CHAPTER 6 INDIGENOUS LITERATURE FROM COLONIAL MESOAMERICA 251the things of youth, who go about speaking of and thinking of their pleasures? For they
just say, “when we are old men we will stop, we will engage in spiritual activities.” (Sell and
Burkhart 2004:275)Those who do live proper lives receive onstage assurance that the Virgin Mary
will indeed help them after they die:SAINTMARY: You, Jesus Christ, my beloved honored only child, I cast myself down before
you on account of your creatures who are suffering in the place where people are puri-
fied by fire, purgatory. O my beloved honored child, have pity on them, show them mercy.
See my weeping and tears and sorrow, for while they still lived on earth, O my beloved hon-
ored child, they never forgot you, they always followed you for at the time they remem-
bered it was on account of your suffering that you saved them.
JESUSCHRIST: O maiden eternal, O my beloved mother, do not cry for your servants
because while they still lived on earth they always trusted in me, relied on me. They will
be defended, helped and saved with my protection, and they recognized my beloved Fa-
ther, God. When they cry out to me I will hear what they say, their prayers when their
hearts are anguished, when they are unwise and in great pain and affliction. As for me, I
will console them, make them famous, honor and exalt them. They will live forever, con-
tent, and I will reveal to them my bliss [glory].(Sell and Burkhart 2004:179–181)Pre-Columbian religious rituals were highly dramatic, with costumes and role-
playing, but were not “theater” in the sense of a staged reality with a written script and
“actors,” as opposed to a sacred, ritual reality with impersonators who were thought
actually to become the deities they represented. Thus, colonial religious theater, a hy-
brid product of colonial evangelization and native performance traditions, was the
first true theater in the Americas. Colonial scripts are limited in number, far out-
weighed by sermons, but give precious insight into a mode of religious performance
much valued in native communities. That some of the scripts we have are eighteenth-
century copies of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century compositions shows that some
plays were passed along over many generations.CIVIL OR NOTARIAL LITERATURE
The office of scribe or notary was a standard part of native town government through-
out the Colonial period. The records of local and municipal affairs kept by these
scribes and other literate individuals comprise a corpus of documents in native lan-
guages that provide many details about daily life in the colonial community. These
texts include wills, records of town meetings, records of land grants, petitions and let-
ters, and other genres, even such things as a note from 1684 that a Mixtec man left
on his wife’s body after he murdered her. The note accused her of having an affair
with the sacristan of the town’s church (Terraciano 1998). The wealth of information
in these texts is best demonstrated by showing some examples. In Box 5.2 of the pre-
vious chapter we presented one particularly detailed land grant document. A few
other genres are excerpted next.
Cochineal is a type of cactus-dwelling insect that Mesoamericans crushed to make
a red dye. In the Colonial period, Europeans sought this dye for paints and cosmetics,