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Mexico From Spain to Mexico A COPY OF IZQUIERDO'S "Beacon of Our Salvation" traveled to New Spain via one of the biannual fleets that sailed to the Indies, either among the personal effects of an individual passenger or as part of a shipment of books and pamphlets sent from Seville to be sold in the colony. Arriving at the Gulf Coast port of Vera Cruz, it would have been transported inland to the city of Mexico. The colonial book trade was a flourishing business: during just two months of 1585, 75 cases of books were conveyed by muleback into the capital city. Ecclesiastical and classical literature prevailed among the imported titles, but a fondness among the colonists for romances of chivalry and other light fare is betrayed by the registers of book shipments. Lists from the 15805 include variousfarsas and didlogos as well as works on the Passion, the life of Mary, and other devotional texts.1 Although no professional, public theater existed in New Spain until very near the end of the sixteenth century (Arroniz 1977:128), the colonists followed the custom of their homeland in celebrating Corpus Christi with the performance of autos. As early as 1565, the ecclesiasticalchapter in the city of Mexico began to award a prize for the best play written or adapted for performance on that festival; the city council granted similar prizes (Castaneda 1936:7). In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, the colony was home to so manypoets and dramatists of Spanish origin that the playwright Fernan Gonzalez de Eslavagave these lines to one of his characters: "So you're becoming a writer of couplets! You'll not earn much as a poet, for they're more plentifulthan manure here" (Leonard 1992:192). With a religious theater in full swing, a colonial elite eager to fancy itself well read, and a local cohort of established and would-be literary art2 38 Chapter 2 ists, there was a market in the colony for works like Izquierdo's drama. It may originally have been imported for Spanish consumption, with no thought to its potential Nahua audience. The city of Mexico was founded in the fourteenth century by the Mexica, a group of Nahuas, or speakers of the Nahuatl language. They gradually turned a couple of muddy islands into a great metropolis that was the center of a large tribute-paying empire. When Hernando Cortes first marched into this island capital in 1519, it was a thriving city of perhaps 200,000 or more people. With its whitewashed walls and green gardens risingfrom the surrounding lake, its busy markets and grand temples, its canals, roads, causeways, and aqueducts, it was at the time one of the world's greatest urban centers, comparable in size to London and Paris. In the course of the brutal siege of 1520-21, much of the city was destroyed and many thousands of people were killed or died of disease andstarvation. The colonial capital had been established on the ruins of the old city. Some of the canals had been filled in to form new streets, but one still could reachthe mainland only by boat or along the old causeways.Acathedral stood beside the site of what had been the main temple; the central part of the city was dominated by administrative buildings and residences built in Spanish style. As the administrative center of New Spain, Mexico housed a Spanish viceroy, archbishop, the judges of the Real Audiencia (or supreme court), the officers of the Inquisition, and other officials, who presided over much of the city's public life. In 1585 don Alvaro Manrique de Zufiiga, Marques de Villamanrique, became New Spain's seventh viceroy. He was followed in 1589 by don Luis de Velasco, whose father of the same name had been the colony's second viceroy. Velascothe Younger held the post until 1595. Since 1574 the archbishop had been Doctor Pedro Moya de Contreras, a loyal ally of King Philip II and a champion of ecclesiastical power. Moya de Contreras sailed to Spain in 1586 to report to the king about dishonesty and corruption among colonial appointees. He never returned to the colony. His successor , appointed in 1592, died in 1600 without ever coming to New Spain.2 Repeatedly buffeted by epidemics of Old World infectious diseases, the native population level continued the downward plunge that would not end until early in the seventeenth century. The most devastating epidemic to date had hit in 1576-79...

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