Posted by Margaret Carson on March 09, 192003 at 17:41:45:
In Los Pastores, as in Final Judgment, Lucifer creates conflict, which means more excitement and spectacle on stage in a play that veers between seriousness and fun. The shepherds’ tame opening paean to the story of the Nativity is immediately followed by Lucifer’s ranting and raving speech describing his personal and individual grievances against his place in the religious cosmos. He is frustrated, consumed by jealousy, driven to declare war against man, tempt him, punish him, torture him, trick him -- anything to keep the prophecy of the Savior’s birth from coming true. (Yet interestingly in the same harangue against man he declares “I know that man shall conquer by his strength and art” -- in the end he knows he’s got it coming to him).
The shepherds with their flocks of animals (sheep, cattle, goats. . .) are hunted by Lucifer, a wolf preying upon lambs, the rustic, humble shepherds. But in the best time-honored tradition of folk tales, the devil is outsmarted and out-deviled by man, to great comic effect. Cucharon deliberately mishears Lucifer question about the whereabouts of the Messiah; he responds by talking about his cousin MatRas (Matias?). When Lucifer insists, “The true Messiah’s born or no?,”(319) Cucharon rambles on more and more about his cousin. (A similar comic device was used in Gueguence, with the same added purpose of hiding information while infuriating one’s superior.) The mighty devil is thwarted by one of the “dumb” shepherds and this must have been a crowd-pleaser, all the more so if the character of Lucifer had been costumed or made up to suggest a local authority. In his article on indigenous theater Max Harris cites a description of a pastorela in 1893 in Texas in which Lucifer was dressed as a U.S. cavalry officer (the cavalry officer had himself provided his uniform, which Harris says is “typical of the habitual blindness of the dominant group to all but the most blatant insinuation of a hidden transcript into the public transcript of fealty and devotion.” (p. 243 of Harris’s article).
Another character I’d like to focus on briefly is Gila. She has wed a “sickly cross old man,” Bartolo (304), a likely cuckold. And “Gila dearest” cooks for the shepherds as well -- all kinds of food. Even the hermit says “She browns tamales to my taste.” Later in the play, before being granted permission by Bartolo to approach the manger, he says, “but first you must dance us a round to earn the boon.” Is she the whore in the inescapable whore/virgin binary? If so, she has the bigger and better part: the Virgin appears and is praised (“Mary, the mother pure of Christ/Princess, lovely flower of Spain” [336] but does not speak.
I also question why a fleeting mention is made to one of the shepherd’s daughters right after the above comment about Gila’s tamales:
Meliso: Listen to what I heard last night
Down in the village. There they say
Gerardo’s daughter’s to be wed.
Gerardo: They have not asked me for the girl,
Just talked of it among themselves;
But if she were provided for,
‘T would take a great load off my mind.
Parrado[aside]: Now heaven forbid! For when I can
I mean to marry her myself.
When I first read this I thought there would be a marriage or courtship subplot in the play. But as it turns out this is all we hear of Gerardo’s daughter. What is the purpose of these lines in the text? What are we to make of them? There’s no surprise in his comment that having an unmarried daughter is a burden -- that’s the norm in many societies. But who are “they” who ask for the girl? Why plural, why not “he”? And if Parrado wants to marry her why doesn’t he just say so, why is it an aside? Since these lines immediately follow the comments about Gila, I wonder if there are some “hidden meanings” to be explored as well -- perhaps what we see here is another display of the anxiety regarding female sexuality and marriage. It is not one of the overt themes of this play, but somehow it crept in.