NAHUA THEATRE
Clay Performance Mask, unknown Aztec artist, 1500
Influence on Nahua
The previous historical research done displays that all historians recognize the difficulty missionaries met while translating the plays to the Nahuatl culture. In Marilyn E. Ravicz’s book, Early Colonial Religious Drama in Mexico: from Tzompantli to Golgotha, she explains that finding similarities between these two continents was sometimes easier than others. Golgotha literally translated as the “hill of the skull” where Jesus Christ was crucified and Tzompantli is the name of the rack of skulls from sacrificial captives of the Nahua people. Franciscan friars with a team of native Nahua assistants translated plays into Nahuatl. However, the translation led to what Ravicz refers to as “vast expanse of different meanings, values, and metaphysical theories.”[1] Ravicz describes in her research that in looking at Mexican Catholic culture today, there is evidence of the misinterpretation of the Nahuas and Spaniards. She explains that “Many reasons for the peculiarities of Mexican Catholicism lie in the methods of acculturation adopted by the early missionaries, whose most ardent desires were to replace paganism with Christianity, and indigenous ideas with a Spanish inspired culture.”[2] It seems discernible that today the majority of the missionaries ideals did come to be the norm.
Student introducing himself in Spanish then reciting a Love Poem by Nezahualcoyotl in Nahuatl Language. uploaded 2009. Click to play
Wikitongues-Javier speaking Nahuatl and Spanish, Wikitongues, Mar. 2013
Click to play
Barry Sell, an editor who has translated numerous plays under Louise Burkhart, formulates an important aspect of the plays in the final volume (fourth) of Nahuatl Theatre. Sells explains, “Descriptions of spectacular products from the late 1530s attest to Nahuas’ early positive reaction to this type of performative Christianity.”[3] Their acknowledgment of the plays, paired with the domination of Spain, did give the Nahuas a closer identity to Catholicism. Where much of it was dictated as they were the “conquered” state, the Nahuas were able to exist with perhaps hiding their traditional beliefs and by incorporating Catholicism into their lifestyle to make for a livable situation.
The survival of the documents accommodated with the translation, and cultural adaptations made throughout these morality plays, seemingly brought about interest, and eventually, attachment to the newly converted Nahua people. In the exercise of this project there is a clear burden involved with the still sizable work to be done. There continues to be more research and translations of the plays and primary sources. The small window that this project has looked through cannot define a final conclusion of this work. However, some closure is found to this piece of history and what was to be achieved by the Nahua audience. Burkhart shares in her book title The Slippery Earth that, “The friars insisted on Christian categories of good and evil but ended up expressing them in terms of the order-disorder dialectic. This was the only way of making their value judgements meaningful to the Nahuas, yet it effectively ‘Nahuatized’ what they were trying to say. By placing great emphasis on certain things, they could work on altering content-for example, the punishment of sinners after death-but they were still operating with what was essentially a Mesoamerican universe.”[4]
Today the Nahua’s land which is now generally known as Mexico, gives many apparent examples of the daily impacts of Catholicism, and the way in which this religion has made its home in the people. The plays may have originally come across to the natives as foreign, but over time they have assimilated into this new creation of a society in which Spaniards and Nahuas lived together, and ultimately become what we currently label as Mexicans. As Nezahualcoyotl shares in one of his poems about his 'songs' and how they will remain, so will the Nahua people. Just as many colonized peoples have adapted their life to fit into a new altered culture and lifestyle, they, the Nahuas, would remain.