In Mexico, Christmas is the best season of the year.
With the fiesta-loving, lively nature that sets us
apart, we Mexicans have styled this religious
celebration very much in our own fashion. So much so
that perhaps no where else in the world do so many
traditions exist to celebrate it, from asking for
room at the inn, to remembering the road Mary and
Joseph took to Bethlehem, to piñatas, those big
star-shaped clay and cardboard figures that are
smashed with heavy sticks to release their sweets
and seasonal fruits as gifts to the children…
And the “pastorelas”! There is
no Christmas without these pastoral dramas of the
Nativity. Whether in remote towns or in the big
Mexican cities, pastorelas set the
stage for the whole of December and leave us,
through their playful language and funny situations,
the most important message of the season: Good
always overcomes Evil.
Pastorelas are plays that recreate the
biblical passage where the shepherds follow the Star
of Bethlehem to find the Christ Child. In order to
reach the birth place of the Redeemer, they have to
experience a series of changes in fortune and
confront the Devil, who will do everything possible
to prevent them from completing their mission. It is
at that moment that the Archangel Michael
intervenes to defend the shepherds on their
journey.
Well, that's the general idea of the pastorelas.
They are very different today; the fact is, they
were already very different when they were first
presented hundreds of years ago, being one of
Mexico's oldest traditions. Imagine that you are
back when the Spaniards reached the New World and
began to colonize its inhabitants, instructing them
in the Catholic fait
In Tenochtitlan, the great capital of the ancient
Mexicans or Mexica, people entertained themselves
with an art form that combined song, theater and
dance.
Performances were greatly enjoyed in the plazas and
open spaces, where the actors tended to make jokes,
pretending they were drunk, sang and gave
recitations for the townspeople, who thundered their
applause.
For the Mexica, the play was not just a form of
entertainment, but a way to communicate with their
gods, as well. Before the altars, in the smoke of
the aromatic copal, the priests acted out battles,
played warriors at victory and in their defeat. This
is how they informed the deities who ruled their
days, simultaneously handing down their history to
the entire people.
The play was so important for the Mexica that they
had professional singers, actors, dancers and
buffoons; poets and orators, as well as memorization
experts: remember that the Mexica had no alphabet,
just a picture-based type of writing that
represented objects or sounds. There were also
people who produced the ceremonial vestments,
jewels, plumed feathers of exotic birds, and
fabrics, something quite similar to what we would
call today, an innovative clothing designer.
When the Spanish conquered Tenochtitlan in 1521,
these specialists ended up with no work and no
stage. This situation actually lasted for a very
short time, however, because the Franciscan monks
who arrived in the New World between 1523 and 1524
quickly became aware of the Mexicas´ artistic
sensitivity and took advantage of it to lay a bridge
between two cultures that had nothing in common.
Already in Italy and Spain, the Franciscans had
observed the advantages they reaped by teaching the
faith this way. Only a couple of centuries before,
the Iberian Peninsula had seen the initial
representation of “autos” , that is, acts or actions
inspired by the most important biblical passages or
by the lives of saints.
And they were quite successful.
As a result, it was completely natural for the
Franciscans, in order to evangelize the indigenous
peoples en masse, to explain the most important
passages of Christ’s life graphically, through a
play for example.
The pastorela tradition is said to have begun
in a little town called Acolman, a short distance
from the Teotihuacan pyramids, where the Franciscans
arrived in 1528.
Other versions say that Cuernavaca, i n the State of
Morelos, was the birth place of this deep-rooted
tradition. Whether Acolman, or Morelos, the fact
is that the force behind them lay in the
Franciscans, and the artistic ability in the
indigenous people.
Another truism is that Acolman is the origin of
another beautiful Mexican custom. It was here that
Fray Pedro de Gante gathered a group of natives for
the singing of hymns in celebration of Christmas, an
event that would later turn into "asking for room
at the inn".
With activities like this, the Franciscans earned
the trust of the Acolman inhabitants and introduced
them to religious activities. In the beginning, they
accepted the indigenous people´s belief that the
theatrical presentations of biblical scenes had a
certain “power of purification”, and consequently ,
flowers and songs were included “to keep evil
spirits away”.
Within a very short time, the indigenous people took
over the entire production of the pastorelas
. They were the actors and musicians; they produced
the sets and made the costumes... They are even
thought to have translated or written the texts
to/in Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica, something
fundamental to the evangelizing mission of the
stagings.
The indigenous people were much taken by the story
of the shepherds who followed a shining star,
perhaps because they identified it with their own
legend in which a great comet announced the end of
one empire and the birth of a new one, but above
all, because when they rendered “adoration” to the
Christ Child, the actors playing the shepherds
introduced their own prehispanic dances that
concluded in a mitote with leaps of joy
The first formal record of the pastorela we
know of dates from 1536. It is called “El Auto de
Adoración de los Reyes Magos’ (The Adoration of the
Three Kings). Written in Nahuatl, dancing and music
were added to it. It had thirteen actors: the Baby
Jesus, the Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph, The Three
Kings, their messenger, an angel, King Herod, his
chief steward, and three Jewish priests.
As you might imagine, the shepherds, secondary
characters in the bible story, in this setting where
they danced and kibbitzed about, soon became the
main actors. Each shepherd took on a personality,
like Gila, the group leader, and Bato or
Bartholomew, the ignorant, scatter-brained fellow
who serves to explain the religious message to the
public.
The time arrived when owing to its major element of
jocularity and even mischief-making, the
pastorela was no longer allowed in the churches,
not even in the atriums, and it had to take to the
streets. Freed of restraints, it acquired the
language of the common folk, spontaneous situations,
and a certain element of irony in connection with
the government of New Spain.
These “irreverent stances" did not please the Holy
Inquisition, an iron-handed institution that checked
up on the proper behaviour of Catholics in the
Spanish territories, and so it was that they were
declared irreligious and their staging prohibited.
Then, in the 19th century, Mexicans, particularly
those living in the country’s capital, entertained
an immoderate admiration for all things foreign,
mainly from France. As a consequence, the
pastorelas were relegated to towns and
settlements far from this international influence.
Mexican intellectuals would not take long to rescue
them from hiding however, to make them shine now not
in the atriums or public plazas, but in Mexico’s
brightest theater.
"La noche más venturosa”, written in 1821 by José
Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi, marks this new epoch
for the pastorela and casts it solidly among
the most famous, deep-rooted traditions of Mexico.
Today, pastorelas are very different. Very
rarely do the personages of Jesus, Mary or The three
Kings appear in them. The shepherds may be a band of
street urchins or rural workers from the North, and
there is a huge variety of settings; besides the
jocular language, the content may be highly sexual
or even vulgar.
Nonetheless, the basic theme continues to be the
struggle between Good and Evil, with the outcome
always favouring Good. And although the message is
not solely Catholic, it is evangelical in that it
brings good news and is a time for renewal.
Implicitly, it carries a collective desire to start
over and to imbue all of society with good
intentions.
The pastorelas of today are laced with
political irony, mockery, or at least funny
allusions to public figures, and a strong dose of
the typically Mexican double-entendre that
we call the ‘albur’. Without this non-exportable
ingredient, the pastorela would be somewhat like a
taco minus the salsa.
There are two locations, like the Atrio of
Cuernavaca, and the El Carmen Museum in Mexico City,
among others, where the tradition of a pastorela
with the original personages is preserved, with the
colors of the piñatas and the lanterns, and that end
with a delicious hot punch to ward off the cold of
winter nights. This is something that every Mexican
girl and boy experiences and continues to nourish
with poignant affection throughout his or her life.
Angelica Galicia
Read: How to Stage Your Own Pastorela
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