Each year in the Mexican state of Sinaloa, as Lent gives way to Holy Week, men in masks and animal hides descend on the streets of Los Mochis. They dance through clouds of dust and sunlight, blurring the sacred and the profane. They were once the source of childhood fear for photographer Andrea del Muro, but in her series “Something Deep and Authentic Lives Within Us,” they’re her inspiration. She tells Natalie Stoclet how these masked dancers preserve a centuries-old blend of Indigenous and Catholic ritual, and how tracing their movements helped her to rediscover her own roots, and the quiet power of home.
You wear the mask to accept your sins. You dance to ask forgiveness. When you burn the mask, you are free.
When Andrea del Muro was a child, she used to run from the masks. They appeared every year before Holy Week in her hometown of Los Mochis, Sinaloa—men dressed in animal hides and painted faces, dancing through the streets with a sound that filled the air before you ever saw them. The tenábaris, tiny silkworm cocoons filled with stones and tied around their ankles, made a soft rattle that announced their arrival. “Ahí vienen los Judíos,” she would shout. Here come the Pharisees. Andrea would grab her mother’s hand and hide, half laughing, half afraid. Now, years later, she runs toward them.
Her series “Something Deep and Authentic Lives Within Us” began the day she followed her father to a church on Palm Sunday. What she found wasn’t quiet prayer but a scene of noise and devotion: dozens of masked dancers circling the church, their clothes shimmering with movement, every step an instrument. “It felt like being in a rave, a natural high,” she says.
The dancers, known as fariseos or judíos, are central to Yoreme Holy Week rituals across northern Sinaloa and southern Sonora. In the month before Easter, they lead processions called contis, visiting homes that display a wooden cross to welcome them. They dance to drums, collecting offerings that sustain the community’s ceremonies. By the end of Lent, they’ve spent a month masked, hidden from their families, atoning through exhaustion and repetition. On Easter Sunday, they burn their masks in a collective release.
The tradition blends Catholic and Indigenous cosmologies. The Yoreme people, whose name means “those who respect,” adapted elements of Spanish Holy Week to preserve older rituals of transformation and renewal. The fariseos represent evil or temptation, mocking Roman soldiers and Judas while guarding the sacred drama of the Passion. Within the Christian frame there remains an Indigenous logic: through dance, repetition and concealment, the Yoreme reaffirm their connection to each other and to forces larger than themselves. “It’s symbolic,” Andrea says. “You wear the mask to accept your sins. You dance to ask forgiveness. When you burn the mask, you are free.”
You’d see the ‘monster’ next to a human, but in the end, they’re the same.
Her photographs capture the trance of it all—the heat, the weight, the prayer. Men gather in horned masks beneath church bells while a young, unmasked woman stands beside them. Fabrics are adorned with flowers, skulls and sacred hearts. Hands clasp onto rattles that shake loose a rhythm of sound. “What struck me most was seeing the mix between masked figures and normal people,” she notes. “You’d see the ‘monster’ next to a human, but in the end, they’re the same.”
For Andrea, the project has also been a way back to herself. After years traversing the globe for work and studies, she had grown disillusioned. “I thought everything important was happening somewhere else,” she says. “But when I came back home, I realized there was magic right here.” In photographing the fariseos, she has been struck by the motion and texture of it all.
You don’t have to go to big cities to find big things. Sometimes they’re right where you started.
“The air vibrates,” she says. “You feel it in your chest.” Their costumes are tactile—reed shirts, leather cowls, masks painted with snarling faces. “When they dance, they almost look possessed,” Andrea adds. “But they didn’t care that I was there. Because of the masks, there’s hardly ever eye contact.”
That anonymity allows her to explore the space between the spiritual and the profane, the ancient and the contemporary. Traditional masks are still made from tanned goatskin painted with enamel and crowned with horsehair, but newer ones appear too—wooden faceplates, synthetic hair, even cartoonish versions that twist pop imagery. “I once saw a Lilo & Stitch mask that looked kind of diabolical,” Andrea says, smiling. “It’s the new generation interpreting tradition in their own way.”
Masks can take months to make and cost more than many participants can afford. Each one is personal. On the back of every costume, people paint faces of those they’ve lost—a child, a brother, a grandmother. “It’s a way of carrying them,” Andrea notes. “When they dance, it’s as if life and death exist together in the same body.”
For traditional fariseos, who are only men, the rules are strict. Once Lent begins, the mask must stay on. No one can see their face, not even their wives. Some break the rule in secret, removing it only at night when no one is watching. Children sometimes lift theirs halfway, shyly letting her take a photograph before pulling it back down. “You see a flash of their eyes,” Andrea says. “And then they’re gone again.”
When the masks are burned at the end of Holy Week, “It’s not sadness,” Andrea says, “it’s relief.” The fire crackles, masks fall away, and faces return. For her, that’s the heart of the project—watching people shed what hides them. Photography, she says, feels the same way: a way to strip things back until something true appears. The images are, in a way, a homecoming. A woman returning to her roots, seeing the familiar through new eyes. “Being here connected me back to something inside myself. You don’t have to go to big cities to find big things,” she says. “Sometimes they’re right where you started.”