Reliving Golgotha

The nuanced analysis of a large-scale religious ritual, under the probing scrutiny of a seasoned historian, provides one of the most fruitful entries into the social fabric of a community. The reenactment of the Christian Passion is thusly mined by Trexler, who explores how one Mexican town famed for its annual passion pageant also plays out the power struggles manifest on the larger national stage. With its “visualized brutality” (p. 17), the biblical narrative of Jesus’s last days — from his betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane, to the way of the cross and his crucifixion on Golgotha — is, for the lower classes, “congruent with their own experience of scarcity, injustice, brutality, and early death” (p. 220), whereas the triumphant Easter resurrection of Christ is not. Street theater imitates life in ways unscripted and unpredictable; in understanding the interaction of patron, performer, and audience, we gain insight into societal fissures not captured in official histories.Reliving Golgotha builds on Trexler’s formidable studies into early modern European and colonial Latin American rituals and, at the same time, departs from the author’s previous scholarship in both its twentieth-century focus and in its heavy reliance on newspaper accounts — a dependency that also sets a more informal tone to this text. As background for the contemporary passion play of Iztapalapa (a town just south of Mexico City), Trexler briefly examines the history of Passion plays in both Europe and New Spain. We learn, surprisingly, that by the sixteenth century only fragmentary precedents crossed the Atlantic. Most importantly for their lasting impact on New World manifestations, these include the control exercised by civic groups and lay confraternities over Holy Week processions, with their dramatic post-Passion interludes such as the descent from the cross, and, secondly, the vigorous practice of flagellation. The indigenous population of the New World enthusiastically took on both the “ownership” of theatrical productions and the penitential rites of self-mortification, thereby helping to establish their rightful claims to the new religion.In the remaining chapters, Trexler follows the evolving nature (mutatis mutandis, his oft-repeated phrase) of the Passion theater in Iztapalapa from the late nineteenth century to the present day. The material is divided into discrete periods (decades, generally) that mark distinct changes in one or another facet of the annual presentation, linked in every case to major Mexican benchmarks. One of the books’ strengths is its ambitious scope, contextualizing this specific passion play within broader trends. However, this trajectory can also be dizzying, since it presumes familiarity with events in modern Mexican history that the text cannot, or does not, fully explicate (such as the Cristero Rebellion of 1926 – 29) and that may leave the average reader mystified. Two overarching themes consistently influence the form and content of the theatrical production: the tension between church and state and the age-old struggle between the lay organizers and the clergy. Throughout the century, the general populace of Iztapalapa (originally Indian but increasingly mestizo) manages to keep a firm rein on the proceedings, selecting the nonbiblical scripts for the play, dictating a route that eventually encompasses and modifies the entire urban space, choosing and preparing the actors, and finally, capitalizing on the projection of their event to the outside world and its commercial success.While viceregal authorities had long recognized the empowering, and thus threatening, nature of public rituals, censoring their “grotesque” or irreverent interpretations of Christian liturgy, ultimately they, and successive governing institutions, were powerless to eliminate entirely these indigenous performances. The impersonation of armed soldiers or centurions (as armadas or sayones) was a persistent cause for alarm, yet Trexler notes strong continuity in the native male right to “dress up as warriors against an emasculating colonial power” (p. 77). Within and through their telling of the story of Jesus, Iztapalapa and other native communities could express their own political and social structures, as well as reclaim authority over their communal spaces.Trexler’s dependence on the newspaper coverage of the event skews his information toward a more secularized, urban perception of this popular festival. With the exception of interviews with the Guerra family, who have been involved in the pageant for over three generations, other local sources (for example, the internal history of the organizing committee) appear to have been off limits or nonexistent. Yet one of Trexler’s gifts is his ability to read between the lines of his sources, parsing the journalistic descriptions to recognize bias and to retrieve valuable data, as in his subtle but telling distinction between the use of images versus live representations as a significant index of the degree of clerical control. In spite of the inroads of commodification and intrusive media coverage on the Iztapalapa Passion play, this is an intriguing tale relayed by a master storyteller of a public celebration that continues to enact the most basic needs and deep-seated desires of its community

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Humanities · Literature · Narrative · Passion · Political science · Power (physics) · Scholarship · Scrutiny · Sociology · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Latin American history and culture · Law · Psychology

• Breaking New Spain, 1808–21

  John Tutino•Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos•2021

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