“August 13, 1521, heroically defended by Cuauhtémoc, Tlatelolco fell into the hands of Hernán Cortés. It was neither triumph nor a defeat. It was the painful birth of the mestizo nation which is Mexico today.”
—Translation of a plaque in the Square of the Three Cultures, Mexico City
“In order to tell your story, you must first go to Mexico,” suggested Manuel Aguilar, my fellow faculty member at California State University–Los Angeles. I had called Professor Aguilar, a scholar of Mesoamerican art and history, to ask his advice about a new play I planned to create about the conquest of Mexico. His guidance proved to be invaluable as I wrestled in the ensuing months with how to write this epic tale for a young audience. How could I empower children to connect with a history that is untold and forgotten? What is the part of young people in shaping history? What are the tools to make the epic and the personal narrative become one? These questions were at the very heart of the journey I took along with my collaborators at Childsplay in Tempe, Ariz., leading up to The Sun Serpent’s debut there this past October and November.
The Sun Serpent is the sixth play I have premiered at Childsplay as its playwright-in-residence. Childsplay is a national leader in creating new plays and works that are reflective of the Latino community, and presenting them to hundreds of thousands of young people across Arizona and the country. The stories we’ve created and told together have been compelling and untraditional, capturing young people at their best despite hardships and challenges.
As challenges go, The Sun Serpent held plenty. My task was to retell the conquest of Mexico, based on the surviving accounts, from the native point of view. This is a chapter of history about which very little is known in the United States. It is a grand story that rivals The Odyssey or The Mahabharata—an adventure story that portrays the strength of the human spirit. To devise a work that would live up to this vision took nearly two years, eleven drafts, four workshop sessions and hundreds of rewritten pages. We began the process by involving the resident artists at Childsplay, along with guest artists from around the country. Extensive research informed our process throughout—and none was more influential than the trip that Professor Aguilar suggested. In December 2009, I spent eight days following the path of Cortés’s conquest, from the coast of Veracruz to Mexico City.
I had mixed emotions about going to Mexico. The American press had reported increases in gangland violence and the U.S. government was sending out travel warnings. As a boy I had journeyed to Mexico with my mother and grandparents, but this time I would go alone. My grandparents spoke lovingly, longingly and wistfully about their lives when they lived there, but for me Mexico was still a mysterious and foreign place. Still, I was open to transformation—of myself, and of my characters. I took in the history, sights and sounds of the people and the landscape, and each day I wrote down my experiences and sent them to David Saar, the artistic director and founder of Childsplay.
October 31, 2009: I went to the Zempoala ruins. It is an impressive site of pyramids contained within a fort built by the Totonacs. When the Spanish first saw the city they thought it was made of gold because it glowed in the sun. It is here that Hernán Cortés befriended a fat king (cacique gordo) to help him against the Aztecs. The Aztecs were not well liked by many of the native nations since they demanded tribute and slaves. Note: I wonder if my character of the native boy is first discovered here?
I spent three days on the eastern coast of Mexico in Veracruz, where Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés and the natives made first contact. The Aztecs believed Cortés to be Quetzalcoatl, the precious feathered serpent returning to rule his kingdom on earth. An ancient prophecy foretold his coming.
The landscape at Veracruz was dramatic: Tomb-like structures on a high hill overlooked the ocean below. Alone, excited and nervous, I climbed above them to a steep rock formation from which I could see the coast. All the while I was thinking about the native boy I wanted to write about in The Sun Serpent. Would he have seen the “floating mountains,” as the Spanish ships were first described? Was he frightened to see “the men with beards whose skin was white as if made of chalk?” I could see the story forming as each day passed.
Cortés met someone else on this coast: a girl named Malintzin (also known as Malinche), who would play a crucial role in history as well as in my play. With her valuable ability to speak several native languages, Matlintzin would become Cortés’s interpreter, translator and mistress (she bore him a son). The house that Malintzin lived in after the conquest still stands. Two elderly artists, a couple, live there now; they were personal assistants to Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, another famous couple.
Malintzin was not Aztec; she was abandoned by her mother and sold into slavery. She must have been barely in her teens when she met Cortés. The importance of this struck me: It meant children were directly involved in the conquest.
November 5, 2009: The Teotihuacan pyramids are a half-hour outside of Mexico City. They are spread across miles. It’s hard to explain this place because it’s so vast, impressive and humbling. Note: I see the young native boy walking through a place like this, but it’s filled with thousands of people. He’s never seen anything like it.
After exploring Veracruz, I followed Cortés’s path by bus to Mexico City. The Spanish described it as the “City of Dreams.” The ride took me five-and-a-half hours; in 1519, it would have taken the Spaniards months to make the journey.
In the great center of Mexico City, I arrived at the Zócalo, one of the largest squares in the world. Beside it is the Cathedral Metropolitana, the largest cathedral in Latin America, built right upon the ruins of an Aztec temple. The stones used from the temple were used to build the cathedral. I could still see them embedded into the walls.
A Mixtec couple and their young son stood near the cathedral, offering native blessings. I asked to receive one. It took less than two minutes. The Mixtec couple prayed over me with a smoke-filled urn while I stood there with palms opened up to the sky. Their child told me at each step what to do. They rubbed a native flower over me and then blessed me with water. My prayer was to give thanks for my family, friends and the journey that I was taking to create The Sun Serpent. The irony didn’t escape me that there were still native people at the Zócalo celebrating the Day of the Dead, as well as protesting the ongoing struggles in Chiapas.
November 5, 2009: My last stop is Tlatelolco, where the Aztecs fought Cortés for 80 days before being defeated. It was at Tlatelolco that the first college was established in the New World. The Franciscans educated the native children who survived the conquest, teaching them to read and write in Spanish, Latin and Nahuatl (the Aztecan language). It was these children who would grow up to be the first native scholars to write about the conquest.
When I returned home from Mexico, I wrote a one-page treatment, which I shared with our creative team at Childsplay: an impressive group of artists including director Rachel Bowditch, composer Daniel Valdez, projection designer Adam Larsen, costume designer Connie Furr-Soloman, scenic designer Carey Wong, mask designer Zarco Guerrero and actors Andrés Alcalá, Ricky Araiza and Andréa Morales.
I knew that I wanted to tell an epic story in which only three actors would perform more than 30 characters, using multiple languages—English, Spanish and Nahuatl. This would be both a challenge and an opportunity. Professor Aguilar was brought on to help us with research, historical accuracy and translation. It was vital for me to capture what I had felt while in Mexico and bring it to our audience. We had to create multiple locations that would totally immerse them.
During our four workshop sessions, all the collaborators were in the rehearsal room together exploring ways to tell our story using physical theatre, puppetry, video animation, music and mask work. Out of these sessions we built a foundation for the story and found solutions to staging. We discovered how to convey a final epic battle using only three actors: a bold, dramatic combination of video projection (green-screening actors’ silhouettes as conquistadors) and the use of dual masks with native and Spanish faces.
The actors moved their bodies to the dynamic rhythms of Daniel’s grand soundscape of Spanish guitar, native flutes and drums. At another point in the play, our young protagonist witnesses the destruction of a province. We wanted to give faces and names to the dead. Rachel envisioned a character wearing a dress made of masks of those lost souls, and it became one of our most haunting, visually stunning moments.
Rehearsals were always open to the company and to guests as well. We wanted input from everyone who attended. There was a culture of trust throughout the process. This openness energized and excited the company, including Saar and dramaturg Jenny Millinger, who asked crucial, often difficult questions that sent me back to my hotel room for hours of late-night and early-morning rewrites. During one of these restless nights between rehearsals, I dreamed that the blue waters off the coast of Veracruz surrounded me. I looked up to see the silhouette of a hull of a Spanish ship stopping right above me. An anchor splashed into the water with Hernán Cortés standing on top of it. This vivid dream found its way into the play, courtesy of Adam’s projection design and four 18-foot textilene panels.
In the play’s final form, we see through the eyes of our central character, Young Anáhuac, as his family, culture and world are turned upside down by the conquest. The native boy journeys to Mexico City in search of his older brother, who has joined the Sun Serpent, Cortés, in bringing down the Aztec empire. The story has parallels to the U.S. Civil War, with its divided families and profound human cost.
Our intention was that our young audiences, ages eight and up, would follow and sympathize with Young Anáhuac. In previews, we found this to be true: They tracked the epic and the personal story clearly. We had achieved our goal.
Young people in Mexico continue to face uncertainties—immigration, war and a depressed economy—that date back to the Spaniards’ arrival there. In Arizona, where The Sun Serpent premiered, young people are living among heated debates about border politics, the SB 1070 anti-immigration law and the elimination of an ethnic-studies curriculum in the Tucson Unified School District. I wrote this play for all of them—to explore what it means to be a young person anywhere in this world where the tectonic plates of change keep shifting.
YOUNG ANÁHUAC:
Long ago,
When I was a boy,
My world would change forever
But I remember,
I remember…
José Cruz González’s plays include Super Cowgirl and Mighty Miracle, The Blue House, Sunsets and Margaritas, The Heart’s Desire, Tomás and the Library Lady, The Cloud Gatherer, Earth Songs, Waking Up in Lost Hills, September Shoes and Harvest Moon. In addition to his residency at Childsplay, he is an associate artist with L.A.’s Cornerstone Theater Company.
