The Illegal Immigration of Medieval Drama to California

Abstract

century. Yet at Christmastime one can actually experience this phenomenon, amid the palm trees, sunshine, and Santa Clauses on surfboards, in the form of the Pastorela, a shepherds' play spoken and sung in a mixture of English and Spanish (both of the local variety) by community and professional groups. The story the play enacts is the familiar biblical encounter between shepherds and angels on the first Christmas Eve, culminating in the shepherds' visit to the holy Child, and its theological dramaturgy betrays many clear connections even at this distance with the medieval religious drama. To trace these connections we must make our way back to the era of Christopher Columbus and Hernando Cortes, to the site of the so-called Discovery of the New World that terrible collision of cultures and bloody brutalities which five hundred years later we are attempting (with considerable confusion) to commemorate, lament, and understand. The Spanish conquest of Mexico was accomplished not merely through the technology of navigation, firearms, plate armor, and horsepower, but also by the fervor of an evangelical ideology and the mission of converting the heathen. This latter task fell to the Franciscan friars, who came to Mexico as early as 1524. That they brought with them the medieval traditions of European religious drama, including the shepherds' plays, is abundantly clear; the very earliest theatrical records of post-conquest Mexico document a Christmastime performance of Los Pastores for Spanish soldiers garrisoned in what is now Mexico City on 9 January 1526, in the ruins of the great Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, conquered and