CHAPTER 6 INDIGENOUS LITERATURE FROM COLONIAL MESOAMERICA 249INDO-CHRISTIAN LITERATURE
During the Colonial period, a tremendous quantity of textual material was written
for use in the context of the Catholic Church. This includes catechistic materials for
teaching Catholic doctrine to native people and devotional texts, such as prayers
and songs, for native people to use themselves. Some of these works were published.
Indeed, the first text ever published in the Americas was a Nahuatl catechism issued
in 1539.
Most of this Christian literature was authored by priests. However, even those
who were fairly fluent in the native language being used relied extensively on native
assistants and interpreters, to the extent that what we really have are collaborative
texts in which natives and nonnatives participated to varying degrees. In some cases,
native style and imagery are so prevalent that we may consider the texts to be works
of native literature. Excerpts from two very native-style songs are given in Box 6.3.
Christian preaching often drew on knowledge of native culture, sometimes den-
igrating it to argue that Christianity was superior, sometimes using native imagery to
make Christian teachings more appealing. For example, Bernardino de Sahagún
and his Nahua students compare the pious Saint Clare to the native noblewomen de-
scribed in his ethnographic work:Noblewomen highly esteem decorated blouses, quail blouses, coyote fur blouses, various
precious blouses. But God’s beloved Saint Clare just put on an itchy mantle, called a hair
shirt.... They make themselves up, they paint their faces with red powder, they paint their
faces with yellow ochre, they color their teeth with cochineal, the sinful women. But God’s
beloved Saint Clare went about with her face lowered. (Burkhart 1989:139)
Juan Bautista, a Franciscan who, like Sahagún, worked closely with Nahua assis-
tants, encourages devotion to the Virgin Mary by using native-style parallel con-
structions and emphasizing her associations with flowers and gardens in this text for
the Feast of the Conception:And now may you know, oh my precious children, that the flower garden, the flowery en-
closure, our Lord’s place of consolation, his place of repose, is really she, the precious no-
blewoman, Saint Mary, whose festival we celebrate this very day. She is really our advocate,
really our appeaser. It is true that it is she who is our lord God’s flower garden. The way
that in God’s flower garden there lie gathered together many flowers that are very good,
very wondrous, just like that is the noblewoman, Saint Mary. Many things that make one
good, that make one proper lie gathered together with her, and the boons, the gifts, of
the Holy Spirit. And sacred sweetness, sacred fragrance—which means, the signs of good
living—lie gathered together with her. And God placed them with her, they grew with
her, so that people would take her as a mirror, take her as a measuring stick. (Burkhart
2001:15)Another collaborative genre was theater: Native actors performed plays with Chris-
tian subject matter, written or translated by priests and/or their native assistants. These
range from simple Bible stories to three-act extravaganzas based on works of Spain’s