by Caleb Fort
Daily Lobo
Daniel Garcia said the Undergraduate Research and Creativity Symposium is a good way for students to show their work to the rest of the University's academic community.
Garcia will be presenting a 10-minute documentary he produced over the summer about a religious ceremony in the East Mountains at the Nov. 21 symposium.
"I felt the symposium would be a good way to help me tighten up a few loose ends in the project and demonstrate to the academic community of UNM what I've done," he said. "The whole point of the project is to communicate this ceremony."
Garcia spent a day at San Antonio Church of the Holy Child Parish of Tijeras, near Cedar Crest, filming the ceremony, he said.
His project is titled "An Ethnographic Survey of the East Mountains."
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The ceremony, called "Dancing of the Matachines," is practiced in churches all over New Mexico and is a celebration of each church's patron saint, he said.
The ceremony he witnessed was unique, Garcia said.
"That church is particularly poignant because there's an acequia that flows through the church grounds, so the dance includes a blessing of the acequia," he said. "It's very meaningful, because water is so precious in New Mexico."
An acequia is a traditional New Mexican irrigation channel.
The ceremony includes musicians and several costumed dancers, he said, but it is not all serious.
"There is a component that brings comedy into it," he said. "It's a clown - a man dressed up as a woman."
He said the clown's dress is eventually torn off during a fight with someone dressed up as a bull.
Garcia, who grew up in Cedar Crest, said he decided to make the documentary after he visited the church for his ethnography documentation class offered by the Chicano Studies Department and the Communication & Journalism Department, he said.
"In that class, we, as a class, would go to different communities throughout New Mexico and sort of learn about some of these indigenous rituals," he said. "The closeness of the subject in combination with the class was an incentive to do the project."
Although he spent only one day at the church, he put in several hours researching the ceremony and putting together the documentary, he said.
Garcia said his piece is interesting because he grew up in the area and made it personal.
"I've taken a reflective approach. I've taken my personality as an urbanized Hispanic and Chicano and used that to interpret the ceremony," he said. "My piece is very impressionistic."
Many other people have done research on the ceremony or similar ceremonies, he said. However, he said his work contributes something unique.
"What's lacking in academics is the perspective of an individual who comes from that community," Garcia said.
The project will help him in his future career, either as a doctor or a lawyer, he said.
"The decision to do this project was one that I can only see as benefiting me in the future," he said. "As a person who hopes to go into medical school or law school, this project is very important because it helped me build a relationship with a traditional community of New Mexico." Garcia is trying to get some musicians who play in the ceremony to play at the symposium for his presentation, he said.
Editor's note: Daniel Garcia posts the Daily Lobo to the Web site, but did not post this story to avoid a conflict of interest.
