Consecrated Transactions: Of Marketplaces, Passion Plays and other Nahua-Christian Devotions

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 F. 239v (Vol. 1072, leg. 5, fs 195–295, Ramo Inquisición, Archivo General de la Nación). Huejotzingo is located near San Martín Texmelucan, southern state of Puebla, one of several towns connecting important main commercial and pilgrimage roads (the old Camino Real). Huejotzingo dates to the beginning of the Franciscan campaigns during the first half of the sixteenth century and is located just south of San Martín, some 25 kilometres from Puebla. 2 Archbishop Manuel Rubio y Salinas had already circulated through a 1757 letter a prohibitive decree against the enactment of Passion Plays (‘que comunmente llaman Necuitiles’ [commonly referred to as Nescuitiles]), calling for governors, mayors, priests, choral singers and others involved in Lent activities and liturgical practices to curb and supervise the proliferation of texts and their performance (in Vera, vol. : 6–7). 3 This article is in part inspired by (and joins) a re-evaluation of colonial Nahuatl drama and Nahua religious devotions both in a broader transatlantic and in localized contexts. Although referring to Passion Plays, this article does not intend to examine their literary historical value, a topic I explore elsewhere. My interest lies in examining the circulation of devotional material production among Nahuas and the role marketplaces played in such transactional dynamics. If the reader is interested in the history of Nahua/Nahuatl Christian theater, see Fernando Horcasitas's two volumes of Teatro Nahuatl (now republished by UNAM), Nahuatl Drama Series (the first volume is available and the other three are forthcoming, University of Oklahoma Press) – a collection of translations and analyses of Nahuatl drama in which I participate, edited by Louise Burkhart, Barry Sell, and Elizabeth Wright, Louise Burkhart's Holy Wednesday: A Nahua Drama from Early Colonial Mexico (), to date the most thorough study of a Nahuatl play, and María Sten (coord.) and Óscar A. García and Alejandro Ortiz Bullé–Gouri's El teatro franciscano en la Nueva España: Fuentes y ensayos para el estudio del teatro de evangelización en el siglo XVI (2000), an excellent bibliographical source and compilation of older and newer studies on drama of evangelization. On eighteenth-century religious theatre of presumed earlier Nahua authorship, see Juan Leyva's La Pasión de Ozumba, a compact and well-researched study plus edition of one of two Ozumba Passion Plays confiscated by the Inquisition in 1768. Useful studies, among others, are Othón Arróniz's Teatro de evangelización en la Nueva España () and Jerry Williams's El teatro del México colonial: Época misionera (1992). 4 In examining the nexus between power and social control, Michel Foucault saw the administration of social activity as a serializing and regulatory reproduction of monastic life affecting schools, workshops and hospitals but casting a ‘panoptic’ eye on the general construction of social space where the ‘body’ (physical, figurative) appears as both productive and subjected (: 26, 149). The marketplace as a social space that regulates and frees from regulation represents, then, a constant challenge to the panopticon, to the need to adjust types of assembly to the demands of a dominant political machinery. 5 196r. Letters, decrees and the confiscated plays appear in folios 195–294r of the Inquisition Archive, vol. 1072. A shortened version of this investigation appeared published as ‘Las representaciones teatrales de la Pasión’, Boletín del Archivo General de la Nación (: 332–356). The volume in question of Fondo Inquisición from which the latter was extracted in 1182. Volume 1072 is the source of this study. The published 1934 palaeography includes one of Pontius Pilate's dictates after the Jews condemned Jesus, but does not offer transcriptions of full-length confiscated passion plays that appear at the end of the 1768 corpus I identified in vol. 1072. Until recently, Fernando Horcasitas (), Louise Burkhart () and others relied on the Boletín's 1934 publication for analysis (1974: 425–430). Prior to Juan Leyva's publication and study of one of the two Ozumba plays (2001), the only reference I have found to vol. 1072 appears in Serge Gruzinski , 175n, although there is no indication that he had visual access to the actual confiscated plays. The title of this play resembles more closely the titles of two other confiscated Passion Plays sewn within vol. 1072, one of two Ozumba plays and the Amecameca, ‘Passion Domini Nostri JesuChristi,’ although it could be one of the other confiscated cuadernos mentioned in the investigation no longer extant in this volume. Avendaño may have also misspelled the tile in his letter. All references to the extant confiscated plays (four in total) and to the Inquisition investigation come from this volume. All of these Passion Plays relate closely to the Nahuatl Tepalcingo ‘Dominica pazio de Ramos’ (‘La Pasión del Domingo de Ramos’) that Horcasitas published in Teatro Nahuatl (1974: 337–419); and to the Passion of Axochiapan located at Tulane University, still unpublished and untranslated. Horcasitas was preparing palaeography and a translation of this Passion before his death, a study that was to be complemented by case studies based on Lenten traditions still preserved in Amecameca, Tlayacapan, Mazatepec, Yecapixtla, Atlatlauhca, Axochiapan and in other towns. He provides a comparison of the dramatis personae between the Axochiapan and Tepalcingo Passions and of the first two paragraphs in the plays (421–423). For discussions of the Tepalcingo play and other Nahuatl religious plays in general See James Lockhart (: 409, 401–410), Burkhart (), and Richard Trexler's introduction to Reliving Golgotha: The Passion Play of Iztapalapa (2003). Raul Macuil Martínez is in the process of translating into Spanish a Nahuatl Passion Play from the region of Tlaxcala (personal communication). 6 ‘[Que] notifique, intime y haga saber de nuestra orden a todas y cualesquiera personas que intervengan en semejantes actos se abstengan de su representación pública o pribadamente, so pena de excomunión mayor la sentencia ipso facto, incurrenda y de doscientos pesos aplicados para gastos del dicho Santo Oficio y de otras penas a vuestro arbitrio, a que procederemos a imponerles en caso de contravención, como a contumaces y rebeldes’ ([That] he should notify, explain and make public our decree to all of those who are involved in such acts [of performing Passion Plays] so that they abstain from public and private enactments, or they will risk a sentence of ex-communion ipso facto, and a penalty of two hundred pesos to be used for Holy Office expenses and of other punishments according to [Victoria's] judgement, after which we will declare those who do not follow our orders contumacious and insurgents) (p. 199). It appears from the auto and the Huejotzingo interrogations that ownership of plays and subsequent enactments could be private (family owned) and public (communal) manifestations of devotion, echoing family-calpulli-altepetl type organizations. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the original Spanish are the author's own. 7 The investigation launched by Victoria's complaint was reviewed by the Inquisitors Julián de Amestoy, Nicolás Abad and Cristóbal Fierro, who echoed Victoria's concerns. In his complaint Victoria cited earlier edicts against representaciones made by the Archbishop Manuel Rubio y Salinas (1703–65), who travelled widely through the region and, in his attempt to promote further secularization and to control idolatry, decreed the prohibition of representations. The second and definitive wave of condemnation made use of Victoria's 1768 complaint and came through Archbishop Francisco Antonio Lorenzana in 1769. See Othon Arroniz (1979: 100–201), Leyva (: 9–10) and Gruzinski (: 175–177) for discussions of this incident and citations of Rubio Salinas and Lorenzana's decrees. 8 ‘¡O meson de las ofensas, / o paradero del vicio, / en el mundo de la carne / para el diablo baratillo!’ Diccionario de Autoridades I: . 9 Pages 153–154, 160. Bakhtin's discussion of language and the marketplace opposes, like so much of his analysis of Rabelais's work does, official and popular practices. For an analysis of language and the marketplace, see chapter 2 on ‘The language of the marketplace in Rabelais’ (145–195). 10 Matt. 21:1213; Mk. 11:15; Lu. 19:45. 11 Acts 8:9–24. 12 Preoccupations of this sort are evident even today as tensions arise when government and church officials attempt to curb commercial activity around shrines and devotional locations in Mexico City, where much trade occurs related to pious iconography. Places that come to mind are El tepito (from Nahuatl tepito, a 37–square-block district whose commercial hub predated the Spaniards), with a large, mazy and always crowded popular marketplace located near the Zócalo or main plaza starting just behind the Metropolitan Cathedral and extending several blocks to reach one of the main urban arteries. This neighbourhood is characterized by open and clandestine trade practices considered illegal by the state and intricately woven into the fabric of the community. (The Egyptian bazaar is transplanted, not without incongruity, to El Tepito in Midaq Alley [1995, ‘El callejón de los Milagros’], a film version that takes place in this poor district where people struggle to overcome economic and social limitations, based on the Egyptian Naguib Mahfouz's novel.) Another location is the grounds around the Basilica of Guadalupe, where much trade in devotional objects, food and several other trinkets congregates. Néstor García Canclini has been hailed (and criticized) for his often celebratory look at this kind of informal trade, a dynamics of production (and consumption) that, in one of his most recent opinions, can be interpreted as being ‘good for thinking’. One of his central ideas – that assessing popular cultures and their unequal appropriation of cultural capital requires alternative approaches – has been, however, pivotal in promoting better understanding of the struggles for autonomy of poor and indigenous communities against hegemonic sectors. See his early work Las culturas populares en el capitalismo (1982), Culturas híbridas: como entrar y salir de la modernidad (1990), and Consumidores y ciudadanos: conflictos multiculturales de la globalización (). For a rounded view of Canclini's contributions, see George Yúdice's introduction to the latter's English translation, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts (2001). 13 The assumption here is that, even though criollos, mestizos, blacks and Spaniards invited the (trans)formation of markets catering to their needs, these were more prominent in or near urban centres. Towns such as Ozumba, Amecameca, Tenango, and others saw their tianguiz accommodate to new demands and ethnic and commercial movement in different degrees. The market Avendaño visited may well have been a mixed space. 14 Molina 113r. Besides tianguiz other hispanicized versions of the word appear in other chronicles. 15 ‘Que los tianguis no se hagan en domingo ni en otras fiestas solennes y que en cada pueblo se procure aya un hospital çerca de la iglesia. – Los mercados y tiangues que los yndios usan por guardar su antigua costumbre suelen caer muchas vezes en los dias sanctos del domingo y otras fiestas solennes, por lo cual los yndios de los pueblos comarcanos a donde el tianguez se haze suelen desamparar sus pueblos aunque aya monasterio de religiosos y sacerdotes en ellos, y dexan de oyr missa y los sermones que se predican por yr al tianguez a vender o comprar sus cosillas; lo qual es ofensa de Nuestro Señor y un perjuysio manifiesto de sus ánimas’ (in Llaguno ). 16 The study of place has in the past 15 years resulted in a variety of emphases and approaches, many of which call attention to the idea that place evokes much more than just spatial and temporal locations. It is also a religious, poetic, aesthetic, or sociopolitical and economic strategy invested with shifting meanings about identity and community construction. As Sharon Zukin explains, even though the beginning of the modern market society set up an opposition between market and place, both have been historically interwoven: At its origins, a market was both a literal place and a symbolic threshold, a ‘socially constructed space’ and a ‘culturally inscribed limit’ that nonetheless involved a crossing of boundaries by long-distance trade and socially marginal traders’ (1991: 6). Unlike commodities in general, devotions were not intended or produced for the exclusive purpose of exchange, although they were expected (and intended) to be disseminated. For studies of place and the social itinerancy of commodities (sacred and not), see Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga's The anthropology of space and place: Locating culture (2003), Zukin's Landscapes of power: from Detroit to World Disney (), and Arjun Appadurai's The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective (1986), among others. 17 Lockhart explains that along with its tlatoani (dynastic ruler) and its specific divinity, the central market was the one to undergo the least transformation, at least until the mid-sixteenth century when information about markets dwindled substantively from official records (1992: 185). A distinction is still in order as regards the use of such terms as ‘market’ or ‘marketplace’ when discussing colonial Mexico. Markets played a central role in pre-conquest Mexican societies and a shift to a Christian calendrical system affected more than just Nahuas’ relationship to trade and time. As Hassig explains, marketing patterns in pre-conquest and colonial times had as much to do with periodicity as they did with tributes, deity or saint cycles, and ritual observances (2001: 150). Although markets in pre-conquest and at various colonial times differed variously, depending also on whether they were metropolitan or not, the assumption still holds that they remained periodic social spaces of redistribution of goods whose symbolic and economic values were intimately related to the household and the community. A distinction must be drawn, therefore, between markets of capitalist economies and markets determined not by economic but by socio-ceremonial relationships. This view does not assume that Nahuas had no interest in profit or profit-oriented production and trade. It promotes the idea that an emphasis was placed on the economics of symbolic rather than capitalist value. For a lengthy, though under-researched, history of Mexican marketplaces, see David Kaplan's dissertation ‘The Mexican Marketplace in Historical Perspective’ (). His argument that pre-conquest marketplaces were periodic spaces of convergence to redistribute goods in the context of social kinship relationships is useful, although his claim that colonial equivalents were markedly different is vaguely evidenced. Research conducted since the publication of Charles Gibson's The Aztecs under Spanish rule: A history of the Indians of the Valley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (1964) reveals a more complex array of continuities and discontinuities that deserve further scrutiny. 18 The idea of cultural capital as it is used here derives from social sciences that see human activity as generative and multifunctional, distancing interpretation from antinomies that generally see this activity as the result of incompatible binaries – ‘determinism and freedom, conditioning and creativity, consciousness and the unconscious, or the individual and society,’ etc. (Bourdieu, : 55). This apparent infinitude of human actions restores, as Michel de Certeau has argued, popular culture's identity as mobile and resistant to ‘dominant panoptical procedures’ (: 10, 13); and reminds us that people's ‘ways of operating’ are also the means by which cultural capital is reappropriated and given practical meaning in everyday life (: xiv–xv). 19 As Pierre Bourdieu indicates, habitus is a product of history in a cognitive and experiential sense whose structures result in individual and collective practices, behaviour and beliefs, inscribed in bodies (human, institutional). Once internalized, this system generates and organizes social practices and representations, becoming relatively autonomous – as ‘embodied history’, that is, as accumulated (cultural) capital with the ability to provide continuity and reactivation of those same practices (1990: 53–58). I am not here concerned with how habitus itself originates, a question better suited for other fora, but with its social and economic implications within a given community. 20 Lockhart believes that during the eighteenth century the equivalents of ‘pochteca’ (a preconquest Nahuatl designation of merchant) had waned, although ‘Spanish sources point in the direction of a continuing or even increasing role of Indians in the lower levels of interregional trade’ (1992: 196). This would suggest that by the eighteenth century, after Nahuas had recovered somewhat their demographic health, the pochteca heritage had dissolved, making many of its trade practices available to the general population regardless of social rank. See discussion on ‘Markets, traders, and non-agricultural occupations’ (185–198), and Charles Gibson's section on production and exchange (1964: 335–367). 21 These are Nahua pre-conquest sociopolitical organizations that survived after the Spanish invasion and were preserved alongside the implementation of New Spanish political orders. They referred etymologically to territorial unities (‘in alt, in teptl’, the water[s] the mountain[s]) but designated a more complex sociopolitical organization of conglomerate or subordinate city-states (Lockhart, : 14). Tlaxilacalli was another term that resembled calpulli (neighbourhood, estancia or barrio). Under the supervision of a tlatoani (Nahua dynastic ruler, pl. tlatoque) calpulli were subdivisions of altepetl and were made up of family units. The calpulli was subordinated to the larger Spanish cabecera (sometimes called also señoríos), which continued to be ruled by a tlatoani (Gibson: 34–66; Lockhart: 14–16). 22 These Franciscans are presumably Joan de Tecto, Joan de Ayora, and Pedro de Gante. Muñoz Camargo's description of Nahua reaction to preaching in the markets is worth quoting at length: ‘Y cuando predicaban estas cosas, decían los señores y caciques: “Qué han estos pobres miserables? Mirad si tienen hambre y, si han menester algo, dadles de comer”’ (When they preached these things, the lord chiefs said: “And what is the matter with these miserable beggars? Check whether they are hungry and, if they want something, feed them”’) (: 172). Other Indian nobles and chiefs identified those foreign gestures simply as signs of sickness or madness: ‘Estos hombres deben de ser enfermos o están locos, dejadlos vocear a los miserables, que tomádoles ha su mal de locura, que deben de estar locos. Dejádlos estar, pasen su enfermedad como pudieren … [y] que pasen su enfermedad como pudieren … sin ninguna duda es mal grande el que deben de tener, porque son hombres sin sentido, pues no buscan placer ni contento, sino tristeza y soledad’ (These poor men must be sick or mad. Let them rave, such poor people with their madness, that a madness has got hold of them … and let them deal with their sickness however they may … without a doubt their sickness is great, because they lack all sense, since they live not in pleasure or contentment but in solitude and sadness) (173). 23 Hernán Cortés, Cartas de relación (: 232–238). 24 ‘Y lo tomaron, y con pregón público que manifestaba su delito le hicieron llevar por aquel grand mercado y allí le pudieron al pie de uno como teatro que est[á] en medio del dicho mercado. Y encima del teatro subió el pregonero y en altas voces tornó a decir el delito de aquél, y viéndolo todos, le dieron con unas porras en la cabeza hasta que lo mataron’ (1993: 186). 25 ‘y en aquellos días en que teníamos tan arrinconados los indios acabóse de hacer (‘a trabuco,’ a catapult) y llevase a la plaza del mercado para lo asentar en uno como teatro que está en medio della fecho de cal y canto, cuadrado, de altura de dos estados y medio y de isquina habrá treinta pasos, el cual tenían ellos para cuando hacían algunas fiestas y juegos, que los representadores dellos se ponían allí porque toda la gente del mercado y los que estaban en bajo y encima de los portales pudieses ver lo que se hacía’ (p. 417). Cortés's description is discussed briefly by Horcasitas (1974: 102). 26 1985: 163. 27 Dura´n adds that tianquiztli were gentle and appealing places to the Mexican nation and that they were so popular, especially on fair days, that many people flocked just to be there (1995, I: 183). Chapter XX on tianquiztli and slaves and chapter XXI on dance deities and dance schools (cuicacalli, from cuica, to sing, and calli, house) can be read as complimentary, since the momoztli or platforms located in the middle or adjacent to markets were to a good extent used as public castigatory stages and also as altars for celebrations by trained dancers and singers honouring specific deities. One such deity oversaw exclusively the market and its celebrations (p. 182). Sahagún calls them altars or stages, made of stone, wood or cane (1979: 136, 937; , II: 110; and III: 12). What Cortés saw were, in fact, momoztli Durán described as ‘humilladeros de picotas’ (pillory or gibbet, Diccionario de Autoridades III: 260) and Sahagún as public altars located throughout roads, street corners and marketplaces. Samuel Edgerton sees in colonial momoztli the site of a ‘Renaissance-style illusionism’ and ‘Western realism’ indicative of a ‘remarkable and indivisible Native-European symbiosis that has persisted ever since’ (: 161). Although I identify, indeed, processes of transculturation, often they are not symbiotic, especially since Christianization did not always translate into beneficial changes for Nahuas, and the Church, in turn, persecuted constantly Christian behaviour considered a departure from orthodoxy. 28 The two examples examined in these pages deal with the bequeathing of ‘spiritual’ goods, which include not only objects such as hangings, altarpieces, churches and mantles but also the very sense of identity and belonging associated with a particular devotional history. 29 Part of a Christian-Nahua dramatic tradition known in Nahuatl since the sixteenth century as neixcuitilli, its textual and dramatic production became an important part of many Nahua Christianities. I refer here to manifestations of Nahua-Christian dramatic forms as neixcuitilli, although other Nahuatl terms such as machiotl, machiotlatolli or tlamahuiçolli (or combinations of these) have appeared also as designations of plays. Neixcuitilli was a frequent enough appellation used by Nahuas, Spaniards or criollos when titling or referring to the dramas. Although possible definitions – echoed or reproduced by Nahua informants and scribes or by friars such as Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Fray Andrés de Olmos and Fray Alonso de Molina – were modelled on what they felt were close equivalents, the results, that is, the neixcuitilli, became distinct Nahua–Christian dramatic productions, with analysable performative and sociopolitical locations that acknowledge a Spanish influence as well as Nahua reconfigurations of it. According to Molina, neixcuitilli meant ‘dechado, o exemplo [model or example]’ (: 66r), and designated presumably moral exemplary dramatic forms, perhaps a specific type of figurative model or practice. The word derives from the verb ixcuitia, a verb that may, depending on its agentive form, emphasize giving to, or receiving from, others a (good, moral) example. See Burkhart (: 46–48 and : 93–99) for more detailed discussions of neixcuitilli and tlamahuizolli. 30 Como Vuestra Caridad sabe, las nuevas vinieron a esta tierra antes de cuaresma pocos días, y los tlaxcaltecas quisieron primer ver los que los españoles y los mexicanos hacían, y visto que hicieron y representaron la Conquista de Rodas, ellos determinaron de representar la conquista de Jerusalén, el cual pronóstico cumpla dios en nuestros días (As Your Highness knows, the news came to these parts [Tlaxcala] just before Lent, and the Tlaxcallans wanted to see first what the Spaniards and Mexicans would do, and once they saw that they represented the Conquest of Rhodes, they decided to represent the Conquest of Jerusalem, an event I hope to see accomplished in our time) (1985: 203). Motolinia's millenarian hopes are evident in this last comment, where he expresses hope for the reconquest of the holy city as a catalyst for Christ's second coming. See John Phelan's The Millennial Kingdom of the Franciscans in the New World () and Georges Baudot's Utopie et histoire au Mexique: les premiers chroniqueurs de la civilisation mexicaine (1520–1569) () for further discussions of Franciscan millenarianism. 31 For discussions of this epic drama see Horcasitas (: 505–509), Orróniz (1979, 63–70), Jerry Williams (: 6–70), and Carmen Corona's more recent article dealing with the latter theme ‘El auto La Conquista de Jerusalén: Hernán Cortés y la transgression de la figura’ (In El teatro franciscano en la Nueva España : 291–297). 32 The martyrdom of the three children of Tlaxcala in the late 1520s is well known, memorialized today in the church of the Virgin of Ocotlan, where posters and cards can be bought telling of their sacrifice. Like the tale of Juan Diego and the apparition of the Virgen of Guadalupe, this story acquired popularity during the seventeenth century only to see it grow with time. What seems to have been a report of their death, turned into a chapter in , was later unshelved and translated into Nahuatl by Fray Juan Bautista to be published in1606 in a Sermonario. The story was again translated, this time back into Spanish, in 1791, and later re-edited in 1856 by Vicente García Torres (Baudot, : 44–45). In subsequent renditions, this is the text known today. The three youths were beatified as martyrs by Pope John Paul II in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City on 6 May 1990. 33 Pulque was a drink made of the maguey cactus and was popular, although condemned if drunk in excess, in Nahua communities. Tezcatzoncatl was apparently a more salient pulque god, having more to do with the moral and punitive consequences of drinking (Sahagún, , I: 24, 51). Durán mentions a ‘Dios de los mercados y ferias’ (god of markets and fairs) that was often placed on top of momoztli – the stages described by Sahagún and Cortés (: II, 182). According to Dura´n, this god promised bad times to those that did not attend the markets, determining even the distance people ought to travel to honour him or her according to established laws. 34 Diccionario de Autoridades: 545. 35 Concern over the proliferation of Indian cofradías and hermandades was articulated in terms of their poor financial administrations, their bad influence on Christian devotions and temporal commodities, or both (Gruzinski, 1993: 175–177). A letter written in 1773 complained to the Archbishop of Mexico of mayordomo disorderly administrations and illegal cofradías, resulting eventually in a 1789 inquiry designed to determine the number, legal history and extension of brotherhoods. This report was not made available to the secular authorities by the Mexican Archbishop, however, until 1794, given ecclesiastical reticence to the continuous intrusion of civil administrations on the evolution of devotions (176). 36 The encomienda – the first of several economic institutions founded by Spaniards to provide its imperial and colonial designs with a forced seasonal labour service (which later became a tribute) – had detrimental economic, political and social consequences for the indigenous population. Estancias represented a similar system enacted to respond to the needs of Spaniards who arrived after the encomiendas had been assigned. Although less abusive, repartimientos had a given number of Indians ‘distributed’ to a person for a period of time. This system followed a rational grid of distribution focused on the economic needs of Spaniards. 37 Research related to a sociology of this kind of transitory migration is scarce, although a good deal of documentary material has been published, making available legal testimonies of its economic, social and political dynamics. 38 Consulta del comisario de Chalco Consulta del comisario de Chalco sobre las representaciones theatrales de la pasión y muerte de nuestro redemptor. Fondo Inquisición 1768–70 Archivo General de la Nación . Vol. 1072, leg. 5, fs 195-295 [Google Scholar]…, fs 239v, 242. 39 Victoria refers to these people as ‘los que llaman en los pueblos gente de razón [quienes] tomaron a su cargo representar la Pasión y, traduciéndola del idioma mexicano en nuestro castellano, la representan en algunos pueblos’ (those who the townsfolk call people of reason who took it in their charge to represent the Passion and, translating it from the Mexican language into Spanish, enact it in some towns…) (Consulta del comisario de Chalco: 195r–195v). 40 Those familiar with the early modern Spanish Passion by Lucas Fernández (1474–1542), El auto de la Pasión, will immediately recognize the dramatic format evoked by Gaona's colloquies. Believed to have had initially a liturgical purpose, this dialogue between Peter and St Dionysius that also includes the participation of Jeremiah, Matthew and the three Maries is in fact an elegiac narrative poem of Christ's martyrdom seen from different perspectives. The anachronism of the characters is mitigated by their attention to the different stages of suffering and revelation Christ's Passion dramatized. Although it is expected that poems such as this made the transatlantic journey in print or in the minds of friars, there were dramatic models more suitable to the biblical narrative than Fernandez's poem. Two in particular correspond to elements in the Chalco-Amecameca collection that invite further scrutiny, Alonso de Campo's ‘Auto de la Pasión’ (c.1481–83) and el Comendador Roman's ‘Coplas de la Pasión’ (c.1490). 41 (‘Because since then [the time when Torquemada introduced/instituted the representations of Nahuatl ‘exemplos’ on Sundays] they are enacted and used in many parts by other friars, either by writing new ones or using one of the many I myself have written; or using others written with much elegance and erudition by my Theology teacher Fray Juan Bautista’). Richard Trexler's study of the modern Passion of Ixtapalapa interprets this passage as suggesting that Gamboa himself instituted representations on Sunday evenings after the sermon (2003: 38). Although Torquemada's text indicates that Gamboa ordered a stage of the Passion to be represented during the sermon (‘en el discurso del sermon, que se predica’ [‘during the sermon preached’]), later the text suggests that it was during Gamboa's life time that such representations were instituted, not necessarily by Gamboa himself (‘en su tiempo se instituyeron vnas Representaciones de exemplos’), gathering many native and Spanish spectators (, III: 581).