Las Pastores de Belen
This year I got in ahead of the game, and checked several times, starting a couple of weeks in advance, and confirmed. It was on. Away I went.
So what’s a Pastorela? Glad you asked. Awfully cooperative of you.
THIS is a Pastorela.
Pastorelas, as I mentioned, are shepherds’ plays, one of the oldest of Latin/Mexican Christmas customs. They’re morality plays, entertainment with a lesson. The theology is sometimes a bit loosely interpreted but the conflict driving the story is usually the same: Good versus evil.
It’s a different part of the Christmas story. By now, most North Americans are familiar with (or at least aware of) Las Posadas, Latin folk dramas which tell the story of Joseph and Mary wandering through Bethlehem looking for a place to stay. Las Pastorelas take up the tale a few days later, to tell the story of the shepherds’ journey to Bethlehem after the birth of the baby Jesus.
The Franciscan friars who ran the missions in Spanish Texas brought the Pastorelas from Europe, where they’d been used for a couple of centuries as teaching tools. In both Europe and the New World, they became popular as morally uplifting entertainment for the natives, many of whom were in fact poor people surviving as farmers, gatherers, and animal keepers – mostly shepherds or gauchos, just like the heroes of the Pastorelas. Until the arrival of the missions and the missionaries, the normal entertainment was a cycle of dance-dramas, with pagan themes. The friars kept the form, but adjusted the message.
Interestingly enough, even as the Pastorelas were being adopted and adapted for the new world, their somewhat casual approach to theology meant that they were being banned in the old one.
The performers here, just for the record, are Los Pastores de Belen from Holy Rosary Catholic Church in San Antonio (it’s a small world!), directed by Richard Vasquez. (He’s Joseph and Lucifer and sometimes other people, too.) Norma Vasquez plays Michael and, being the Secretary of the troupe, keeps the whole shootin’ match running. Richard also took the time to give me a several-minute rundown on what I was seeing, literally moments before the curtain went up. (BIG tip of the wanderer’s hat for that.)
It’s a visual story, so I’m gonna shut up now (mostly) and let the pictures carry it. (with captions, of course; you may want to know who’s whom. Although a picture may be worth a thousand words they aren’t always the RIGHT words…)
Mary and Joseph, on the way to Bethlehem.
Mary, Michael the Archangel, and the baby, settled in after Las Posadas.
“Yo, shepherds… get your flocks to Bethlehem. God’s just been born. You don’t want to miss this.”
(continued)