A powerful expression of Indigenous and Mexican identity, Aztec dance has become a part of Mexican and Mexican American cultural life across North America. Kristina F. Nielsen examines California’s Aztec dance communities to illuminate how the dancers interpret authenticity, tradition, history, and Indigenous and national identities through their music and dance practices. Merging history with on-the-ground interviews, Nielsen looks at the different approaches to Aztec dance. Some dancers maintain practices as they have been passed down through lineages of hybrid Indigenous and Catholic practices. Others strive to restore traditions to what they believe they were in the early 1500s. Nielsen’s analysis examines Mexican and Mexican American understandings of Indigenous histories that inform these decisions by Aztec dancers, and considers the ways they intersect with decolonization in the United States. Enlightening and rigorous, Aztec Music and Dance in California takes readers into the dynamic world of an ever-evolving art form.

Kristina F. Nielsen is an assistant professor of musicology at Southern Methodist University.