This session focuses on a variety of theatrical practices in the viceroyalties of Peru and New Spain that were used in and alongside efforts to convert indigenous communities. Performance was a vehicle for portraying exemplary figures, such as saints and martyrs of the early Church, instructing the faithful in Christian values. But it was also subject to contingencies—like those of staging and audience, as well as linguistic and cultural difference—that led to the creation of complex and even ambiguous works. The proposed panel addresses the topic of performance through comedia, drama, and opera, taking into account transatlantic appropriation, influence, and translation as a way to understand how Europeans as well as individuals born in the New World adapted these Old World cultural manifestations to explain the tenets of Catholicism, such as sin, the devil, sacrifice, and redemption, to local audiences in their own context and, in some cases, even in their own languages.

The translation of classical and indigenous texts occupied a significant place in the cultural expressions of the colonial Mexican city of knowledge. The Jesuits arrived from Europe already firmly established within intellectual circles as active and skillful translators. Translation served the Society’s internal and external goals in learned humanism, indigenous evangelization, and the production of texts by Jesuits for other Jesuits. In this paper, Stephanie Kirk will examine the Jesuit play, Triunfo de los santos (1578), to understand how the politics of translation between Latin and indigenous languages such as Nahuatl operated in the Society. Although the public would most certainly have included members who did not possess a mastery of Spanish, the play was nonetheless performed entirely in Spanish. The Jesuits must have assumed that the spectacle they offered in the form of the theatrical event would be enough to instruct the faithful in Christian values they espoused through the telling of the story of the martyrs of the early Church. In addition, Kirk will also assess the manner in which we can connect this hierarchy of translation values to the representation of Jesuit masculinity that, she argues, built its foundations upon the triumph of Jesuit humanism over what they had promoted as unlettered cultural systems.

In her presentation, Caroline Egan proposes a comparative examination of portrayals of the devil on the New World stage in two texts marked by different forms of transatlantic appropriation, influence, and direct translation. First, she will discuss Bartolomé de Alva Ixtlilxochitl’s seventeenth-century Nahuatl translation of El animal profeta y dichoso patricida San Julián (which Alva attributed to Lope de Vega). She will then compare this work, focusing specifically on its representation of the diabolical, to the Quechua-language play El pobre más rico by Gabriel Centeno de Osma, a drama that adapts a range of Iberian precursors, most notably Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s El mágico prodigioso, to a colonial Andean context. These texts, both marked by Marian devotion and the transatlantic influence of Golden Age dramatists, also grapple differently with portraying sin, the devil, and redemption in colonial contexts with distinct histories of evangelization.

Since their arrival in the Viceroyalty of Peru in 1567, the Jesuits used performative arts such as dance, music, and theater as a pedagogical resource to achieve a more effective conversion of the natives to Catholicism. The missionary opera San Ignacio de Loyola (attributed to Domenico Zipoli), produced in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay in the 18th century, but soon transferred to the Chiquitos region of present-day Bolivia, is an example of the Jesuits’ elaborate artistic displays that combines evangelization with the promotion of their order in the New World. Catalina Andrango-Walker examines the way in which the Jesuits adapted European opera so as to function in an Andean space to present, in Spanish and in the chiquitano language, the exemplary lives of the patrons of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier. Through performance, the exemplary lives of the saints and their fight against the devil were also used to promote the active participation of the indigenous people in the evangelization process.

This academic exchange seeks to illuminate the importance of performance as a venue for the creation of intellectual networks and religious dissemination, expanding our knowledge about theater, music, dance, poetry, and other types of discourse that were closely connected to each other and that also connected Europeans with indigenous people, who collaborated in these pieces as co-creators and performers. Each panelist will read her paper for 15 minutes leaving time for questions and exchange.