MEXICO CITY -- Mexican composer María Leonora prepares for each concert as if she’s gearing up for battle.Her makeup has a tribal edge.Her clothes are arranged in layers she sheds as the show unfolds.
An amulet over her belly button serves as protection.“I look into the mirror and I sort of go to war,” she said prior to a recent presentation in Mexico City.
“I brace myself to walk through the fire and whatever happens happens.”Her 2025 performances were conceived as chapters connected by a common thread.She called the series “Through All the Fire,” believing that both music and flames carry a powerful renewal quality.“A fire can burn and destroy,” she said.
“But if you make it through, you can be reborn.”That same idea of heat and renewal is present in the ambience of her shows.Her concerts draw inspiration from a pre-Hispanic steam bath known as a “temazcal,” which played a significant role in Mesoamerican social and religious life.“You may suffer as you enter a temazcal, but you put up with it,” she said.
“You sweat and your ego cracks.Even if you don’t want to, heat breaks you.”Temazcales had a ritual function and a cosmological significance for Mesoamerican cultures, wrote archaeologist Agustín Ortiz in a publication from Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History.Built in stone or adobe structures, each bath could hold dozens of people and produced steam by heating stones before dousing them with water.“The temazcal was seen as the Earth’s interior and as a passageway between the world of the living and the underworld,” Ortiz wrote.
“It was conceived as an entrance to the ‘beyond.’”Most of them were located near ceremonial ballcourts, underscoring their connection to the game’s ritual dimension.Temazcales remain in use today, but their earliest forms have been found in Maya cities such as Chichén Itzá and Palenque, and in sites like Tlatelolco and Teotihuacán in central Mexico.María ...