A Mexican Tradition Runs on Pageantry and Faith

The week long play attracts more than two million people annually.

IZTAPALAPA, Mexico (By Larry Rohter, NYT) April 12, 2009 — It was mid-afternoon on Good Friday, and Diego Villagrán Villalobos, dressed as Jesus, was struggling in the heat to drag a heavy wooden cross up the hill where he would soon be crucified. The streets and the hillside were lined with people observing his progress, some of whom, as a demonstration of their own faith, followed him barefoot, wearing crowns of thorns or shouldering crosses themselves.

In Aztec times, Iztapalapa was the site of a pyramid and temple where rites of penance and renewal were performed in the spring. Today, though, this working-class community on the outskirts of Mexico City is known for a weeklong Passion Play that has become one of the largest and most fervent in the world, attracting more than two million people annually.

“I’ve been doing this for 56 years, and back when I started, we had an audience of maybe 50 people, all of them from the neighborhood, for what was then a short and simple presentation,” said Anatolio Ávila Domínguez, 70, president of the committee that organizes the play. “Now everything is super changed, but we feel honored to have so many people visit us.”

Unlike many other Passion Plays staged in Latin America during Holy Week, the presentation here dates not to Spanish colonial times, but to 1843, when a deadly cholera epidemic had devastated the local population came to an end. In gratitude, residents wrote and staged their own account of the Passion of Christ, beginning a tradition that withstood even the anti-clerical zeal of the Mexican Revolution and its aftermath.

The play has a cast of thousands, including those playing the Roman Praetorian Guard, but many of the 50 or so main parts tend to remain within local families, almost as heirlooms, a tendency that has generated some discontent as more people want to participate. Miguel Guerra, who is 55 and plays the high priest Caiaphas, said he was the fifth generation of his family to be in the pageant and he regarded it as his duty to uphold the “values inculcated in us by our parents and grandparents.”

The requirements of those who wish to play Jesus or Mary are especially strict. To assure a proper state of purity, tradition demands neither be allowed to date, drink, smoke, or go to parties once they get the role. In recent years, two new restrictions have been added: no tattoos or piercings. Candidates must also show they have sufficient economic means to pay for the resplendent costumes they wear.

Nevertheless, competition for the roles is intense, and those chosen approach their task with great seriousness. When Mr. Villagrán, an 18-year-old high school student, was chosen in January to play Jesus, he immediately embarked on an accelerated fitness program to prepare himself because he felt  “it was God and not the committee that picked me.”

He was already an athlete — he plays American football — which is one of the reasons he was chosen for a role that is so demanding. Whoever plays Jesus must be able to bear a ritual whipping in the square, then carry a cross weighing more than 200 pounds three miles, the remaining Stations of the Cross, and up a steep hill, where he has to endure a brief but real crucifixion in which he is bound to the cross for about 20 minutes.

“I run three and a half miles every day, I go to the gym,” rising at 5 a.m. daily, Mr. Villagrán said in an interview last week. “And spiritually, I’ve prepared myself as I have throughout my life. I go to Mass on Sunday, go to confession with regularity and have gone on retreats. I can see myself on the cross.”

The role of Judas demands a different kind of sacrifice. It is not just that he is the villain and, in the version presented here, ends up hanging himself out of remorse at having betrayed Jesus. There is also the reaction of one’s own neighbors to consider, especially when they get carried away and start pelting Judas with rotten fruit and other objects.

“The people who come to see the presentation shout ‘traitor’ at you,” explained Alfonso Reyes Jímenez, a taxi driver who has played Judas in recent years. “So far, I haven’t been the victim of physical aggression, but you’re always anxious and uneasy because people are really transformed.”

This year, the role went to Jaime Domínguez Cabello, 39, who operates a parking lot with his brothers. In the past, Mr. Domínguez has been an apostle, but he said he did not mind being the bad guy.

“There’s no Jesus without Judas,” he said. “Judas did his betrayal as part of carrying out a mission, and I have my mission, which is to play Judas. I do it out of faith in Him, out of devotion to Him, and to enable this presentation to be preserved.”

As Mr. Domínguez’s comments indicate, Iztapalapa’s Holy Week pageant is first and foremost a religious celebration. But in recent times it has also become a badge of cultural identity for, as an announcer put it on Thursday night just before the staging of the Last Supper at the main square, “a people which, in the face of the rapid advance of modernization, battles to preserve its customs and traditions.”

That does not mean, however, contemporary influences are absent: for the past 20 years, the pageant has been broadcast by satellite all over the Spanish-speaking world, which has helped increase its popularity. In addition, some cast members now use lapel microphones and giant video screens are employed to show the play to onlookers who cannot get close enough to the action.

The Roman Catholic Church’s attitude toward the play has fluctuated over the years. In the past, there were complaints the script, which draws not only on the Bible but also on Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” deviated too much from sacred texts. King Herod, for example, has a harem that performs a sensual belly dance.

But even though it is the local community, largely of indigenous descent, rather than the Church that controls the event, the hierarchy has come to view the pageant as an effective tool for anchoring Mexican Catholics in their religion in the face of a growing Protestant challenge. “Though at one point I contemplated changing religions,” said Javier Villalobos, treasurer of the organizing committee, “this has strengthened my faith.”