Venezuelan Ancestral Masks

500 years ago the future of America was drastically affected with the Spanish invasion at first and later with the incursion of Portugal, England that literally took over the entire American continent, the main problem of the invaders was the resistance of native peoples who fought to be virtually exterminated, without a group to enslave the English quickly devised a way to get people without sailing to Europe, thus was born the slave trade from the African continent.

Beyond all the killings and atrocities with the sole purpose of imposing Spanish culture, they did not measure the social impact of mixing different societies in a country like Venezuela, the few aboriginal groups plus the native African groups and the Spaniards resulted in a mixture of traditions led by African slaves who found in syncretism an ingenious way to maintain their cultural traditions.

Thus the cultural traditions were born with a mixture of African deities and Jewish Christian deities, in different regions of Venezuela were generated manifestations of the corpus Christi, thus was conformed the great brotherhood of the dancing devils, each brotherhood designed different masks each with different forms and concepts which enriched the tradition, and 450 years of festivities are held each year mainly on the coasts of the Venezuelan Caribbean.

It is necessary to stop a little the attention in the deterioration in spite of maintaining the religious celebrations, this due to the closed that are the brotherhoods, that have had to give opening to the incorporation of people foreign to the familiar nuclei that have organized generation after generation, the point is simple, many descendants are not interested in continuing with the tradition and on the other hand the genetic wearing down makes almost unsustainable that a tradition remains intact.

Now it is common to see people expert in popular culture supporting and trying to maintain the tradition culture without altering the ways of constructing the masks and how to organize the events in an easier and optimal way.