Theresa Smalec

I. Introduction

In this paper, I will explore three questions about the politics of performance in 16th-century colonial Mexico. First, how do indigenous modes of performance change after the Spanish conquest of 1521? Secondly, how do particular aspects of indigenous performance endure in post- conquest Mexico, despite the revisions wrought on these performance cultures in their encounter with the Spaniards? Related to the questions above, the third part of my inquiry deals with contemporary methodology. What are the means by which today's scholars approach a time frame and culture that differ profoundly from our own? How do they assess the basic features and structures of indigenous performances, as well as the belief systems that underlie the visible surface of such activities? Most importantly, what are the historical and theoretical tools that today's critical writers use to identify the politics of post-conquest performance in central Mexico? After reviewing several critical texts that deal with the topic outlined above, I hope to develop my own, tentative theory about the ways performance was tactically altered and used by indigenous groups in order to express resistance, transmit knowledge, and achieve their ends despite colonial oppression.

While the project posed above may seem straightforward at the start, it requires a fair amount of unpacking. The following section attempts to accomplish that task. I must first consider what the term "performance" might have signified in central Mexico prior to 1521. One problem with doing so is that the term "performance" does not exist in the Nahuatl language. Spoken by the various local ethnic groups known collectively as the Nahuas, Nahuatl had been the "lingua franca" of the Aztec Empire1. After the conquest, it was the principal indigenous language for the colony known as New Spain. How, then, do today's scholars respond to the absence of "performance" in the primary language of Mexico's pre- colonial, indigenous peoples? One option is to throw up our hands and declare that the lack of a linguistic referent denotes a lack of the phenomenon. After all, without a name corresponding to the theatrical practices concerning us, where do we begin? A more productive approach, however, is to consider two Nahuatl terms that bear similarities to Western concepts of "performance."

Olin is one of these terms. In a general sense, olin means "movement." Movement was a central aspect of pre-conquest ceremonial behavior. According to Diana Taylor, however, the pre-conquest Nahuas understood many things in terms of movement. For instance, they perceived time as movement. The basis of Nahua cosmology was syncretism: the attempted reconciliation or union of seemingly opposing principles or practices. Due to their conceptual merging of two or more categories into one, the Nahuas did not distinguish between time and space, as do Western cosmologies. Olin signified all things related to action; it was also understood as a force, and as a natural source. These definitions suggest that olin was not viewed as something separate from everyday life, but rather an integral part of it. The other Nahuatl term that I want to consider here is aregeito. Aregeito means a "song-dance" movement or activity. Again, because of the syncretism underlying Nahua notions of the world, they did not draw Aristotelian distinctions between songs and dances. Rather, they understood songs and dances as one activity: as a single and unified mode of performance.

Having outlined some Nahuatl terms potentially related to the Western concept of "performance," I must now define the latter concept in its own right. First, I need to underscore some basic differences between "performance" and "theatre." While these terms are often used interchangeably, they are anything but the same. On the one hand, "theatre" is a fundamentally Western tradition that began in Greece in approximately 3000 B.C. The whole basis of this tradition is mimesis: the activity of representing, imitating, or otherwise acting in the subjunctive mood, in what Igor Stanislavski called the "as if." In short, mimesis involves a person consciously playing a role, acting "as if" they were something or someone other than whom they actually are. Moreover, the representational activities found in theatre are generally understood as "artificial, spectacular, or extravagantly histrionic." For instance, Western audiences who witness a drama such as "Oedipus Rex" acknowledge that the actor playing Oedipus is not really Oedipus, but separate from the character he portrays. Thus, when Oedipus gouges his eyes out at the end of the drama, we realize that the actor playing Oedipus has not actually gone blind. Theatre hinges on a fundamental distance between reality and representation, even though actors and spectators alike often pretend that this distance does not exist for the duration of the play.

On the other hand, "performance" does not require the idea of representation. Rather, performance (like "ritual") may also be understood as a form of presentation, as an activity that shows or achieves something directly, for a practical purpose. The first sense of performance recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary is "the carrying out of a command, duty, purpose, or promise; execution, discharge, fulfillment." Other definitions of the verb "perform" offer the following examples: 1) to execute; do: to perform surgery. 2) .to execute in the proper, customary, or established manner: to perform a marriage ceremony. 3) .to carry into effect: to perform a contract. These example all suggest that performance is a force bearing the power to effect real, fundamental changes in the world. This expectation of real change differs radically from the mimetic changes anticipated by theatre audiences. Moreover, performance does not always require a sense of being outside the action and merely watching it happen; it does not hinge on external references such as fictional characters or a script dictating what will happen to whom in the span of roughly three hours. Useful to recall here is the Nahuatl term, olin, and its layers of meaning as "movement," "action," "force," and "natural source." My point is that these connotations have far more in common with performance than with theatre. While any effort to equate Nahua understandings of olin with Western ideas of performance will always fall short of a perfect fit, we do know that the Nahuas used movement and song-dances in order to carry out certain ritual actions to completion. Historical documentation of pre- conquest culture makes it clear that this was the case. Moreover, these ritual activities were often performed in order to accomplish direct, practical goals.

If we agree that ceremonial practices related to what we presently know as "performance" existed in pre-conquest Nahua culture, then what were the basic features, structures and purposes of the actions "done to completion" in that culture? Where, when, and how often did such activities occur, and for what reasons? Which members of society took part in them? In order to continue my study of what indigenous modes of performance might have been, and how they changed in the first six decades after the conquest, I turn now to several critical writings on the topic. To preface my own approach, I first want to point out that even the most prominent Latin American scholars sometimes "slip up" and erroneously apply Western concepts of mimesis to the Nahuas' pre-conquest performance traditions. The problem seems to lie at the level of language. It lies in finding appropriate terms and translations for the indigenous modes of performance that Nahua elders recounted to Spanish chroniclers such as Diego Duran, Bernardino de Sahagzn, and Toribio de Motolinma after the Spaniards' massive destruction of Nahua codices. Max Harris, for example, claims that the pre-conquest rituals of human sacrifice performed in Tenochtitlan involved impersonation and role- playing 8. In describing the Mexica festival known as Ochpaniztli (The Sweeping of the Roads), he translates the Nahuatl term ixiptla (the person chosen to be dressed in the same manner as the image of a Mexica god or goddess) to mean "impersonator9." Robert Potter10, who cites the same Spanish sources as Harris, also argues that "impersonation" was a central component of the Aztec's sacrificial rituals. My problem with "impersonation" is how this term connotes Western theatre's basic premise that an actor consciously mimics or represents someone other than whom he/she actually is. The pre-conquest Nahuas did not have a word for "impersonator" in their vocabulary. Rather, they seemed to believe that the persons chosen to stand "in place of" certain deities really became invested with the force of those divine beings during a ritual performance. A third, problematic account of indigenous performance is found in Inga Clendinnen's 1990 essay. Clendinnen draws an odd comparison between Mexica ritual and two distinctly Western concepts. She writes that Mexica ritual "was a highly elastic and dynamic expressive mode, more street theatre than museum piece," positing that its priestly organizers were "contriving, by very different means, the kind of delirium we associate not with high reverence but with carnival." While I agree that Mexica ritual was a supple and dynamic mode of expression, Clendinnen's anachronistic references to street theatre and carnival strike me as starkly out of place. I also question her emphasis on the delirious, carnival-like atmosphere of Mexica ritual at the expense of its "high reverence," or religious components. Finally, Hugh Thomas' description of the Nahuas' theatrical battles between mock gods and mock soldiers inadvertently implies that artifice was a central component of these military festivals. Yet the "mock soldiers" who competed against "mock gods" actually lost their lives in such performances; these so- called "theatrical" battles managed to effect real and powerful changes in the world, not only from a religious perspective, but also from the experiential perspectives of the sacrificed individuals and their loved ones.

Having cited this short list of phrases that, consciously or not, align indigenous modes of performances with Western notions of theatre, I turn now to scholars whose critical writings may help me discuss the changes wrought upon native performance cultures after the conquest. Though I previously quoted Max Harris' problematic use of the term "impersonation," I nevertheless take up his recent book, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians, in the next part of my essay. Again, let me emphasize that I do not mean to dismiss or disparage any of the scholars cited above; I simply want to underscore the shortcomings of our contemporary languages in terms of translating and subsequently analyzing pre- conquest performances. Having said this, my objectives in the following section are threefold. First, to establish that Nahua performances prior to 1521 were not "theatre" in the Aristotelian sense of the word, even though they featured many "theatrical" aspects. Secondly, to be more precise about the basic goals and methods of pre-contact performance, and to describe how these aspects changed after 1521. In effort to accomplish this second goal, I will compare three scholarly contributions to the field that I seek to assess. Louise M. Burkhart, Max Harris and Richard Trexler have each made distinct additions to the study of post-conquest performance in central Mexico. I will briefly summarize their central arguments, situating their respective texts within the broader fields of Latin American and Performance Studies. I will also try to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their particular approaches. Finally, I will develop my own approach to the questions posed at the start of this essay.

Section II  Contemporary Approaches to Pre-Conquest Nahua Performance

While the aforementioned scholars use different terms to describe the phenomena in question, they agree on one basic premise: communal performances conducted within calendrically determined ceremonial periods were an omnipresent aspect of indigenous life in Mexico prior to the conquest. For example, Richard Trexler acknowledges that "Theatrical spectacle, music, and dance were not merely essential components of sacrifices, but pervasive features of Aztec culture" (307). He points out that "Cortes himself noted the presence of "places like theatres" adjacent to temples, where the young people were instructed in dancing and singing" (307). He also cites Duran's early account of the mock battles and dances involving masked animal figures, puppetry, and dramas of both a mythic and farcical nature, besides the great sacrificial ceremonies (Duran, p. 134-5). In short, Trexler stresses "there was a flourishing ritual drama in Mexico long before the first European contact" (307).

Max Harris also focuses on the indigenous military performances enacted in central Mexico prior to the conquest. In his Aztecs, Moors and Christians, he analyzes the forms of military performance that took place in this region between 1321-1531, concentrating on "events in and around Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), where festivities were most elaborate before the conquest and indigenous memories most painstakingly recorded afterward" (67). Harris offers a short list of the forms of military performance that were prevalent among the Mexica and their neighbors: The Mexica engaged in both scripted and unscripted warfare. The latter included the unqualified yaoyotl (war) as well as the qualified xochiyaoyotl (war of the flowers). The term xochiyaoyotl encompassed a range of confrontations between rival cities from unplanned brawls to ritualized and even sporting battles that stopped short of unrestrained warfare but often shared its goal of taking captives for sacrifice. Scripted combats of an astonishing variety formed a vital part of the frame for human sacrifice in Tenochtitlan, regularly transforming the Mexica capital into a symbolic ceremonial battlefield. (67)

He underscores the deeply entwined relationship between military and religious festivals, devoting a large part of his analysis to the three Mexica calendar rituals in which military modes of performance were most prominent. The calendar rituals he identifies as most inextricably linked to warfare are Ochpaniztli (the Festivals of the Sweeping of the Roads), Panquetzaliztli (the Festival of the Raising of the Banners), which began immediately after the close of Ochpaniztli, and Tlacaxipeualiztli (the Festival of the Flaying of Men.

Like the aforementioned scholars, Louise M. Burkhart acknowledges the monumental roles of warfare and human sacrifice in the Nahuas'  pre- conquest performance culture. In her essay, "Pious Performances: Christian Pageantry and Native Idenity in Early Colonial Mexico," she concedes that "The scale of both human sacrifice and the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods was escalated by the Mexica in the glory days of their imperial enterprise" (361). Nevertheless, she emphasizes "the intense ceremonialism that impressed European observers was not an artifact of empire but a pervasive feature of Nahua religious life in central Mexico" (361). I find this term, "intense ceremonialism," useful in thinking about both pre- and post-conquest indigenous performance. For one thing, it acknowledges the massive theatricalization of communal life before the conquest without blurring the distinction between indigenous performance traditions and Western theatre traditions. For another, "intense ceremonialism" is able to encompass both religious and military performance traditions. I am also impressed by Burkhart's account of the practical, transforming functions of Nahua ceremonialism:

For the Nahuas, contact with the sacred was established through ritual and the collective carrying out of certain actions at prescribed moments in a calendrical sequence or life cycle. Ritual acts produced, in the here and now, fleeting but authentic manifestations of the sacred forces upon which all life depended. Through rituals, men and women laid themselves open to the power of the gods; the frame of the ritual worked to channel and limit this dangerous contact with the gods by directing the sacred forces into persons, images, or other objects invested with a god's regalia, which served as conduits for the sacred manifestations. (361).

This interpretation of ritual as a liminal period of potential danger during which men and women "laid themselves open to the power of the gods" underscores the pragmatic and highly reverent aspects of indigenous performance. The Nahuas' fear of direct contact with the gods also implies that there was no sense of artifice or mere mimicry on the part of the community; the communication with the sacred that ritual enabled was very real and powerful. Finally, I am impressed by Burkhart's account of why the Mexica used persons and objects invested with a god's regalia. Rather than seeking to "impersonate" the gods in question, they sought to respect these gods by directing their force into someone or something that had been ritually purified and prepared to incorporate the god's divine energy into their own body. After the purification/preparation period, the traditional distinctions that Western thought draws between the god, and the lifelike image of that god, did not exist. The god and the chosen ixiptla were understood as the same entity. Briefly to summarize where we are thus far, all the writers cited above agree that prior to 1521, the religious and military goals of indigenous performance were profoundly linked. So how did the Nahuas' "intense ceremonialism" change upon contact with the Spaniards? To answer this question, I start with Richard Trexler's essay, "We Think, They Act: Clerical Readings of Missionary Theatre in Sixteenth-Century New Spain16." Trexler published this piece in 1984, making it the earliest of the critical texts that I analyze here. His essay evoked strong responses, both affirmative and antagonistic, from Latin American and Performance Studies scholars. One reason for its positive influence is Trexler's attention to the inextricable relationship between performance and power. More precisely, he urges theatre and missionary historians to stop neglecting the "political and cultural messages and contexts" (196) of the military theatre tradition that Spanish friars imposed upon Mexico's indigenous populations after their arrival in 1524. In tracing the political and cultural contexts of military theatre, Trexler underscores the actual conquest itself. He argues that the colonial tradition of military theatre emerged long before Spanish friars set foot on Mexican soil. Rather, this brand of theatre "began in the conquest. Soldiers acted, crafting historical events for their subsequent performance by imitators. Behavior was taught in historical events before those events were theatrically reenacted" (190, italics mine). Trexler recounts how Hernan Cortis imagined a "theatrical setting" for his first meeting with the Mexica leader, Moctezuma. He posits that this encounter marks one of earliest Spanish efforts to teach the Nahuas about role-playing. The roles of "inferior leader" and "superior leader" are clearly defined in the visual details of the setting that Cortis imagines. In presenting Moctezuma's ambassadors with a richly-carved chair for their leader, Cortis expects to stage an encounter that will end with Moctezuma in his "proper" place: seated humbly in the limited space provided by his new master. Meanwhile, the Spanish missionaries who arrive in Mexico after 1521 draw upon the political/cultural message of superiority that the conquistadors put forth by virtue of their sheer brutality. First, the friars learn the historical details of the soldiers' violent conquest; next, they strategically use these facts to compose the scenarios for their military theatre project. Trexler argues that "Because of the power of Spanish soldiers and administrators, the missionaries were able to choreograph the "Indian" culture they imagined and force natives to perform that imagination" (189). In short, they develop a mode of performance whose goal is never to let the natives forget their losses. On the contrary, colonial military theatre serves to recall, re-present, and reassert Spain's victories over and over again. While many scholars agree with Trexler's focus on the politics of military theatre, his essay also provokes responses that strongly dispute his thesis about the incontestably ruinous impact of this theatre upon indigenous performance traditions. For Trexler argues that Spanish friars exerted total control over the content and appearance of the military dramas they introduced to New Spain. In his view, these friars changed the face of indigenous performance irrevocably. Whereas the Nahuas' pre- conquest rituals had been geared towards immediate, practical goals such as ensuring the regeneration of the crops, the friars abolished these "pagan" goals and replaced them with allegorical messages about the native leaders' "doomed way of life" (191). Like the conquistadors before them, the missionaries aimed to show Mexico's diverse native populations their proper "place" of humble submission within the new colonial hierarchy:

They painted a verbal picture of the Battle of the Good Angels with the Bad Angels, compared that battle to the Spanish conquest, and announced that the coming evangelization of Mexico would be in its outcome as inexorable as Michael's victory over Lucifer. In these historic episodes the Spanish conquerors acted like someone else and asked their subjects to play roles as well. (191)

Thus, with the help of military theatre, the friars taught the Nahuas to act in the subjunctive mood, "as if" they were Bad Angels destined for failure. They also persuaded the natives to believe that these "roles" were their true and just identities: "The military plays have a distinct character of insult. Different from the autos, they involved large groups of people committing themselves to their own defeat, perhaps driven to the theatre with the same whips used to bring them to church" (199). Do I agree with this pessimistic thesis about the political functions of early colonial theatre? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, Spanish missionaries indeed used military theatre in effort to choreograph or manipulate certain aspects of the "Indian" culture they imagined. By this, I mean the friars quickly realized how Mexico's indigenous peoples were drawn to social spectacles. As noted earlier, intense ceremonialism had been a central component of Nahua religious life before the conquest. Thus, it is no surprise that the defeated cultures recognized something both familiar and acutely desirable in the massive, theatrical battles introduced by Spanish friars. Meanwhile, the friars capitalized on the interest the Nahuas displayed, and generalized about the "nature" of this interest. In short, they developed a military theatre tradition based on racially and biologically deterministic discourses. With the help of these discourses, they depicted all of Mexico's diverse, indigenous groups as "Indians." Furthermore, all "Indians" were understood as small children, as immature beings primarily aroused through the senses. Working with the premise that "Indians" learned through their eyes and not through a deeper, spiritual comprehension of religious concepts, the friars embraced military drama as a means of fostering the conversion process. So yes: in a sense, the spectacles of Christian triumph produced by means of military theatre were all about Spaniards exerting their control.

On the other hand, there are multiple reasons why I dispute Trexler's thesis. First, he focuses solely on the visual aspects of colonial military theatre and accepts at face value the physical gestures of "devotion" that Spanish friars gleefully chronicled native performers as enacting. For instance, he describes how Spanish conquistadors taught the Nahuas that kneeling was an external representation of internally felt submission. The natives were forced to mimic this gesture, learning that it was the proper way to welcome Spanish authorities. Later, the formal missionary theatre taught Nahuas that kneeling was the only way to conclude any theatrical battle between moros y christianos. Since Nahua performers were linked emblematically to the dark-skinned moros, the theorist concludes that their theatrical acts of kneeling (depicting the Moors' submission) also functioned emblematically as a visible sign of the Nahuas' own willingness to convert to Spanish Christianity. My second problem with Trexler's theory relates to the first one of interpreting theatrical events at their surface level. It lies in his use of the term "reading" as an analogy for how both Spaniards and Nahuas understood colonial military theatre. He begins with the deceptively straightforward remark that military theatre in Mexico "had a fundamental morphology consisting of greetings, battle, and submission" (194). Upon closer inspection, however, this linear progression from introductory greetings, to intermediary battle, to the conclusion of conquest indicates the imposition of Aristotelian plot structure onto indigenous performance culture. The problem is that Mexico's pre-conquest indigenous populations did not draw rigid distinctions between the beginning, middle, and end of a performance. For example, an opponent's "submission" often introduced a whole, new ceremonial context: preparations for the ritual sacrifice of the opponent, as well as the assumption that death by sacrifice ensured immediate reunion with the gods. In short, the Nahuas did not necessarily regard submission in battle as an "emblem" of eternal humiliation or damnation. Yet aside from ignoring the cultural and conceptual differences implicit in the three- part morphology cited above, Trexler also assumes that Spaniards and Nahuas interpreted these components the same way. He argues, "If the message for the natives was their submission, both they and the Spaniards read through the play a detailed statement of the social nature of that humiliation" (200).

I will briefly consider Trexler's problematic use of "reading" in relation to how greetings functioned within both European and Mexican military performance traditions. On the one hand, it is a documented fact that European friars "read" the Nahuas' pre-performance greetings as grounds for comparing the extent of "devotion" among specific native communities. They measured the distances that various indigenous groups traveled in order to welcome important Spaniards prior to a given mock battle. They recorded whether or not native parties were willing to accompany the Spanish dignitaries to the next town. Most important of all was the social status of the groups that came out. For example, Friar Motolinma emphasized his great delight that the "signors and principals" of Tlaxcala played roles in the Moors and Christians celebration of 1539. On the other hand, Trexler applies the metaphor of "reading" far too liberally with respect to Nahua greetings and what they might have signified. More precisely, he claims that "both [Spaniards and Nahuas] read beneath the masks the obeisance of the signors and principals of the native villages and cities" (200, italics mine). From my point of view, "reading'" is hardly the best metaphor through which to speculate on what was going through indigenous peoples' minds as they watched or partook in mock battles between moros y christianos. "Reading" implies Western conventions of literacy, as well as Western modes of interpretation. Yet language was a huge barrier, especially during the first few decades after the conquest. The missionaries sent to Mexico did not understand Nahuatl during their formative encounters with the native populations. Likewise, the vast majority of Nahuas did not understand Spanish, nor did they comprehend the European codes of etiquette that the friars brought over.

The greetings that commenced military performances were a highly structured form of social etiquette. I am sure the Nahuas understood this as well as the Spaniards. The question lies, however, in how these distinct cultural and racial groups interpreted the deeper implications of such a convention. Like the Spanish chronicler, Cuidad Real, Trexler reads only the visual surface of these gestures and assumes that "what- you-see-is-what-you-get". Thus, if you see Nahua communities traveling for miles in order to greet a Spanish friar, this means they are committed to the Christian cause. If you see Nahua leaders kneeling or laying their cloaks down for Spaniards to walk on, this means that both the leaders and their people are humble, ready to obey Spanish authority and Christian dogma. I am not, however, convinced by this approach. I am not convinced that common Nahuas interpreted their leaders' greetings as signs of the "obeisance" and "devout humiliation" that Spaniards underscore. First, most natives knew very well that their leaders had little choice in the matter of whether or not to greet the friars. Secondly, deciphering the intentions of indigenous "greetings" was a problem that plagued the conquistadors from the start of their encounters with the Nahuas. In his chronicle, The Conquest of New Spain, Bernal Diaz offers numerous examples of this difficulty. He describes the elaborate greetings and lavish gifts that Moctezumas ambassadors bestowed upon the Spaniards. Whereas the conquistadors initially interpreted these overtures as signs of "friendly" submission, they later realized that the ambassadors' gifts of food and gold were actually intended to persuade them to go home. Moctzuma assumed that gold was what the Spaniards were after, and calculated they would leave once they'd acquired enough. Though he acknowledged the Spaniards through the greetings of his ambassadors, he would not allow them to enter his city. Diaz's descriptions of the political contexts in which such greetings occurred make it clear that the Nahuas' extravagant displays of "welcome" were not gestures of surrender, but rather polite forms of warning.

Finally, there are two, separate traditions of "military greetings" and "mock battles" that precede the Spanish conquest. One is a medieval tradition that flourished throughout Europe after the Spaniards' reconquest of the territories they had previously lost to Muslim Moors. Scholars of medieval history cite the official date of the Christian reconquest as January 1492, when the last bastion of Muslim occupation, the city of Granada, fell to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. While there are few accounts of mock battles between Christians and Moors before 1492, such festivals proliferate vastly in the centuries that follow that Spaniards' decisive defeat of their long-time opponents. However, there also exists a second tradition of military performance that often goes under analyzed by historians of the conquest. This is a pre-Hispanic tradition of skirmishes, mock battles, martial dances, and ritual combat among the Mexica, or Aztecs, of central Mexico. Trexler, for example, fails to mention this indigenous history of military performance in his essay, but Max Harris attends closely to it in his recent publication, Aztecs, Moors and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and New Spain.

Harris' methodology is fundamentally a comparative one. He starts by examining the European roots of the theatrical battles between Moors and Christians. Significantly, he argues that Moors and Christians generally did not let their territorial conflicts unduly impede their relationships as neighbors and trading partners prior to 1492. On the contrary, "Convivencia, the ability of the Spaniards, Moors, and Jews to live together in a pluralistic culture, where each enjoyed in the other's territory a measure of civic, religious, and economic freedom, was at its height in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries" (31). After the Spaniards recapture of all they had once lost, Spanish examples of the moros y christianos tradition attempt to restore the spirit of tolerance that flourished in this region before the reconquest. Rather than depicting the moros as a hated enemy being driven out from Spain, most of these performances stress "the conversion of the Moors at least as much as their defeat" (36). Moreover, Spanish mock battles "usually end with a vision, albeit a Christian one, of convivencia rather than humiliations" (36). Bearing in mind the vision of convivencia that ostensibly prevailed in Spanish theatrical representations of how they related to their defeated Muslim neighbors, Harris turns to a fascinating subject: the relationships depicted between Spaniards and Mexicans through the moros y christianos tradition that was imported to New Spain. He also examines the Mexicans' post-conquest attraction to these "mock battles" between Moors and Christians.

Although this tradition began in Mexico shortly after the arrival of the Spanish missionaries, it persists there to the present day. In fact, today's Mexican populations celebrate such theatrical clashes between Moors and Christians as ardently and elaborately as their Spanish contemporaries. Yet despite the tradition's enduring popularity in this post-colonial nation, numerous people continue to view it as a bastion of Spanish colonial oppression. Harris points out that Trexler is not alone in his speculations about the insulting nature of military theatre featuring moros y christianos. Many Latin American scholars are also bewildered by the Mexicas' eagerness to adopt and re-enact a distinctly European performance tradition imposed for the ostensible purpose of rubbing salt into the wounds of defeated peoples. To preface his own sense of why this particular mode of performance has been so successful in Mexico, Harris cites Inga Clendinnen's statement about the oddity of the phenomenon. "After the conquest," Clendinnen writes, "the Mexicans were to display an early, puzzling and enduring passion for the dances of Moors and Christians." Harris responds to Clendinnen's astonishment with the following, astute observation:

Such a passion should not puzzle us too much, for the tradition was inherently susceptible to indigenous readings. Spanish colonists may have thought they were celebrating the victory of light-skinned Christians over dark-skinned, heathens, linking the defeat of the Moors in 1492 to the defeat of the Aztecs in 1521. But the theme cut both ways in Mexico, for the history being dramatized was not one of conquest but of reconquest: Spanish Christians had driven out Moorish invaders. It was this image of liberation rather than that of Spanish victory that attracted indigenous Mexicans to the imported tradition. (67)

He also stresses that it was not "just a matter of adopting and adapting a foreign tradition" (67), for the Mexicans were already familiar with mock battles of their own. As mentioned earlier, the pre-conquest Mexica engaged in both scripted and unscripted warfare. The latter included the unqualified yaototl (war) as well as the qualified xochiyaoyotl (war of flowers).

Harris' project to assess why indigenous cultures embraced the European tradition of moros y christianos with such enthusiasm leads him to closely examine the features and functions of the flowery wars of pre- Hispanic Mexico. Before doing so, however, he cautions readers about two intellectual temptations that his approach will try to resist. These temptations are important to note, for the writings of early Spanish chroniclers and even some modern scholars reveal how easy it is to succumb to them. First is the temptation "so to assimilate the other's cultural practices to our own that we effectively deny the degree of difference" (67). An equal and opposite temptation is "so to differentiate the other as to license our own self-righteous indignation" (68). Here, Harris cites as an example the European revulsion at the Mexica system of human sacrifice, with which indigenous "mock battles' were inextricably entwined. In addition to these forewarnings, I would also caution about stripping Mexico's indigenous cultures of performative agency, as Trexler does. For even as the Nahuas were conquered by Spanish military technology, this does not mean that they simultaneously gave up their own ceremonial traditions, nor their desire to counteract Spanish colonization. The Mexica in particular were extremely proud of their history of military successes, and military performance is one arena in which that cultural self-respect endures even after the conquest. A little later in this essay, I will offer specific examples of how military theatre becomes as a subversive vehicle for preserving both Mexica war traditions, and the religious beliefs underlying those traditions.

In the meantime, I want to point out Harris' thesis that Mexico's indigenous peoples opted to see past the humiliating, outward appearance of the moros y christianos tradition. He urges scholars to examine the colonial festivals of Moors and Christians from two different political perspectives. In short, he believes that "a public transcript of Catholic triumph masked a hidden transcript of native reconquest" (67, italics mine). This distinction between the obvious and more clandestine aspects of post-conquest military theatre is central to his theory about the indigenous tactics of resistance incorporated into such performances. Early on, Harris draws on James Scott's metaphor of the "hidden transcript" to make a case for the multiple, highly ambivalent layers of meaning that the Nahuas inserted into the mock battles that ostensibly displayed their defeat. He contends that a careful exploration of these "hidden transcripts" can also help scholars understand how the Nahuas managed to preserve many aspects of their pre-conquest rituals and belief systems, despite the Spaniards' arduous efforts to abolish these so- called "paga and "bloodthirsty" performance traditions. Before turning, however, to specific instances of how Mexico's indigenous peoples incorporated their pre-conquest ceremonial practices into the Spaniards' military and religious theatres, it is useful to summarize Scott's theory about how "hidden transcripts" function in a given society. Scott writes about unbalanced power relationships such as those between colonizers and colonized, masters and slaves, or totalitarian governments and disenfranchised peoples. He argues that every subordinate group creates, out of its ordeal, a "hidden transcript" that represents a critique of power spoken behind the dominant. The powerful, for their part, also develop a hidden transcript representing the practices and claims of their rule that cannot be openly avowed. According to Scott, a comparison of the hidden transcript of the weak with that of the powerful, and of both hidden transcripts to the public transcript of power relations offers a substantially new way of understanding resistance to dominance.  In Scott's model, then, we only need to pay attention to the three types of "transcripts":1) the public transcript that attests solely to what those in power want outsiders and subordinates to believe about the nature of social and political relationships within their realm of influence, and about the ideology that justifies those relationships. 2) The hidden transcript of the powerful, which Scott defines as "An attempt by the dominant elite to sequester an off-stage social site where they are no longer on display and can let their hair down." 3) The hidden transcript of the powerless, one that Scott posits as the most difficult to read because it is the most carefully concealed. He points out, however, that we are saved from throwing up our hands in frustration "by the fact that the hidden transcript is typically expressed openly, albeit in disguised forms." Popular festivals, "rumors, gossip, folktales, songs, gestures, [and] jokes are all, according to Scott, modes through which the powerless "insinuate a critique of power" into the public forum "while hiding behind anonymity or behind innocuous understandings of their conduct." The condition of the hidden transcript's public expression "is that it be sufficiently indirect and garbled that it is capable of two readings, one of which is innocuous."

Harris acknowledges Scott's claim that the hidden transcript of the powerless is typically expressed openly. He concedes that, "in many cases, the hidden transcript is consciously insinuated into the public transcript" (25). To exemplify such calculated insertions of a subversive message, Harris cites the danza de los santiago that he witnessed in Cuetzalan in 1988. On the one hand, the Catholic reading of this performance accords victory to Santiago, the militant patron saint of Spain. The dance is said to recall the legendary appearances of Santiago, charging into battle on his white horse and leading Spanish forces to a miraculous victory over Moors and Aztecs. This surface-level message of Christian triumph is what sanctions the dance-drama to be performed at a church festival. After all, the masked santiagos are, to all appearances, Christian soldiers overcoming and converting the infidel pilatos. Harris argues, however, that there is another interpretation deliberately embedded into the spectacle's public transcript. He claims that the Mexican dancers who partake in such mock battles know "their masks challenge the dance's public transcript of Catholic triumph" (25). Interestingly, he bases his argument on hearsay, on the unconfirmed reports of a local mask-maker:

Pablo Huerta Ramir, who carves and paints the masks for many of the troupes in the area, told me that the santiagos represent the sun. This is why, he explained, the face of the mask is red, its eyes and chin display golden sun emblems, and the dancers wear the masks on their foreheads. "They are," he [Huerta] said, "looking at the sun." At the end of the dance, the mask maker added, "el rey sol [the Sun King] kills "el rey pilato." Who then, I asked, are the pilatos? Huerta was evasive. The sun, he said, is challenged by a "less powerful sun," represented by a white or pink mask. The pilatos are this less powerful force. (21-2)

Relying on the "ephemeral" mode of gossip as a form of testimony, Harris comes up with his own hypothesis about how the "hidden transcript" of the danza de los santiago functions. In watching the dancers later, it dawns on him "that the pale faces, rosy cheeks, and dark beards of the pilatos' masks were intended to represent the features of the Spanish conquistadors" (22). A spectator confirms his suspicion by volunteering the observation that the pilatos "are the Spaniards." From a Performance Studies perspective, I am impressed by this analysis for several reasons. First, Harris takes local gossip and innuendo seriously. While such modes of transmitting knowledge are typically dismissed as "fleeting" and unreliable, he treats them as respectfully as any traditional, textual form of scholarly proof. Secondly, he underscores non-verbal modes of staging resistance: masks, costumes, gestures and movements. Though Harris uses the problematic metaphor of "reading the mask" in his approach to indigenous performances, he undercuts that metaphor's discursively focused connotations. In short, he recognizes what Trexler failed to acknowledge the power of non-discursive performance elements to express political "messages" of non-compliance with the dominant discourses of their time. It is precisely with the help of these unorthodox modes of evidence that he decodes, in a highly convincing way, the "hidden transcript" of resistance underlying a seemingly closed performance. Harris concludes: "The indigenous reading, revealed only by masks, pitted the sun and his warriors against the "weaker" invading force of Spanish conquistadors. According to this reading, it was the conquistadors who were defeated when King Pilate was killed" (22-3). Secondly, the "hidden transcript" that Harris identifies leads me to surmise that the Mexicas' pre-conquest motifs, beliefs, and values endure in military performances of the present-day. Though it is clear that the 1988 rendition of the danza de los santiago involves forms of mimesis unknown to indigenous performance cultures before 1521, the fact remains that the ancient Mexica "Sun God" still constitutes the "heart" of the ceremony. In short, while the Spaniards succeeded in imposing the Aristotelian concept of mimesis upon Nahua ceremonialism, indigenous cultures have managed to subvert the intended meaning of this theatrical operation. Here, the santiagos who are supposed to represent Christian soldiers actually embody the ancient Sun King, the very deity whom Spanish friars and conquistadors perceived as a bloodthirsty idol that had to be destroyed. Finally, Harris offers a radical way to think about a conventional aspect of theatre and performance; he points out that "masks, which are ordinarily thought to conceal, in this instance reveal resistance" (23, italics mine). Yet aside from utilizing Scott's idea of the "hidden transcript" to suggest how specific Nahua ceremonial motifs survive in contemporary Mexican military performance, Harris usefully expands his model of reading subordinate resistance. He does so by pointing out a crucial difference between "hidden transcripts" that are consciously insinuated into the public one, and those that are unconsciously inserted. According to him, "it may not always be the case that such insinuation is a matter of conscious intent. Sometimes the unconscious may be at work, and one may be able to read the mask as a window onto conflicts that remain hidden, in some measure, even from the one who wears the mask" (25-6). I am admittedly leery of this metaphorical rendering of performance as a "mask" that then becomes a window onto conflicts that remain hidden. The description calls to mind a European literary tradition called Narrative Realism, a mode of story-telling that presupposes a narrator who can offer readers direct, unmediated access to events taking place in an imagined world. Related to this problem, I am suspicious of who has the agency to empower an imaginary world in Harris' schema. In short, I question his premise that an outside observer may be in a better position to read these hidden conflicts than those who enact them. Nevertheless, Harris goes on to offer a moving example of how such unconscious transcripts manifest themselves. This time, he derives his "evidence" from the concluding moments of the danza de los santiagos that he observed in 1988.

Though I put the term "evidence" in quotations, I do not mean to deny or disparage the "hidden transcript" that Harris cites as unconsciously inserted by Mexican performers into the danza de los santiago. On the contrary, his interpretation of the dance-drama's final moments strikes me as plausible. I find his analysis compelling because of his focus on the dancers' facial expressions and physical gestures. In short, Harris attends to non-verbal and presumably non-scripted aspects of the performance. He takes embodied behavior seriously, concentrating on the unanticipated things that specific bodies do while re-enacting a larger, collective trauma. The following is his account of how a particular performer unconsciously expresses his conflicting emotions as the theatrical danza comes to an end:

After his death inside the church, el rey pilato lay motionless at the foot of the steps leading up to the altar. The caballero, his white horse still strapped to his waist, stepped slowly back and forth across the corpse, tears streaming down his face. To a single, slowly repeated drumbeat, the flute played a mournful dirge. There were few spectators. An elderly man took flowers from near the altar and placed them on the dead pilato's chest. Then he put a lighted candle at the corpse's head. Finally, the santiagos lifted the corpse of King Pilate and bore him at shoulder height down the central aisle to the church door. There the play was over. The pallbearers set the pilato on his feet and all filed back, no longer in character, to the altar, where they knelt and prayed, The actor who has played the cabellero was still weeping. (26)

Harris finds the weeping actor's "breach" of theatrical convention surprising and unsettling; he cites it as a "denouement of unexpected poignancy" (26). Of course, the question to ask is why? Why do a Mexican actor's persistent tears cause an American theorist to conclude that this lament signifies a "hidden transcript" both spontaneous and unconscious?

Good question. If I sought to play the devil's advocate, I'd argue that he reads too much into this closing scene. He relies too heavily on Western conventions of  closure, assuming the performance is over once the so-called "pallbearers" set the pilato on his feet and return to the altar to pray. He also presumes that the weeping actor is the primary figure worth pausing to think about, thereby overlooking both the actors who return to pray, and the elderly man who lights a candle for the enemy at the end of the dance. But perhaps all of these embodied actions are yet another component of the show? Perhaps the Mexican actors' placement of commemorative objects, closing prayers, and tenacious tears are part and parcel of the indigenous "piety" that Spanish friars counted upon? Or maybe the actors' ostensibly reverent gestures are their own way of saying "good riddance to rubbish?" Good riddance to the loathsome Spaniards, though we respect their heritage enough to bestow upon them a proper funeral?

Having put forth these potential scenarios, I confess that I do not want to play the devil's advocate in this particular case. For one thing, the political context of the performance in question leads me to doubt that any of the synopses outlined above are accurate assessments of the complex emotions underlying the actions that transpire. Do I believe that the Mexican actor's sustained weeping is a scripted, routine part of the performance? No, not really. Do I believe that the actor who cries does so out of  piety, out of some lingering homage to Spanish authority? Again, the answer is no. Finally, do I feel that the actor's prolonged tears are shed pseudo-politely, in effort to lay the Spaniards' tyrannical legacy to quiet rest? Not for Harris has already argued convincingly that the consciously inserted "hidden transcript" of this performance is one foretelling "the victory of the sun" (26). Why, then, would any self-respecting Mexican cry about this seemingly happy ending?

The theorist does not have a single, simple answer to these difficult questions. He does, however, offer a tentative hypothesis based on firsthand observations, and on research into the intricate historical circumstances represented by the danza de los santiago. He starts by considering the obviously conflicted affective response that the "hidden transcript" of the Sun God's triumph evokes in the Mexican actor. Rather than rejoicing in the victory of an ancient Nahua deity over the Spaniards' Saint James, "the victory of the santiagos was, it seemed, an occasion for grief" (26). Next, Harris tries to make sense of the underlying reasons why contemporary Mexican performers might feel torn, or even melancholy, about a "pagan" god's victory over a Christian saint:

The nature of the conflict to which the dance bore witness was not, after all, a matter of simple opposition between Spanish and indigenous peoples. As Mercedes Dmaz Roig points put, such "dances of the conquest" dramatize the ambivalence felt by their indigenous Catholic performers towards the conquest that brought them both a Catholicism they have adopted and a foreign domination they resisted. The encounter between two worlds dramatized by these dances, she writes, is not external [to the performer], but internal: his indigenismo and his catolicidad; neither one nor the other can be conquered."31

In short, there are two, coexisting "triumphs" embedded in the danza de los santiago. The dance's public transcript signals the victory of Catholicism over a hitherto polytheistic culture. Meanwhile, its hidden transcript signals the enduring success of indigenous ceremonial values which encompass polytheism, despite colonial efforts to annihilate the Nahuas' pre-conquest belief systems. Yet even as these public and private "victories" coexist in one performance, Harris argues that their synergy creates a tension more akin to mourning than celebration. According to him, "The triumphs signaled by both the public and hidden of the danza de los santiagos also simultaneously signal the irreparable loss of one or the other of the conflicting heritages still valued by the performers" (26). While he believes the actors consciously want to celebrate their culture's resistance to colonial oppression, he underscores the fact that Spanish colonization forced upon the Mexicans the religion they hold dear. As such, an outright rejection of the conquest's painful legacy also necessitates rejecting Catholicism, and these performers cannot bring themselves to do that. Their reluctance to abandon the residue of the conquest in its entirety is signaled by an "unconscious" rupture in the performance. According to Harris, this rupture manifests itself through the persistent weeping of a performer who has slain el rey pilato (the lesser, Spanish sun), and yet grieves that act because it subconsciously represents the death of his own faith.

This is a very different way of conceiving indigenous agency than Trexler's approach, Trexler does not acknowledge a space for conflicting heritages, indigenous and European, in Nahua performance culture of the sixteenth-century. He also denies that Mexico's native peoples tactically appropriated and gradually transformed certain Spanish performance traditions, thereby incorporating these foreign traditions into their own. According to Trexler, Spanish friars scripted the plot and outcome of each performance; the resulting spectacles were nothing more than orchestrated displays of power aimed at persuading conquered groups of the inevitability and justice of their subordination. In his view, this is how the Spaniards introduced a European-derived "popular culture" in Mexico, one that thrives to the present day. Meanwhile, Harris acknowledges the power wielded by the Spaniards after the conquest, and the ways in which military theatre became a mode of dramatizing the friars' intended goal of converting Mexico's conquered peoples. Yet rather than viewing the Nahuas as passive puppets in such a theatre, he argues that Mexico's indigenous cultures actively altered the social- political messages of these performances. While cultural and religious conversion of the natives was part of the conquerors' agenda, the project clearly did not succeed in the sixteenth-century, or in the present day. Interestingly, Harris goes so far as read a sense of compassion into the conclusion of the danza de los santiago that he witnessed in Cueztzalan. He ascribes this empathy to the indigenous performer who knows he symbolically killed the lesser, Spanish sun god. I find this reading fascinating because empathy is not typically conceived as the emotional response of an inferior to the defeat of a superior. Rather, empathy usually emerges out of respect and a sense of equality. That today's Mexican performers show commiseration rather than contempt for the Spaniards whom they vanquish is an indication of their own self-respect, as well as the esteem they bear towards their former conquerors. Throughout his book, Harris examines the complex, embodied means by which the Nahuas transformed a theatre of apparent humiliation into one of self-respecting participation and even anticipation. By anticipation, I mean that the Nahuas did, indeed, seem to regard Spanish military theatre as a genre laden with the nuances of reconquest, and as a mode of dramatizing the hopeful vision of a day when the Aztecs empire would once again reign supreme.

Having compared the methodologies of Trexler and Harris in relation to post-conquest traditions of military performance, I turn now to look briefly at Louise M. Burkhart's theory of religious performances in early colonial Mexico. Of the critical readings examined in this essay, Burkhart's analysis of the relationship between European and indigenous performance traditions strikes me as the most sophisticated. Like Harris, she acknowledges the highly collective modes of ceremonial behavior that underpinned religious life for the pre-conquest cultures of central Mexico. Yet rather than focusing on the subtle similarities between Spanish and indigenous modes of performance, she explores the enduring qualities of Nahua ceremonialism in European-imposed traditions from a different angle. In her essay, "Pious Performances: Christian Pageantry and Native Identity in Early Colonial Mexico," Burkhart puts forth the following objectives:

I examine Nahua ceremonialism after the conquest, in the context of the early colonial church. I am not looking for continuities, real or imagined, between specific rites or between specific pre-Columbian deities ad Christian saints. Rather, I am interested in how the general praxis orientation of Nahua religion informed the Nahuas' ways of becoming and being Christian as well as informing the ways in which their Christianity was described and interpreted by the friars who presided over their religious life. (361).

The first thing that impresses me about Burhkart's approach is her willingness to examine both the positive and negative aspects of the Spanish missionaries' investment in bringing Christianity to the Nahuas through the mode of performance. While Trexler looks only at the tyrannical aspects of how the Spaniards employed performance traditions in the New World, Harris seems overly hasty to find subversive readings in every facet of indigenous military performance. He sometimes constructs elaborate accounts of indigenous resistance based on a few, idiosyncratic, and often tenuous details. Burkhart proceeds rather more cautiously in assessing how the Nahuas' pre-conquest religious tenets and practices came to inform their particular ways of embracing and sustaining a Christian identity.

She starts by explaining why Spanish friars wanted the native populations to become Christian in the first place. On the one hand, "the friars used the Nahuas' Christianity in their various campaigns for better treatment of the native people" (362). In short, there was a genuine, humanitarian motive behind their efforts to impose Christian value systems on the conquered peoples. If Spanish monarchs and colonial administrators could see that these peoples were capable of understanding the basic concepts of Christianity, they would have to acknowledge the Nahuas as rational and redeemable human beings, rather than as cheap, animal-like labor. On the other hand, the also friars employed religion for self-serving and self-aggrandizing reasons. For example, they exploited the natives' interests in Christianity in order "to glorify their own mission, to uphold the hierarchical ethnic boundaries of colonial society, to engage in apocalyptic fantasies, and to construct an image of the native that validated the indefinite perpetuation of colonial rule" (362). The interesting thing, however, is how Burkhart conceptualizes indigenous responses to the mode of Christianity that the friars introduced. In discussing so-called "Nahua Christianity" Burkhart does not mean that the Nahuas became Christian in anything like the sense implied by conventional understandings of religious conversion. She also insists that we should not view indigenous Christianity as a "unified and systematized body of dogma and practice" (362). Rather, her central point is that the Nahuas "understood Christian teachings in their own terms and adapted them for their own ends, which varied through time and from place to place" (362). This perspective on how Mexico's indigenous peoples negotiated their own practical and spiritual needs alongside a foreign- imposed religion strikes me as a true, conceptual breakthrough. Whereas Spanish chroniclers such as Sahagzn and Motolinma were constantly suspicious about the issue of native sincerity, and questioned whether Nahuas who spoke or acted in a Christian manner were "truly" Christian, Burkhart sidesteps this unnecessary and ethnocentric line of inquiry. She points out that to characterize colonial Nahuas as "crypto-pagans operating under a veneer of Christianity is to grant objective reality to the dualistic categories of "Christian" and "pagan", which were highly meaningful to Europeans but foreign to indigenous self-conception" (362). Mindful of this statement, it is useful to recall the conceptual syncretism that underpinned Nahua cosmology prior to the conquest. The Nahuas had understood religion as an accumulative phenomenon. When one local group defeated another in battle, the conquerors did not demand that the conquered peoples renounce their former gods and ritual practices; rather, the defeated group was required to add the triumphant group's gods to their own collection of deities. This was not only a tactical maneuver enabling both groups to go back to their normal lives after the defeated group accepted the new gods, but also an authentic, conceptual shift in that defeated groups really did seem to respect and care for the new deities forced upon them. Burkhart suggests that the Nahuas performed a similar maneuver after the Spanish conquest, and that they really did show interest in embracing the concept of having Christian identity.Significantly, however, they took up this Christian "identity" in ways that were meaningful to them, in ways they understood and enjoyed, and often in ways consistent with their former religious practices. While many modern scholars readily accept Spanish chronicler' accounts of the "spiritual conquest" that took place in Mexico after the literal conquest, Burkhart offers a more complex analysis of how the Nahuas determined which particular aspects of Christianity appealed to them. Interestingly, performance seems to have played a central role in the Nahuas' tactical responsive to Spanish Christianity. The theorist concedes that the Nahuas'  formal conversion to Christianity, characterized by mass baptisms and other enthusiastic displays, quickly became legendary as a "spiritual conquest" (362). She also concedes Trexler's contention that the friars' chroniclers predictably glorify the achievements of the evangelizers while representing the native people as passive and childlike recipients of the Word. Yet Burkhart departs from this approach by suggesting that today's scholars "invert the rhetorical flow of the [chroniclers'] propaganda so as to grant agency to the native people" (362). If we are willing to make this conceptual inversion, she insists we can come to see how the Nahuas, "by selectively responding to the devotional options presented to them by the friars, exerted considerable control over the creation of their church" (362). I agree with Burkhart that such a pivot must be made if we hope to understand the poetics and politics of Nahua Christianity. Significantly, the theorist does not ask us to dismiss the controlling, often oppressive role played by the friars in the establishment of Nahua Christianity. Instead, she posits that indigenous choice played a critical role in the Nahua faith that emerged. Although the friars imposed a basic, religious structure on the natives, there were many fine points within that structure that the Nahuas determined for themselves. For example, Burkhart notes how the friars "soon found that preaching fire and brimstone got them nowhere" (362). While frightening modes of ministry worked just fine back in Spain, Mexicos natives did not seem afraid of or remotely attentive to them. Yet if the friars "set the catechism to music and invited the natives to sing and dance, or put on a Christmas pageant with native actors in costume, suddenly the churchyard could not accommodate the crowd" (363). Bishop Zumarraga wrote to Charles V in 1540, "more than by preaching they are converted by music."

This appropriation and reversal of Spanish rhetoric and customs conforms to a broad pattern of "disguised reconciliations" between natives and Spaniards at this point in colonial history. "Situations occurred," Charles Gibson remarks, "in which Indians accepted one aspect of Spanish colonization in order to facilitate the rejection of another Spanish colonization was such that Indians were able to range with some freedom between attitudes of affirmation and dissent". Gibson continues that, in certain instances, the natives "came close to fulfilling the most idealistic expectations of Hispanic imperial theorists, At other times, the Indians seemed almost to be exploiting Spaniards, so effectively were they able to take advantage of humanistic colonization." In line with Gibson's argument, Burkhart also cites such tactical appropriations and transpositions as underlying foundations of Nahua Christianity. She concludes that the Nahuas "manipulated their friars into presiding over a church founded not upon abstract Christian theological or moral tenets, but upon an exuberant pageantry" (363). She adds that "this phenomenon tended to mask a slower and more subtle process by which world view and philosophy were renegotiated by the Nahuas without there being any abrupt rupture with the past" (363). Although I feel Burkhart goes a bit too far in claiming that the Nahuas "manipulated" the friars, I agree that exuberant pageantry stands out as an integral and autonomously determined aspect of indigenous Christianity, both different from and surprisingly independent of Spanish control. I would also add that live performance and naturalistic adornments become principal modes through which the natives display their psychic and political interests in differentiating their brand of Christianity from the dryer, less animated European models that the friars initially offered them.

Several examples of how the Nahuas employed "exuberant pageantry" and thereby distinguished their mode of Christianity from Spanish models are found in Friar Motolinma's account of the festivals of Saint John and Corpus Christi that were celebrated in Tlaxcallan in 1538. Throughout this account, Motolinma cannot help but reiterate that such massive, extravagant performances surpass the customary scale of even those found in Spain. 36 For instance, he describes the Tlaxcaltecas'  procession of the Blessed Sacrament, remarking on how "the veils of the crosses and the ornaments of the platforms were all of gold and feather work, the best of which would be prized in Spain more than brocade" (102). He also depicts the enormous scale of the adornments covering the road where the procession traveled. "There were ten big triumphal arches very neatly made, and what was even more striking and noteworthy was that they had the whole of the road divided into three lanes, like the naves of a church" (102). Aside from the ten big arches framing the procession, there were "medium-sized arches of about nine feet, and there were by actual count 1,068 of these arches, for three Spaniards and many others counted them, considering it a noteworthy and astonishing thing" (102). Yet what seems to impress Motolinma the most is the Tlaxcaltecas' exceptional talent for "imitating" nature, or utilizing specific elements of the natural environment in order to create an awesome yet seemingly unaffected backdrop for their performances. The following is his account of how cleverly and precisely the Tlaxaltecas designed a setting for their one-act rendition of the Adam and Eve story:

Round about Paradise there were three cliffs and a great mountain full of everything that one can find on great and verdant hills, and the particular things that one finds there in April or May, for these Indians have a special knack for imitating things exactly. There was no lack of birds, large or small, certainly the most beautiful birds that I have seen anywhere. On the cliffs there were also animals, both natural and artificial. One of the latter was a boy dressed as a lion, tearing and eating a deer which he had killed. The deer was real and was an a ledge between some rocks. This was a thing that attracted much attention. (108)

The Nahuas incorporation of both natural environments and human bodies into high religious festivals seems to have struck Spanish onlookers as a novelty. The natives' closeness to the natural world and its various animals also astonished the Spaniards. Yet they marveled at these indigenous "innovations" without acknowledging that nature had always been a central component of Nahua ritual ceremonies and cosmology. In short, the ceremonialism the Nahuas brought to their church can be considered a native tradition, existing in the postconquest world. Yet because the Spaniards had rashly destroyed the native codices, it took them over a decade to identify the "pagan" roots of this ceremonial tradition. Perhaps this delay in Spanish awareness accounts for why it took so long before the friars and colonial administrators attempted to outlaw "suspicious" forms of Nahua ceremonialism altogether. Burkhart writes that, within a decade of the 1524 arrival of the first official Franciscan evangelizers, "the parameters of Nahua-Christian devotional practices had been laid" (364). The resulting guidelines were at once permissive and restrictive. On the one hand, the incorporation of song and dance, musical instruments, processions and dramatic performances into devotional practice was permitted. The use of flowers as ornaments was also allowed. Interestingly, the massive consumption of flowers seems to be a hallmark of native practice, continuing and even expanding upon pre-Columbian practices. In the decades after the conquest, flowers served as readily available substitutes for other types of regalia, gold, feathers, precious stones, fine textiles that were now beyond the means of increasingly impoverished native communities. The many varieties of flowers provided a whole symbolic code of color and fragrance through which the presence of the sacred was manifested while the dancers danced and the holy images were carried about. Then, at the festival's end, as the wilting remains were collected and taken away, their faded forms would signal the transience of all contact with the sacred, as well as the transience of life . I am somewhat surprised that the Spaniards permitted the natives to perpetuate the massive consumption of flowers. In many ways, the gathering and disposal of the wilted petals recalls the gathering and disposal of the bloodied, human remains left over after elaborate rituals of sacrifice. Nevertheless, there were indeed many new restrictions placed on Nahua devotional practices in the decade after 1524. For instance, Nahuatl devotional texts had to be based on Christian teachings; crucifixes and saints' images were the principal, sanctioned cult objects. Moreover, "most of the musical instruments and the music played upon them were of European style" (364). Other restrictions that Burkhart cites were the "new rules of sexual propriety excluded women from the dances and dramas (though not from the processions). Human and animal sacrifices were also forbidden, and self-mortification took the form of self-flagellation rather than blood-letting" (364).

Yet even in these new and modified forms of devotion, Burkhart argues we can see continuities with the Pre-Columbian ceremonial cycle. The following passage articulates her understanding of the points of contact between Nahua Christianity and pre-conquest ceremonial rituals. Akin to the intense ceremonialism that preceded the conquest in the form of massive public rituals, Nahua Christianity also revolved around embodied performance. In short, Nahua Christianity consisted of "Collective, public performances conducted by social groups within a calendrically- determined ceremonial period, during which temporary manifestations of a divine presence were effected through the ritualized investment and divestment of persons, images, and spaces with sacred regalia" (364). At the same time, however, the theorist underscores the ways in which that pre-conquest ceremonialism was transformed through the Nahuas' encounters with the Spaniards: "Nahua Christianity was the religion of a colonized people. No matter how closely it might emulate Old World customs, it was a religion of the natives, of Indians, an ethnographic category on whose invention and perpetuation the colonial enterprise depended" (364). She points out that Nahuas "could become Christians, but they could not become Spaniards; their church was separate and unequal perhaps superior in some limited respects to that of the Spaniards but necessarily separate and different" (364).

Most of what modern scholars know about Nahua Christianity comes from the ethnographic descriptions of the same friars who compiled the extensive accounts of the pre-Columbian ceremonies. Significantly, however, no one recorded a description of the full Nahua-Christian festival cycle in a colonial community on the scale of what Sahagzn and Duran did for the pre-Columbian rites. Burkhart explains why: "Colonial practice, being considered arcane or dangerous, called for no such key to decipherment; one need only keep a watchful eye for the resurgence of those ancient idolatries" (364). Yet even as the friars tried to police the boundaries between past and present, pagan and Christian, Burkhart's careful analysis of the Nahuas' post-conquest devotional practices leads to me believe that pre-Columbian performance practices found their way into Nahua Christianity, and remain in Mexican Christianity to the present day. As in the case of the post-conquest military performances discussed in the main part of this essay, embodied behavior often reveals a "hidden transcript" or deeper level of meaning than is accessible to the eye. While I hesitate to say that post-conquest Nahuas adopted both European military theatre and Spanish Christianity for the conscious purpose of subverting these foreign traditions, they nevertheless succeeded in transforming these heritages to suit their colonial situation, as well as to foster their hopes and needs. I agree with Harris that the Nahuas took up the European moros y christianos tradition because it celebrated the concept of reconquest. Whereas the Spaniards had already accomplished this idea by taking back the lands that Moors had previously seized from them, Mexico's indigenous populations appear to have viewed it as a prophecy of the eventual reconquest of Mexico by its defeated peoples. Even today, mock battles between Aztecs, Moors and Christians remain a remarkably sophisticated vehicle for the expression of communal dissent, and for articulating particular grievances. As for Nahua Christianity, I believe that Mexico's conquered peoples also embraced this tradition as a gesture of hope, as a promise of eventual redemption from the Spaniards, and not necessarily from their sins.Like the mock battles, Christian devotional activities were one of the few outlets of expression available to the Nahuas, By all accounts, they performed these devotional activities with a mixture of "merriment and solemnity." I also speculate that the Nahuas relished the individual and collective pride that such devotional practices allowed them to demonstrate to the Spaniards. For example, Motolinma observes that they "adorned their churches very neatly with such ornaments as they had. What they lacked, they supplied with many branches, flowers, reeds and rushes." The conquered peoples' meticulous care for their places of worship suggests determined resilience in the face of adversity. Although they lacked expensive fineries because the Spaniards had pillaged those, they still made the effort to display their intrepid integrity. The Spaniards could take away a lot of things, but not the peoples' self-esteem. Motolinma also writes that the indigenous "lords and nobles, all decked out and dressed in their white shirts and mantles worked with feathers, and with clusters of flowers in their hands, would dance and sing songs in their language,  which the friars have translated for them." We may wonder forever about what words the Nahuas really sang as they celebrated their festivals, but the fact remains that they retained their pre-conquest custom of aregeito, a song-dance movement or activity. They also seem to have realized that devotional practices were a sanctioned way to pass the time, to escape temporarily from the ceaseless labor the Spaniards demanded of them. In this sense, religious performances were also a means of survival, a means of taking a break and getting some rest. Motolinma states that "these songs and dances begin at midnight in many places, and later they also sing a large part of the day without it being much work or burden to them." Well, compared to the slave-like burdens the Nahuas were subject to by colonial administrators and conquistadors, it is hardly surprising that they took pleasure in sanctioned opportunities to perform from time to time.

In closing, embodied performance seems to have been a key to cultural, political, and personal survival in early colonial Mexico. "Performance or else" is one way to think about the Spaniards' impositions, upon the Nahuas, of European military theatre and Christianity. However, the historical and contemporary evidence that I have cited in this essay suggests otherwise. Rather than being a burden, performance became a means of hope, a means of transmitting ostensibly outlawed cultural knowledge, and a means of undying resistance.

Works Cited

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