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Nahuatl Theater Volume Two: Our Lady of Guadalupe

Edited by Barry D. Sell, Louise M. Burkhart, and Stafford Poole, with essays by Poole and Burkhart

Published 2006, University of Oklahoma Press
Volume 2 small



This volume includes the only two known colonial Nahuatl dramatizations of the Guadalupan apparition narrative, the story of how the Virgin Mary appeared to Juan Diego, a recently-converted Nahua man, in 1531. She sent Juan Diego to the bishop, fray Juan de Zumárraga, to request that a shrine be built to her on the site of the apparitions, and ultimately left her image imprinted on his cloak in order to convince the bishop that Juan was telling him the truth. Devotion to Our Lady of Guadalupe is central to Mexican Catholicism and Mexican national identity, even though the origins of the shrine and the story have long been the subjects of controversy. These dramas show how priests presented the Guadalupe story to Nahuatl-speaking audiences in dramatic form. One play, an anonymous work, dates from the very late seventeenth or early eighteenth century; the other, by the creole priest Joseph Pérez de la Fuente, dates to the second decade of the eighteenth century. Additions and changes to the canonical version of the story indicate that at the time there was some flexibility and variation in how the apparition story was viewed.

The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, now hanging in the basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico CIty.


"Dialogue on the Apparition of the Virgin Saint Mary of Guadalupe"

The earliest copy of this drama is in the Biblioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia in Mexico City. Later copies are in the New York Public Library and the Bibliothéque Nationale de France in Paris (this copy is incomplete). Our transcription is based on the manuscript in Mexico City, with annotations comparing it to the other two.

The play has three full acts and incorporates music and dancing. Its author was probably a creole priest (born in New Spain of Spanish ancestry), but he very likely had one or more native speakers of Nahuatl assisting with the text.

The action follows the canonical apparition story fairly closely, incorporating passages that quote directly from the Nican mopohua, the Nahuatl version of that story first published in 1649. However, it includes roles for Juan Diego's wife, María Lucía, and Juan Diego's father, even though the 1649 account makes Juan a widower at the time of the apparitions. The play also includes a comic subplot involving a quack physician who, at the end of the play, is beaten up by Juan Diego's father and uncle and other members of the community.

"The Wonder of Mexico, famous play, and first in Mexican verse"

This one-act play survives in two copies, one in the the New York Public Library and the other in the Bibliothéque Nationale de France. Our transcription is taken from the New York copy, made by the nineteenth-century Nahua scholar Faustino Chimalpopoca Galicia; annotations relate this version to the Paris copy.

Joseph Pérez de la Fuente wrote this play in what he called "Mexican verse," an idiosyncratic style bearing little relationship to the indigenous poetic style known from such texts as the Cantares mexicanos. The play is written in lines, mostly of eight or nine syllables, with a trochaic rhythm (as in Longfellow's "Hiawatha) but no consistent rhyme pattern. The author sometimes creatively manipulated Nahuatl words to make them fit this pattern. As with the other play, the author likely had help from one or more native speakers, as another work of his shows much less ability with Nahuatl, but the language of this text is in general less fluent and standard than that of the "Dialogue."

This play is less closely tied to the canonical Nican mopohua than is the other play. However. the prominence given in both plays to Juan Diego's wife, María Lucía, and to the couple's vow of celibacy, suggests that one may draw upon the other, or both upon a shared prototype. Instead of the physician subplot, this play draws its humor from the shenanigans of Juan and María's two servants, "Toast" and "Cocoa Bean," who are comic foils for their pious, respectful, and well-spoken master and mistress. The drama ends abruptly with the revealing of the image on Juan's cloak.

Supplementary texts

The volume also includes three previously unpublished Nahuatl texts on Our Lady of Guadalupe, from the New York Public Library's guadalupan document collection.

1. Song to Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexican Verse by Joseph Pérez de la Fuente, 1719

This text is another example of Pérez de la Fuente's idiosyncratic Nahuatl verse style.

2. Sermon

3. Prayer to the Mother of God in Mexican Language

The prayer and the sermon are anonymous and undated; it is possible that they are compositions of their nineteenth-century copyist, Faustino Chimalpopoca Galicia. They both ascribe an indigenous appearance to the Guadalupan image, a feature very meaningful in contemporary guadalupanism (she is seen as a "dark virgin" closely tied to indigenous people) but unknown in texts that can be securely dated to the colonial period.

 

Juan Diego gathers flowers and the Virgin places them in his cloak. Engraving from Francisco de Florencia's /La estrella del norte de Mexico/, 1785. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University