Nahuatl Theater Project
Louise M. Burkhart and Barry D. Sell
Project web site
This project will produce a reference collection of texts, translations, and analyses for the first truly American theater: the Nahuatl-language theater that developed in colonial Mexico as Spanish and Nahua writers scripted new plays on Christian themes and adapted European plays for native audiences. Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, was spoken by millions of people across Central Mexico and served as a lingua franca in the Aztec Empire and the Spanish colony. Nowhere else in the Americas are there colonial plays in any Native American language.
While Nahuatl theater receives intermittent scholarly attention, most published texts are marred by outdated translations and unreliable transcriptions; many materials remain unpublished. Scholars have primarily treated the plays as evangelization tools. Using Burkhart's 1996 book Holy Wednesday as a model, we expand this traditional framework, exploring the insights these scripts offer into the colonial experience of the Nahuas, their artistic qualities, and their linguistic significance. In the end, we aim to grant them their proper place in the literary canon of the Americas.
Dramas are of particular value to colonial studies because of their public, performative character. As adaptations of Christian materials enacted in Nahuatl by Nahuas, these dramas inhabited the contested, hybrid zone between the culture of the conqueror and that of the conquered. As theater, they projected an imaginary reality which, inevitably, commented upon the colonial world beyond the stage; hence, they have great potential for investigating the expressive culture of a colonized people.
The University of Oklahoma Press has accepted our 4-volume series. Volume 1, Death and Life in Colonial Nahua Mexico, was published in 2004. This volume contains transcriptions and translations of the following seven dramas: "Final Judgment," "The Sacrifice of Abraham," "The Three Kings," "How to Live on Earth" (previously published with the title Tlacahuapahualiztli "Bringing up Children"), "Souls and Testamentary Executors," "The Merchant," and the recently discovered "The Life of Don Sebastián." The volume includes and introductory essay by Miguel León-Portilla and articles by Burkhart, Sell, Daniel Mosquera, and Viviana-Díaz Balsera, and will also publish an English-only student edition of selected dramas.
Volume 2, co-edited with Stafford Poole, C.M., to be published in 2006, will center on the two surviving colonial dramas relating to Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mexico's principal religious devotion, supplementing these with supporting documents from other genres. The history of this devotion has attracted much historical attention, as it plays critical roles in Mexican nationalism and in the ethnic identity of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans today. Our work will provide firm documentation of the devotion's later colonial development and dissemination among indigenous people.
Volume 3, co-edited with Dr. Elizabeth Wright, will trace the Atlantic crossing of three plays from the Golden Age of Spanish theater, as don Bartolomé de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a priest of Spanish and elite Nahua heritage, rendered these works into Nahuatl around 1640. We will compare the Spanish and Nahuatl versions, contemplating Alva's work in relation to his social context. This is a unique opportunity to see how major literary works of a metropolitan center were adapted in a non-Western colonial setting. The comic intermezzo Alva added to one of the plays is a one-of-a-kind work that gives further insight into Alva's creative fusion of Nahua and European literary forms and social commentary (and his sense of humor).
Volume 4 will present remaining colonial dramas, including works edited by a prominent nineteenth-century native scholar. Four extant colonial texts will be presented; other content depends on availability of originals and/or editing of their previously published transcriptions.
This project has received a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
