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On a sidewalk in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, outside Saint Michael’s Church, Maritza Xalanda , 13, asked for her mother’s help to tie on a giant mask, completing her costume as an old man with a bulbous nose and a long white beard.

She and about a dozen other children were gathered at the end of June with their parents to perform la danza de los tecuanes — the dance of the jaguars — a Mexican dance mixing native and Catholic traditions.

Maritza, while paying homage to her cultural heritage, is at the same time bucking hundreds of years of traditions.

Decades ago, when the first Mexican immigrants arrived in New York from the central Mexican state of Puebla, they brought with them the dance, which has indigenous Chichimeca and Zapotec roots.