The Coliseo of Mexico City: a public theatre owned by the Indians' hospital, and the accounts that prove it
Mexico City had a purpose-built, permanently roofed public theatre standing in the cloister of the Hospital Real de Naturales before 1673, roughly seventy years before Madrid roofed its own corrales. It was not merely near the hospital: it was the hospital's property and one of its largest revenues, judged by an oidor who sat as judge of hospitals, and its actors' contracts obliged them to play free performances for the hospital's altar wax and for burying their own dead.
Why this wins its question: The usual English sentence about theatre in colonial Mexico is that plays were performed and that the Church disapproved. The institutional fact - that the capital's public theatre was a revenue-producing asset of the Hospital Real de Naturales, the hospital for the indigenous population - is almost never stated, and where it is stated it is stated without evidence. This entry supplies the evidence from the 1895 history that prints it: the coliseo standing in the hospital cloister before 1673 and counted among its richest rents, the Madrid arrangement it copies, the description of tiers, celosías and stage dimensions, the 1778 auto signed by an oidor sitting as judge of hospitals and of "la finca del Coliseo", the eight-month account of 34,225 pesos taken against 23,602 spent, and the actors' contracts obliging free performances for the wax of the Cuarenta Horas in the Hospital Real and for burying their own colleagues. It then does what the source does not: it names the fragility of funding a hospital from ticket receipts, the conflict of interest that follows, and the author's own anticlerical framing, and it separates that framing from the figures printed beside it.
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 theatre stood inside the hospital and belonged to it. The 1895 history records a first coliseo "anterior á 1673, sito en el claustro del Hospital Real de Naturales, cuya cédula de creación se remonta á 1553", administered like the hospital by the Hipólito friars and constituting "una de sus rentas más pingües". The parallel drawn on the same page is with the Cruz and the Pacheca in Madrid, built for the confraternities of the Pasión and the Soledad and applied to the maintenance of the Hospital General there: the arrangement is a Spanish one, exported.
It was built for the purpose and roofed, and the source states the comparison in years. Against the "pobrísimo aspecto" of the corrales of the Príncipe and the Cruz in Madrid, the Mexican coliseo "tuvo sobre éste y los de la corte las ventajas de haber sido expresamente construído para teatro y de haber estado techado de firme, casi setenta años antes que aquel". The claim is a nineteenth-century writer's comparison rather than a measured priority, and it is carried at the confidence that deserves.
The building is described closely enough to picture. Two andanadas or tiers of aposentos and palcos were entered through the hospital cloisters and formed of series of arches with turned balusters, fitted with celosías and their shutters so that the occupants could see or be seen at will; the cazuela or gallery was of heavy timber; and the stage stood a vara and a half high, fifteen long and eight wide, separated from the hall by well-dressed wooden pilasters with the royal arms in the middle of the frontispiece. Pedro de Arrieta, maestro mayor of the kingdom and of the cathedral, was ordered to inspect the coliseo and the hospital and praised its construction and ornament.
The legal machinery makes the ownership explicit, and it was a royal judge's business. By an auto of 15 December 1778 the lessee San Vicente was suspended and his lease embargoed; the auto was signed by Basilio Villarasa Venegas, styled "Oidor de la Real Audiencia y Juez en turno de Hospitales y de la finca del Coliseo". A judge of the high court sitting by rotation over hospitals and over the theatre as a hospital asset is the clearest single indication of what the Coliseo was in law.
There are figures, and they are the kind that can be checked against each other. From 19 April to 19 December 1778 the takings of the Coliseo were "treinta y cuatro mil doscientos veinticinco pesos cuatro reales", the costs "veintitrés mil seiscientos dos pesos seis y medio reales", and the profit "diez mil seiscientos veintidós pesos y cinco y medio reales". The arithmetic is internally consistent, and a surplus of a little over ten thousand pesos in eight months is the order of magnitude of what the theatre could contribute to the hospital in a good season.
The charitable obligation reached into the individual actors' contracts. From the document "Razón de los individuos de que se componen las Compañías de Cómicos, Bailarines y Orquesta del Teatro de esta Corte, sus sueldos y obligaciones", which the 1895 author says he is publishing for the first time, the first dama Antonia de San Martín earned 1,800 pesos for the season, could not be dismissed or recast, and was bound to play one free "comedia de pilón" each month so that its proceeds would cover the adealas and gajes, another whenever a member of the company died until the fifty pesos given for the burial were covered, and one every year "para los gastos de la cera de la Oración de las Cuarenta Horas en el Hospital Real". A following note extends the same obligations to every member of the company, orchestra and dancers.
The pay scale it discloses puts women at the top of the bill and of the payroll. The first dama's 1,800 pesos a season is the highest figure the document opens with, supplementary comedies were paid at six pesos each beyond the four she owed weekly, she could ask for no increase or gratification under any title, and the second dama María Ortega y Rocha drew 1,000 pesos for the four weekly comedies. What that bought in security is a separate question the document does not answer.
The counterpoint belongs in the same entry as the achievement. A hospital for the indigenous population funded out of ticket receipts is a hospital whose income falls when a season fails, when a viceroy closes the theatre or when a lessee is embargoed - and 1778 shows all three risks in one year, with the lease suspended, a depositary appointed and the direction handed to another man. Funding welfare from an entertainment monopoly also makes the welfare institution an interested party in the censorship, pricing and licensing of that entertainment. Neither consequence is drawn by the source; both follow from what it prints.
The source's own framing should be read as framing. Olavarría was writing in 1895 in a liberal and anticlerical key, and his comment on the arrangement is not neutral: "Esa era la época: todo lo que rendía algún provecho, tributaba ó era propiedad del poder eclesiástico, erigido en tutor de la sociedad civil y en promotor y director de la educación y de la beneficencia." That sentence is a judgement, not a finding; the accounts, the auto of 1778 and the actors' obligations printed on the same pages are the findings, and this object separates the two.
What is missing here is worth naming. No original of the 1786 "Razón de los individuos" was opened, and it is read only in the 1895 transcription; no hospital account book was consulted, so what share of the theatre's surplus actually reached the wards is unevidenced; the cédula of 1553 cited for the hospital's creation was not opened either; and there is nothing here about how indigenous patients experienced the institution that this money was raised for.