Religious drama in Nahuatl: the autos of New Spain, 1530s-1540s
Within twenty years of the conquest, Nahua towns were staging full-length religious plays in Nahuatl, with indigenous actors and casts drawn from the ruling lineages. Two friars describe the productions in detail — the paradise built at a hospital door, the burning hell with a false door, the siege of Jerusalem fought by Tlaxcalan and Mexica companies — and the same pages record what the plays were for and whom they were used against.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of "missionary theatre" in Mexico usually assert in one sentence that friars used plays to evangelise, cite a modern survey, and move on; the Tlaxcala productions appear as a colourful anecdote about a fake Jerusalem. This object quotes the pages themselves. It gives the rehearsal time (all of Friday to render four autos into prose, two days to learn them), the stage inventory down to the fourteen parrots counted in one tree and the two tethered ocelots, the sentence that settles the language question — "Este auto fué representado por los Indios en su propia lengua" — the full order of battle of the Jerusalem play with the Teuhpipiltin, the Huaxteca, Mixteca and Tarasco companies and a Soldan named for Cortés, and the editor's own footnote warning that the naming is a double fiction. It puts the price beside the achievement because the source does: the same procession damned a drunkard singing an indigenous drinking song and the herbal practitioners who caused miscarriages, baptised adults inside the action of a play, and had the devil advertise the wine trade. And it adds a second witness with a named author and title — Torquemada on Olmos's Nahuatl Juicio Final performed before Mendoza and Zumárraga — which the anecdote version of this story almost always omits.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The scale is established by a friar writing while it happened. Motolinía reports that on the day of St John the Baptist at Tlaxcala the Indians performed four autos; that putting them into prose took all of Friday because "no es menos devota la historia que en metro"; that in the only two days left, Saturday and Sunday, "lo deprendieron"; and that they then performed "harto devotamente la anunciacion de la Natividad de San Juan Bautista hecha á su padre Zacarías", which ran about an hour and closed "con un gentil motete en canto de órgano". The Annunciation of Our Lady, the Visitation and the Nativity of St John followed on separate scaffolds, the last with a real baptism of an eight-day-old child named Juan.
The staging was built by the performers out of local materials and local skill. For the auto of the fall of Adam and Eve, prepared near the door of the hospital, the paradise was fitted with trees bearing fruits and flowers "de ellas naturales y de ellas contrahechas de pluma y oro", birds from owls and raptors down to small birds, and so many parrots "que á veces estorbaban la representacion" — Motolinía says he counted fourteen in a single tree. Two ocelots were tethered on stage, boys were sewn inside counterfeit animals, and the four rivers of paradise carried labels reading Phison, Gheon, Tigris, Euphrates. His judgement on the workmanship is explicit: "porque en contrahacer una cosa al natural estos Indios tienen gracia singular".
The performance language is stated without ambiguity, and so is its effect on the audience. After describing Adam and Eve driven out with three angels apiece singing Circumdederunt me in canto de órgano, and the villancico "Para qué comió / La primer casada, / Para qué comió / La fruta vedada", Motolinía writes: "Este auto fué representado por los Indios en su propia lengua, y así muchos de ellos tuvieron lágrimas y mucho sentimiento, en especial cuando Adan fué desterrado y puesto en el mundo." A friar's account of an indigenous audience weeping at a play in Nahuatl performed by indigenous actors is the earliest kind of evidence there is for vernacular American theatre.
The best-documented production, the Conquista de Jerusalem staged at Tlaxcala on Corpus Christi to mark the peace between the Emperor and the king of France, began as intercity rivalry rather than as a friar's programme. Motolinía's letter to his prelate fray Antonio de Ciudad Rodrigo says the Tlaxcaltecs first wanted to see what the Spaniards and the Mexicans would do, "y visto que hicieron y representaron la conquista de Rodas, ellos determinaron de representar la conquista de Jerusalem", and kept it for Corpus Christi to make it more solemn. Jerusalem itself was built on top of the unfinished cabildo houses in the new city's main square.
The cast list is a map of who counted in the indigenous polity and how the colonial order was being rehearsed. All who entered the auto "eran señores y principales, que entre ellos se nombran Teuhpipiltin"; Tlaxcallan and México went in the vanguard carrying the royal standard and that of their captain general, the viceroy Don Antonio de Mendoza; "en la batalla iban los Huaxtecas, Zempoaltecas, Mixtecas, Colhuaques, y unas capitanías que se decian los del Perú é Islas de Santo Domingo y Cuba"; the Tarascos and the Cuauhtemaltecas formed the rearguard. Indigenous companies played the army of Spain and the army of New Spain besieging a Jerusalem whose Soldan bore the name of Hernán Cortés, and the account prints mock despatches between a captain general "Don Antonio Pimentel" and "Don Cárlos, Emperador".
The nineteenth-century editor of the text flags what a modern reader should not take from it. García Icazbalceta's footnote to the Cortés passage warns that the conquistador did not himself play the Soldan: the protagonist had been given his name "por una doble ficcion", since otherwise one would have to believe that the viceroy Mendoza appeared in person — "lo que es absolutamente inverosímil" — and the count of Benavente, "que nunca vino á México". He adds that Pedro de Alvarado was captain general of the Moors and that he does not know why the friars, "autores de todas estas fiestas", offended the conquistadores by putting them among the infidels. The claim that the friars organised the festivals is the editor's, and the puzzle he records is a real one.
The same Corpus Christi procession carried three artificial mountains with an auto on each, and the first of them put the wealth of the empire into the devil's mouth. In the temptation of Christ, Lucifer entered disguised as a hermit but could not hide his horns or the bone nails half a palm long on every finger; from a high crag he recited to Christ "todas las particularidades y riquezas que habia en la provincia de la Nueva España, y de aquí saltó á Castilla", listing fleets, rich cloth merchants, silks and brocades, "y entre otras dijo, que tenia muchos vinos y muy buenos, á lo cual todos picaron, así Indios como Españoles, porque los Indios todos se mueren por nuestro vino". A Franciscan wrote that sentence about a colonial trade his own order was complaining of, and had it spoken from a stage.
The cost is in the same pages, and it falls on named categories of people. The second mountain's auto had St Francis preach to the birds and tame a beast; his sermon was then interrupted by a man feigning drunkenness and "cantando muy al propio que los Indios cantaban cuando se embeodaban", and the demons carried him into hell. Next came "unas hechiceras muy bien contrahechas, que con bebedizos en esta tierra muy fácilmente hacen malparir á las preñadas", and they too were put into hell. Motolinía's own summary is that "de esta manera fueron representados y reprendidos algunos vicios en este auto". The theatre that taught the Gospel in Nahuatl also staged the damnation of indigenous healers before an indigenous audience.
The special effects were as ambitious as the message. The hell of that auto "tenia una puerta falsa por donde salieron los que estaban dentro; y salidos los que estaban dentro pusiéronle fuego, el cual ardió tan espantosamente que pareció que nadie se habia escapado, sino que demonios y condenados todos ardian, y daban voces y gritos las ánimas y los demonios; lo cual ponia mucha grima y espanto aun á los que sabian que nadie se quemaba." Earlier in the same procession, adults presented as Turks were publicly baptised inside the action of a play, at the request of the actor playing the Pope. The line between representation and sacrament was crossed on purpose.
A second and independent witness names an author and a script. Torquemada, writing of fray Andrés de Olmos in libro XX of the Monarquía Indiana, records that he "Compuso en la Lengua Mexicana vn Auto de el Juicio Final, el qual hiço representar, con mucha solemnidad, en la Ciudad de Mexico, en presencia de el Virrei Don Antonio de Mendoça, y de el Santo Arçobispo D. Fr. Juan de Çumarraga, y de innumerable Gente", and that it opened the eyes of Indians and Spaniards alike "para darse à la virtud, y dexar el mal vivir", and moved "muchas Mugeres erradas" to conversion through fear. The same passage says Olmos also drew out in Nahuatl the huehuetlatolli, "las Pláticas, que los Viejos, y Señores Mexicanos hacian à sus Hijos, y Vassallos". The man who wrote the first surviving grammar of Nahuatl also wrote a play in it.
What these two sources establish, and what they do not. Both are friars describing a missionary programme they belonged to, and both are reporting success; neither preserves a line of the Nahuatl actually spoken, and the texts of the Tlaxcala autos do not survive in these printings. Motolinía's account of the Jerusalem play reaches print through an 1858 editor working from manuscript, and Torquemada's through a 1723 Madrid folio composed a century after Olmos's death. Nothing here shows what Nahua performers themselves understood by these plays, how the parts were allotted inside the altepetl, or whether the drama continued after the mid-century; those are questions for cabildo records and for surviving Nahuatl play manuscripts, which this corpus has not opened.