CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 5/30/2019

In Phyllis Galembo's new book on the mask cultures of Mexico, ritual object and corporal body become one

"Reyna, Queen of the Santiagos" (2017) is reproduced from Phyllis Galembo: Mexico Masks Rituals, launching tonight at Howl! Happening in the East Village. Essayist Sergio Rodríguez Blanco writes, "Within ancestral cultures living on the latitude of Earth we now call Mexico—as well as in how those cultures survive in what we call popular culture—participants in the rites which generally coincide with Roman Catholic festivities, in dance and chants, wearing masks and costumes, stop existing as themselves and morph into an ancestor, into a deity. Ritual object and corporal body become one, and catapult to a dimension beyond time or history. They revisit the myth in order to invoke their communal origin, in order to recover—for an instant—the radiance of original time, while also reinforcing their social behaviors and reclaiming their ethos."