Miguel de Quintana’s Art

Miguel de Quintana had a trained aesthetic sensibility. If indeed he did attend the Cathedral School in Mexico City, he learned the common verse forms. His teachers may have been secular clergymen, perhaps ones trained by Jesuits.

He recalled he used to write "coloquio para festejar al Niño Dios en su nacimiento," which Francisco Lomelí and Clark Colahan translated as "plays in celebration of the birth of the baby Jesus."

In the early years, a coloquio was a part of larger play that could be performed separately. It was much like a rondo within a sonata. It was always part of the larger composition, but followed rules unique to itself, and could be extracted and played separately.

Franciscans adapted Spanish dramatic forms to the Aztec language to induce natives to be baptized. Dominicans and Jesuits expanded the genres.

The most popular were the auto sacramentales, which were mounted on carriages that drove through the streets. Each auto depicted a different scene, and included a coloquio. The ones that survived in New Mexico focused on Joseph, the inns, the shepherds, the magi, Jesus in the temple, and holy week. Arthur Campa noted they survived in fragments and by 1934 had been fused into a single drama.

The coloquio was a dialogue between two characters that had no narrative impulse. James Crawford believed they originated in Italy and were brought to Spain as amusements of the aristocracy. He described them as casuistical, meaning they dramatized two sides of moral questions by applying them to mundane events.

Carlos Eduardo Castañeda noted the coloquio evolved into a simpler dramatic genre "in the form of a dialogue, written either in verse or prose." He said, it "gained special popularity in Mexico."

Eight coloquio written by Miguel de Quintana were preserved in the files of the Holy Office in Ciudad de México. Six were given to Manuel Sopeña in 1732, but only two may been written for him. One was written for José Irigoyen in 1732, and one for Juan Sánchez de la Cruz in 1737.

There were committed in an acuarterón, a kind of personal notebook made from folio pages cut into fourths measuring 4.5" by 6.5." As shown in the photograph of a page made by the translators, he transcribed them as if they were appearing on a printed page with the verses in two columns separated by a commentary written at a right angle. The prose was below.

One coloquio has two sets of verses and prose, but six only have one. One had no prose, while the one he gave to Irigoyen had no marginal commentary.

They all began with the line, "Jesús, María, y José," followed by a four line verses that took the form ABCB. The rhymed lines ended with vowel or assonant sounds.

Cree, Mi-guel, con vi-va fe
que Di-os no te ha con-fun-di-do
ni su di-vi-na gran-de-za
es-tá en-jo-ja-do con-ti-go.

Spanish theorists emphasize the total number of syllables to the line, unlike the English who count the number of stressed syllables (the ones in bold above). Quintana varied his number of syllables, but did tend to make the rhyming second and fourth lines shorter in the style of the seguidilla real that alternated between lines containing 10 and 6 syllables.

Angélico Chávez noted Quintana had a "marked facility in rhyming within the limits of the quatrain in trimeter," meaning three stressed syllables. The translators used the quoted verse to illustrate his "poetic virtuosity" because the verb "enjojado" does not refer to the preceding noun, "grandeza," but to the one before, "Dios."

The verses were dialogues between Miguel and God. Following Franciscan conventions, Miguel was personified as a poor sinner seeking guidance.

Following the coloquios proper, the prose described events which precipitated the conversations. They may have been modeled on instructions for actors or producers. The ones that probably were written before Sopeña threatened to denounce him described the character Miguel

- Seeing a vision of Juan de Tagle
- Being unable to complete a Christmas coloquio and changing to the Miguel series
- Being unable to complete saying the rosary when contemplating the Sorrowful Mysteries

These contained his most vivid writing. Tagle’s ghost was described with his "hands stuck in his sleeves like a dead man’s" with "his eyes being two fountains of tears" and his face, "capilla calada," the color of "a chapel recently whitewashed with lime." Behind him the altar cloths were red, "encarnado."

One of the prose sections specific to Sopeña dealt with the horrors with which Quintana was threatened. The other mentioned Miguel no longer was participating in the Third Order. The one Quintana gave to Irigoyen specifically mentioned threats of the Inquisition.

He wrote another coloquio in 1737 for Cruz. In the prose section, he claimed "The reverend father who is the commissary of the Holy Office and his notary have come, Miguel, with frivolous pretexts dressed in the passions to hit you with a cat-o’-nine tails." The translators noted the original wording, "a dar gatazo," might have been a subtle pun if the word gatazo was derived from catear. The latter implied a conspiracy.

The form he used was neither linear nor was it based on oral tradition, though the translators noted several times when he chose colloquial rather than formal words. If one reads his coloquios as published from top to bottom, one becomes lost in the repetitions. Instead, one should read the prose first, then read the dialogues as illustrations of the moral quandaries raised by events.

Notes: The quoted verse was written in 1737 for Cruz. The translation loses the verbal dexterity:

Believe, Miguel, with living faith
that God has not confused you,
nor is His divine might
angry with you.

Campa, Arthur L. Spanish Religious Folktheatre in the Spanish Southwest (First Cycle), 1934.

Castañeda, Carlos Eduardo. "The First American Play," The Catholic World, January 1932; quoted by Campa.

Chávez, Angélico. "The Mad Poet of Santa Cruz," New Mexico Folklore Record 3:10-17:1949.

Crawford, James Pyle Wickersham. Spanish Drama Before Lope de Vega, 1922; on coloquio.

Hart, Stephen M. A Companion to Latin American Literature, 2007; on development of drama in México.

Lomelí, Francisco A. and Clark A. Colahan. Defying the Inquisition in Colonial New Mexico, 2006; contains Spanish and English versions of all documents described here.

Quintana, Miguel de. Coloquio, 1732 and 1737, reprinted in Spanish and English by Lomelí.

Montaño, Mary Caroline. Tradiciones Nuevomexicanas, 2001; on developments in New Mexico.