Spectacular Conversions: Religious Conversion and Self-Fashioning in Colonial Mexican Theater

This dissertation examines how playwrights from the 1530s to the 1730s use plays about Mexican history to enter into long-running theological debates about the nature and ethics of religious conversion. These theological position-takings, I argue, are also linked to social self-conversions, as playwrights use theater to survive and succeed in colonial Mexican society.;In the Introduction, I analyze tensions within the work of classical and medieval Catholic theologians, as they attempt to understand what role, if any, violence has in triggering the conversion of free human beings. This ambiguous tradition, I demonstrate, is polarized in the first decades of Spanish imperialism in the New World: the Dominican theologian Bartolome de las Casas demands conversion by pure persuasion, while the Franciscan missionary Motolinia supports varying degrees of coercive violence. These opposing perspectives, as I demonstrate in Chapter One, lead Las Casas and Motolinia to write about early Nahuatl missionary theater in entirely different ways: Las Casas rejects, while Motolinia embraces, violence in these spectacles.;In Chapter Two I turn to the secular cleric Fernan Gonzalez de Eslava, who wrote open-air civic allegories in the late sixteenth century. This playwright, whose ancestors may have been forced converts from Judaism, uses Lascasian conversion strategies in his plays about Counter-Reformation dogma: his characters convert thanks to the linguistic skill and patient attitude of transcultural missionaries. This is not the case in the plays of Juan Ruiz de Alarcon, which I analyze in Chapter Three: Alarcon, who was born in Mexico and later worked for the imperial bureaucracy in Spain, attacks Lascasian idealism and supports conversion by the sword.;In Chapter Four I turn to Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and reexamine her conquest loas in the light of the non-canonical loa to San Hermenegildo. The conversion tactics of her missionaries, I demonstrate, ultimately resemble Motolinia more than Las Casas. I conclude in Chapter Five with the eighteenth-century playwright Eusebio Vela, whose plays about shifting identities return to the first decades of New Spain's history and revisit earlier debates about religious conversion.