Uri Celeste Mosco Ramírez, the young woman who this year will play the Virgin Mary in the representation of Holy Week in Iztapalapa, commented in a recent interview that the Covid-19 pandemic and its terrible effects brought to the memory of the inhabitants of eight original neighborhoods of the mayor’s office, the origin and true purpose with which this religious manifestation emerged 179 years ago: a collective act of faith to demand an end to the cholera epidemic, which in the 19th century decimated almost half of the inhabitants of that demarcation, which at that time was an agricultural town separated from the capital.
The Cerro de la Estrella, in Iztapalapa, has been the main stage for two rituals that show the fervor of those who have inhabited this land. In pre-Hispanic times, in the Huizachtépetl (“hill of the huizaches”, in the Nahuatl language) the New Fire ceremony took place every 52 years; Three centuries later, the inhabitants made a pilgrimage to its slopes to venerate the Lord of the Cuevita.
The anthropologist Mariángela Rodríguez Nicholls provides details of this history in her article ‘The unusual paths of tradition: Holy Week in Iztapalapa’, originally published in the ethnographic atlas Los pueblo originarios de la Ciudad de México (INAH, 2007) and more recently in the magazine Rutas de Campo number 5 Iztapalapa: memory and culture, both editions of the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH).
According to the researcher at the Center for Research and Higher Studies in Social Anthropology (CIESAS), the staging of the Passion of Christ in Iztapalapa is the result of several factors, one of them being cultural practices, such as edifying theater, which took root in New Spain society during the evangelizing process.
On the other hand, the confiscation laws issued in 1856 relatively freed the ritual organizations of the neighborhoods from the strict tutelage of the Catholic Church. Curiously, the author points out, years before the ecclesiastical lands were alienated, a devastating epidemic of cholera morbus (1833-1859) was unleashed, causing enormous damage in Mexico City, and in particular in the population of Iztapalapa:
“As a result of this scourge disease, some religious festivals arose; one of them was the Holy Week in Iztapalapa. Such events influenced the formation of this practice of popular religiosity, in particular the evangelizing theater.
The doctor estimates that the permanence of the representation of Holy Week in Iztapalapa is explained in the first place because “there was a cultural tradition that included theatrical representation and social commotion in the face of bloody and painful events. Second, the missionaries used the evangelizing theater as a method of Christianization, which was adapted to the very conceptions of the Indians, since in the role of ‘the chosen one’ death always appears as the fundamental principle of life and health.
“They are two rites that come together in the depths of history. It is no longer the Aztec gods who decide life; now it is the Catholic God who, through the person of Christ and with the mediation of the Lord of the Cuevita, guarantees its continuity.”
In his opinion, the intelligence of the Spaniards to colonize central Mexico should be recognized, since the substitution of cultural practices – call it singing, dancing, theater – was well designed. In turn, the indigenous response to this is also worthy of consideration, “because apparently they changed their religious conceptions, but deep down they hid them so that they would continue to exist; for example, the Lord of the Holy Burial or Lord of the Cuevita, venerated in Iztapalapa, was the ancient Tezcatlipoca”.
This, he concludes, is known as a ‘cult of substitution’, “and today the commemoration of Holy Week in Iztapalapa has the purpose of thanking the Lord of the Cuevita for having stopped the mortality caused by cholera morbus in 1848 in the city. from Mexico”.