenerational and community-based healing for Indigenous Latinx, Xicanx communities in Abya Yala.