Mexican Concheros

The term concheros is derived from concha, the name of the musical stringed instrument that Mexican dancers use. Regardless of their precise origin, concheros have been performing with their colorful garments for a long time in the atriums of the Catholic churches of several cities and towns in the center of Mexico. In recent decades, their costumes, musical instruments, and ideology have undergone a transformation and a great expansion within Mexico itself, in the United States, and in Spain.

The concheros are organized in brotherhoods called mesas (tables), referring to the altar around which many of their ceremonies are performed. On this altar are placed the images of their revered Catholic saints and other sacred objects. This altar, or oratorio, is in the home of the “captain” or leader of the mesa. They are hierarchically organized, following a military pattern: captain, sergeant, alferez, soldiers, malinches or censers (a rank held only by women), and a few generals.

They have two types of rituals: (1) the dance, which is diurnal and public, and (2) the velación (wake), which takes place privately at the captain's oratory, usually in the night before the dance, and which includes a ritual called the “spreading of the flower” while praises, accompanied by conchas, are sung. The following day, without any sleep, they go to the church to dance the whole day.

The concheros of Mexico City have to go to dance yearly, at least in five shrines placed at the cardinal points plus a center at Saint James's Church in Tlatelolco. Saint James is considered the “patron of the four winds.” These four shrines are (1) the Virgin of Guadeloupe, (2) the Christ of Chalma's (a famous place of pilgrimage), (3) Our Lady of Los Remedios, and (4) the Christ of Amecameca.

In Chalma, the concheros stay for several days, where they dance and take part in several other rituals. They also have a sort of assembly where they discuss matters related to their mesas or elect new generals.

Each mesa celebrates its own patron saint with a velación and a dance, inviting the members of other mesas as a net of reciprocal “obligations.”

In the past few decades, many of the conchero costumes have changed. The old conchero dress for both men and women, which is still worn by some groups, was a long skirt and a shirt and a headdress made of colored ostrich feathers. The Aztec dress, copying the ancient garment used by the Mexica, was introduced around the 1940s, and many mesas, especially the ones called Aztec, have adopted it. Drums have become popular instruments. Rules have relaxed. To become a conchero, there were very strict rules, which if not followed, resulted in severe punishment.

No longer confined to poor, uneducated people, the ideology and social composition of the concheros has changed; now influenced by New Age thinking and the Mexicanidad (“Mexican-ness”) movement, which has also appropriated the dance, arguing that it is of pre-Hispanic origin, and instead of dancing for the saints, they dance for the pre-Hispanic gods.