Ethnohistory
2014 Presidential Address:
Christian Salvation as Ethno-ethnohistory:
Two Views from 1714
Louise M. Burkhart, University at Albany, SUNY
Abstract. Formulating the concept of “ethno-ethnohistory,” Ray Fogelson urged
ethnohistorians to seek out indigenous people’s perspectives on their own pasts,
which might differ from Western academic modes of representing history. In this
article, slightly expanded from my 2014 Presidential Address at the American
Society for Ethnohistory’s Indianapolis conference, I examine two indigenousauthored texts from colonial Mexico that adopt a Western discourse — Christian
salvation—but appropriate it in such a way that it grants legitimacy to indigenous
communities. The genres in question are not conventional modes of historical
writing, either indigenous or Western, but in the first case a Roman Catholic
catechism adapted into pictorial form and in the second a religious drama linked
to Renaissance and baroque European performance traditions. Both genres had
been assimilated into indigenous textual practices in the sixteenth century. The
authors, Nahua noblemen, counter dominant views of indigenous religiosity by
asserting full and competent participation in the Christian order.
Keywords. Mexico, ethno-ethnohistory, indigenous Christianity, pictorial catechisms, Nahuatl theater
Over the sixty years since the American Society for Ethnohistory was
founded, we have been looking for, and writing about, indigenous histories, often reading against the grain of colonialist or imperialist discourses
to find another side in the accounts of missionaries, settlers, or government
agents. We have turned to oral history, legends, memoirs, winter counts,
letters, wills, and other places where indigenous voices inscribe themselves
more directly into the record. We have come to view indigenous versions of
Ethnohistory 63:2 (April 2016) doi 10.1215/00141801-3455267
Copyright 2016 by American Society for Ethnohistory
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Christianity, alphabetic literacy, and other colonial introductions as innovative appropriations, survival tactics, and fodder for new constructions
of local identities, not as slippages down a unidirectional slope toward
acculturation and the loss of cultural integrity.
Nevertheless, a concern that ethnohistory is often the history of
indigenous peoples written from a Western perspective led Ray Fogelson
(1974: 106–7) to advocate, memorably, for ethno-ethnohistory, or “ethnohistory written from a native point of view,” and even ethno-ethnoethnohistory, “native writing of native history from a native perspective.”
As an example of this latter genre, Fogelson offered Traveller Bird’s 1971
biography of Sequoyah, which, though riddled with inaccuracies if viewed
according to the standards of the Western historical profession, crafted a
new myth of the Cherokee hero. As for ethno-ethnohistory, such writing
from the “native point of view” would privilege “native theories of history
as embedded in cosmology, in narratives, in rituals and ceremonies, and
more generally in native philosophies and worldviews” (Fogelson 1989:
134–35). Jay Miller’s (1998) exploration of the role of names in Tsimshian
chronology, published in this journal, is one study that elucidates such an
approach.1 From outside native North American studies, William Miles
(1993: 12), writing about the colonial Hausa, deploys a more restricted
definition of ethno-ethnohistory as “the recollections and interpretation
concerning early Western visitors and settlers in the history of indigenous
peoples.” While I believe most Americanists would prefer a broader view,
one encompassing indigenous people’s constructions of their past both
before and after European intrusion, how people integrated the intruders
and their cultural baggage into their own conceptions of history is certainly
a subject of wide interest in our field.
Proliferating ethno- prefixes would seem to draw us further and further away from “Western” and toward “native” concepts and perspectives, but we must allow that indigenous people may voice their historical
consciousness via appropriated Western categories and do so in expressive
genres distinct from the chronicles and annals we might most readily recognize as histories. In the case of Mexico, Nahuas of the later seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries looked back to the conquest-era political and
religious realignments — to the coming of the friars, to the acceptance of
baptism and the building of churches, to political accommodations forged
with representatives of the Spanish crown— as foundational events for
their corporate identities, events that secured their rights to endure as selfgoverning, landholding entities. One place they inscribed this vision was
in the community histories known as “primordial titles.”2 As with Traveller
Bird’s book on Sequoyah, it is easy to find factual inaccuracies in these
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works, but scholars have come to appreciate them as expressions of
indigenous historical consciousness.
I will here take a look at two colonial Nahua documents not overtly
framed as historical accounts. Both are from 1714 and so witnessed their
three hundredth anniversary as the ASE celebrated its sixtieth. Each employs
a European textual genre with which Nahuas had been conversant since
the early years of colonial rule: in one case the Roman Catholic catechism, here adapted into a pictorial format, and in the second case
the biblical or hagiographic theatrical production. I have worked on the
first of these texts in connection with a recent project (Burkhart 2014;
Boone, Burkhart, and Tavárez in press); Barry Sell and I published the
other several years ago (Sell and Burkhart 2009: 280–311). In a rare
situation for documents in either of these genres, both carry not only a
date but also the name of their creator, and both can be linked to a specific
Nahua community.
As noted above, Fogelson suggested that native views of history may
be found in “cosmology” and “narrative”; I aim to show here that Christian cosmology and Christian narrative can also serve as vehicles for native
historical consciousness. In colonial Mexico, a performed, public Christian identity, solidified in art and architecture, inscribed in writing, and
expressed in voice and comportment, was essential to the survival of the
indigenous corporate community, whatever other practices might continue
in more hidden venues. Given the readiness of outsiders, especially European and criollo churchmen, to belittle indigenous Christianity and find
evidence of superstition, idolatry, and diabolism, performances of piety
were political acts that challenged colonialist assumptions of indigenous
inferiority (see, e.g., Burkhart 1998). By artfully indigenizing and localizing
universalizing Christian discourses, the creators of these documents confidently align local and indigenous history with the salvation story of
Christianity and thus with both cosmic order and political legitimacy. As
they were authored by Nahua men, we could consider them ethno-ethnoethnohistories, even though their content draws heavily from European
cultural imports.
“All the Words of God”: Don Lucas’s Pictorial Catechism
On 19 August 1714 Nahua notary Don Lucas Mateo completed a new copy
of a pictorial catechism (see figs. 1–3). This work, held by the British
Museum since 1911,3 lacks any place-name. However, I have been able to
trace Don Lucas to San Salvador Tizayuca, a community thirty miles
northeast of Mexico City in what is now the state of Hidalgo. In handwriting identical to that of the catechism, he copied two documents included
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Figure 1. Last part of the Apostles’ Creed, fols. 11v–12r. Egerton Manuscript 2898,
British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum
in a set of materials intended to detail and uphold Tizayuca’s landholdings
and boundaries, inscribing his name at the very end. This material, written
on maguey paper, accompanies a Techialoyan manuscript (a pictorial
subgenre of the “primordial titles” mentioned above) and a large map. The
map, constructed from sheets of maguey paper similar in size to those used
by Don Lucas, is referred to in the documents he transcribed. A Spanishlanguage text that accompanied these indigenous materials to court in
Mexico City bears the date 19 January 1710.4 Hence it seems likely that
Don Lucas assisted with the compilation of these land documents roughly
five years before he created the catechism.
In the land documentation, whose native paper enhanced its aura of
Indian authenticity, Don Lucas signed himself “ton locax mateo tlacuillo,” using the indigenous word for scribe and adapting the Spanish
words don and Lucas to Nahua pronunciation (4v). On the catechism he
identifies himself with the Spanish term escribano (as escrivano) and gives
his name as the somewhat less Nahuatlized “Locas Matheo,” following
an elaborate “Don” and accompanied by rubrics (30r). As a catechist
he performs a less “Indian” self-presentation than when he penned
the earlier document. His name itself, comprising two Spanish saints’
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Figure 2. Last part of the question-and-answer catechism, fols. 18v–19r. Egerton
Manuscript 2898, British Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum
names, suggests he was not a member of the high elite. His right to use the
prestigious “don” title likely came with his appointment as notary to
Tizayuca’s ruling council, or cabildo.5
Don Lucas painted what is the most visually striking extant exemplar
of the pictorial catechism genre, as well as the largest in booklet form
(its thirty folios measure approximately 23 by 17cm). These catechisms are
illustrated booklets made by indigenous pictographers that lay out the basic
texts of Roman Catholic doctrine in rows of images, a few maintained from
pre-Columbian writing but most of them colonial inventions, with some
consistencies but little standardization across the genre. They date to the
mid-seventeenth century and later (to the extent that they can be dated),
though there are references to similar documents in a few sixteenth-century
sources. Most are entirely pictographic; only two others are fully captioned
in Nahuatl and one in Otomi. A couple dozen colonial-era exemplars are
known. Since alphabetic writing had largely replaced conquest-era pictographic conventions by the early seventeenth century, the persistence or
revival of pictography to encode what was a quintessentially “Western”
introduction— the Roman Catholic catechism— is a strikingly nativizing
act of appropriation. I argue elsewhere that Nahuas used pictographic
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Figure 3. Section of the Rosary, fols. 23v–24r. Egerton Manuscript 2898, British
Museum. © The Trustees of the British Museum
catechisms as part of a strategy to position their ancestors as early and
enthusiastic converts to Christianity, a status that would reflect well on their
later descendants as they navigated the colony’s political arena (Burkhart
2014; Boone, Burkhart, and Tavárez in press).
Scholars have concluded that Don Lucas copied an earlier work from
which one folio had been lost, as he includes blank space where these
missing pages lay in the model, leaving catechumens with an incomplete
rendering of the Ten Commandments (Normann 1985: 137–39; Berger
2002: 18–19). The original model seems to have come from a community
under Dominican tutelage, which Tizayuca was not. Not only are priests
depicted in Dominican habits (see fig. 2, first, second, and third rows); the
work includes the only rendering of the Rosary prayer cycle in a pictorial
catechism (see fig. 3). Though widely used in colonial Mexico, the Rosary
was linked particularly with the Dominican order, as according to legend
the Virgin Mary presented a rosary to Saint Dominic himself. In Mexico
printed texts of or about the devotion circulated mainly in texts of
Dominican authorship, with the first Nahuatl version printed in 1565
(Anunciación 1565: 75r–80r; Burkhart 2001: 121–27). However, Don
Lucas’s model could not itself have been particularly antique, as it contained
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a question-and-answer text in a version that did not circulate until 1653 and
later (Burkhart 2014: 182, 195; see fig. 2). His choice to reproduce the older
text indicates approval, by him or by whoever engaged him to do the work,
of its format and content.
Don Lucas’s catechism and its presumed model differ from the genre
as a whole in their arrangement into lively scenes (see, for example, Jesus
Christ directing sinners to hell in fig. 1, first row). In other exemplars, images
parade in linear sequences, each figure corresponding neatly to a word or
short phrase, an arrangement that, in the other glossed catechisms, facilitated tidy sub- or supertitling. His text also features far more rebuses than
any other of its genre: for example, the prominent hand (maitl) representing
the imperative particle ma, visible in several places in figures 1–3.
I surmise that Don Lucas’s glosses are his own addition, perhaps
a result of a decision made after he had copied the pictures, because of
the haphazard way he had to arrange the alphabetic text around the
painted images, sometimes splitting words into two parts on either side of a
picture or even from one row of images to the next (for example, in fig. 1,
iteotenahua–tiltzin in rows one to two, nic–neltoquitia in the second row,
and mochi–huaz in the third row). Since one of the other alphabetically
glossed pictographic catechisms bears the date 1719 and the others
can be placed sometime after 1675 and in the early eighteenth century,
respectively (Burkhart 2014: 195–96; Soustelle 1936: 18), it is possible that
the custom of adding alphabetic glosses to pictographic catechisms was
something developed during, and limited to, this window of time. In adding
these texts Don Lucas asserts control over the alphabetic mode of inscribing
knowledge (his specialty as an escribano) as well as the pictorial mode,
which— as in the pictorial components of the land documents he helped to
prepare — evoked the authority of preconquest and conquest-era ancestors.
Thus he manipulates dual modes of inscribing authoritative knowledge
on paper.
Don Lucas framed his catechism with two inscriptions that assert his
own expertise in Christian doctrine and his responsibility for the text (even
if he copied it), and state a purpose for the work. At the very beginning he
writes this:
yCa yn itocatzin Dios tetatzin Dios tepiltzin Dios espiritu S.to ma
in mochihua Jesos ynic ye nican nictecpana niquiCuilohua mochi yn
teotlatolpeuhcayotl ynic huel mochi oncan quimomauhtizque yn
ayamo quimati yn pipiltzitzinti yhuan in ye huehueitotonti machtilozque ytitilozque ynic teotlatoltica huapahualozque yn itlalticpactzinCo Dios yc maquixtiloz yn inyolia ymaniman yn ixpantzinCo yn
Dios.
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[In the name of God the father, God the child, God Holy Spirit, may it
so be done Jesus, such that right here I put in order, I write/paint all the
words of God. I start from the Christian Doctrine, the beginning of the
sacred words, so that everyone will learn it there who doesn’t know it
yet, the little kids and those who are already a little bit big, they will be
made to know, they will be made to see, so that with the sacred words
they will be brought up on God’s earth, so that their spirits, their souls
will be saved before God.] (1r)
At the end of the document, he writes the date, repeats the above statement
in part, and then pens the boilerplate notarial statement “Auh nican nictlalia notoca nofirma don locas matheo escriuano” (And here I place my
name, my signature, Don Lucas Mateo escribano) (29v). By “Christian
Doctrine,” he may be referring to the actual doctrina, or alphabetic catechism, whether printed or a manuscript, on which he bases the glosses.
Note his couplet “they will be made to know, they will be made to see,” in
which he alludes to the pictographic text with which the children can see the
teachings while acquiring their knowledge. The same verb, cuiloa, denotes
writing and painting and thus covers both pictures and his alphabetic text.
Don Lucas avers a seemingly enthusiastic compliance with the obligation of indigenous religious leaders to ensure the catechesis of children
and a confidence that this education suffices to secure the children’s membership in the Christian order of things, the holy words, on God’s earth.
Where he refers to “their spirits, their souls,” he uses a common pairing of
the Spanish or Latin word anima with the Nahua -yolia, derived from
the verb yoli, “come to life,” itself related to the word for heart. Nahuas
adopted -yolia to serve as a counterpart to anima and to designate the
Christian notion of the soul. Linguistically, both are treated as body parts,
not as spiritual doubles of a material body. Salvation is expressed as rescue
or, more literally, “being taken out by the hand,” as one could be rescued
from enemies or any other danger. I make these points to show that even if
we speak of souls and salvation, these concepts have been shifted into an
indigenous Christian worldview. Don Lucas asserts this confidence in
Nahua Christianity in the face of the pessimistic perspectives on indigenous
religion formulated by Catholic churchmen— their perpetual complaints
that, at best, Indians may know some basic catechismal texts but little else,
and their common opinion that idolatry persists, forming, with alcohol
abuse and laziness, the formulaic triad of Indian inferiority.
One of the more striking characteristics of this catechism is the extent
to which Don Lucas — copying his model, we may assume —paints Indians
into the Christian story, striking pious poses as they share the pages with
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God, Christ, and the Virgin Mary. Many of the figures are generic males,
often shown in knee-length blue pants when standing and clad simply in
long, belted tunics when kneeling (for example, compare fig. 1, top row left,
with standing figure just below). However, red cloaks knotted at their
necks in the characteristic Nahua fashion label many of these figures more
explicitly as indigenous males, as may their lack of beards; in contrast,
Adam, the male saints, God, and Jesus are bearded (compare the cloaked
figures in fig. 1, second row right, with the images of Christ above them and
at their far left). Some figures kneel, a pose associated with Christian
practice and rare in indigenous imagery before the seventeenth century
(Olko 2014: 160). Kneeling here is associated particularly with the entreaty
of Christian entities. Kneeling figures may clutch a rosary, receive communion, observe Mass, or perform other devout acts; figures 1–3 exhibit
various examples. Other figures, typically in pairs to embody a collective
“we,” accept protection from evil and affliction, receive and eat their daily
tortillas, weep and sigh to the Virgin Mary and appeal for her mercy, are
educated by angels, and represent both good people and sinners. These
figures typically have unpainted clothing and no cloaks (see, for example,
fig. 1, top row).
In the Apostles’ Creed, blue-trousered figures stand and point to
images that represent the various tenets, crosses in front of their mouths
indicating the piousness of their words (fig. 1, second and third rows).
Similarly, in the question-and-answer dialogue a Dominican friar poses the
questions, but we see our blue-trousered catechumen, smaller than the friar
and perhaps meant to be a youth, answering everything correctly (fig. 2).
The same figure performs twelve of the fourteen Works of Mercy; in one of
the others he prays in a red cloak and white tunic. All other extant pictographic catechisms simply lay out the text to be recited. They may show
figures performing pious acts, but none so consistently depicts people as
believers able to carry out the recitation and the prescribed acts. The confidence in Tizayuca’s youngsters that Don Lucas expresses in his introductory statement is here rendered pictorially.
Don Lucas adds gender complementarity where it does not exist in
print catechisms or in other pictorial catechisms. He inserts a quite unorthodox Adam into the Salve Regina prayer’s reference to “we children of
Eve,” in a sense diluting and degendering the blame for humanity’s fallen
condition (6r). He includes a woman attending Mass along with a man in
response to the first commandment of the church (9r). He adds santas to the
santos mentioned in the general confession, painting two pairs of women
and men facing one another within the blue circle of heaven (27v). When
Christians are mentioned, he uses both masculine and feminine forms of
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this Spanish loanword, illustrating accordingly with Nahua gentlemen
and ladies (fig. 1, second row right; fig. 2, second row middle right). At his
baptismal font a woman in native dress holds the baby, accompanied only
by the Dominican friar, whom she faces as if they are equals (9v). For the sin
of adultery Don Lucas shows a man and woman wrapped in a blanket (8r).
Our notary even dresses Christian sacred personages as if they were
Nahuas. When Mary is labeled a cihuapilli, or noblewoman, corresponding
to Our Lady or Nuestra Señora, she wears a huipilli or native overblouse.
She is indistinguishable, in her hairstyle and her seated pose on a mat, from
Don Lucas’s depictions of Nahua women (fig. 3, second row left and third
row right; compare fig. 2, second row right). Likewise, he sometimes dresses
God and Jesus in the same red cloak that his indigenous men wear, with the
visible knot (fig. 2, top row; fig. 3, bottom row left). There is nothing strange
about draping the Christian deities in robes, but to show the knot and the
protruding corners of the cloth is quite striking.
Another motif that places us into an indigenous context is the woven
mats, petlatl (petates in Mexican Spanish), that recur in various contexts. In
addition to providing a seat for “noblewoman” Mary and the Nahua lady
in figure 2, mats support the bodies of the dead and dying (2v, 8v, 10r). A
man sheltering a traveler, depicting one of the Works of Mercy, puts his
guest to bed on a petlatl (25r). Even the newborn baby Jesus rests not in a
manger but on a mat (20r).
Nahua pictographic catechisms speak of heavenly reward by depicting
flowers and people holding flowers. One conveys happiness via a figure
playing the harp.6 But no other portrays scenes of heaven as festive as those
in the Tizayuca manuscript. People awarded life in heaven dance with
flowers on their heads and flowers and palm fronds in their hands, and they
play guitars and harps (fig. 1, top left; fig. 3, second row right). One such
figure thus bedecked climbs a ladder to enter heaven (fig. 3, third row left).
These depictions grant heaven a sensory reality — movement, sound, scent,
space — that render it solid and accessible. Don Lucas’s hell figure is comparably concrete and evocative. He deploys the Leviathan or hellmouth
motif standard in the pictographic catechism genre, but we see the
streaming tears of the sinners approaching the maw or already engulfed in
its flames (fig. 1, top row).
According to Don Lucas’s historical vision, his community and its
children are inscribed into the story of the Passion, Resurrection, and Last
Judgment. Their knowledge of basic Christian doctrine accords them a
status as fully competent Christians, occupying the same spaces and even
wearing the same clothes as divine beings. Such a representation, created,
held, and used within the community, asserts Tizayuca’s membership in the
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global Christian community and religious compliance in the terms imposed
by the colonial regime. I have suggested elsewhere (Burkhart 2014) that
pictorial catechisms conferred ancestral legitimacy on their holders’ Christianity because their pictography harked back to the conquest era and the
early days of the evangelization effort, when Nahuas were not yet alphabetically literate. That is, the use of Christian picture writing insinuated
that one’s ancestors were early adopters of the Christian faith. One such
catechism states outright that Don Pedro de Motecuhzoma, a son of the
Mexica emperor Motecuhzoma Xocoyotzin, learned Christianity from its
images (see Boone, Burkhart, and Tavárez in press). Primordial titles often
make a parallel argument, representing the conquest-era ancestors as so
eager to accept baptism and build churches that, as Robert Haskett (2010:
247) writes of Cuernavaca nobles as seen by their descendants, “the arrival
of the Franciscans merely awakened their Catholic selves.” Hence Don
Lucas’s catechism is not unrelated to the land documentation to which he
had lent his pen some years previously: the performance of Christianity
was one modality in which indigenous leaders asserted their right to rule and
to retain or regain community territories.7
“With This Sign You Will Conquer”: Don Manuel’s History Play
The second text takes us about sixty miles southeast of Tizayuca, and sixty
miles east of Mexico City to the area of Tlaxcala, capital of the modern state
of the same name. On Thursday, 31 May 1714, the feast of Corpus Christi,
the Nahuas of Santa Cruz Cozcaquauhatlauhticpac, a dependency of the
city of Tlaxcala, put on a play called Colloquio yn quein oquimaxili yn
tlaçomahuizquauhnepanolli Sancta Cruz in tlacemicnopilhuiani S. Elena
(Colloquy of How the Fortunate Saint Helen Found the Precious and
Revered Wooden Cross, the Holy Cross) (see fig. 4). The fifteen-folio script
was “written down in an orderly manner” by Bachiller Don Manuel de los
Santos y Salazar, the local priest, and in 1896 found its way into the John
Carter Brown Library.8 Like Don Lucas, Don Manuel may have worked
from an earlier text, revising it as he considered appropriate — they both use
the verb tecpana, “to set in order.” Whatever his immediate source, the play
drew on Christian legends and Roman history, and had precedents in
Spanish performance traditions (Torroja Menéndez and Rivas Palá 1977:
45–47, 53; Rouanet 1979: 2, 21–42).
Despite Saint Helen’s prominence in the title, the play appends the
legend of her discovery of the True Cross to a longer dramatization of how
her son Constantine, prompted by a vision in which he saw a cross in the
heavens inscribed with the words hoc signo vinces (in this sign you will
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Figure 4. First folio of Don Manuel de los Santos y Salazar, Colloquy of How the
Fortunate Saint Helen Found the Precious and Revered Wooden Cross, the Holy
Cross. Codex Indianorum 16. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown
University
conquer), placed a cross on his standard, defended the imperial crown of
Rome from his brother-in-law Maxentius, and subsequently converted to
Christianity under the guidance of Saint Sylvester— thus changing the
Roman Empire from a pagan to a Christian realm. The legend as recounted
in the play elaborates on Constantine’s historical victory over Maxentius’s
much larger army at the AD 312 Battle of the Milvian Bridge, a bridge over
the Tiber north of Rome, and his tolerance of, and deathbed baptism into,
Christianity. The second legend, elaborated on a trip the historical Helen
made to the Holy Land, is the narrative according to which she found the
actual cross and nails used in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.
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Don Manuel’s work is one of two surviving Nahuatl plays, both from
Tlaxcala, that enact the historical conquest of a great city, as these events
were embellished in Christian legends. The other, The Destruction of Jerusalem, is an anonymous eighteenth-century script about Rome’s AD 70
siege and sacking of Jerusalem (Sell and Burkhart 2009: 242–79; Burkhart
2009: 20–30; Burkhart 2010); a one-leaf fragment of another play on this
theme also survives (Sell and Burkhart 2009: 276–79). Even two centuries
later, for colonial Nahuas stories of the defeat of great cities would inevitably recall the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521, an event that introduced urban
warfare tactics of a ferocity previously unknown to Nahuas.
Like Don Lucas, Don Manuel was a man of the Nahua elite, but as his
names and titles suggest he enjoyed a more prominent social status than did
his Tizayucan contemporary. His great-great-grandfather was Don Bartolomé Citlalpopoca, one of the four men who ruled Tlaxcala as a confederacy at the time of Hernán Cortés’s arrival. Ordained in 1691, Don
Manuel was the first man in a lineage of illustrious Nahua officeholders to
be accepted into the Roman Catholic priesthood, an exceptional but not
unknown career path for an indigenous man at the time. A “Tlaxcalan
patriot,” as James Lockhart (1992: 593n59) dubbed him, he edited the
Nahuatl historical annals of his father’s friend Don Juan Buenaventura
Zapata y Mendoza and also authored other works in Nahuatl and Spanish.
He died just one year after he penned the play.9
In the play Constantine expresses a wish to learn more about Jesus
Christ, but a demon tells the audience of Maxentius’s impending attack,
news of which soon diverts Constantine from his theological musings.
Fearing defeat, he takes a nap. A harp plays, a “Holy Cross” (Santa Cruz)
appears above the performance space, and this song is sung (4r):
Huel yca ynin machiotl
Constantino totexicos
yhuan ypampa tihuicos
ytechpatzinco yn Dios.
[Truly, with this sign,
Constantine, you will conquer
and because of it you will be brought
to God.]
When he wakes, Constantine issues this order: “Niman ma motlalli yn itech
yn noquachpanhuan çe quauhnepanolli ca yehuatl yntlahuiz yezqui cemicac yhuan ma caquizti yn yaohuehuetl yhuan tepozcuicuizcatlapitzalli ca
yca yn nicxicoz nicpopoloz y noyaouh Maxencio” (Have a wooden cross
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placed on my banners right away. That shall always be their insignia. And
let the war drums and the trumpets be sounded. With this I shall defeat and
destroy my enemy, Maxentius).
Don Manuel highlights Constantine’s ignorance of Christianity by putting in his mouth a Nahuatl word for cross— a wooden thing that is crossed
over itself—rather than the loanword cruz, which was quickly adopted into
colonial Nahuatl and is what we always find in catechisms, sermons, and the
like. So the stage directions refer to a Santa Cruz —the community’s sacred
patron—but here and elsewhere while still in his pagan state Constantine uses
the word quauhnepanolli, signaling his similarity to Nahua ancestors before
they had learned the word cruz. Reflecting the same distinction, the play’s title
pairs “precious and revered quauhnepanolli” with “Holy Cross.”
It was Cortés’s alliance with the rulers of Tlaxcala against their longunconquerable rivals, the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, that enabled a combined
Tlaxcalan-Spanish force, eventually joined by many other parties, to defeat
the Aztec Empire. To Tlaxcalans, this was a Tlaxcalan victory, and for
centuries they claimed special status as allies of the Spanish crown and the
political equals of Spanish colonial authorities. For Tlaxcalans, the story of
Constantine, a pagan ruler— and in the play he invokes the gods and makes
offerings to them —who rises from a position of military weakness to victory over an empire because he allies himself with Christian power, could
not but refer back to the fall of Tenochtitlan, Tlaxcala’s finest hour. The
story of Constantine and Helen would have held special resonance for Don
Manuel as a Tlaxcalan patriot and for the community where he was stationed in 1714, whose sacred patron was the Holy Cross — the very object
Helen recovered in Jerusalem.
The play, following legend sources, misdates Constantine’s baptism —
here an iconic, world-changing turn from paganism to Christianity — to the
immediate aftermath of his victory over Maxentius, rather than to AD 337,
when he was dying (Illustrated History n.d.). Similarly, some Tlaxcalan
histories, such as Diego Muñoz Camargo’s chronicle, from around 1576
(Muñoz Camargo 1978: 193–205), and the Lienzo de Tlaxcala (Chavero
1979: 25; Gillespie 2004: 57), exaggerated the speed with which the four
rulers of Tlaxcala were baptized, placing this event at the time of the alliance with Cortés, in 1519, rather than the more likely date of later in the
1520s (Gibson 1952: 29–30). This primordial baptism was even the subject
of an anonymous play, written in Spanish and dating to 1619 or earlier,
called Colloquy of the Conversion and Baptism of the Last Four Kings
of Tlaxcala (Castañeda 1936), in which the Tlaxcalan kings serve “as an
exemplar of peaceful conquest” (Ybarra 2009: 58). In a painting of the
event from around 1690, the upper half of the canvas depicts heaven, with
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the Trinity hovering prominently in the center while, below, a Tlaxcalan
lord —presumably Xicotencatl— bends over the baptismal font, Cortés at
his elbow.10 And Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza, whose late
seventeenth-century Nahuatl chronicle Don Manuel himself edited, wrote,
“Yn iquac huala capitan general don Hernado Cortes yn quiquayatequique
tlatoque clerico Juan Diaz Xicotecatl Maxixcatzin Citlalpopocatzin Tlahuexolutzin” (When the Captain General Don Hernando Cortés came,
the cleric Juan Díaz baptized the rulers, Xicotencatl, Maxixcatzin Citlalpopocatzin, [and] Tlahuexolotzin). The entry closes with ayamo huel
momatia, “not yet well were they thinking,” which, I surmise, acknowledges that the rulers had not been extensively indoctrinated prior to baptism. Don Manuel added the note, in Spanish, “coming of Cortés,” and did
not question this entry concerning his ancestor and the other rulers (Zapata
y Mendoza 1995: 96–97). Thus we see how this alleged event became
historical fact and an icon not only of Tlaxcalan exceptionalism but also,
for nonnatives like the anonymous playwright and the painter, of the
potential for Christian conversion, so often doubted when actual ordinary
living indigenous Christians tended to disappoint outside observers.11
Just as knowledge of basic doctrine sufficed to rescue the children of
Don Lucas’s community, a 184-word summary of Christianity delivered by
Saint Sylvester is all that Constantine requires to enter the Christian order
(9r–9v; Sell and Burkhart 2009: 298–301). An expansion on the Apostles’
Creed, it contains many phrases familiar to any Nahua watching or participating in the drama. If someone were to imagine the perfunctory
preaching that would have been delivered to the four Tlaxcalan lords prior
to their baptism, it would be very much like this — and justify the qualifying
remark that Don Juan placed on his description of that event.
Several other elements in the play further the parallelism between
victory over Maxentius and victory over Motecuhzoma. Constantine’s
vision of the cross in the sky finds a parallel in the premonitory omens,
including signs in the sky, that became canonical in indigenous histories of
the conquest, not just for the defeated Mexica but also in Tlaxcala. Muñoz
Camargo tells, for example, of a light like a white mist that appeared in the
eastern sky three hours before dawn (1978: 172). In the play, Maxentius
sends sorcerers to try to defeat Constantine’s army through magic, a tactic
also ascribed to Motecuhzoma in the chronicle compiled by Fray Diego
Durán (Durán 1994: 513–14) and in the Florentine Codex’s Nahuatl history of the conquest (Lockhart 1993: 82, 84, 100, 102). In both cases, the
magicians fail in their endeavor, and the enemy forces march on.
Crosses played a striking role in Tlaxcalan memories of the conquest
era. The indigenous artist whose drawings illustrate Muñoz Camargo’s
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Louise M. Burkhart
Historia depicted the early Franciscans erecting a cross, which drives away
a bevy of pre-Columbian deities, visually merged with devils.12 Cortés
erected crosses all along his path (Gibson 1952: 31n11), but one in particular acquired a fantastical reputation, possibly alluded to in images in the
Lienzo de Tlaxcala. According to the Franciscan Gerónimo de Mendieta’s
account from the 1590s, after the four Tlaxcalan rulers’ first meeting with
Cortés, a cross miraculously appeared at midnight on the spot where they
had gathered. Two of the rulers and Cortés erected this large cross. Then,
when the priest of Tlaxcala’s patron deity climbed the temple stairs, light
like lightning shone from this cross in all directions, and another local god
actually fled from his temple and ran into the mountains. People named the
cross tonacacuahuitl, “sustenance tree,” and made offerings to it. The cross
had, by the 1590s, worn out and been replaced, but in the eighteenth
century various communities laid claim to it (Mendieta 1980: 308–9;
Gibson 1952: 31). Thus Tlaxcalan history, much like the legends of Constantine and Helen, linked the cross with military victory and Christian
baptism, making this story an excellent choice for theatrical enactment.
In Constantine’s retinue are two comic servant characters, Victorillo
and Theodorico. These men cavort and squabble in a baroque comedic
mode, but they also speak of eating their war captives or dressing in their
flayed skins. These titillating references to pre-Columbian sacrificial practices (from a safe remove of nearly two centuries) elide any distinction
between Constantine’s men and warriors of preconquest Mexico.
One additional Mexicanizing and indigenizing element occurs during the celebration of Constantine’s baptism. Action pauses while the
tocotín dancers enter and “dance for a long time” (huecauhtica mitotia).
A tocotín, named for a Nahua technique of indicating drumbeats, was in
the baroque era a quintessentially “Indian” dance, performed with preconquest-style instruments and costumes. Incorporated into the literary
works of such criollo authors as Francisco Bramón and Sor Juana Inés de
la Cruz (Parodi 2008: 102), these dances were considered safe and stately
enough that, according to the eighteenth-century Jesuit observer Francisco Javier Clavijero (1982: 245), indigenous people were allowed to
perform them in church.
The play’s subject matter and staging thus invoke parallels and points
of identity between key events in Christian history — as embellished by
widely known legends — and the local past. If Tlaxcala and its leaders can
be compared or even merged with Rome and Constantine, then Tlaxcala
has a corresponding significance in global Christian history. Tlaxcalans
have ancestors who accepted Christianity and then conquered an empire.
The people of Santa Cruz Cozcaquauhatlauhticpac, celebrating their
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community patron, recapture Helen’s triumphant quest in Jerusalem —
another iconic city that reads as a symbol of Tenochtitlan in other contexts.
Salvation as Ethno-(Ethno-)Ethnohistory
Now just fragile inscriptions on paper—rare survivors of indigenous
manuscript genres underrepresented in the historical record— in 1714
these texts were put into action. Voices and bodies aligned themselves
with these legitimating messages, praying and reciting the catechism or
acting out the play with speeches, music, dancing, and the clowning servants’ slapstick violence. Chanting children or declaiming actors, they were
staking claims about the postconquest history of their communities, countering dominant colonial discourses that associated indigenous people with
idolatry and superstition far more frequently than with equality as competent fellow Christians. Appropriated and localized in this manner, the universalizing story of Christian salvation can become a native theory of history,
deployed in subtle and unexpected ways and in a variety of textual genres.
Thoroughly “ethno-” constructions of history may make indigenizing and
nativist uses of Western historical visions, rather than merely conserve or
recover overtly precontact formulations.
Notes
Delivered at the annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory in
Indianapolis, IN, November 2014.
1 Several contributors to the volume in honor of Fogelson edited by Sergei Kan
and Pauline Turner Strong (2006) discuss Fogelson’s “ethno-ethnohistory,” as
does Patricia Galloway (2006).
2 On this genre, see, e.g., Haskett 2005, 2010; Lockhart 1992: 357–64, 410–18;
Wood 1998, 2003; Sousa and Terraciano 2003.
3 Egerton Manuscript 2898. Images of the entire text can be found at www
.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?
assetid=218486001&objectid=649998&partid=1. The “19” and the “7” are
missing from the date. However, these numbers appear in a copy of the manuscript’s Nahuatl glosses that the Nahua intellectual Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca penned in the nineteenth century, when the manuscript was part of
José Ramírez’s collection and before it left Mexico. This “Catecismo HispanoMexicano por Lucas Mateo” is Mexican Manuscript 465, Ramírez 513, in the
Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Nearly all the other damage to the manuscript predates Galicia Chimalpopoca’s copy and suggests heavy
usage as a working catechism. The Bancroft manuscript opens with material
copied very precisely from the beginning of Father Ignacio de Paredes’s 1758
Nahuatl translation of Gerónimo Matínez de Ripalda’s catechism, the “todo fiel
christiano” invocation, and the per signum crucis. I would guess that this was
added to Lucas Mateo’s work, which lacked the sign of the cross, for local use
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4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
Louise M. Burkhart
after 1758 and before it left Tenayuca, and was removed sometime after the
document left Ramírez’s hands.
These documents later came into the hands of Emperor Maximilian, who gave
them to Baron Kaska, his physician (Hiersemann 1911: 81–83). Now known as
the Codex Kaska, they are housed in the Hispanic Society of America Library
(HC 397/433). Stephanie Wood (2007: 17) examined the codex and listed Lucas
Mateo in her catalog of scribes whose names appear in the Techialoyan corpus.
Pursuing this potential connection, my student Benjamin Leeming compared
the two hands in 2014, noting their identity, which I confirmed in 2015; I thank
Vanessa Pintado of the Hispanic Society for granting us access to this fragile
codex.
See Lockhart 1992: 121–27 on naming patterns and the use of “don.”
Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Manuscrit Mexicain 77, a Nahuatl-glossed
1719 manuscript from San Miguel Totocuitlapilco.
Similarly, Kelly McDonough (2014: 64) includes “faithful conversion to
the Catholic religion” among the “discursive pillars” on which later-colonial
Tlaxcalans, such as the annalist Don Juan Buenaventura Zapata y Mendoza,
supported their arguments for Tlaxcalan political legitimacy and exceptionalism (the others were assertion of their descent from conquest-era nobility and
their loyalty to the crown).
Codex Indianorum 16, from the Nicolás León Collection, acquired in 1896.
Images are on the library’s online Indigenous Collection, archive.org/details
/colloquioynqueni00sant.
On Don Manuel, see, in addition to Lockhart’s note, Villella 2012; editors’
introduction in Zapata y Mendoza 1995: 19–23; Townsend 2010: 22–26,
186–93.
Painting by José Sánchez, Mexico, housed in the Church of San José, Tlaxcala,
exhibited in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Contested Visions in the
Spanish Colonial World exhibition in 2012 (Los Angeles County Museum of
Art n.d.: item 94).
On Tlaxcalan exceptionalism, see also Kelly McDonough’s (2014: 63–82) discussion of Zapata y Mendoza and his chronicle.
The Erection of the First Cross. Pen-and-ink illustration in Historia de Tlaxcala,
by Diego Muñoz Camargo. Sixteenth century. MS Hunter 242 f.239v. Glasgow
University Library, Scotland. An image of the text can be found at www
.bridgemanimages.com/en-GB/asset/232041/mexican-school-16th-century/ms
-hunter-242-f-239v-the-erection-of-the-first-cross-from-historia-e-tlaxcala-by
-diego-munoz-camargo-pen-ink-on-paper (accessed 30 June 2015).
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