When I was a child, I danced as a child, but now that I am old, I think about salvation: Concepción González and a past that would not stay put1

Abstract

The article, ‘When I Was a Child, I Danced as a Child, but Now that I Am Old, I Think about Salvation: Concepción González and a past that would not stay put,’ reconstructs an incandescent moment in the history of Mexico, a moment when ordinary Mexicans dramatically transformed Mexico's future. In the mid‐1930s in the midst of President Lázaro Cárdenas's efforts to remake rural Mexico and its people, men and women trained to revere the Virgin Mary enter a church in the village of Ario Santa Monica, Michoacán, seize the wooden icons of Jesus, the saints, the Virgin, and torch them in the plaza. Later that evening, a number of men and women re‐enter the church and dance before the altar. The essay explores this moment through a combination of ethno‐historical and fictive techniques. It traces the meanings of the Virgin, God, and time in Mexico and the author's own experiences of doing ethno‐history among the Ario Santa Monica villagers. It weaves together large historical issues with actual scenes and dialogue in a particularly intimate way. As the essay is about specific historical actors’ diverse relationships with time, women's bodies, and spiritual life, it is both structured in a fashion consistent with the various actors’ preferred relationship with time and reproduces the actors’ varied understandings of these issues. Specifically, the essay creates a composite priest who wrestles with his own insecurities, with the relationship between human behavior during a period wracked with violence, women's sensuality, and the second coming. It reconstructs the Virgin Mary's role in promoting and discouraging the dance. It enters the memories and contemporary life of the socially prominent village woman harboring long‐term rancor against the dancers, and those of the last surviving dancer whose reticence about the dance emerges clearly. And it recreates the author's own ethno‐historical relationships with the villagers.