Dancing resistance, controlling singing and rights to name heritage: Mexican Indigenous autonomy, P’urhépecha practices, and United Nations

All cultural practices, including dance and music, take place in specific sociopolitical-economic contexts within ideological-historical environments and trajectories. They are, therefore, clearly embedded in matters of power relations, which inherently involve issues of human rights. In some contexts, dance and music are categorized as “heritage” for a united nation and for United Nations through the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Through the coloniality of heritage thinking, within authoritarian nationalistic and touristic frameworks, covert forms of human rights violations take place in such contexts of dance and music. This chapter considers a case involving Indigenous P’urhépecha practices; the Dance of the Old Men of the Island of Jarácuaro; the P’urhépecha a song form, pirekua; and the Zacán P’urhépecha Artistic Contest. Tracing a trajectory of incorporation of the Dance of the Old Men as national heritage in the postrevolutionary years of the 1920s, to processes of reappropriation of the narrative through the Indigenous P’urhépecha Autonomous movement, to the 2010 designation of the pirekua as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity through UNESCO, this chapter raises questions around spheres of control and artistic production.