What can traditional Mexican masks teach us about the popularity of Snapchat?

While I was walking through a new exhibit at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, I couldn’t help but see a reflection of modern online culture in the primal artform of masks.

The new Masking exhibit gives attendants a unique look at this human tradition. The exhibit is displaying dozens of traditional masks from Mexico along with contemporary art that “blur the lines between art and artifice, self and other, being and nonbeing.” These pieces are more than art they represent a culture’s identity, beliefs, and values. Whenever someone puts on a mask they step into their ideal self.

Observing the dozens of masks made in the image of animals, men, and gods I noticed the similarities of these masks with the ones we wear online.

Social media are the new masks. Mobile apps let you go beyond the careful crafting of your persona and let you wear a mask online. Snapchat filters gives you the ability to digitally transform your face by giving you a dog snout and ears. The app can even change the pitch of your voice or give you the face of a modern icon like Bob Marley or Prince. These digital performances can be recorded then shared with everyone you know.

But, this human need to take on another identity and share it with the world is not new. Human cultures around the world and throughout history have used masks to channel and express their societal identity.

“I consider masking to be an an aspect of the semiotics of identity, that is, one of a variety of  means of signalling identity, or changes in identity,” wrote University of Buffalo Professor Donald Pollock about the role masks play in human identity in his paper  Masks and the Semiotics of Identity, “ A mask is symbol that represents an aspect of a culture and its society.”

One of the stand out pieces are the authentic viejito masks, which are from Michoacan and date back to pre-hispanic times. The masks are worn by dancers performing the danza de los viejitos or dance of old men.  In the ceremony, the dancers walk out towards a captivated crowd to no music. They are dressed in white with  brightly colored zerape cloaks draped over their bodies and straw hats with ribbons hanging off the rims on their heads. Their outfits are completed with clay or wooden masks with the likeness of an old man’s face painted on them.

The men slowly tremble into the center of the crowd with hunched over backs and the support of wooden canes. As the music starts their movements get faster. They start tapping their wooden-soled sandals. Eventually, their quick coordinated stomps create a song of their own.

The tradition started as a Purepecha ceremony paying reverence to their aging fire god and wise elders. Over time the dance was also meant to mock the conquistadors for their fair skin and clothing. Now the folk dance is performed in parties and festivals all over the Mexican state of Michoacan. The viejito masks has evolved, along with the Purepecha society, from a religious symbol, to a form of resistance, and finally a work of art representing cultural identity.

The original Purepecha dancers put on their masks and became their idols, the Curicaueri and the elders. Like the Purepecha, millennials continue the tradition of using masks and imitation to pay respect to their idols while expressing their own cultural identity. Exiting the museum, I checked my Snapchat and saw that a few of my friends had put on their masks. Some were now bunnies, others Albert Einstein.