Nahuas, Franciscans, and the Theater: An Early Mexican Holy Week Drama

Readings

Baudot, Georges. 1995. "The Spiritual Discovery of Mexico by the Franciscans." Chapter 2 of Utopia and History in Mexico: The First Chronicles of Mexican Civilization, 1520-1569. Bernard Ortiz de Montellano and Thelma Ortiz de Montellano, trans. Niwot, Colo.: University Press of Colorado.

Burkhart, Louise M. 1995. "The Voyage of Saint Amaro: A Spanish Legend in Nahuatl Literature." Colonial Latin American Review 4:29-57.

Clendinnen, Inga. 1990. "Ways to the Sacred: Reconstructing 'Religion' in Sixteenth-Century Mexico." History and Anthropology 5:105-41.

Ricard, Robert. 1966. "Pomp and Magnificence" and "The Edifying Play." Chapters 11 and 12 of The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico. Lesley Byrd Simpson, trans. Berkeley: University of California Press.

SUMMARY

Around 1590, a native Mexican scholar translated into Nahuatl a Spanish religious drama entitled "Lucero de Nuestra Salvacio'n," or "Beacon of Our Salvation," by the Valencian Ausi'as Izquierdo Zebrero. A copy of this Nahuatl play, inscribed into a Franciscan priest's notebook, was discovered in 1986. It is the earliest extant manuscript of a drama written in a Native American language. It pertains to the famous "missionary theater" of early colonial Mexico, long seen as an important tool of evangelization. But the Franciscan-educated Nahua author altered the play so pervasively, in structure and content, as to confound any reading of this text as a simple transfer of Spanish-Christian religious discourse into Nahuatl. It is clear that the playwright was acting without close priestly supervision, yet all of his changes were subtle enough to have eluded censorship.

Intended for performance during Holy Week and titled simply "Holy Wednesday," the play consists of a dialogue between Christ and the Virgin Mary, interrupted by an angel who brings letters from Old Testament figures imprisoned in Limbo and anxious for Christ to die so that he might come and liberate them. Christ convinces his sorrowing mother that he does indeed have to go to Jerusalem and be put to death. Thus, though it does not actually dramatize the Passion, the play comments extensively on Christianity's central narrative of Christ's death and resuurrection.

This presentation will compare the Nahuatl play with its Spanish model, examining the Nahua playwright's translation strategy and the changes that he made in the text. These changes will be interpreted as part of an ongoing Nahua construction of Christianity and critique of Spanish-Christian culture. In particular, the role of Nahua scholars and interpreters as cultural brokers, exercising much more influence on native Christianity than their priest-mentors intended them to have, will be assessed. The play's relationship to other textual genres and to visual representations of characters and events will also be discussed.