Native and Afro-Mexican traditions take center stage at Old Town School concert for Indigenous Peoples’ Day

The Aztec tradition lives on in Chicago thanks to the efforts of a local dance group.

Rosa Huilotlalcoatl Xochitlmazatl Gaytán, the founder of Calpulli Ocelotl-Cihuacoatl, is bringing her group’s ceremonial dance ritual to the Old Town School of Folk Music on Monday to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

After the group’s ceremonial dance, Afro-Mexican singer Alejandra “La Morena” Robles, by way of Oaxaca, Mexico, will close out the show with her signature melodious vocals, inspired by the sounds of the coastal Mexican town she grew up in.

In 1992, Gaytán and her husband moved to Logan Square in Chicago, which triggered a “loss of all those connections.”

Feeling depressed, she said, Gaytán searched all around the city for a dance group like the ones she was a part of in Mexico, but came up short.

“I was looking for my path. I was looking for my spirituality, my dance, and I couldn’t find it,” she said.

After meeting with others in her church community, in 2000 Gaytán started the group with three families, and they started practicing weekly in St. Sylvester Catholic Church in Logan Square.

That group became Calpulli , a dance collective that practices the traditions of Danza Mexica, which honors ancestral wisdom and the connection between the spiritual and natural worlds. Their dances also function as an expression of gratitude for life, sustenance and more.

Calpulli (a term from the Náhuatl language the Aztecs spoke, which roughly translates as “community”) is an intergenerational group, consisting of family and individual members ranging from 6 to 85 years old.

Gaytán said that each time a new member joins the group, she encourages them to bring their loved ones along.

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Provided/Néstor Daniel Borjon

“We’re gonna be learning a lot, so you don’t wanna leave your family behind,” she said.

“I tell them to bring [their] family … fall in love with nature and many of the things that when we are in the city we don’t see. We don’t realize that we have all this beauty around us.”

Their performances open with an honoring of the four directions: North, East, South and West. Each direction represents an aspect of Aztec mythology. The East, for example, is regarded as the beginning of life because the sun rises from that direction, Gaytán said.

In her hometown of Aguascalientes, Gaytán studied to become a teacher of Mexican art and dance. As she worked on her college thesis, the indigenous dance tradition became central to her life.

“At that time dance was my church, my spiritual support, my everything,” she said.

Now, they meet twice weekly to practice and travel throughout the United States to perform their ritual dances.

Each dancer’s regalia is unique, reflecting their connections to different deities and homages to their ancestors or personal lives. They all wear feathered headdresses, beaded jewelry and ayoyotes (anklets adorned with hard-shelled seeds from the chachayote tree) for each performance.

“The most exciting part is to be part of this as indigenous from Mexico, as a Mexica,” said Gaytán of performing alongside Robles.

Robles, from Puerto Escondido, Oaxaca, will sing selections from her music catalog including “La Malagueña Salerosa,” “La Llorona,” “La Bamba” and “Babalú.” Her sounds are influenced by the Afro-Mexican and Native communities of Oaxaca.

She credits her family for piquing her interest in music when she was a little girl. Her maternal grandfather performed in trios across Oaxaca.

Robles’ father was a musician and restaurant owner in Oaxaca, and she remembers going up to the family business to perform when she was four years old.

“That’s how I began to discover that I loved to sing, and later on I realized that if you don’t study, talent is something that goes away and gets lost,” Robles said.

In Mexico, she studied opera and sequentially went to the Paris Conservatory, a prestigious college of music and dance in France.

“Although my training was classical, I always had the desire to sing traditional music, folk music,” she said.

Robles is also the host of “Las Joyas de Oaxaca,” a Mexican TV show where she highlights other Oaxacan artists, especially Afro-Mexicans like herself.

“It is very important to talk about Afro-Mexico, especially because Afro-Mexicans have been denied by the history of Mexico, not only for years, but for centuries,” she said. “Through my music, through my presence, my voice … I hope that people will know and know more about us, because by knowing more I believe that we will put an end to the racism … in our country.”