Project description Nahuatl Theater

Home	Project Overview	Volume 1	Volume 2	Volume 3	Volume 4

Project description

Nahuatl was a lingua franca in Aztec and colonial times, and contemporary dialects of the language are spoken today by over a million people. For more information on the language, see John Frederick Schwaller's Nahuatl site.

The Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, fell into Spanish control in 1521, and Spaniards soon consolidated colonial control over all of Central Mexico. Christian evangelization began almost immediately. Catholic missionaries introduced theatrical productions in the 1530s in an effort to make Christian teachings meaningful and appealing to the native people, whose own religion had featured very elaborate ceremonies.

The sixteenth-century church at
Tepoztlan, Morelos

Though those ceremonies had many elements of drama, such as costumes, song and dance, impersonations of deities by priests and sacrificial victims, and references to historical and mythological events, they were not dramas in the sense of set scripts telling a story, performed by actors playing temporary roles, in front of an audience.The new, Christian-themed plays were, for the Nahuas, a new genre of text and performance, and one which they adopted avidly. It was the first genre of theater to emerge in the Americas. The plays were performed in the churches and churchyards that rapidly became the new ceremonial centers of the colonial Nahua communities. The subject matter was always Christian, but literate Nahuas frequently assisted with or authored the scripts. The subject matter, adapted into Nahuatl and performed by indigenous actors, could take on many local nuances and new levels of meaning. Therefore, these scripts are an important source of insight into the development of indigenous Christianity in Mexico.

The purpose of our project is to publish a substantial reference collection of colonial Nahuatl plays, representing different genres and time periods, with up-to-date transcriptions of the Nahuatl, translations into English, and accompanying notes and interpretive essays. Nahuatl plays were never published during the colonial era, and thus survive only in manuscript form. Plays were often copied and re-copied over generations, and it is often difficult or impossible to tell when a given play might first have been composed and performed. Even though historical records describe plays performed as early as 1531, only one script can be securely dated to the sixteenth century, and that one dates to about 1590. Most surviving scripts are from the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

Our books are dedicated to the Mexican anthropologist Fernando Horcasitas (1924-1980), who included a number of these plays in his excellent two-volume work El teatro náhuatl, volume one from 1974, republished in 2004, and volume two, published posthumously in 2004, by the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. The main differences between Professor Horcasitas's work and our own are that we reproduce the Nahuatl texts more closely to the way they appear in the manuscripts, and our translations reflect advances in Nahuatl studies of the past three decades. We are also publishing several dramas that Horcasitas did not include in his study, and all our volumes include new analyses of the material.