The Mexican Hat Dance

The "Jarabe Tapatío", better known internationally as "The Mexican Hat Dance", is a popular Mexican dance also popular in other countries such as Cuba, Peru, and the Dominican Republic, that has come to symbolize Latin America both domestically and internationally.

The word jarabe is likely from the Arab word xarab which means "herb mixture". Tapatío is a nickname for the people of Guadalajara . The jarabe tapatío shares its name with a number of dances from the center and south of Mexico, including the jarabe de Jalisco, the jarabe de atole and the jarabe moreliano, but the tapatío version is by far the best known. There is some dispute as to the jarabe tapatío’s authenticity. Music researcher Nicolás Puentes Macías from Zacatecas states that true jarabes are almost extinct in Mexico, found today only in small fractions of Zacatecas and Jalisco and that the jarabe tapatío is really a form of a dance called "tonadilla."

The earliest evidence of the dance comes from the late 18th century. It was originally danced by female couples in order to avoid the disapproval of the church. Shortly before the Mexican War of Independence, mixed couples began to perform it, with a public performance at the Coliseo Theater in 1790 in Mexico City. Shortly after that performance, The jarabe was banned by colonial and religious authorities as it was considered to be morally offensive and a challenge to Spain’s control over the territory. However, this only served to make the dance more popular as a form of protest and rebellion, with people holding illegal dances in public squares and neighborhood festivals.

Just after Independence, the jarabe and other dances grew and spread in popularity even more, with colonial-era restrictions lifted. People celebrated the end of the war in 1821 with large fiestas, which prominently featured the jarabe. Jarabe and other folk dances came to be seen as part of Mexico’s emerging identity as a country. The jarabe would maintain various regional forms, but that associated with Guadalajara gained national status, becoming not only popular in that city but also in Mexico City as well, as a dance for the elite around the 1860s. By the Mexican Revolution, it had become popular with the lower classes as well. During the Revolution, the dance's popularity waned somewhat until Guadalajara music professor Jesús González Rubio composed a standard melody for it as a symbol of national unity, leading the dance to become the "national dance" of Mexico and the melody to gain wide popular recognition. It became internationally famous after Russian dancer Anna Pavlova added it to her permanent repertoire after visiting Mexico in 1919.

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