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Adopted Pedagogies: Nahua Incorporation of European Music and Theater in Colonial Mexico City

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2015

Jonathan Truitt
Jonathan Truitt*
Affiliation:
Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, Michigan
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In 1519 Spanish conquistadors arrived on the shores of Mesoamerica under the leadership of Hernando Cortés. Following the defeat of Mexico-Tenochtidan, the Aztec capital, Cortés requested that members of the Franciscan order be sent from Spain to lead the conversion effort. In 1523 the first three Franciscans arrived, among them fray Pedro de Gante. One year later another 12 Franciscans made the journey. They established themselves in the southeastern portion of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and under their direction Nahua laborers built the principal Franciscan religious compound, San Francisco, and the first indigenous chapel in New Spain, San Josef de los Naturales. Together this friary and chapel served as the main point of interaction for Franciscan conversion efforts within the altepetl, ethnic state, of Mexico-Tenochtidan. In the courtyard of San Francisco, next to the indigenous chapel, fray Pedro established an indigenous school aimed at the indoctrination of the Nahua peoples of Mexico-Tenochtitlan and other outlying altepetl. Although its students were primarily members of indigenous nobility, other promising Nahuas received an education there as well.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 66 , Issue 3 , January 2010 , pp. 311 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2010

References

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27. Newberry Library Ayer Collection (NL AC), MS 1481 Β (3) 1.

28. Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris (BNP), Fondo Mexicains (FM) 112.

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40. AGN, Bienes Nacionales, vol. 387, e. 1, fs. 15. Special thanks to James Lockhart and Susan Schroeder for providing input and assistance on both this document and others.

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42. For more information on the Códice Valdés, see Cruz, “De cómo una letra.”

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44. Ibid.

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57. Only one cue in the Sacrifice of Isaac called for a named song, specifically, the Misericordia. Sell, and Burkhart, Nahuatl Theater Volume 1, p. 159.Google Scholar

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64. Ibid.

65. Ibid. The Iztapalapa passion play is performed every year on Good Friday and is quite possibly the largest performance of the Passion İn Mexico. Other Passion plays are enacted in small towns throughout the Mexican countryside as well. For information on the Iztapalapa Passion play, see Trexler, Richard C. Reliving Golgotha: The Passion Play of Iztapalapa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).Google Scholar

66. Burkhart, “Pageantry”; and Sell, and Burkhart, Nahuatl Theater Volume 4.Google Scholar

67. Turrent, La conquista, p. 153.Google Scholar