In the Tlalocan of Saint Francis – religious syncretism and intercultural dialogue in the Christian texts of Cantares Mexicanos

Research financed by the National Science Centre in Poland, founding program: SONATA 17, grant number: UMO-2021/43/D/HS3/00386.

After the conquest of the Aztec-dominated lands by the expedition of Hernan Cortes, local inhabitants’ lives radically changed. The Spanish king, represented by a viceroy and numerous officials of various ranks, replaced the former Aztec ruler. Traditional agriculture adopted new crops and animal breeding. The old gods had to retire into the shadows, and their followers were successively evangelized, first by the conquistadors and then by European, mainly Spanish, clergy.

The Franciscans, Dominicans, and Augustinians who first began working in this newly discovered “sheepfold of the Lord” quickly realized that the Aztecs’ oral tradition provided rhetoric models applicable for preaching and that their value system was not as different from the Christian one as it seemed at first glance. Thus, in cooperation with their indigenous students, they began adapting the old song models to new needs. Singing and dancing performances (called cuicatl in Nahuatl), which in pre-Hispanic times served to transmit knowledge about the past and strengthen the group’s cultural identity, were transformed into attractive evangelization tools.

These colorful performances, presented during various Christian festivals, used ancient formulations, motifs, metaphors, and decorations, only slightly adapted to the new cultural context. At the same time, however, thanks to their rootedness in ancestral traditions, the cuicatl also became a space enabling Aztec neophytes to smuggle in elements of the ancient worship into the ostensibly Christian songs in a way that went unnoticed by the friars.

The cuicatl presented in this project come from the 16th-century manuscript “Cantares mexicanos,” held today in the National Library of Mexico. Of the nearly one hundred songs collected in this document, we have selected those that we believe reflect various degrees of religious syncretism and intercultural dialogue developing in the missionary literature of New Spain.