“Come back to Earth!”

After Spanish forces and indigenous allies defeated the Mexica Empire in 1521, Franciscan and Dominican friars sought in their theological and humanistic works to explain Christianity using terms from Mesoamerican languages. This chapter introduces a new direction in the study of religious translations in colonial Spanish America by analyzing little known as well as completely unknown scholarly and devotional works in colonial Zapotec. These works, produced through collaboration between Indigenous authors and friars, attempted to rewrite Indigenous history and sacred narratives from a Christian perspective. Passages by the Dominican devotional author Luis de Granada were translated into Zapotec and in 1567, the Dominican Pedro de Feria adapted one of Granada’s texts for part of his Zapotec-language “Doctrina.” Yet other works written in celebration of Mary and Christ were patterned after an Indigenous ritual genre performed to the beat of drums in imitation of Pre-Columbian ancestor worship. These works highlight continuities and differences between Christian teachings about wisdom and Pre-Columbian knowledge, depict an abrupt discontinuity between Mesoamerican notions of sacred history and Christian beliefs, and demonstrate an intellectual divide between Indigenous elite learning and popular devotion after the Counter-Reformation.