The Guadalajara Reporter

New World Christians and Christ’s birth: Uncertain, arrogant, applying inappropriate old habits to a baffling, different world

Christian colonists in the New World were often hostile to celebrating Christ’s birth. In North America and in Nueva España – Spain’s Latin American conquests – some didn’t like the idea at all. There were divisions in their own ranks. Sometimes it was a rejection of established Christian dogma, sometimes of widely accepted Christian practices. Sometimes liturgical history.

Friars following the Spanish conquistadores had no way of knowing how the defeated population of the shattered Mejica Empire was absorbing the scatter-shot Catholic teachings thrown at them. Spaniards disdained the dominant Nauhatl language. A few vaguely saw its value in controlling the huge uprooted population. But none recognized that the language was disintegrating with the collapse of the Aztec Empire, its society, gods and culture. Some of the clergy, thinking they were mastering the language of their converts, used a debased argot dense with fraying meanings, and awkward mispronunciations.

Defeated Mejicas, cast adrift by their gods and beliefs, began substituting clerically approved titles for “pagan” deities while continuing to worship ancient gods and goddesses. (Tonanzin for the apparition of the Virgin Mary, later known to both Spaniard and Mejica as La Virgen de Guadalupe.

Since Europe’s Medieval days, the Catholic Church employed allegorical plays to teach the illiterate the “lessons” of the Bible. Since the 1100s, such “mystery plays” were used in France, Austria, the Low Countries and the Iberian Peninsula. They became a major tool, along with the sword of course, in the Spanish Church’s armory for gaining wealth, spreading the word of god, and saving the world by occupying it. Mystery plays taught in simple and entertaining terms not only the implications of Christian saints, but of the dangers of sin and the devil. Such plays were performed by amateur theatrical groups and local religious organizations. They were meant to represent graphic – and attractive – examples of ethnic blending dominated by Catholic dogma. In New Spain, Spanish friars, often using translators, energetically organized such presentations on Catholic feast days performed by Mejica converts. Especially successful, friars and priests felt, were those surrounding Christ’s birth, the pastorelas. They displayed raw spontaneity and frequent irreverent humor. The theme of these, and many such plays, was temptation into sin. Pastorelas traditionally opened with four devils – Luzbel, Asmodeo, Sin and Lucifer. The four plotted to derail the holy journey of devout but vulnerable pilgrims to celebrate the birth of the Savior. Two major targets of devilish designs are an elderly and lively hermit, and Bartolo, the fool – who contribute most of the comedy. The climax of the pastorela comes when the hermit, tempted by the devils, is about to rob one of the shepherdresses as she sleeps. This scene is sometimes filled with misdirection implying double entendre. But, qué milagro, Saint Michael the Archangel appears and announces the holy birth. Foiled, Lucifer submits to Saint Michael; the shepherds proceed to the nativity site.

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