Summary Of Burkhart's Aztecs On Stage

After the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521, the Spanish wanted nothing more than absolute conquest and colonization of the New World. This was no easy task, and the native people that had inhabited the region had their culture and beliefs deeply planted in what was formerly the Aztec Empire. With no common tongue to begin with, the Spanish took part in a long and strenuous process of conquest in this region. As they wanted to implement their own social and economic systems into New Spain, they knew the importance of converting the native people to Christianity. According to Louise Burkhart, author of Aztecs on Stage, by the year 1533 friars from a Spanish religious order called the Franciscan order were in the New World to convert

Marriage and engaging in marital sexual relations were important tenets to teach the Nahua. We see marriage mentioned by Satan in the Final Judgement play in Burkhart’s Aztecs on Stage when speaking to Lucía before she is sweet off to hell “ Get moving, O wicked one! You don’t remember until now that you should have gotten married?…But now you’ll pay for all your wickedness! Run along! Get Moving!”(Burkhart, 77). According to Burkhart, local Nahuas were asked to formalize their “marriages” so to become more a part of the Catholic practice. Characters are introduced in this play called “Penance, Holy Church, and Time” and these are introduced to the native people. They wanted them to be aware of these things even if they did not really understand what they were. The friars could be brutal and have no sympathy for religious plurality; it was their Christian way, or the highway. For example, we can see the language used in the Teaching Catholicism document is clear-cut and you can see the Spanish truly dictate exactly what the natives must do, “This indeed is your obligation for as long as you live. And in order for you to perform your obligation properly, do well what I now tell you”(Anderson and Schroeder, 3). This statement from Fray Bernardino de Sahagún

Direct translation was impossible because of the fact that Aztec language used pictures to display language, not a phonetic alphabet like the Spaniards, this presented a very large problem. Matthew Restall, author of Mesoamerican Voices, touches on the difficulty of linking native life to Christianity, “Many fundamental Christian principles simply had no corresponding native equivalent; Christian concepts such as sin, heaven, her, and the devil had no ready equivalents”(Restall, 175). Interpretation was the name of the game for Nahua theater, each individual could have interpreted lines or characters in different ways, possibly creating links from Nahua life to Christianity (strong and weak links). One example of common interpretation was the congruity between the character Herod (The Three Kings) and the Aztec emperor Motecuhzoma. Here is a quote from Louise Burkhart addressing this possibility, “In New Spain, Herod’s position resembles that of the Aztec emperor Motecuhzoma when Cortés arrived. The Spaniards came from the east, across the Atlantic. They came from a mysterious world outside Mesoamerica, of which the Nahuas knew nothing. Cortés insisted that Motecuhzoma and other native rulers submit to a foreign power, the Spanish king, and to a new god”(Burkhart, 84). This could be a