Without a word, troupe tells Mexico's history

Twice a week during their get-togethers, Jessica Salazar permits no verbal conversation among her people. Talking doesn't accomplish their mission.

Speech might not be the easiest form of communication, anyway, between dancers with differing dialects. Salazar has a better form, one that kicks aside other language barriers.

"I really believe that through dance we can understand each other," she said. Salazar is founder of the Utah Hispanic Dance Alliance, which will give a pre-Cinco de Mayo concert today at the Rose Wagner Performing Arts Center. The alliance of women and men from all over Latin America has devoted months of Thursday night and Saturday afternoon rehearsals to the event, which is a survey of Mexican cultural history.

During rehearsals, Salazar forbids chatter. Her troupe members can't afford to do much besides dance, after all. They range in age from 15 to 50, and attend college, work graveyard shifts or put in the double shift of day job to homemaker. "Some of them go straight to work after four hours of (dance) practice," Salazar said, adding that when they are on stage, her performers also serve as teachers.

They will teach about Cinco de Mayo, a holiday many Americans aren't too sure about. May 5 is not, as some think, the Mexican independence day. That was back on Sept. 16, 1810, when Mexico won its war with Spain. Cinco de Mayo commemorates an event more than half a century later: On May 5, 1862, the Mexicans, though poorly armed and outnumbered, defeated the invading French army in the battle of Puebla. Although Napoleon III later prevailed and installed his relative, Archduke Maximilian of Austria, as ruler of Mexico, the Mexicans eventually drove him and his soldiers out.

Yet European art and dance stayed and flourished. The people stirred polka and Spanish flamenco into their indigenous dance forms, and taught all of those moves to their children at weddings, baptisms and other fiestas.

Today's concertgoers will see Mexico's history danced, not told.

There will be Aztec rituals, with dancers resplendent in feathers. The performers will mix mazurkas with fast, light Mexican footwork. And they will swirl across the stage in frothy white costumes from the Pacific coastal state of Veracruz. "That was the site of Cortez's landing in 1519," the beginning of the Spanish conquest. "The foam on the ocean is represented in the amount of lace and ruffles on the dresses."