Two languages, Many Stages: Bartolomé de Alva’s Nahuatl Theatrics in Seventeenth Century Nueva España

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Abstract/Contents

Abstract: In the seventeenth century in Nueva España, Bartolomé de Alva, a multilingual Jesuit priest of Spanish and noble Texcoco descent, produced three works: a Spanish-Nahuatl guide to Confession, three translations of Spanish Golden Age plays into Nahuatl, and an introduction to Horacio Carochi’s Nahuatl grammar and dictionary. Throughout all three of these works, despite their differing genres, I identify theatricality. In the Confessionario I see this in the script and stage directions Alva gives to the characters he constructs. Theatricality is intentionally avoided in Alva’s Nahuatl translation of meta-theater in Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s original “El gran teatro del mundo.” Lastly, the liberties that Alva takes with the introduction to the dictionary defy the bureaucratic genre and replace it with his own personal monologue. In each of these objects, Alva uses or avoids theatricality alongside Nahuatl to mediate and soften differences between the Nahua life and the colonial vision of Christian conversion and assimilation. Yet, use of these languages is based in the faulty notion that Spanish and Nahuatl provide two sets of words that can be exchanged and still inform the same worlds. Ultimately, these three translation projects reveal the Nahuatl language’s incongruity with the goals of Alva’s religious and epistemic colonization, which only exist in his theater.

Author	Nelson, Theresa Elizabeth
Thesis advisor	Hughes, Nicole T.

Subject	Nahuatl language
Subject	Nahuatl drama
Subject	Nahuatl language > Study and teaching > Spanish speakers
Subject	Conversion > Christianity
Subject	New Spain
Genre	Text
Genre	Thesis

DOI	https://doi.org/10.25740/dm352hw2548
Location	https://purl.stanford.edu/dm352hw2548

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License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).

Preferred citation: Nelson, T. (2022). Two languages, Many Stages: Bartolomé de Alva’s Nahuatl Theatrics in Seventeenth Century Nueva España. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/dm352hw2548

Undergraduate Theses, Iberian and Latin American Cultures Department, Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, Stanford University.

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