Meat, bread, tortillas, and deer dancers

A long strip mall along South 12th Avenue has two stores at the same address: Mercadito La Unica, which sells meat, bread, and tortillas; and Alejandro's Tortilla Factory, which makes… you guessed it. I stopped by on April 3rd because I'd taken a bus to Mexico from the same shopping center during March, and I'd noticed the murals and signs interspersed across the top of the businesses:

The man's head with a deer's head on top looked familiar. Oh, I remember: I rode a bus from the Tucson location of the Mexican bus company Tufesa, farther along the same shopping center. Tufesa's logo is a deer dancer:

I asked a friend about that. He said it's a deer dancer (in the Yaqui language, maso). I searched online and found that the deer dance is part of the culture in Sonora and Arizona. In case you're interested, here's some of what I found:

• Images of maso "deer dancer" from DuckDuckGo (a privacy-oriented search engine)
• A Wikipedia page titled Yaqui music that covers the dance in Wikipedia's usual amount of detail
• A page from Encyclopedia Britannica with the first section titled “maso dance: Native American dance”
• A page from the Pascua Yaqui tribe called Ceremonies of the Yaqui with a section titled “The Mazo Kova Pahko (Deer Head) Ceremony” (maybe Mazo is the same as maso?)

I found this sculpture in a shopping area of Hermosillo, Sonora in March 2022.

About the rattles, the Britannica page above says: “In addition to container rattles, Native Americans make rattles from small objects strung together in clusters; these objects include deer hooves, seashells, seeds, seed pods, nuts, fruit pits, …”

End of lesson, class. :)