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When the Spanish missionaries arrived in the Valley of Mexico, they faced
the task of imbueing the natives with a narrative of their god, but also a
Christian behavioral ethic. Although the passion and sacrifice of Jesus at
first was off-limits, presumably because that story and image seemed to
validate the native practice of human sacrifice, within a generation the
friars began to inform the Americans of the story and the resulting ethic
of Christ-like flagellative punishment.
In the middle of the century, the Augustinian friar Antonio de Roa,
missionizing to the native Otomis to the northeast of Tenochtitlan,
developed a self-representation of himself as Jesus in passion, a
representation performed before these highland natives that may be seen as
a type of incipient passion play. The paper to be delivered will describe
and analyze the account of Roa's activity given in Juan de Grijalva's
Cronica of the Augustinian order, pointing in the end to the way that this
imitatio Christi was converted into the colonial and modern passion plays
of central Mexico.
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