Tania Candiani

La Maringuilla is the owner of all varieties of corn and the owner of medicinal herbs. In the Danza de los Negritos she represents the “mother of the serpent” and she is assimilated to Chalchiutlicue, goddess of water, she is also the mother/wife.

La Maringuilla wears breeches and a white shirt under a petticoat and a loose-fitting blouse or a long white dress and a shawl or shawl, evoking the clothing of the bourgeois women of the cities, she always wears a veil, not as a wedding veil, but to hide her face male. Since although she is the only female character, as in other colonial dances she is played by a man; what for some evidences the dual symbol guiding principle in the Totonac worldview; although it may also be due to the machismo of the time and region, which prohibited women from participating in ceremonies and dances.

Video of her features her swiveling with the snake in hand. The constant stomping, the continuous rhythm of its twists and turns, the undulating movement of its skirt remind us that it is also the goddess of rain or the mother of thunder, for which reason the dance, among the Totonacs, constitutes a fertility rite. symbolizing the arrival of the rains, death and resurrection.
In this piece, in the same way as in Sanes de la sanación, we see the image of the dancer, superimposed on his own dance, thus forming the horizontal narrative of the work, where the body itself becomes his ghost.