Death and Life in Colonial Nahua Mexico presents seven dramas from the first truly American theater. Composed in Nahuatl during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most of these plays survive only in later copies. Five are morality plays. Presenting Christian views of moral reform, death, judgment, and punishment for sin, they reveal how these themes were adapted into Nahua culture. The other two plays dramatize biblical narratives: the stories of Abraham and Isaac and of the three wise men. In this volume, Barry D. Sell and Louise M. Burkhart offer faithful transcriptions of the Nahuatl as well as new English translations of these remarkable dramas. Accompanying the plays are four interpretive essays and a foreword that broaden our understanding of these rare works. This volume is the first in a four-volume set entitled Nahuatl Theater, edited by Barry D. Sell and Louise M. Burkhart

A history examining the interactions between church authorities and Mexican parishioners&—from the late-colonial era into the early-national period&—shows how religious thought and practice shaped Mexicos popular politics.

Barry D. Sell and Louise M. Burkhart have chosen plays that represent the types of dramas performed in late-colonial Aztec communities and underscore the differences between local religion and church doctrine. Included are a complex epiphany drama from Metepec, two morality plays, two Passion plays, and three history plays that show how Nahuas dramatized Christian legends to reinterpret the Spanish Conquest. Fruits of a performance tradition rooted in sixteenth-century collaborations between Franciscan friars and Nahua students, these plays demonstrate how vigorously Nahuas maintained their traditions of community theater, passing scripts from one town to another and preserving them over many generations. The editors provide new insights into Nahua conceptions of Christianity and of society, gender, and morality in the late colonial period. Their precise transcriptions and first-time English translations make this, along with the previous volumes, an indispensable resource for Mesoamerican scholars.

The foundation legend of the Mexican devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe is one of the most appealing and beloved of all religious stories. In this volume, editors Barry D. Sell, Louise M. Burkhart, and Stafford Poole present the only known colonial Nahuatl-language dramas based on the Virgin of Guadalupe story: the Dialogue of the Apparition of the Virgin Saint Mary of Guadalupe, an anonymous work from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, and The Mexican Portent, authored by creole priest Joseph Pérez de la Fuente in the early eighteenth century. The plays, never before published in English translation, are vital works in the history of the Guadalupe devotion, for they show how her story was presented to native people at a time when it was not universally known. Faithful transcriptions and translations of the plays are accompanied here by introductory essays by Poole and Burkhart and by three additional previously unpublished Guadalupan texts in Nahuatl. This volume is the second in a four-volume series titled Nahuatl Theater, edited by Sell and Burkhart.

Staging Christ’s Passion in Eighteenth-Century Nahua Mexico explores the Passion plays performed in Nahuatl (Aztec) by Indigenous Mexicans living under Spanish colonial occupation. Though sourced from European writings and devotional practices that emphasized the suffering of Christ and his mother, this Nahuatl theatrical tradition grounded the Passion story in the Indigenous corporate community. Passion plays had courted controversy in Europe since their twelfth-century origin, but in New Spain they faced Catholic authorities who questioned the spiritual and intellectual capacity of Indigenous people and, in the eighteenth century, sought to suppress these performances. Six surviving eighteenth-century scripts, variants of an original play possibly composed early in the seventeenth century, reveal how Nahuas passed along this model text while modifying it with new dialogue, characters, and stage techniques. Louise M. Burkhart explores the way Nahuas merged the Passion story with their language, cultural constructs, social norms, and religious practices while also responding to surveillance by Catholic churchmen. Analytical chapters trace significant themes through the six plays and key these to a composite play in English included in the volume. A cast with over fifty distinct roles acted out events extending from Palm Sunday to Christ’s death on the cross. One actor became a localized embodiment of Jesus through a process of investiture and mimesis that carried aspects of pre-Columbian materialized divinity into the later colonial period. The play told afar richer version of the Passion story than what later colonial Nahuas typically learned from their priests or catechists. And by assimilating Jesus to an Indigenous, or macehualli, identity, the players enacted a protest against colonial rule. The situation in eighteenth-century New Spain presents both a unique confrontation between Indigenous communities and Enlightenment era religious reformers and a new chapter in an age-old power game between popular practice and religious orthodoxy. By focusing on how Nahuas localized the universalizing narrative of Christ’s Passion, Staging Christ’s Passion in Eighteenth-Century Nahua Mexico offers an unusually in-depth view of religious life under colonial rule. Burkhart’s accompanying website also makes available transcriptions and translations of the six Nahuatl-language plays, four Spanish-language plays composed in response to the suppression of the Nahuatl practice, and related documentation, providing a valuable resource for anyone interested in consulting the original material. Comments restricted to single page plays composed in response to the suppression of the Nahuatl practice, and related documentation, providing a valuable resource for anyone interested in consulting the original material

Stages of Conflict brings together an array of dramatic texts, tracing the intersection of theater and social and political life in the Americas over the past five centuries. Historical pieces from the sixteenth century to the present highlight the encounter between indigenous tradition and colonialism, while contributions from modern playwrights such as Virgilio Pinero, Jose Triana, and Denise Stolkos take on the tumultuous political and social upheavals of the past century. The editors have added critical commentary on the origins of each play, affording scholars and students of theater, performance studies, and Latin American studies the opportunity to view the history of a continent through its rich and diverse theatrical traditions.--from publisher's statement.

A sophisticated, state-of-the-art study of the remaking of Christianity by indigenous societies, Words and Worlds Turned Around reveals the manifold transformations of Christian discourses in the colonial Americas. The book surveys how Christian messages were rendered in indigenous languages; explores what was added, transformed, or glossed over; and ends with an epilogue about contemporary Nahuatl Christianities. In eleven case studies drawn from eight Amerindian languages—Nahuatl, Northern and Valley Zapotec, Quechua, Yucatec Maya, K'iche' Maya, Q'eqchi' Maya, and Tupi—the authors address Christian texts and traditions that were repeatedly changed through translation—a process of “turning around” as conveyed in Classical Nahuatl. Through an examination of how Christian terms and practices were made, remade, and negotiated by both missionaries and native authors and audiences, the volume shows the conversion of indigenous peoples as an ongoing process influenced by what native societies sought, understood, or accepted. The volume features a rapprochement of methodologies and assumptions employed in history, anthropology, and religion and combines the acuity of of methodologies drawn from philology and historical linguistics with the contextualizing force of the ethnohistory and social history of Spanish and Portuguese America. Contributors: Claudia Brosseder, Louise M. Burkhart, Mark Christensen, John F. Chuchiak IV, Abelardo de la Cruz, Gregory Haimovich, Kittiya Lee, Ben Leeming, Julia Madajczak, Justyna Olko, Frauke Sachse, Garry Sparks