Dear colleagues,
Below you will find four documents to start our discussion on cities as theaters of conversion.
The first of these documents comes from Toribio de Motolinía’s History of the Indians of New Spain. Motolinía’s History is a key document on the conquest and early colonization of México. The selected text narrates how the Tlaxcalans staged a “Conquest of Jerusalem” in June of 1539. The event that inspired the spectacle was the 1538 Truce of Nice between Spain and France, which allowed Charles V to focus once again on defeating the Ottoman Turks. As I explained during my presentation, the place chosen for the representation of the Conquest of Jerusalem as singular as the staging itself. As Motolonia narrates, the play took place in Tlaxcalla not in the old indigenous settlement, but, “in the city which they have recently begun to build down below on the plain.” There, “they left a big and very handsome plaza in the middle, and here they constructed Jerusalem on top of a building that they were erecting for the cabildo -or city hall … Our Lord the Emperor was stationed opposite Jerusalem, to the east and outside of the plaza. To the right of Jerusalem was the camp to be occupied by the army of Spain. Opposite to this was a place prepared for the provinces of New Spain, and in the center of the plaza was Santa Fe, where the Emperor was to be lodged with his army. All those places were surrounded by walls and painted on the outside to look like stone-work, with their embrasures for cannon, their loopholes and battlements, all very realistic” By staging the old city of Jerusalem in the middle of the construction site of the new colonial city and making the Tlaxcalla take part in the action not as spectators but as actors, the Spaniards were aiming to transmit Tlaxcallans much more than religion. Of course, they sought to indoctrinate them on the history of salvation and the alleged role of the Spanish King in Jesuschrist’s long awaited second coming. In fact, the religious significance of the whole event was underlined by the fact that the army of the Tlaxcallans of New Spain was baptized during and as part of the play -and not in fiction, but in reality- thereby blurring the lines between theatre and ritual. However, Spaniards also wanted them to understand what a Western city was and that the world was composed of a hierarchy of cities with Jerusalem at its apex. They wanted them to realize the way in which Western urban space was configured and the importance of writing (as opposed to orality) in the functioning of urban spaces and the Spanish empire as a whole. Through this combination of theatre and urbanism, the Spaniards were aiming to accomplish a multifaceted conversion of their colonial subjects.
The second text I would like to share with you is an article I published in 2007 [unfortunately, the relevant primary sources for that article are in Spanish only; otherwise, I would not have sent you this text]. The article focuses on the celebrations that took place in the city of Lima in 1631 on the occasion of the birth of Prince Baltasar Carlos, son of Phillip IV, during which the city’s guild of mulattoes staged a version of the abduction of Helen transforming Lima’s main square into the city of Troy [Unfortunately, the original historical material is in Spanish only]. As I explain in the article, this event offers us the opportunity to observe the interaction of peoples of African descent with sophisticated forms of colonial lettered culture as well as the complex ways in which texts and narratives passed from dominant to subordinate groups. It also allows us to reconstruct the collective efforts of the mulatto group to redefine its identity in the framework of seventeenth-century Lima caste relations. I find this interesting for our discussions about conversion because it shows that conversion was not simply a one-side event orchestrated from to top to bottom. Those at the bottom of the social hierarchy also tried to orchestrate their own “conversions” as part of their negotiations with the colonial elite. The guild of mulattoes did so by transforming their urban space [the colonial city (Lima) into a classical city (Troy)] and their identity [they transformed themselves into classical heroes].
The third text I have attached is the first chapter of Angel Rama’s The Lettered City. While Rama was not interested in “conversion per se,” I find his analysis extraordinarily relevant for our discussion since it shows that colonial cities were created and designed as kind of immense machineries for cultural, political, and religious conversion. In fact, religious conversion per se cannot be understood without taking first into account the implications of the introduction of Western urban culture, and it is not possible to explain colonial urban culture without also taking into account the role of literacy and written culture in the Spanish empire. The key point that this text brings to our discussion is that religious conversion could only really go through once a comprehensive social, spatial, and hermeneutic conversion was under way.
The last document I would like you to read is the first chapter of José María Arguedas’ novel Deep Rivers (1958). The narration takes place in the city of Cuzco in the mid-20th century. It describes the encounter of a child with the old capital of the Incas. It brings to the fore the issue of conversion not as a radical process of transformation nor as a Hegelian Aufhebung. Contrary to the views of his contemporaries, Arguedas argued that the Incas did not simply disappear, engulfed by colonialism and the forces of modernization. On the contrary, they continue to exist in a dialectical relationship with the dominant culture, a relationship that, of course, is not free of hierarchies and subjection. In fact, indigenous culture is that “deep river” that runs under the history of Peru. The urban space and material objects of Cuzco itself embody the persistence of indigenous culture and the complex -sometimes fruitful, sometimes terrible- relationship it has established with the Spanish/Western worldview.
Taken together, I think these texts offer these texts offer the opportunity to reflect on the issues that we discussed at the meeting: What is conversion (and when is a conversion not a conversion)? What role did cities play in the spiritual, economic, psychological, artistic transformations of Early Modern populations both in Europe and in the broader colonial world? How did urbanism and modern theatre interact in order to effect those transformations? And how did the city itself become a theater of conversion?
Selected readings:
[Motolinía, Toribio, and Elizabeth Andros Foster. 1950. History of the Indians of New Spain. [Berkeley, Calif.]: Cortés Society.] Motolinia.History.of.the.Indians.of.New.Spain
[Jouve Martín, José R. 2007. “Public Ceremonies and Mulatto Identity in Viceregal Lima: A Colonial Reenactment of the Fall of Troy (1631)”. Colonial Latin American Review. 16 (2): 179-201.] jouve.troy
[Rama, Angel, and John Charles Chasteen. 1996. The lettered city. Durham, NC: Duke University Press] Rama.Lettered.City
[Arguedas, José María. Deep Rivers. Waveland Press, 2002.] Arguedas.Deep.Rivers