‘Forged and perforated with fine craftsmanship’: an Indigenous intellectual ‘reduces’ Calderón

This article analyzes the castizo priest Bartolomé de Alva’s (c. 1597–?) Nahuatl translation of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s (1600–1681) metatheatrical allegory El gran teatro del mundo. It uses the frame of reducción—a term that could include translation, grammatical analysis, or forced resettlement—to place Alva alongside the broader trend of Indigenous intellectuals transforming Catholic culture. Thinking about Alva as an Indigenous agent of reducción helps us better understand how he treats key elements of Calderón’s play, such as its musicality and spatial organization, and helps explain the influence of the pre-Conquest performative tradition of tēīxīptlayōtl (in which both sacrificial victims and sacrificing priests were transformed into the gods they imitated). The result is a play that in some ways is more metatheatrical and performative than Calderón’s, and that has important implications for a more complete understanding of the world which both Alva and Calderón inhabited.