Franciscan Missionary Theater in Sixteenth-Century New Spain: Conquering Expectations and the Syncretic Reality

Martin V. Fleming

Few studies have examined indigenous reactions to Spanish attempts to impose religious and cultural hegemony. It is very difficult to evaluate indigenous reactions through the written record, since surviving documents were written either by natives educated by Spanish friars or by the friars themselves, whose motive was the attempt to find the best ways to convert the “pagans” of Mexico to the Catholic faith. But Franciscan friars, with the help of Nahua informants, wrote one-act morality plays in the Nahuatl language, known as autos sacramentales, in which all the players and other participants were indigenous. All actors who played parts that the friars considered evil, such as the devil and demons, were dressed as pre-Columbian Nahuatl gods. The friars hoped that the indigenous would associate their lives before the arrival of the Spanish and their religion as evil and in need of change, but there is substantial evidence that the indigenous subverted the intended meaning that the friars were attempting to convey. The resulting religious syncretism is part of a unique Mexican church and culture, forming an enlightening case study of cultural encounters in the sixteenth-century Atlantic world. [WP# 98012]