Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain (review)

Aztecs, Moors, and Christians: Festivals of Reconquest in Mexico and Spain. By Max Harris. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. x + 309 pp., prologue, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth, $24.95 paper.)

This is a splendid book. In large part it is because Max Harris has meticulously recapitulated a remarkable variety of imperial Spanish and Native American spectacles of conquest and reconquest. The span of time and places also is impressive: from twelfth-century Lleida (Catalonia) to Zacatecas in 1996. His purpose, first, is to discover the provenance of the archetypal dance of conquest, moros y cristianos, that came to be popular everywhere but is regularly thought to have originated in Spain; and, second, to explicate the performers' agenda. But it is not one dance that had to be investigated, for festivals in Medieval Spain were complex affairs.

Most typically, they were fashioned as courtly theater to replicate mythohistorical events and to celebrate royal and ecclesiastical patronage. The pageantry of any festival might include the mêlée, juego de cañas: entremes, comedía, danza, and so forth. Vast sums were expended on musicians, costumes, decorations, fireworks, equestrian displays, and the construction of temporary buildings, such as castles and gallows; and all of it could go on for days. Early American theater often was just as prodigious, for politics and religion were the common ground for conquest performances on both continents. Human sacrifice was a factor too, whether Christian or Aztec, for it served, on the one hand, to rationalize conquest as God's beneficence and, on the other, to remind every single citizen that war and conquest were processual and inherent to the maintaining of order within the Mesoamerican cosmos.

However, by far the greatest merit of this book is in what Harris refers to as "reading the mask" (18–27), literally. Many dancers wore masks that he feels served to camouflage, in a way, indigenous performance ideologies. The moros y cristianos dances of the Americas were not, as Richard Trexler (1984) asserts, military theater with the natives reenacting their humiliation and subjugation by the Spaniards. Yet that may have seemed to be the purported message. But Harris, assiduously looking for the subversive and the hidden transcript in public theater, repeatedly finds the opposite. Moreover, the moros y cristianos dances may have had some precedent in fifteenth-century Spain, but they did not really manifest until the downfall of the Aztec capital at Tenochtitlan. In America the first on record was the occasion of Cortés's entrance into Coatzacoalcos in 1524, as he marched toward Honduras. Thereafter, moros y cristianos is mostly Indians playing Moors, Chichimeca, or Aztecs, and they were not reenacting their defeats but rather insiduously mocking the Spaniards. Their dance is the retaking of their territory.

Harris sees this as the prevailing leitmotiv of conquista dances across the sweep of New Spain. His point is well taken and is supported with abundant evidence. With time, moros y cristianos took on a life of its own, with regional adaptations that included the conflation of ancient history, colonial figures, and current events. But always the natives are patriotically using autochthonous forms of power—their own deities, ancestral kings, ritual calendar, and performance art—as counterpoints to the public transcript of domination by foreigners.

Nonetheless, Harris privileges the Spaniards. This is loser history. Conquest is treated as Armageddon. Rather little thought is given to the indigenous perspective of the invasions of the Spaniards or the destruction of Tenochtitlan. Indeed, most aspects of Native culture continued and were quite apparent. Moreover, several Native authors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries failed to mention the Spaniards at all in their histories. It is likely that the events of 1519–21 were considered as part of an ongoing cycle of war and conquest. (Consider the ancient Zapotec danzantes of Monte Albán, for instance.) Then, Spanish Catholic theater may have been a welcome complement to...