Colonial Angels

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Colonial Angels
Narratives of Gender and
Spirituality in Mexico, 1580–1750

Elisa Sampson Ver a Tudela

University of Texas Press, Austin

Cover illustration credit: Reproducción autorizada por el
Instituto Nacional de Antropologı́a e Historia.
conaculta.-inah.-mex
Reproduction authorized by the National Institute for An-
thropology and History. conaculta.-inah.-mex.

Portions of this book in revised form first appeared as: ‘‘Voy-

ages in the New World Cloister’’ in History and Anthropology,
Vol. 9 Nos. 2 –3 (1996), reprinted with permission of Har-
wood Academic Publishers; and ‘‘Fashioning a Cacique Nun:
From Saints’ Lives to Indian Lives in the Spanish Americas’’
in Gender and History, Vol. 9 No. 2 (August 1997), reprinted
with permission of Blackwell Publishers.

Copyright q 2000 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

First edition, 2000

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work

should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press, Box
7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

j̀The paper used in this book meets the minimum require-

ments of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of
Paper).

library of congress
cataloging-in-publication data

Sampson Vera Tudela, Elisa.

Colonial angels : narratives of gender and spirituality in Mex-
ico, 1580 –1750 / Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-292-77747-7 (alk. paper). — isbn 0-292-77748-5 (pbk.:
alk. paper)
1. Mexican prose literature—Women authors—History and
criticism. 2. Nuns’ writings, Mexican—History and criti-
cism. 3. Mexican prose literature— To 1800 —History and
criticism. 4. Literature and society—Mexico. 5. Sex
role—Political aspects—Mexico. 6. Mexico— Church
history. I. Title.
pq7133.t83 2000
8688.08 — dc21 99-20697
For my parents

For Hamid
THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
Contents

Preface ix

Acknowledgments xvii

Chapter 1. Moving Stories: New Spanish Hagiographies and Their

Relation to Travel Narrative 1

Chapter 2. Chronicles of a Colonial Cloister: The Convent of San José

and the Mexican Carmelites 14

Chapter 3. From the Confessional to the Altar: Epistolary and

Hagiographic Forms 35

Chapter 4. The Exemplary Cloister on Trial: San José in the

Inquisition 55

Chapter 5. Cacique Nuns: From Saints’ Lives to Indian Lives 76

Afterword 98 Notes 163

Appendix 1 101 Bibliography 188

Appendix 2 118 Index 199

Appendix 3 148
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Preface

. . . los que son naturales españoles, si no tienen mucho aviso, a pocos años andados de
su llegada a esta tierra se hacen otros . . .
Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, bk. 10,
chap. 27 1

Bernardino de Sahagún’s concern about the power of the New World to

transmogrify the Spaniards who traveled to it is one that was shared by any
number of writers, readers, and, above all perhaps, inhabitants of the Indies.
Nuns immured within their convent walls were not exempt from worries
about what the New World environment might do to their search for per-
sonal and communal spiritual perfection. By the eighteenth century, the
powerful ecclesiastical reform movement that grew in New Spain to curb
the ‘‘abuses’’ and ‘‘relaxation’’ of convents seemed to confirm that the nuns
had succumbed to America, abandoning the purity of their Peninsular origin
and becoming otras, just as Sahagún had warned happened to all things and
persons Spanish.2
There were, of course, exemptions: nuns and convents that tried to re-
main faithful to the Old World models of piety that had been exported to
the New World and who resisted both the real and the imaginary differences
of the Americas. To this day, for example, the Carmelite nuns of Puebla,
Mexico, keep in a well-protected box a Carmelite habit sent to them by a
convent in Spain in the seventeenth century. By way of explanation, the nuns
tell how their predecessors were uncertain whether they were wearing the
correct habit and keeping to the exact rules on clothing. Sta. Teresa of Avila
appeared in a vision to the mother superior, assuring the convent of her help.
Soon afterward, they received a complete Carmelite habit from their sister
x • Colonial Angels

convent in Spain. The contents of the box were intended to instruct the
New World nuns in the path of orthodoxy and to confirm their kinship ties
to the Old World Carmelites.3 The vast distances of the discoveries cohabit
here with the intimate and familial space of the cloister and its customs that
unite two communities in sisterhood across the oceans. The story of this box
and what it encloses is fundamentally also the story of this book.
In applying to their Peninsular sisters to provide guidance on matters of
correctness and decorum in religious practice, these Mexican nuns make
vivid the uncertainties attached to the validity and legitimacy of colonial
practices. There are, of course, competing versions or stories of what exactly
these practices were and how they constituted New Spanish culture in the
period. One characterizes Mexico as perennially in opposition to the Pen-
insula: black to Spain’s white; while the other sees the colony as eternally
subservient to Madrid, copying its every move slavishly. These interpreta-
tions go from political appraisals of viceregal government, seeing it either as
an instance of independent municipal traditions inspired in the medieval
fueros of Castile, or as a typical example of the encroachment of royal abso-
lutism, to economic analyses that propose radically divergent opinions of the
extent to which the colonies were implicated in the ‘‘decline’’ of Spain. More
broadly cultural judgments also display this tendency to polarize the consti-
tution of the colony. In these cultural evaluations, academic culture, artistic
production, and civil society in general in New Spain are alternately praised
for their perfect execution of European models or condemned for their pro-
vincialism.4 This book argues that both these extreme explanations are in-
adequate. The material examined in Colonial Angels suggests some very
complex ways of thinking about and overturning, more than once, the
simple oppositions between colony and capital, center and periphery, New
and Old, as well as the distinctions, hardly ever discussed in this context,
between male and female, and enclosed and free.
The New World in this period is less El Dorado or Utopia than the land
of Cockaigne—a land, that is, of change and exchange. Take, for instance,
the two most often quoted examples of the exchange involved in coloniza-
tion: the building of Mexico City’s cathedral on the site of the most impor-
tant Aztec temple in the city, and the adoption by the Spaniards of the In-
dian maize tortilla as a replacement for the wheaten bread of the Peninsula.
The stark disparity between the two examples means they could easily be
thought of not so much as evidence of exchange but of brutal imposition, on
 Preface • xi

the one hand, and pragmatic appropriation, on the other. Without in any
sense negating the trauma of the Conquest, it is possible to see that even the
adoption of the tortilla carried with it considerable cultural weight. Bread of
either kind was a staple food, quotidian and yet symbolically resonant, es-
pecially in the Roman Catholic tradition. Maize grows more quickly than
wheat and requires less care. Tortillas were prepared exclusively by women
at specific times of the day. All these factors would have meant that the
switch from the one to the other inevitably entailed cultural shifts, in this
case particularly in the distribution of time in agricultural work and in the
sexual division of labor.
Colonial Angels is in part an attempt to understand the histories and sto-
ries of such negotiations as these. It stresses the reciprocity of the exchanges
while not ignoring their often unequal nature. There are hundreds of ex-
amples of the kind of ‘‘down-up’’ transmission of culture embodied in the
tortilla example, where the dominant Spanish group in some measure ac-
knowledged the existence and value of the conquered and marginalized in-
digenous group. The investigation of these kinds of exchange is a difficult
one to document because it concentrates on spheres that leave less obvious
‘‘traces’’ than the reproduction of institutions or the ideological import of
the evangelical work of missionaries. The writings connected to convents
and their inhabitants provide such a source. While certainly a record of the
transplantation of an Old World institution to the New World, they also
reveal aspects of this transplantation that have less to do with the machinery
of imperial domination than with the personal experience of cultural ex-
change and negotiation.
Colonial Angels studies this kind of transmission of culture with an em-
phasis on the issue of gender and its place in the imposition of the Spanish
empire. This takes us back to the Mexican Carmelites and their precious
box. Any Old World inheritance had to make a hazardous journey in order
to reach the New World, but the dangers and difficulties encountered on
this journey by women and by a ‘‘feminine’’ tradition, if we may call it that,
were especially perilous. The founding mother of the Carmelites occupies
an important role in this respect. As a writer and spiritual model, she is the
figure that dominates the Mexican Carmelites and that influences nuns of
every religious order in the New World.5 Sta. Teresa of Avila’s spiritual and
textual legacy, however, is not easily assumed—how, for example, does one
inherit a ‘‘tradition of reform’’ without falling into paradox?
xii • Colonial Angels

Access to women’s texts of this period is itself complicated and often tan-
gential. It frequently involves the examination of works by male authors who
use primary material written by women. Thus, an important part of Colonial
Angels involves an attempt to understand the cultural context, the impera-
tives and sanctions, in which the re-elaboration and use by men of texts
written by women took place. The writings by women that I examine were
absolutely necessary to the being of their authors as nuns. Writing defines
these women; it is their ‘‘work.’’ The very existence of the nuns is justified
by their representation, their writing of themselves as virtuous individuals,
even as potential saints. Their ability to represent themselves is both a source
of vulnerability (because it was always monitored by the authorities) and of
strength (because it was impossible to control completely). Although this
literature is in many senses similar to propaganda, its techniques are never
straightforward or univocal. Colonial Angels may not reveal the literary sisters
of sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, but in this context it is of little significance that
the nuns in this book appear at first sight to be less artistically talented than
sor Juana; their importance lies rather in the fact that they write in another
ambiance where exemplarity is more important than aesthetic virtuosity.6
This does not mean that they are conformist. Their exemplarity is, in fact,
better thought of as a negotiated originality: negotiated with priests, with
literary traditions, with cultural values. What it reveals are novel literary
forms that, though not necessarily outstanding according to aesthetic norms,
are nonetheless dynamically creative.7
Colonial Angels examines various examples of the range of this creativity
and the literary acculturation it illustrates and argues that the New World
context necessitated the creation of a new kind of writing. The first chapter
concentrates on the shock of the new, on the transformations undergone by
women and their convents when they were transplanted to the New World,
and on how these were represented. Its principal focus is to see how the
hagiography succumbed to the influence of that other genre so intimately
connected with the discovery of America: the travel narrative. It is intended
to be read as an extended introduction to the book, laying out the principal
concern of the other chapters in a very precise form; what is the relationship
between generic change and historical change, and what is the gendered
dimension of both?
In the next three chapters, which form the center of the book, the convent
and its collective and individual histories are the focus. In the first, the
 Preface • xiii

founding of the Carmelite convent of San José in Mexico City and the nar-
ratives of disunion, rebellion, and reform that it gives rise to are discussed in
relation to how they borrow from and change both the Teresian narrative
tradition and the more general inheritance of hagiography as a guiding
genre. In the second chapter, the focus is more refined and concentrates on
the individual, examining the letters written by a nun to her confessor and
his reworking of them into her hagiography. In the third, we return to the
Mexican Carmelites, only this time to find them in the Inquisition, accused
of heresy. The testimonies and letters connected to this trial provide an op-
portunity of seeing how the cloister and its nuns represent themselves and
their community in this extreme situation, what the literary models they
recur to are, which they privilege and which they ignore. In the Inquisition,
the hagiographic topoi of reforming nun and recalcitrant community are
rehearsed to suit the requirements of the Holy Office’s forensic rhetoric,
and their terms become very political—a politics connected to institutional
struggles in the New World and to the power of different ecclesiastical fac-
tions. Once again, questions of the exchange and negotiation of cultural
values in the colonial context are raised. The central quarrel between these
Mexican Carmelite nuns and their archbishop is the same as that which
brought Sta. Teresa of Avila into conflict with the clergy in Spain and even-
tually led to the splitting of the order into opposing factions. In both the
Peninsular and the Mexican cases, the Carmelite nuns argued about whether
their spiritual purity and the integrity of the Carmelite reform was better
safeguarded under the jurisdiction of the regular or of the secular clergy. The
Carmelite tradition was transplanted whole to the New World; that is, with
its heritage of fractures and fissures intact. Significantly, however, as the
chapter shows, the New Spanish version of the tradition splinters in specifi-
cally New Spanish ways.
The book closes with a chapter on the foundation of a convent for noble
Indian women, a piece which, like the first chapter, confronts the differences
of the Americas directly and tries to evaluate the new kind of narrative sys-
tem through which they are represented. To ascertain the feasibility of the
foundation, the authorities demand reports from priests who have had var-
ied and long experience of ministering to the spiritual needs of Indians.
Their testimonies certainly form part of the classic debate as to whether the
Indies were truly Christian (and civilized) or still pagan (and barbaric).
However, through the transformation of the intimate material exchanged
xiv • Colonial Angels

between priest and Indian woman in the confessional into information of a

more general nature, these accounts also contribute to a newer kind writing
on the Indies— one which shares the comparative and epistemological
stakes of ethnography and which, in this extraordinary case, also considers
issues of gender. Once more, the strict association of feminine piety with
the hagiographic model is broken in these narratives.
The shape of Colonial Angels then moves from direct contact with the
difference of the New World, to the more complex, if attenuated, differences
of established colonial society, and then back again. Hagiography is the
genre at the heart of the book, serving as the medium through which to
narrate every stage of contact with the New World. As a genre, hagiography
has a very distinct form that relies on well-established conventions, and it is
the modification and transformation of these that is so revealing about the
transmission of culture in the colonial situation. For example, a recurrent
pattern in the genre is for the virtuous individual to find herself in conflict
with the sinful society around her. In the convent chronicle, this pits the
saintly nun against her monastic community. In many of the Mexican writ-
ings, this conflict is expressed in terms of birthplace, the sinful nuns being
insulted variously for being criollas (of Spanish blood but born in America),
gachupinas (Spaniards in America), or Indias (indigenous women), and for
exhibiting the supposed characteristics of these peoples. Thus, the gachupi-
nas are condemned as modernas or lovers of novelty, the criollas are regalonas
or spoilt and indulgent, while the Indias are chocolateras or eaters of chocolate
in a period when it was considered an aphrodisiac.
Throughout the New Spanish vidas, the sins of the less virtuous find ex-
empla rooted in experience, in the politics of the moment. Greedy nuns add
chili to their food, revealing their decadence and their inability to eat simply,
in an opposition where ‘‘decadence’’ is connected to the new spice discovered
in the Indies, and ‘‘simple’’ qualifies the food of the pure Peninsula. Vain
nuns wear numerous jewels, a complaint usually directed at criollas, who
were considered to be utterly superficial and ostentatious, while lazy nuns
are described as Indias, ruined by the climate whose pernicious effects were
well established. The specificity of these insults reveals how the issues of
birth were social and cultural before they became racial. They also reveal the
extent to which the chronicle hagiographies were a literature of everyday life
in the cloister. In this respect, they are an extraordinarily valuable source
because descriptions of this kind do not exist in more official literature. In
 Preface • xv

the manuscript chronicle of the Carmelite convent, for example, the conflict
between the reforming nun who is a gachupina and the criolla monastic com-
munity is represented exclusively in the cultural terms described above.
However, when Parayso occidental, a version of the same chronicle, comes to
be published, the conflict is represented as pertaining only to spiritual virtue
and religious orthodoxy. Nevertheless, it is the other versions that remain
vivid, versions telling the stories of wicked nuns, lazy and indulgent, lulled
by the climate and rendered lascivious by the food, who smoke, who watch
plays and listen to concerts in their cloisters, and whose convents are like
small cities where Indians, blacks, and children also live and work in a mis-
ceginated social chaos far removed from the more official pictures of the
stately order of baroque Mexico City.
The convent, which seemed initially the perfect institution to transplant
to the New World (because of its implied rejection of any world), became
instead an important arena where political influence was negotiated strate-
gically by the New Spanish elite and the Peninsular authorities. Similarly,
though the subject matter of the texts associated with convents was suppos-
edly transcendental, these writings became instead histories of the cultural
values in the colony. The New World cloister—in its theoretical distance
from the world and in its real submersion in it; in the silence vowed by its
members and in their lived communication, writing, and sociability—pro-
vided the space for the representation of what more usually remained silent:
women and their creative role in colonial society.8 The tremendous force of
the writings about New World nuns, and especially the writings by them,
lies in their revelation of other prodigies, new conundrums, and situations
notably unlike those presented by the America written about and marveled
over by missionaries, colonizers, adventurers, and philosophers and with
which we have by now become so familiar.
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Acknowledgments

As befits a study of the relationship between the Old World and the New,
this book owes its existence to both worlds. In particular, to Italy, where at
the European University Institute I did much of the initial writing, and to
Mexico, where I carried out the research for it. Among the many people in
both worlds to whom I owe substantial debts of gratitude, I will mention
only a few: in Europe, Fernando Cervantes, Olwen Hufton, Richard Kagan,
Jonathan Murphy, Anthony Pagden, Gianna Pomata, and Ulinka Rub-
lack—all read and commented on different parts of the text at different
moments of its writing. Special thanks to my mother, Ana Marı́a V. T.
Sampson, who checked all my translations. In the Americas, Asunción Lav-
rin read the vaguest of first outlines and encouraged and advised, and
Lourdes Villa Fuerte Garcı́a and José Antonio Robles Cahero introduced
me to the Mexican group Historia de las Mentalidades and, more impor-
tant, welcomed me into their circle of friends. Thanks to his knowledge and
love of the library, Roberto Beristain of the Biblioteca Nacional in Mexico
City provided me with sources untraceable in catalogs. My thanks also to
my family in Peru, among whom I finished the manuscript. Later in its
progress, the book was fortunate to have two very attentive and generous
readers, Catherine Jaffe and Stacey Schlau. I am grateful to David Brading
for help in locating the cover picture and to Alberto Islas, Alejandra Gon-
zález, and Carmen Flores Vallejo for their generosity and kindness in secur-
ing permissions. I would also like to thank Sheri Englund of the University
of Texas Press, who guided me through the process of preparing the manu-
script for publication.
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Colonial Angels
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c h a p t e r 1

Moving Stories:
New Spanish Hagiographies and Their

Relation to Travel Narrative

Basta decir que impelida de su ardiente fervor del bien de las almas y zelo de propaga-
ción de la Fe y derramar su sangre, andubo por mar y tierra seis mil leguas, que en una
mujer y monja es muy ponderable.
Bartolomé de Letona, Vida de Gerónima de la Asunción, 16621

. . . de romera a ramera hay poquı́sima distancia.

Alonso de Andrade, Tratado de la Virgen, 16422

The foundation of the first convents of the Spanish empire in the Indies
required a number of women to undertake the extraordinary journey to the
New World. This voyage, with all its dangers and insecurities, constituted a
challenge for even the hardiest of men at the time, and the participation of
women in such adventures elicited the reverential shock and allusion to mar-
tyrdom that the quotation from Letona exhibits. Nevertheless, women were
not just in physical danger when traveling, and their movement was not only
a sign of physical strength. Their journeying was both moral vulnerability
and sexual deviance as Alonso de Andrade’s comment in his treatise makes
apparent. In his opinion, there is but the slightest distance separating the
movement of the pilgrim woman from that of the prostitute, a slip in virtue
being mimicked by a corresponding slip in language.3
2 • Colonial Angels

In this context, the travel narratives contained in the convent chronicles

and hagiographies of New Spanish cloisters provide an extraordinary source,
retelling not only the progress on the path to salvation of pious nuns and
their cosmic spiritual journeys but also the real transatlantic voyages of
women whose virtue was unimpeachable. These narratives marry a spiritual
representation of travel with accounts of the personal experience of jour-
neys most often associated with the ‘‘discovery’’ of the Americas. The nar-
rative reconciliation of hagiography with the testimonial genre that these
texts achieve is an important moment in the context of Spain’s evangelical
empire-building mission. Moreover, the presence of female protagonists in
these stories provides a unique opportunity to assess the role of women in
the colonial project.
The protagonists of the chronicles and vidas are predestined to be good
travelers. The saint has always been a classic mediating figure in Western
Christendom, providing a bridge between heaven and earth, between the
known world and the unknown. The Vida de Marı́a de Jesús (1676) by Fran-
cisco Pardo provides an extended and rhetorically developed version of this
notion. In a dream that bears clear parallels with such classical forebears as
Scipio, Marı́a de Jesús is transported by two guardian angels through the
cosmos. The summary that prefaces the chapter gives a good idea of the
kind of voyage she undertakes. She is an alert sentry, a look-out tower for all
the planets, who rises to explore all the hemispheres, discovering the delights
of Glory. She passes over the diaphanous regions of clouds and sees the
horrors of the center, outwitting the cries and desires of the abyss, penetrat-
ing the immensities of the sea. Her journey takes her to the lakes and other
out-lying parts of purgatory, until by the end of it, she has traversed all the
‘‘provincias y naciones del universo, y rodea en palmas de angeles todo el
mundo . . .’’ [the provinces and nations of the universe and encircles the
world with triumphing angels].4
This kind of journey is clearly reserved for the chosen few, but the virtu-
ous nuns who aspire to sainthood also share a more generally diffused spiri-
tual notion of travel: that of the continual movement of the soul on its voy-
age to heaven and salvation. When Isabel de la Encarnación experiences her
religious calling in a vision, its nature is that of a metaphorical journey. She
is shown a very long path, full of brambles and sharp thorns and at the end
of which there is such a small light it is almost impossible to see. At this
moment in the journey, sor Isabel hears a voice that tells her, ‘‘This is the
 Moving Stories • 3

path you have to walk, and to reach the joy of the light and of rest, you will
have to travel on it and be torn to shreds, leaving your insides on those
thorns.’’ 5
The contradiction between the imperative that women remain cloistered
from the world within the walls of their homes or convents, and the spiritual
movement and drive for progress that they are also urged to undertake is
enormous. In some cases, as a response to this double imperative, the lan-
guage used to describe the effects of prayer, which is the chief tool the saintly
‘‘mediators’’ use to travel between heaven and earth, is so ambiguous it leaves
an image that embodies the contradiction perfectly: a completely breachable
cloister. It is in her small cell that the wings of sor Catarina’s heart spread,
and she flies up to the breast of her Husband. From this place she is shown
the deepest secrets, seeing many of her confessors flying up to heaven at the
moment of death, rising up to where the Divine King promised that none
of those who had guided her soul would lose theirs. From here God shows
her many souls that live in mortal sin so that she can chastise and correct
them and intercede for them so that they reform their lives. From here also
she is transported for many leagues, traveling in spirit to the provinces where
the Jesuit fathers had their missions. This part of her journey is especially
vivid, and she is able to describe the land and the new conversions as well as
how the houses and huts are constructed, what dress the Indians use, and
what the missionaries looked like. Apparently, all of this was later proved to
be true [. . . viéndose después todo cumplido].6
In the didactic literature of the day, there is a clear attempt to resolve and
contain the contradiction between the nun’s enclosure and her role as holy
voyager, mediating between heaven and earth, through a dichotomy that
separates the body from the spirit. The New Spanish hagiographies, how-
ever, show the impossibility of such a project, most obviously because of the
real nature of the voyages recounted. It is significant that the breaching of
the cloister described above should primarily concern the action of the nun
in purgatory and in evangelization. The conception of purgatory, as argued
by Jaques le Goff, significantly modified categories of space and time in the
Christian imagination.7 The idea of purgatory as a ‘‘place,’’ though theo-
logically contested, was in practice widely accepted and is very much linked
to the pastoral and evangelical role of the Church. Most notably, it was used
in the diffusion of the faith because it provided instances of instructive ex-
empla. Purgatory could be traveled to and its inhabitants described, the ac-
4 • Colonial Angels

counts of their torments serving as valuable information for the preparation

of the spiritual journey the listener’s or reader’s own soul would inevitably
have to undertake. Le Goff argues that the introduction of purgatory in the
form of exempla into the narrative mode common to the hagiography and
the sermon (which addresses a concept of time that is transcendental, that
of salvation and conversion) implies an introduction of historic time that
cuts across and interrupts this eschatological time.8 The voyage of prayer
that carries Catarina de San Juan in the above quotation from her cell to
purgatory and then on to specific Jesuit missions where she is able to report
accurately on the customs of the land she sees and on the dress and character
of those who inhabit it, makes vivid how versions of the spiritual narrative
of the cosmic tour often succumb to the allure of a kind of description most
often associated with the account of ‘‘real’’ journeys. This type of narrative
has perhaps as its distinguishing characteristic the ‘‘historic’’ treatment of
time as opposed to the transcendental, and it is plausible to suppose that
the New World provided particularly attractive exempla of this kind. Even
the stylishly polished hagiography of Marı́a de Jesús can be seen to indulge
in this other narrative mode. The references to the paradise she sees on
her journey are in consonance with the most conventional requirements
of learned hagiographic form, being a reproduction of the classical locus
amoenus. There are green forests, crystalline rivers, colorful birds, all in a
luminous and pleasant space.9
This description of a place that is effectively ‘‘no place’’ breaks down when
the journey reaches purgatory however, and it is notable that the regions she
sees here could be interpreted as representing the recent past of the land she
travels from (New Spain), when it was still the place of idolaters. It is as
though the New World, like purgatory, once acknowledged as a real geo-
graphical destination, different from the terrestrial paradise it was at first
thought to be (and which is, in effect, ‘‘nowhere’’) can only be narrated in
the historic rather than eschatological mode. So, the angels take sor Marı́a to
other ‘‘remote and different’’ climes—those of infidels—where she makes
out ‘‘muchas riquezas, profanas pompas, sobrados placeres, amenas arbole-
das y agradables frutas . . . [great wealth, profane pomp, excessive pleasures,
pleasant trees, and delicious fruits . . .] in a description that owes much to
the tradition of representing the Americas as an extraordinary cornucopia.10
Without a doubt, the New World presented enormous difficulties for the
imposition of European cultural and spiritual norms. The kinds of distortion
 Moving Stories • 5

that travel and the New World could bring to the hagiographic model of
feminine sanctity is evident in the hagiographies examined, which exhibit
the strain of adapting a narrative form that was becoming more and more
rigid at the time to stories telling of different lands and different experi-
ences.11 The frequent reference to martyrdom and the ‘‘desert’’ the New
World presents for the traveling nun is an indication of how a predomi-
nantly masculine hagiographic model had to be invoked to explain the pres-
ence of female saints whose lives were more traditionally ones of immobile
and virtuous enclosure.
The far-reaching implications of this kind of modification for concep-
tions of the feminine itself can be identified in the vida of Ana de San José,
a Spanish nun who lived her entire life in a convent in Salamanca but whose
hagiography was reprinted in Mexico in 1641. In a spiritual voyage, sor Ana
not only journeys to a land of evangelical enterprise, but she becomes a
preacher herself, usurping that most sacred of male privileges, direct access
to the Word of God:

Otras vezes me sentı́a llevar sin saber de quién y estando yo en arroba-

miento veı́a mi cuerpo ası́ vestido con el hábito, y de la misma manera
que ando; y estando yo elevada, como si fuera otra, veı́a que me llevaban.
Esto me ha sucedido muchas vezes ir andando por el aire como volando;
y algunas vezes me hallo entre multitud de Indios de diversas naciones,
con la doctrina Christiana en la mano, y ellos estan de rodillas oyéndola.12

The absolutely unorthodox, not to say heretical, behavior that Ana de San
José describes herself as indulging in can only be imagined because of the
distance separating her real cloister in Salamanca from her dream destina-
tion in the New World. Arrival in the Indies clearly placed the travelers and
their cultural and religious ‘‘baggage’’ in an extreme situation where such
certainties as sexual difference can already be seen as challenged by this if
not ‘‘world-turned-upside-down,’’ certainly ‘‘otherworldly’’ situation. New
Spain, however, did not confuse only the categories of sexual difference but
also those that divided civilization from barbarism. In the Western tradition,
the journey of a saint was generally understood to imply an entry into a
different world, and more specifically it often meant abandoning civilization
for barbarism, the city for the desert. Paradoxically, the presence of convents
and their inhabitants in the Indies was supposed to signify precisely the im-
6 • Colonial Angels

position of civilization, of the Spanish state, and of all its cultural, religious,
and political adjuncts. The strict entry procedures that legislated the race
and social class of the nuns, the political intrigues and competition sur-
rounding the foundation and patronage of convents, and the important part
they played in processions and celebrations in the city makes apparent their
central role in the creation of a civic politics, a politics that was necessarily
also a racial, religious, and cultural one. The city as conceived of in classical
thought was the model upon which many of the discussions about the good
government of the Spanish empire in America turned, and the establish-
ment in such an empire of a community of women (the convent), within the
civitas (as reconceived by Christianity) would serve as symbolically resound-
ing proof of its civility.13
The New Spanish hagiography has thus to narrate the ‘‘exportation’’ of
Spanish civility to an idolatrous land in narratives that range from the his-
tories of heroic conquest by Spanish soldiers to stories of the equally heroic
martyrdom of missionary priests. These narratives, however, also have to
affirm that the idolatrous nation in which such adventures unfold is ulti-
mately, or will become, Christian and orthodox—the fitting place for such
pious heroes. It is in the representation of travel that the complexity of such
a project is made evident. On the one hand, there is a desire to assert the
specificity of the New World setting—its status as land of idolatry for ex-
ample, and, on the other, a wish to deny the pernicious effects of its ‘‘dif-
ference’’—the fact that it might prove impossible to eradicate such beliefs
completely.
One narrative strategy that can be traced in many of the writings involves
an attempt to register movement without representing change. In a curi-
ous version of the relationship of time and speed to distance, the spiritual
mathematics of nuns’ journeys allows the representation of their voyages to
consider these variables while bracketing the question of place. Nuns in the
chronicles certainly travel on real as well as spiritual journeys, but they effec-
tively go nowhere, for it is precisely by acknowledging no change in the
matter of place that the New World’s difference is neutralized and its reli-
gious (and political, racial, and social) orthodoxy asserted in terms of its
asymmetry to the Old World.14
An enlightening explanation of the importance of place in such a kind of
journey is given in the remarks attributed to the abbess of the convent of
Sta. Catalina, a Capuchin foundation, on her being offered decorations for
the cloister:
 Moving Stories • 7

¿Quién a visto que los pasajeros que caminan ligeros al termino donde
van, busquen comodidades en los oficios y ventas? Pues nuestra casa es
una venta donde estamos de camino para el fin que deseamos, que es lo
eterno.15

Place, in this case the cloister itself, which is figured as an inn on the route
to heaven, is clearly of no importance on the journey to salvation. Neverthe-
less, it is crucial to represent movement in this Christian eschatology be-
cause of its inexorably teleological nature, and so the convent chronicles
provide very detailed topographical information of the founding mothers’
movements. The itinerary on arrival in New Spain is an established one:
Veracruz, Puebla, the Shrine of Guadalupe, and then Mexico City. The
journey certainly takes on the value of pilgrimage with the visiting of holy
sites and relics in convents along the way. The geographical detail provided,
however exact, remains, as Michel de Certeau puts it, a ‘‘backdrop’’ against
which the comedy of the nuns’ immutably constant desire for salvation is
played out.16
In a philosophically rigorous working out of this ‘‘geography of the sa-
cred,’’ one would expect from these narratives a representation of traveling
that involves no experience of such movement and change on the part of its
subjects. The nun, as ultimately innocent woman, would always be the dupe
of the experience of travel that she would never experience as experience, her
innocence turning it into events, places, things that happen to her but do
not affect her. The chronicles certainly gesture at this in the emphasis on the
enclosed nature of the journeys the nuns undertake. They move from cov-
ered coaches to ships’ holds, staying overnight in convents and keeping to
their liturgical hours in a representation of continual enclosure, emphasized
by the insistence that their veils prevent them from both seeing and being
seen. In the sermon that Juan Ignacio de la Peña uses as a source for his
chronicle of the foundation of the first Capuchin convent in Mexico City,
during the journey, as the group crosses the Sierra Morena, the confessor
accompanying the nuns encourages them to look out at the view because of
its beauty. They refuse to lift their veils, saying they will see everything in
heaven. As compensation for their sacrifice, the nuns are rewarded with a
much more significant sight, which refers them to a place in the geography
of the sacred rather than that of Spain: a vision of the Virgin.17 In a similar
rhetorical strategy, the nuns are represented as exempt from the usual ‘‘fe-
male’’ constraints on travel; they have no special demands and do not endan-
8 • Colonial Angels

ger the efficient progress of the expedition. In fact, they are not women but
that most hardy traveler of all, a male apostle: ‘‘unas mujeres varoniles, ver-
daderas apostólicas.’’ 18 The function of this kind of description is to make
clear that the huge distances covered in the journeys elapse outside historical
time, the nuns never entering the world, Old or New, but transporting their
cloister and its special ‘‘time’’ to a different place.19
Despite the considerable strength of this hagiographic narrative imper-
ative to present movement without change, travels without places, the
chronicles also exhibit the influence of a radically different mode of writing
about journeys that is resolutely ‘‘historical’’ to use le Goff ’s terms. The
manuscript chronicle of the convent of Sta. Brı́gida is an excellent example
of a narrative open to influences of this sort. In the chapter devoted to de-
scription of the journeys undertaken by the founding mothers, a consider-
able amount of attention is paid to circumstantial detail, the personality of
the accompanying men, the kind of places chosen to sleep in overnight,
and the weather. Perhaps the most blatant modification of the hagiographic
genre is the explanation of the foundation’s enforced postponement due to
war breaking out between England and Spain. The nuns are forced to re-
main in Cádiz for four years and are only eventually able to embark because
of the danger of an invasion of the city. This situation is clearly translatable
into hagiographic terms: the nuns as potential martyrs, the prey of evil here-
tics. Although this is gestured at in the chronicle, what seems to interest the
nuns writing is more a historical explanation, along the lines of cause and
effect (giving an abbreviated account of European politics at the time) and
an interpretation of individual reactions in very ‘‘naturalistic’’ terms (particu-
larly of the bravery and determination of the captain of their ship).
It is arguable that the principal contribution of the narratives of discovery
written about the New World concerns the status of the writing subject and
the issue of authority in the text. One can thus see that the representation
of travel in conventual chronicles allows an exploration of the issue of gender
and authority in the texts. Traditionally, it was clear that a woman writer’s
authority in her writing came through divine sanction, not a simple concept
to assert as the increasingly ‘‘juridical’’ character of Curia inquiries into vidas
shows.20 The accounts of voyages to the New World reveal other strategies
for asserting authority in writing. The main problem for writers of histories
of voyages to the New World was the textual void they were also venturing
into.21 It is apparent that one solution was to invoke the personal experience
 Moving Stories • 9

of the writing subject. The influence of forensic rhetoric in constructing the

‘‘I’’ as witness in hagiography cannot be underestimated. The increasingly
legal nature of the hagiography also meant that often narrative events took
the form of a legal deposition, or at least gestured toward this type of ‘‘truth.’’
In the chronicle of Sta. Clara, Antonio de la Rosa Figueroa in his introduc-
tion to the extant second book, which is devoted to the description of the
fire that destroyed the convent, comments on the greater historical value of
an experiential account than one based on hearsay:

Siempre es templado en la verdad lo que vemos y siempre es sublime en

la grandeza lo que [viera] de nuestras noticias la antiguedad o la distancia;
alocución que el juicioso Horacio advirtió en su Arte Poética, diciendo que
se concedı́a más la admiración cuando son testigos los ojos que cuando
[resuena] solamente al examen de los oı́dos.22

The writing of Bartolomé de las Casas is classically taken to present the

contradictory narrative pulls between the desire to invoke the authority of
tradition in the form of an authenticating text and a wish to assert the value
of his own experience by constantly invoking his ‘‘presence’’ in the Indies.
Although examples of the recurrence to ‘‘experience’’ in the chronicles may
be found, and forensic rhetoric is certainly used extensively, it would be in-
appropriate to identify such marked contradictions in the conventual vidas.
Hagiography certainly provided a very authoritative form and canon of texts,
yet it was flexible to change, especially when its instrumental use as history,
as in the New Spanish examples, called on it to represent categories such as
travel and difference, usually outside its epistemological scope. Moreover,
the didactic function of hagiography meant that issues such as the status of
the writing subject and its relation to authority in the text were focused on
in a very different manner, much more concerned with the text as ‘‘tool’’
and as ‘‘practice’’—in fact, with its reception and consumption rather than
its production.
Once this focus on reception is acknowledged, the significant differences
between how printed and manuscript works represent travel and its contra-
dictions begin to make sense.23 The accounts of voyages in the manuscript
chronicles were meant for ‘‘domestic’’ consumption in the cloister itself.
Their reading at moments of recreation in the convent would have served to
create a notion of a community with a shared history expressed very much
10 • Colonial Angels

in terms of the ‘‘experience’’ of the founding mothers. The conventional use

of the same pronoun to designate the protagonists of the history and its
voyages (nosotras) and those who read about their exploits (nosotras) empha-
sizes this. The audience’s degree of estrangement from the experiences con-
stituted by the wondrous real voyages recounted in the chronicles could be
seen as complicating the construction of any sense of community around
such extraordinary experiences. Nevertheless, this supposition must be miti-
gated by acknowledging the ease with which spiritual voyages of a kind the
modern reader finds incredibly bizarre were narrated. This sort of travel was
particularly good at illustrating the mediatory power of saintly individuals in
the community, and there are innumerable instances of pious nuns traveling
to purgatory, being shown their convent, and learning about the very private
vices and virtues of its members. This knowledge of interiores, as it is called,
is of transparent didactic use but also functions to create a sense that the
cloister and its particular nuns were carried toward salvation and redemption
precisely through this continual traveling of its more pious members. When
the plague strikes Mexico City in 1633, Agustina de San Juan’s privileged
knowledge is demonstrated in a vision she has of the nuns to be saved. Her
mediatory role is emphasized by her post as gatekeeper of the convent, and
it is while walking toward the gate that she retells her premonitory vision.
The Holy Trinity appeared on its throne to sor Agustina, summoning nuns
from one side and young girls from the other, making her incredibly happy.24
The power these journeys to purgatory and other celestial spheres have to
create a sense of community rests on their appeal to a shared experience,
achieved in great part by the introduction of exempla. These examples fur-
nish the narration with an element of historic specificity, mentioning events
and people who are ‘‘real’’ protagonists in the community’s past. In this way,
the spiritual journeying of pious nuns can be argued to carry them closer to
the community they travel from. The mise-en-scène of their voyaging is
certainly often staged in startlingly naturalistic terms, the trance being fixed
precisely in time and its accompanying gestures being minutely recorded:

El dı́a de los Santos Niños Innocentes del año de 1630, estando la Madre
Isabel de la Encarnación muy fatigada de sus trabajos y dolores, y en espe-
cial en el costado, a las diez de la noche entró la enfermera a verla . . . en
esta ocasión llegó la Prelada . . . Estuvo pues la Prelada en compañı́a de
otras dos religiosas en la celda acompañando a la enferma. La cual como
 Moving Stories • 11

si estuviera buena se sentó sobre la cama, arrimándose a la almohada, y

quedó arrobada, con el rostro y los ojos tan hermosos y encendidos, que
parecı́a un serafı́n. . . .25

In contrast, the printed versions of nuns’ journeys, both spiritual and real,
address a much wider audience and their authors often have a transparent
political agenda. In some cases, their concern is the promotion of a specific
religious order or what might be called a precocious patriotic desire to de-
fend New Spain from all charges of inferiority by intervening in the issue of
the New World’s difference and the modes of infusing its representation
with authority. Nevertheless, the valorization of ‘‘experience’’ in creating a
sense of a community and of its history that is evident in the manuscripts
can also be found in the printed versions where the nature of the community
created is necessarily much more diffuse. Significantly, the work of pooling
experience achieved in the manuscripts through the consummate simplicity
of the pronoun nosotras devolves in the printed sources to the narration of
travel. Here, the private perusal of the text through its reading takes on the
character of a journey and appeals to the readers by constructing a homology
between any real journey they may have made or can imagine and the meta-
phorical voyage of reading. For example, the readers of Trono Mexicano are
invited to become as itinerant as the subject matter and to consider their
own travels when reading about that of the nuns:

¡Ponderen los que han navegado, y experimentado los riesgos del mar! Y
los que no los han pasado, por lo que han oı́do admiren lo que padecerı́an
unas pobres religiosas; que si las molestias y trabajos de una navegación
son grandes, tanto tuvieron de mayores en las madres, cuanto su instituto
de más rı́gido, con el prolijo recato de su retiro.26

The postscript to Isabel de la Encarnación’s life is even more explicit about

the shared ‘‘experience’’ the hagiography alludes to. It addresses its ‘‘dear
Christian readers,’’ telling them that God did not create us for this world
but for the next, and that to reach this other life only two paths exist. One,
though narrow, difficult, and unattractive (that of virtue), has a sure and
guaranteed end, there being no danger of getting lost. The other, though it
may seem more easy and delightful, is deceptive because its pleasures are
false. ‘‘Halt!’’ the book orders its readers, pleading with them not to be stu-
12 • Colonial Angels

pid and blind but to walk on the sure and true path of the sufferings of the
Cross, so that by imitating the venerable nun who is the subject of the book,
they may gain their inheritance of Eternal Happiness. The author ends his
exhortation claiming that this is the happy end ‘‘a que he dedicado el trabajo
de esta Historia’’ [to which he has dedicated the plot of his History].27
In this injunction, the reader’s personal spiritual voyage and the example
set by sor Isabel’s own journey are joined in the notion of the traveling con-
stituted by the reading experience itself. As the reader reads sor Isabel’s vida,
he or she learns from the examples given. The consumption of this kind of
text was clearly meant to have a direct bearing on the actions of such a
reader. How successful this didactic intent was remains a question for an-
other study. Here, what is important to note is the mode in which such a
transference from text to action was conceived as taking place. To return to
the categories used earlier, the deployment of didactic examples introduces
a ‘‘historic’’ time to what would otherwise be an eschatological narrative of a
saintly life. In the New Spanish case, the introduction of such examples
necessarily meant confronting and negotiating the ‘‘difference’’ the New
World presented. Although the New Spanish conventual chronicles and
vidas may have wanted to affirm in their exempla that only the ‘‘place’’ was
new, not the institution or the orthodoxy of its inhabitants, the very recog-
nition of place meant a compromise of hagiographic form. At points, the
parallels to be drawn between exemplary women (ave raris by the period’s
own definition) and strange monsters of the New World are baroque temp-
tations too attractive for the male writers to resist. They use such a happy
conjunction to display their learning by comparing the nuns to the monsters
in the works of Pliny and other classical writers. In Rodrigo Garcı́a Flores’
sermon on Teresa de Guzmán, she is compared to the monsters in Aulus
Gellius, who live only off the scent of flowers, as well as to the anthro-
pophagi in Pliny, who can only survive and breathe in a specific country,
hers being that of prayer and peace.28
The affinities between the New World, the evangelical mission it sug-
gested, and the narrative modes associated with both point to the demise of
‘‘pure’’ hagiography in this context and, paradoxically, to its resurrection and
success as a heterogeneous narrative form. The narration of the extraordi-
nary real journeys made by these nuns from Spain to the New World is
clearly the most obvious example of how the colonial hagiographies were
called upon to be as flexible and permeable as the cloisters they represented
 Moving Stories • 13

in order to answer to the needs of the historic and cultural context they were
written in. The narrative adaptations required by the New World context
were not confined only to the chronicling of ‘‘real’’ journeys however. These
texts invite their readers to embark on emulative journeys to reach the virtues
they advocate, and in this didactic project, the travel narratives they contain
are shown to represent not only the voyages of Spanish nuns and institutions
to the New World but also those of a range of Spanish cultural, sexual, and
spiritual orthodoxies. It is precisely in the narration of both metaphorical
and real voyages, which require a degree of detail and historical specificity
that militates against any desire to neutralize the New World’s extraordinary
difference, that the stories of virtue in the colonies are never quite able to
escape the exoticism of the real adventure that brought them to such a far-
away place.
c h a p t e r 2

Chronicles of a Colonial Cloister:

The Convent of San José and the Mexican

Carmelites

[México, ciudad] . . . dignamente merecedora de que en los ecos de la fama haya llegado
su nombre a los más retirados términos del universo, aún no tanto por la amenidad
deleitosı́sima de su sitio; por la incomparable hermosura de sus espaciosas calles; por la
opulencia, y valor de sus antiguos reyes; por la copia y circunspección de sus tribunales;
por las prendas que benignamente les reparte el cielo a sus ilustres hijos; conseguido ser
la cabeza y metrópoli de la América; cuanto porque a beneficio de éste, y de otros innu-
merables templos, con que se hermosea su dilatado ámbito se puede equivocar con el
cielo empı́reo, cuando desde ellos, sin intermisión, se le envı́a a Dios Nuestro Señor el
sacrificio y holocausto de sus debidos elogios, y a donde viven los que los habitan con
pureza celestial.1
Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Parayso occidental, 1683

Llegadas a la casa, entramos en un patio. Las paredes harto caı́das me parecieron, mas
no tanto como cuando fue dı́a se pareció. . . . Yo no sabı́a qué hacer, porque vi no con-
venı́a poner allı́ altar. . . . Comenzáronse a buscar [clavos] de las paredes; en fin, con
trabajo, se halló recaudo. Unos a entapizar, nosotras a limpiar el suelo, nos dimos tan
buena prisa, que, cuando amanecı́a, estaba puesto el altar, y la campanilla en un corre-
dor, y luego se dijo la misa.2
Teresa de Jesús, Libro de las fundaciones, 1610

Sigüenza y Góngora’s extravagant idealization of civic space celebrates con-

vents as some of the most important buildings in the ultracivilized and pious
 Chronicles of a Colonial Cloister • 15

metropolis of Mexico City. His description forms part of the introduction

to a chronicle that contains an account of the foundation of San José, the
first Carmelite convent in the viceregal city. Another Carmelite convent,
also called San José but located in Medina del Campo, Spain, is the subject
of the second quotation, but in this case idealism is abandoned in favor of
an account of the prosaic realities of founding such institutions. Sta. Teresa
of Avila recounts how hard physical labor was required to convert buildings
that were in dilapidated conditions. Her description of this foundation, and
indeed of all the religious houses included in the Libro de las fundaciones,
gives the impression of Carmelite convents as essentially improvised insti-
tutions, springing up in the interstices of metropolises that were unaware of
their existence and often indeed openly hostile to them.
What change did the perception of the Carmelite Order undergo for the
first of its convents in Mexico City, founded scarcely one hundred years after
the rather ad hoc and precarious establishment of the Peninsular convents,
to figure as the centerpiece of an official account of the glories of the colonial
capital? What happened for this most radically ascetic of monastic reforms
in the sixteenth century, whose essence was embodied in Sta. Teresa’s com-
ment that God was to be found también en los pucheros [even among the pots
and pans] to become the subject of such pompous and triumphalist rhetoric?
This surprising change in the Teresian tradition, and the journey and place
of destination that played a part in occasioning it, is the focus of this chapter.
We are used to thinking of the New World as a place in which European
culture re-created itself. In terms of religious communities, the two most
salient examples of European traditions interacting dynamically with the
New World context are the millenarian dreams of the Franciscans and the
utopian projects of the Jesuits. My intention here is to study an instance of
precisely this kind of exportation— of a spiritual tradition that was also an
intellectual and a writing tradition, but which in this particular case had a
woman at its center. In some senses, to claim that there existed a female
‘‘tradition’’ in this period is to be purposefully anachronistic, for women were
generally excluded from the ability to create powerful genealogies of any
kind. Nevertheless, the long history of misogynist writings in Europe is itself
a ‘‘tribute’’ to the existence of this illegitimate female line. What is so inter-
esting about examining the Teresian tradition, and particularly in the New
World context, is precisely that it constitutes an instance of a female tradi-
tion being deemed acceptable and indeed co-opted by the ecclesiastical and
16 • Colonial Angels

political hierarchies that usually worked to marginalize such phenomena.

And this situation is even more intriguing because, as we will see, the Tere-
sian tradition in the Indies is being championed within the context of a
crucial argument about the orthodoxy of the New World, the success of
conquest, and indeed of the evangelizing enterprise itself.3
The number and variety of the chronicle histories of San José give us
an extraordinary insight into what the exportation of the Teresian tradition
meant for very different authors and their equally diverse intended audi-
ences. There are manuscript writings by the nuns themselves, telling the
history of the foundation in biographical and autobiographical form.4 There
are also three accounts of the foundation by men: one, a secular academic
(Sigüenza y Góngora); one, a Dominican preparing a general history of
the Carmelite Order (Avendaño); and the other, a chaplain of the convent
writing a history of its foundation (Méndez). All of these stories of how
San José came to be established have as a literary model the writings of Sta.
Teresa, and their relation to this body of founding texts is an important
indicator of how the tradition fared in the New World.
All the authors agree that the foundation of San José is an event of mo-
mentous importance in the colony. Avendaño and Méndez go so far as to
claim the foundation to have been divinely ordained. Indeed, both histori-
ans declare that Sta. Teresa herself had often expressed her desire for such
an event. In his history, Avendaño documents the devotion to Sta. Teresa
shown by eminent people before the foundation and argues that this is a
pious portent of San José’s success. Among these devotees is the hermit Gre-
gorio López, an acclaimed ‘‘holy man’’ of the Indies who was revered as a
saint at the time and whose support would have been both spiritually and
politically very valuable.5
The fortunes of the Carmelite Order in general in the Americas are dis-
tinguished by the drama and speed with which they unfolded. The years
1600 –1606 were some of the most active of the Counter-Reformation. They
were also a period in which Sta. Teresa’s fame in the New World grew. By
1604 Lima had its Carmelite convent and in New Spain potential patrons
and founding mothers were numerous. Inés de la Cruz and Mariana de la
Encarnación, the nuns who went on to found San José, mention various
other attempts that disrupted their own during these years. These involved
nuns from other New Spanish convents, beatas from Spain, and female
members of elite Mexican families.6 Sor Inés and sor Mariana eventually
 Chronicles of a Colonial Cloister • 17

succeed, but in order to establish San José they and their companions have
to leave the Conceptionist convent of Jesús Marı́a in which they were pro-
fessed nuns. Their abandonment of the Franciscan Order and their break-
ing of the rule and of the cloister are the painful episodes that give birth to
San José.
The reaction of the nuns left behind in Jesús Marı́a is to accuse the de-
parting women of being nothing but noveleras [modish] and to allege that
their wish to leave the Conceptionist rule has no more substance than a
fashionable whim. The perception of the Carmelite Order as a ‘‘reforming’’
force was widely held, and the vehemence of these nuns’ condemnation of
reform is a response to the fact that it necessarily implied criticism of exist-
ing norms. In this case, criticism of an established religious institution to
which they belonged. The situation was a delicate one and serves to remind
us of the status of the Carmelites as relative newcomers in a hierarchy of
religious orders that stretched back many centuries. Indeed, Trent’s promo-
tion of the Carmelites (however patchy and inconsistent this sometimes
was) would have lent the order an ultramodern aura. The founding mother,
Mariana de la Encarnación, clearly wants to avoid the ecclesiastical scandal
that such accusations of superficiality could lead to, and in her account of
the foundation she emphasizes the fact that the Carmelite confessors first
concentrated on making the nuns who were intent on reform keep to their
Conceptionist rule perfectly before moving on to ideas of taking on a new
or different one.7
The arrival of Archbishop Pérez de la Serna to Mexico City in 1612 pro-
vided the ecclesiastical backing that made this kind of diplomacy irrelevant.
The archbishop had spent the transatlantic crossing reading Sta. Teresa’s
writings and believed that he had been saved from shipwreck by her inter-
vention. Opposition to the foundation of San José was at an end—the con-
vent was to be the archbishop’s magnificent ex voto.8 Pérez de la Serna was
certainly very energetic in ensuring that his chosen object of devotion ac-
crued as much ‘‘saintliness’’ as possible and as quickly as possible. In 1618,
the year of Sta. Teresa’s canonization, he also named her patron saint of
Mexico City, a title that would have conferred great honor on the saint’s
representatives in the city—the nuns of San José. The archbishop had al-
ready made sure the convent had as its chaplain Francisco Lossa, possibly
the most celebrated holy man in the Indies at the time because of his past
friendship with the dead Gregorio López, who was himself considered a
18 • Colonial Angels

saint. Moreover, Pérez de la Serna also ensured that López’ bones were held
in the convent, thus making it the possessor of very powerful relics.9 The
weight of these associations charged San José and its inhabitants with a con-
siderable spiritual aura. It also confirmed that the Carmelite convent and its
nuns had come to be the exemplary signs of an orthodoxy that the Church
aspired to communicate to the entire colony.
The ceremonies connected to the foundation of San José confirm the po-
litical importance of the event as well as baroque commonplaces about how
public display could be used in ratifying institutional power and world order.
The written account of these ceremonies, of the magnificent altars erected
along the route, of the illuminated streets, fireworks, and public squares cov-
ered in rich carpets and flowers, certainly serves to record and acknowledge
these instances of benevolence on the part of a devout patron or group of
patrons. It also serves the more broadly political and ideological projects that
San José had come to embody. This second function is transparent in two
descriptions of particularly significant images: St. James and Sta. Teresa her-
self. Both images are life-size and richly decorated. The image of St. James,
the saint of the Crusades against the Moors and who had been adopted by
the conquistadores as their patron, is described as breaking through crowds,
forcing them to give way in a dramatization of the triumphant victory of the
most orthodox of Spanish reconquista values—values that were, of course,
to be guarded in the new convent.10 The altar devoted to Sta. Teresa also
stage-manages a transparent political meaning. Accompanying the image is
a ‘‘spectacle’’ consisting of a forest populated with animals and Indios who
prostrate themselves as the procession goes by. Once again, San José is as-
sociated in these shows with a notion of the spiritual conquest of the New
World as accomplished, triumphant, and celebratory.
Of course, the most important objects and displays that San José pos-
sessed were its nuns and their pious lives, and the written accounts of the
nuns themselves provide the material required for confirming their own as
well as their convent’s saintliness. The most elaborate accounts are the two
versions of the foundation of the convent by the founding mothers, Inés
de la Cruz and Mariana de la Encarnación. There are also autobiographical
vidas as well as other biographies of virtuous nuns. Most of these have Inés
de la Cruz or her protégé Bernarda de San Juan as subjects and are written
by different nuns, although Margarita de San Bernardo emerges as the chief
 Chronicles of a Colonial Cloister • 19

author. The writings of these women are used as a source by all of the male
chroniclers.
Parayso occidental by Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora is the only published
chronicle; Avendaño’s and Méndez’s works and that of the nuns exist only
in manuscript. Both these last male authors often refer the reader to the
nuns’ accounts through marginal notes, allowing the reader to conjecture
that their work was meant for a convent audience who would have had ac-
cess to the women’s manuscripts. In contrast, the panoply of dedications,
approvals, and prologues that accompany Parayso occidental make apparent
its very public status as a piece of writing. It is also the history of San José
that most abandons the texts by the women as a writing base. In Sigüenza’s
version, the main story concerns the convent of Jesús Marı́a, and the inclu-
sion of the story of the foundation of San José by nuns who leave this first
convent is subsidiary to the main narrative.
All the versions of the foundation, whether by men or women, whether
more or less elaborate, are greatly influenced by Sta. Teresa’s own writings
and in particular the Libro de las fundaciones and Camino de la perfección.11
From some of the nuns’ accounts, it is clear that these writings were available
in manuscript in the convent. Inés de la Cruz’ account of her own life de-
velops the Teresian parallels most systematically. She describes herself as
avidly reading the vidas of hermits as a child as well as ‘‘mirror’’ books, just
as Sta. Teresa claimed to have done. Later, when sor Inés’ father decides to
go with his family to the Indies, sor Inés sees in this her opportunity for
martyrdom, in a manner reminiscent of Sta. Teresa’s wish to die at the hands
of the Moors. It is, however, Sta. Teresa’s admission of her love of secular
literature, and in particular of novels of chivalry, that is most often echoed
by the New Spanish Carmelites. Often the seductive texts are poems or plays
rather than novels, but the guilty enthusiasm is the same.12 Moreover, the
tone and style in all these Mexican writings is intimate and personal, some-
thing that has often been remarked on in relation to Sta. Teresa’s own
work.13 In the accounts of the New Spanish nuns, this is particularly notable
in the way personages representing enormous political power are written
about. Both founding nuns, for example, are careful to reproduce Arch-
bishop Pérez de la Serna’s speech, usually the jokes he makes at their ex-
pense. The relation to Juan de Rivera, the patron, is described in terms of
the flirtatious techniques of persuasion the nuns have to use on him. In a
20 • Colonial Angels

similarly light and mischievous vein, their dealings with the oidor Quezada
are characterized as ‘‘complicated’’ due to the fact that the men in Quezada’s
family have a history of falling inappropriately in love with nuns, a weakness
that predictably makes Quezada’s wife unsympathetic to his patronage of
the Carmelites.
An instance of the chronicles making direct allusion to Sta. Teresa’s writ-
ing in their narrative structure occurs in accounts of the taking of legal pos-
session of houses in which to found the convent. Each of these versions is
inspired by passages in Sta. Teresa’s Libro de las fundaciones, which have been
described as ‘‘picaresque histories’’ because of their irreverent and comic
tone.14 The ironic fact that in order to do God’s work Sta. Teresa must dupe
and out-maneuver landlords and officials from the town council is repro-
duced in the New Spanish versions when it becomes clear that the houses
that the patron Rivera had bequeathed in his will to the Carmelite founda-
tion are inhabited and so must be vacated before the nuns can move in.
The archbishop decides to do this by taking legal possession secretly at
night—again, an action with numerous Teresian precedents.15 He arranges
for someone in the house to set up an altar, and he arrives in the early hours
of the morning to say mass and so consecrate the building and force its
inhabitants to leave. Méndez’ account is a transcription of Mariana de la
Encarnación’s, adding only the explanation that the archbishop used a bell
to wake up the neighbors because this reminded him of Sta. Teresa’s way of
taking legal possession of a building. Mariana claims her account comes
straight from the archbishop’s oral version and is very effective at describing
the speed and confusion of events as well as the archbishop’s obvious de-
light in the adventure. We are told Pérez de la Serna breaks out into laughter
at the sight of the startled tenants emerging ‘‘unos medio desnudos, otros
cubiertos sólo con frazadas y algunos en camisa, dando voces que no los
podı́an sosegar’’ [some of them half undressed, others covered only in blan-
kets, some in their shirts, and all screaming so loudly that nothing could
calm them].16
The New Spanish versions share Sta. Teresa’s own pleasure in narrating
the absurd details of such nocturnal adventures. For Sigüenza y Góngora,
the episode presents an irresistible opportunity to describe a moment of
enormous dramatic potential that he takes on with enthusiasm, producing
an account of comic confusion that finds resolution with the coming of day-
light.17 Moreover, his framing of this episode within the device of a dream
 Chronicles of a Colonial Cloister • 21

and an (entirely geographically specific) earthquake constitute the kinds of

rhetorical effects that have encouraged critics to claim the hagiography as a
precursor of the novel.18
Other examples of how the New World versions of the foundation story
take the Teresian tradition of adaptation and transformation of literary form
to heart abound in the chronicles. In this respect, the Teresian inheritance
can be seen as an extremely liberating and creative one. A marginal note by
Mariana de la Encarnación to Méndez’ chronicle supplies a particularly tell-
ing instance of this. In her note, sor Mariana tells the story of a miracle that
the male chronicler did not include in his version; she elaborates on the
man’s text, appending her own version of events. The roots of the story she
tells lie most probably in the fables that would have been the staple both of
oral storytelling and of many of the sermons that she would have heard, but
the comic pace and irreverent tone are absolutely sor Mariana’s own:

Siendo novicia tenı́a a su cargo el corral de las gallinas y estando un dı́a

haciéndoles salvado, llamaron la campana para comulgar (y como habı́a
de ser la que [oraba] en el acto de comunidad) dióse más prisa para acabar
con la ocupación, dió el gallo en meterse el lebrillo de salvado estorbán-
dola a que lo acabase incorporar [sic] y afligida, dióle con el cucharón en
la cabeza y quedó muerto; la pobre novicia le metió la cabeza en el salvado
y se fué a comulgar pidiendo a Dios la vida del gallo, con gran fe de que
lo habı́a de alcanzar; ası́ que salió del coro fué a ver su difunto y hallólo
muy brioso paseando todo el corral.19

Sor Mariana’s talent and creativity point to how both the nuns and the
men writing about San José enjoyed a considerable amount of formal free-
dom and innovation in their compositions. They adapt the Teresian model,
which was so evident a reference point, but they also adapt the generic
model behind all these accounts, and behind Sta. Teresa’s writing itself—
namely, the hagiography. This genre had come to be the privileged form
through which to write the history of religious orders by way of catalogs of
their illustrious members. In one sense, this use of hagiography to record
history seems contradictory, given that the epiphanic and didactic uses of
the genre allow very little room for narrative, instead producing works that
are an ‘‘exposition’’ of the saint’s life and of the universe itself as the Divine
Book. In this kind of narrative, plots are always already written by God
22 • Colonial Angels

Himself, who orchestrates all events, acting through the saint. Despite these
very strong formal characteristics of immanence and repetition that hagi-
ography’s continual reference to exemplary events brings about, the repre-
sentation of virtue in hagiography can in contrast be seen to ‘‘fix’’ the genre
very firmly in worldly concerns, situating it on the side of the status quo.
Michel de Certeau has argued that the representation of virtue rather than
that of the extreme states of martyrdom or of a hermit’s existence can be
seen as an attribute of the established Church’s hagiography.20 In de Cer-
teau’s analysis, martyrs and hermits predominate in hagiography when the
Church represented is under siege, attacked and vulnerable. In contrast, the
established Church gives rise to hagiographies of nuns and monks, both
essentially products of its fixed institutions and whose lives conflate religious
virtue with social conformity.21
It is significant in this context to recall that the concept of ‘‘heroic virtue’’
was itself first used in the canonization process of Sta. Teresa in 1602 and
was introduced specifically as a measure meant to lessen the importance usu-
ally attached in such procedures to the miracles performed by the saint. ‘‘He-
roic virtue’’ was designed to separate bona fide saints from practitioners of
magic and the black arts. Candidates had to exhibit the three theological
virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity as well as the four cardinal ones of
Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude, all to a ‘‘heroic’’ degree that
ensured no demonic interference was possible.22 From these very precise
elaborations of the concept, we can see how the figure of Sta. Teresa was
adopted by the Counter-Reformation Church in its evangelical mission to
staunch any manifestations of spirituality except those it itself promoted and
sanctioned.
The unmistakably political projects that hagiography was associated with
make it apparent that the genre could then also be fairly easily assimilated
into an apologetic project for the Catholic Church’s evangelical mission in
the Indies and, more generally, for the colonial enterprise itself. Problems
remained, however, with the representation of exemplary spirituality and
particularly with a specifically feminine spirituality.23 The difficulty of ex-
pressing spiritual truths in narrative had, of course, been raised by St. Au-
gustine himself, whose vida constituted the model for all hagiography. His
rejection of a career as professor of rhetoric may be read as a symptomatic
distrust of form, of the figurative power of language. Thus his praise of
Cicero’s Hortensius focuses on the force of the text’s content: ‘‘. . . not to
 Chronicles of a Colonial Cloister • 23

sharpen my tongue did I employ that book, nor did it infuse into me its
style, but its matter.’’ 24 Notwithstanding this caution, it is precisely the rhe-
torical figure of metaphor that achieves Augustine’s conversion: ‘‘. . . espe-
cially after I had heard one or two places of the Old Testament resolved,
and oft-times ‘in a figure,’ which when I understood literally, I was ‘slain’
spiritually.’’ 25
Capable of slaying and resurrecting simultaneously, ‘‘spiritual language’’
was a contentious issue and, by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
much policed by the Inquisition. Given the Pauline injunctions on women’s
silence, their exclusion from theological knowledge, and the recuperation of
misogynist patristic and scholastic texts by Renaissance moralists, women’s
access to such language was much disputed.26 Hence Sta. Teresa’s cautious
introduction to her use of the metaphor of a garden for the soul in her own
writing:

Habré de aprovecharme de alguna comparación, que yo las quisiera excu-

sar por ser mujer, y escribir simplemente lo que me mandan, mas este
lenguaje de espı́ritu es tan malo de declarar a los que no saben letras como
yo, que habré de buscar algún modo, y podrá ser las menos veces acierte a
que venga bien la comparación; servirá de dar recreación a Vuestra Mer-
ced de ver tanta torpeza.27

Sta. Teresa’s claim to simplicity and her association of this with her sex is
a strategy also adopted by the nuns of New Spain and is in marked contrast
to the learned approach of Sigüenza y Góngora or other male compilers
of convent chronicles. The description of incredible spiritual events and
mundane domestic ones in the same tone, which is so characteristic of Sta.
Teresa’s writing, was strongly disapproved of however by Luis de Granada
(1504 –1588), who attempted to limit the use of examples to strictly biblical
ones.28 Although the Curia was never able to implement such strict control
over the form of the vida, it is clear that during this period the text of the
potential saint’s life was as much an object of scrutiny as the life itself.29
In the writings produced by nuns in San José, the women are careful to
avoid the worst consequences of being caught in theological or doctrinal
error by expressing their access to spiritual knowledge through the trope of
docta ignorantia, a well-established figure for affirming female religious and
literary inadequacy. The deployment of this trope in the vidas reproduces
24 • Colonial Angels

the dichotomy that may be understood to inhabit the body of the female
mystic. In this body, the radical disjunction between the divine male voice
and the female body it speaks from is dramatized through a spectacle that
serves to illustrate the anomalous position of women in relation to lan-
guage.30 The woman may speak powerfully, but the voice is not her own; it
is God’s. Nevertheless, the fact that in the chronicles of San José the theater
for this knowledge is the page and not the body makes a crucial difference.
In writing, the nun is not only transmitting spiritual knowledge but repro-
ducing it; she is creating, as we have seen from the instances of departure
from tradition and generic form discussed earlier.31
As a consequence, though these nuns certainly claim ‘‘entendimiento
rudo y torpe lengua,’’ their simple wits and clumsy tongues are liberated in
their writing, where access to spirituality is often figured and celebrated as
access to articulate and fluent language itself:

Elevábase el entendimiento en estas ocasiones tan altamente que, admi-

rándose ella misma de lo que razonaba (que solı́a ser en versos suavisı́si-
mos y elegantı́simos), exclamaba diciendo: ‘‘¡Qué es aquesto! ¿Quién a mı́
me ha hecho poeta? ¿Quién es quien me ilustra mi entendimiento rudo y
le sugiere semejantes palabras a mi torpe lengua?’’ 32

This type of articulacy and inspiration is readily mentioned in the chroni-

cle vidas but certainly not reproduced in quotation. Similarly, Méndez’ de-
scription of Inés de la Cruz’ theological knowledge concentrates on her deli-
cate deployment of the correct vocabulary to describe the nature of the Holy
Trinity. Her actual words are not transcribed for the reader, however.33 The
fact that sor Inés’ record of her mystical experiences is written for her con-
fessor goes some way to explaining this reticence. The kind of subjective
experience of the spiritual that is alluded to, and figured as perfect speech, is
meant for a very select public: the nun’s confessor. Nevertheless, it clearly
remains what Asunción Lavrin describes as an ‘‘opportunity’’ for the subjec-
tivity that was erased through the novice’s vows at profession to be in some
measure restored to her in the writing of her vida.34 And it is through the
politic deployment of reticence when describing spiritual matters that the
writer secures the orthodoxy of her vida by differentiating it from the dis-
reputable mystical model of feminine spirituality. This reticence is also in-
dicative of a more general evasiveness in the chronicles connected to the
 Chronicles of a Colonial Cloister • 25

representation of spiritual knowledge. The convent history certainly wishes

to lay claims to the sanctity of its nuns, but it does not narrate the content
of this access to knowledge, though it often narrates the effects of such sanc-
tity: miracles, prophecies, and so on. These miracles and prophecies have
their representation justified by appeals to their demonstrable ‘‘truth,’’ clearly
something much more difficult to claim for an interpretation of a vision or
a theological explanation given by an ecstatic nun.35
The image of the convent community that emerges from a reading of
works by both women and men is by no means a consistent one; at points
unity is emphasized, at others, dispersion. This variation is most easily ex-
plained by the plot of the chronicle narratives, which set out to record the
life and history of a community and which come into conflict with the ha-
giographic plot that had as its subject the individual. The principal plot ‘‘de-
vice’’ in the histories of San José could be described as rebellion followed by
reform. This narrative dynamic requires, on the one hand, the exaltation of
a virtuous reforming individual (and achieves its effect by contrasting this
individual with a recalcitrant community), and, on the other, it requires that
this virtuous individual be seen to be the exemplar of a community whose
own perfection makes it heavenly. Clearly, this double narrative imperative
implies quite serious formal problems in terms of keeping generic decorum.36
The problems of representing reform were not confined only to the ele-
gant execution of the recommendations of rhetorical handbooks—it had a
direct impact on and relation to the institutions and persons represented.37
It was also intimately connected to an important contemporary debate on
the virtue of religious institutions in New Spain. A new and adapted Con-
ceptionist rule published by Archbishop Francisco Manso y Zúñiga in 1635
addressed this debate. The convent of Jesús Marı́a would have been subject
to this new rule, and Jesús Marı́a is also, of course, the convent abandoned
by the reforming would-be Carmelites on the grounds that its enclosure
was not ‘‘strict’’ enough and that it infringed many of its own laws. Manso
y Zúñiga’s pamphlet begins by hinting that the archbishop’s political and
spiritual power is not all that he would wish it to be, the nuns being unruly
and reluctant to accept his authority.38 It goes on to specify necessary re-
forms in sections covering dress, the method of electing an abbess, the dis-
tribution of the community’s economic possessions and income, the regula-
tion of entries and exits from the cloister, the keeping of the vow of silence,
and the preservation of a ‘‘peaceful’’ atmosphere within the community.
26 • Colonial Angels

These areas designated as a problem are strikingly similar to the features of

convent life in Jesús Marı́a, which the would-be Carmelites choose to com-
plain about in their justifications for breaking away.39
The fact that the breakaway nuns focus their case for reform and spiritual
purity on this contrast between their contemplative and ascetic desires and
the mundanity of the community they found themselves in has curious nar-
rative consequences. In most cases, it leads to a reproduction of misogynist
topoi on female sociability by the author, regardless of the latter’s sex. Thus
in the vidas, without exception, the convent figures as a space from which to
escape the veniality the aspiring nuns are understood to be condemned to by
virtue of their female sex if they remain in the world. Consequently, spiritual
weakness in the convent is signaled precisely by a reversion to these worldly
values. Hence, the outcry against ornamented habits, servants, and the pres-
ence of lay persons in the cloister.40
The communal ‘‘paradise’’ of rational flowers envisaged by Sigüenza y
Góngora in his prologue to Parayso occidental will simply not function as an
image of the convent if reform of the community and the virtue of a par-
ticular individual has to be represented. For reform to be justified, both in
spiritual and narrative terms, it is necessary for the cloister to replicate the
sins of the world within its walls, producing a convent community fractured
in many ways, the most important clearly being the division between the
saved and the damned. The reforming nun’s portentos [premonitions] often
work to confirm this kind of division in the community. A striking example
is Inés de la Cruz’ vision of the nuns who sang hours in the choir gently
ascending to heaven. She recounts the vision to the community, reciting
the names of those she had seen rising up, and her reaction to the anxiety
her account causes those nuns absent from the pious roll call is to laugh,
exhorting them to keep the rules of the order in future.41 The heavy-
handedness of this crude blackmail tends to obscure the sophisticated claim
it makes, and the fact that such a claim was perfectly ‘‘orthodox,’’ however
much the ecclesiastical authorities might complain about divisions within
convents. Reform was divinely sanctioned.
The groups and ‘‘bands’’ that convents were accused of breaking into were
often determined by friendship and by kinship; that is, by the kinds of strong
emotional force that Inés de la Cruz appeals to in her manipulative vision.
The story of Marina de la Cruz and her daughter (with whom she professes
after becoming widowed for a second time) is revealing about the kinds of
 Chronicles of a Colonial Cloister • 27

ties and affection that are licit in the convent. Sor Marina loves her daughter
dearly and spends most of her time dressing and ornamenting her. God
intervenes and kills the daughter in a particularly bloody and spectacular
way, leaving Sigüenza y Góngora to comment that worldly affection will
bring only eternal death to its devotees.42 His later approbation of sor Ma-
rina’s adoption of Inés de la Cruz as a ‘‘spiritual’’ daughter makes clear that
affections in the cloister were precisely differentiated and that the convent
represented a space where the affective ties of the worldly family were invalid
and, on occasions, sinful. Thus, Inés de la Cruz’ vocation is confirmed early
in her life when she abandons her mother in the cathedral in order to pray
alone.43 What makes the representation of this very traditional topos of con-
temptus mundi so interesting in the chronicles is how often the ties the nuns
are represented as having to throw off are connected to the family.
The overtly didactic purpose of the official convent chronicles alerts us
to the fact that such an emphasis is carefully calculated in texts. That this
should be so is not so surprising given what we know of the powerful sys-
tems of patronage and influence that depended on ties of kinship and how
they linked ecclesiastic and political institutions in the colony. These ‘‘net-
works’’ are clearly visible in convents where sisters, nieces, cousins, and so
forth, would profess in the same institution.44 Though all convents, Euro-
pean and New World, absolutely depended on such systems, in strict doc-
trinal terms they were all too worldly—and often caused competition and
conflict between the different groups. Inés de la Cruz’ refusal to accede to
Archbishop Pérez de la Serna’s request that the founding nuns for San José
be chosen from each convent in Mexico City could then be interpreted as
an attempt to ensure not only spiritual coherence (she argues that taking
nuns from different religious orders will make it difficult to impose a new
order) but also political stability, by ensuring that a completely new system
of solidarity and community identity, designed by sor Inés herself, can be set
in place.45 In fact, sor Inés’ request echoes various comments of Sta. Teresa’s
in Libro de las fundaciones, where she describes the harm that powerful
groups within the convent can bring. Sta. Teresa’s drive to abandon the use
of titles, which was the custom in the convent she left in order to found the
reformed branch, also has a dual significance. On the one hand, it is an
assertion of pious humility (all nuns, whatever their station in the world, are
equal before God in the cloister) and a politic implementation of reform
meant to break up social and kinship groups in the convent. For example, all
28 • Colonial Angels

the histories of San José condemn ‘‘particular friendships’’ or the ties of

worldly affection in trenchant terms inherited from Sta. Teresa.46 This type
of affection, especially among women, is considered to threaten the downfall
of convents. Without having to look for psychosexual explanations of this
anxiety, it is obvious that such friendships and alliances challenged ecclesi-
astical authority and the union of the convent community.
Inevitably, the family becomes the focus of the ‘‘reform’’ plot just de-
scribed. It provides a simple way of describing allegiances in the convent and
of assigning nuns to ‘‘groups.’’ Mariana de la Encarnación herself becomes a
victim of these divisions when she contemplates the idea of reform, a wish
that is immediately identified as a threat to the community. The convent is
full of her sisters and other relatives, as well as friends who were educated
there with her as small girls before professing. None of these people can
understand her desire for change and try to dissuade her by appealing to her
sense of solidarity with this group.47 These women speak of their shared
experiences in San José, of the difficulties overcome and the happiness se-
cured. They also tell sor Mariana that by siding with the reforming gachu-
pinas she will be reneging on all this. Almost obscured by the emotional
force of her friends’ complaint is the fact that these nuns describe the women
responsible for taking sor Mariana from them in terms of their birthplace.
The nuns in New Spanish convents like Jesús Marı́a were all of Spanish race,
as was stipulated by their entry requirements, but there was a distinction
between those born in Spain and those born in the Indies, between criollas
and gachupinas, and it is this distinction that sor Mariana’s friends invoke.
This difference begins to be expressed in increasingly biological terms in
contemporary sources such as sor Mariana’s account, and I will reproduce
this terminology, but it should be kept in mind that the difference between
gachupinas and criollas in the convents should be thought of as primarily
cultural or ethnic rather than strictly racial.
The detail of birthplace reveals the plot of reform regarding the founda-
tion of San José to be organized around divisions that are as much rooted in
culture as they are in family or kinship structures. That kinship and family
structures should also be marked by culture is a fairly obvious revelation, but
given the context of the New World, what happens in the chronicle stories
of reform is that the plot of religious orthodoxy is transformed into one of
cultural (and racial) orthodoxy. This interesting and significant development
means that the enclosed nun comes to symbolize the honor of contesting
 Chronicles of a Colonial Cloister • 29

power groups in the Indies and that her story becomes the reflection of their
histories and the projection of their imagined futures.48
The nun as heroine of the New World narrative is not altogether unex-
pected if we remember the important role played by hagiography in sup-
porting established values—both those of generic form and those of eccle-
siastical hierarchy. If it becomes possible to write hagiographies of the New
World in which women shine for their piety and orthodoxy, the piety and
orthodoxy of this erstwhile pagan land is confirmed and, along with it, the
success of the Spanish evangelic mission. The difficulties of convincing any-
one of the truth of this story, and the virtue of its heroine, are palpable in
the attempt by Juan Ignacio de la Peña to describe the success of the Capu-
chin Order in Mexico. Peña has to insist on the ‘‘legitimacy’’ of the nuns for
their vocation—they may be born in the Indies and subject to the malign
influence of the food, climate, and air of the place, but they are, nonetheless,
‘‘true’’ Capuchin nuns:

. . . Señoras vı́rgenes Capuchinas, criollas, hijas legı́timas del espı́ritu y

aliento de sus primeras madres Capuchinas, para que vea la Europa, que
hay alientos de su tamaño en la América, porque aunque los influjos, los
alimentos y los aires pueden debilitar las fuerzas, hasta hacer en los cuer-
pos más delicadas las complexiones, es poderosa la gracia para formar
espı́ritus gigantes. . . .49

This extended assertion of equality in spiritual matters pivots, however, on

the very difference between the Old World Capuchins and the New, a dif-
ference that Peña acknowledges as physical and material and spiritual. It is
these differences that only the extreme virtue of the criollo Capuchin voca-
tion can overcome.
We know that New Spanish convents at this time were populated with
women of very heterogeneous racial and cultural backgrounds. The nuns
may all have in theory been of Spanish ‘‘origin,’’ but the children in their
care, the women taking refuge, and the servants working there could have
been blacks or Indians or members of one of the castas —the name given to
the groups of misceginated peoples that makes apparent the beginnings of a
project to categorize them. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that
this kind of problem was exclusive to the New World. In some ways, such a
concern for purity of birth and of blood is a resolutely Peninsular one and,
30 • Colonial Angels

given that we know Sta. Teresa came from a ‘‘New Christian’’ family, it is
particularly resonant in the Carmelite context. The saint’s Jewish ancestry
and the blind prejudice and suspicion that such people were subject to in the
period lends her appeals for the annulment of worldly ties in the cloister a
more urgent and precise tone. So the transplantation of the Carmelites to
the New World involved both the transplantation of the idea of ‘‘purity of
blood’’ and the critique of that same notion. Moreover, it was as if this no-
tion and its opposing idea had been placed in a context so exageratedly de-
signed to test them that it seemed almost parodic: a land of indigenous pa-
gans and of other peoples of recently created and suspicious lineages, as well
home to any number of migrant Jews and heretics.50
It is no wonder then that the reformatory stance taken by many of the
virtuous nuns in the chronicles should be interpreted not merely in terms of
religious ambition but also of social and ‘‘racial’’ advancement.51 The nuns
of Jesús Marı́a see Inés de la Cruz’ desires for reform as being intimately
connected to her status as a gachupina in a convent overwhelmingly made up
of criollas. They warn Mariana de la Encarnación that she is being deceived
by what are described as gachupina proclivities: the love of novelty and the
desire for celebrity.52 Ana de San Miguel, who is abbess at the time of the
breakaway, goes further and presents a global interpretation of the privileges
enjoyed by gachupines in New Spain. Clearly, what is at stake may nominally
be religious orthodoxy, figured as greater austerity, but there are a host of
political interests, represented as cultural and racial purity, also involved. Sor
Ana’s comments are made during the period when Archbishop Pérez de la
Serna became the patron of the would-be Carmelites and link the patronage
he proffers explicitly to the fact that the leading reformer, Inés de la Cruz, is
also gachupina.53 The abbess’ identification of the political rather than spiri-
tual reasons for Pérez de la Serna’s behavior is quoted by Mariana de la
Encarnación, who, in the same account, provides information that would
seem to confirm this as being the principal motivation the archbishop had.
Sor Mariana describes how he berates the founding mothers when they try
to refuse the grand entrance ceremony he has planned for the inauguration
of the convent buildings. Pérez de la Serna classifies their complaint that
such ceremony is unnecessary as disingenuous hypocrisy. He at once con-
soles and reprimands them, saying that they will have time enough in which
to display their orthodoxy as Carmelites and all the austerity this implies.
 Chronicles of a Colonial Cloister • 31

On this particular occasion, however, the politics of the moment is the pre-
eminent concern, not spiritual etiquette.54
The enormously complex political and racial situation these comments
point to is further revealed as being of central importance, both in the clois-
ter and outside it, by Méndez’ extended aside on racial politics, meant as an
explanation of Ana de San Miguel’s remarks mentioned above. Méndez’
opinions are an elaboration of a profoundly ‘‘democratic’’ Christian argu-
ment: that all people, no matter where born, are equals spiritually. Crucially,
he does not argue for their equality outside the cloister. The existence of
buena o mala tierra is not questioned, difference in these matters clearly be-
ing admitted, but the convent thus becomes the utopic homeland— nuestra
verdadera patria —where this difference is dissolved in the same way as other
worldly attachments:

Y contención de Indias o España, de esta o la otra tierra es cumplirse al

pie de la letra lo que la mı́stica Doctora de la Iglesia, Nuestra Madre Sta.
Teresa de Jesús dice: que es pelear sobre si esta o aquella tierra son buenas
para adobes o para tapias. Dejemos tierras, con todo religioso y religiosa
hablo, los que hemos profesado el hollar y poner debajo de nuestros pies
al mundo y sus vanidades. . . .55

His reference to Sta. Teresa is to her dry words in Camino de la perfección,

where she declares that discussions about which is the best tierra [homeland]
are but a debate over which soil is better for making walls of sun-dried mud
or of simple mud.56
Although Méndez quotes Sta. Teresa in an attempt to close off argument
once and for all, his words in fact make it clear that the belief in the differ-
ences existing between gachupines and criollos held great currency. It was
used throughout the arguments about laxness and reformation in convents
to support opinions about the spiritual inferiority of criolla nuns. The stories
of the other contenders for the foundation of San José only serve to confirm
this. Inés de la Cruz describes how the patron Rivera sends to Spain for
nuns, as he does not want to found the convent with Mexican women. She
writes to him explaining that she herself was born in Spain, in order to se-
cure his support. Although sor Inés does not explicitly mention the racial
values at issue in the foundation attempt, Mariana de la Encarnación’s ac-
32 • Colonial Angels

count of Archbishop Pérez de la Serna’s words make transparent how im-

portant these were. Pérez de la Serna believes criolla women to be incapable
of keeping the strict Carmelite rule and associates them with features char-
acteristic of ‘‘relaxed’’ convents:

Que mientras que él fuese prelado no consentirı́a fundasen convento de

religión que profesa tanta perfección criollas regalonas y chocolateras.
Que traerı́amos tres o cuatro criadas cada una que nos sirviesen. . . .57

At this point it is useful to consider the two charges of which the prelate
accuses criollas: regalonas and chocolateras. The first is connected to the ne-
farious effect the climate of the Indies was believed to have on its inhabi-
tants, making them lazy and morally lax. The second charge is a refined
version of the first, chocolate at this point being considered a drink of in-
dulgence and luxury, consumed primarily by women of the New Spanish
elite.58 The misogynist assumptions underlying both charges are obvious:
the criolla in this reasoning is simply an excessive woman. This excess of
sexuality is precisely what the perfect Carmelite does not signify, and as a
result of the cultural specificity of the arguments put forward, the criolla is
thus not a Carmelite because of what is classed as her ‘‘racial’’ difference. In
other chronicles of the same period, nuns often take distance from their New
Spanish heritage, using exactly the same logic that extends the concept of
inheritance and purity to quotidian matters such as food, the consumption
of which necessarily had implications for the purity of the body. Thus, Marı́a
Josefa de Gracia, though born in the Americas, is also ‘‘born’’ a Capuchin,
her vocation signaled by her rejection of the staple New Spanish food of
chocolate.59
Gerónima de la Asunción, the founding mother of the Carmelite convent
of Manila, whose spiritual opinions are recorded by Bartolomé de Letona in
his La perfecta religiosa (1622), acknowledges the differences between Penin-
sular women and those born in the Indies but points out that where such a
difference has led to a change in practices, the criolla nuns cannot be accused
of laxness. Apart from making clear that many of the procedures that are
considered as being relaxed are in fact permitted by learned prelates, sor
Gerónima also points to the different financial status of the convents in
Spain and in the Indies as an explanation. She describes Spanish convents
 Chronicles of a Colonial Cloister • 33

as being assured of an income from which to provide food for their ‘‘robust’’
inhabitants. American convents, in contrast, ‘‘no tienen tanta providencia ni
tanta salud.’’ That is, they have no fixed incomes and are populated by less
healthy individuals. Her mention of these factors means that the polarities
of what was considered a monolithic ‘‘natural’’ difference are opened up
and made relative by acknowledging its cultural valence.60 This relativizing
movement is confirmed by her comments on fasting, where she makes
apparent that the Carmelite rule is adaptable to regional and cultural dif-
ferences and that these cannot then be regarded as indicators of religious
orthodoxy:

Del ayuno: En las Indias hay costumbre legı́tima de comer todos en las
cuaresmas y demás dı́as de ayuno huevos y cosas de leche. Con que la
prohibición que de estas cosas pone aquı́ la regla no obligará en este reino
ni en los demás donde hubiere semejante costumbre. Y más diciendo la
regla que las monjas guarden la costumbre de la región.61

Sor Gerónima’s words argue that quotidian practices are in a different

realm to the kinds of practice that determine correct religious belief. How-
ever, from the evidence of the chronicles, it is clear that, though these quo-
tidian elements may indeed be in a different realm, they remain laden with
significance; they are in fact as much markers of identity and orthodoxy as
declarations of faith or spiritually correct renditions of visions. In relation to
fasting, it is not surprising to find that a New World substance, chocolate, is
the one that causes sor Gerónima difficulties in terms of justification. Several
of the nuns are described as drinking chocolate only in order to fast, and sor
Gerónima takes up the point that this practice has been criticized by people
who allege that chocolate is in fact a solid food and that one cannot therefore
fast on it. She attempts to defend the substance saying that chocolate natural
y ordinario is a liquid, and therefore it is licit to consume it while fasting.62
Several of the references in the chronicles to the use of chocolate also make
this caveat, claiming the chocolate they refer to is not the luxurious and
spiced drink usually consumed, but a more primitive and simple version
made with water rather than milk and containing no condiments. The ul-
timate impossibility of rescuing chocolate for ascetic signifying purposes,
however, is signaled by the new rule added to the Carmelite’s vows: the nuns
34 • Colonial Angels

promise not to drink the substance. This extra, and American, vow serves
at once to affirm the purity of their spiritual archetype and their difference
from it—their New Worldliness.
It seems then that the details of the New World Carmelite chronicles are
irredeemably condemned to ‘‘giving away’’ the fact that these stories of virtue
happen in a place that makes them difficult to believe with complete confi-
dence. If this is true for the details of the stories retold, it is also true for
more structural elements as well—from the echoing of Teresian plot de-
signs, to the organization of the story of reform around specifically New
World themes, to instances of individual writing talent and creativity.
Part of this vitality that the hagiographic form shows in its New World
manifestation is due to the fact that however conservative the genre may
ostensibly be in theoretical terms, in practice, the didactic impulse behind it
makes its writing an incredibly ‘‘modern’’ enterprise, in that it is always di-
rected at the future.63 No wonder hagiography seemed the perfect vehicle
with which to trumpet the victories of the conquering and evangelizing
Church in the New World. And the attraction and significance of placing
women at the center of this celebration is apparent in the way the Carmelite
tradition is transported to the Indies. Sta. Teresa no doubt would have imag-
ined herself in the New World as a martyr—along the lines of her desired
Moorish martyrdom in childhood— embodying an extreme form of piety
whose manifestation depended on the complete removal from civilization
and from worldly concerns. Instead, her legatees, her New Spanish Carmel-
ite daughters, are utterly compromised with the politics of the colony and
with arguments about social and cultural hierarchy and orthodoxy—just as
Sta. Teresa herself had been in the Old World.
c h a p t e r 3

From the Confessional to the Altar:

Epistolary and Hagiographic Forms

Hasta aquı́ la Venerable Madre, a cuyas ponderosas, eficaces palabras no tenemos que
añadir en la narrativa de este punto; pues añadir, o poner algo, serı́a derogar mucho de
las expresiones y viveza con que lo refiere todo.1
José Eugenio Valdés, Vida admirable y penitente de la venerable madre sor
Sebastiana Josefa de la Santı́sima Trinidad (1765)

José Eugenio Valdés takes his task as hagiographer of Sebastiana Josefa de la

Santı́sima Trinidad, a professed nun in the convent of San Juan de la Peni-
tencia for Poor Clares in Mexico City, with evident gravity. He shows a
lively concern for authenticity and accuracy, claiming to want to preserve the
moving and expressive character of the nun’s writing by transcribing it with-
out annotation or addition. His actual practice in the hagiography he writes
of her is quite different. But this is in itself an old story, and a great deal of
recent research has been dedicated to telling such tales differently, to right-
ing the balance by unearthing the works of women and allowing them to
speak for themselves.2
This tracing of women’s texts across geographical and cultural boundaries
offers a significant and valuable critical option, allowing women’s writing to
be located within a female textual lineage. In relation to convent writing and
the vida, we must be wary however of thinking of writing nuns as an isolated
community. Previous chapters have already demonstrated how the symbol-
ism of an unbreachable cloister obscures a reality in which social, political,
and economic factors played a crucial part in establishing convents, main-
36 • Colonial Angels

taining nuns, and, in the New World, sustaining an imperial mission. The
vida, in particular when written by women, is distinguished as a literary
genre by its mediated nature. The figure of the confessor or spiritual father
is always present. This is certainly the case in sor Sebastiana’s letters, which
are the subject of this chapter. My principal concern here is to read and
interpret the story of the confessor Valdés’ relation to sor Sebastiana and her
writing, and more generally her relation to the various confessors who solic-
ited writing from her. The focus then is on the interplay between writing
practices and on the intentions—historical, spiritual, and political—that
guided them in the New Spanish context. As a consequence of this empha-
sis, exploring sor Sebastiana’s relation to a tradition of feminine autobiog-
raphy and hagiography is not central to my argument, while elucidating her
relation to broader colonial writing practices (including the work of men,
and in particular of her confessor) is.3
This does not mean abandoning an examination of gender and its relation
to writing practices in the colony. Indeed, in this instance, my more general
concern about surveying the transformations undergone by generic forms in
the New World has the issue of sexual difference placed at its center. Do
men and women write differently about the same thing? The contrasts be-
tween the two accounts we have of the ‘‘same’’ subject—sor Sebastiana’s
life—would indicate so. Valdés’ is a heuristic relation of sor Sebastiana’s life,
designed to unveil the nun’s virtues in a plot where experience is dissected
into types and reorganized so as best to serve the essentially didactic purpose
of the work. This is very different to sor Sebastiana’s own narrative, which
is teleological and forms an experiential story structured around events and
their repercussions, either for sor Sebastiana personally or for the convent as
a whole.4 These contrasts invite speculation both as to how gender is related
to genre and as to how sexual difference dictates writing practices. By this,
I do not intend to imply that men and women write differently because of
their sex, rather that different writing practices and strategies are available
to male and female authors, and that, in the narration of hagiography, these
different authorial possibilities and proscriptions are especially marked.
The sixty extant letters by sor Sebastiana make up three hundred folios of
closely written text. On the cover page of the sewn booklet, a note tells that
the collection of letters was given to Ana de San Bernardo, the abbess of sor
Sebastiana Josefa’s convent, in November 1760, three years after sor Sebas-
tiana’s death.5 They were donated by sor Sebastiana’s brother, Miguel de
 From the Confessional to the Altar • 37

Maya, a Franciscan friar. Sor Sebastiana’s writing is part of a tradition of

works carried out by women to fulfill a vow of obedience and is intimately
related to the sacrament of penance and the practice of confession. General
confession as an annual requirement had been mandated by the Fourth
Lateran Council in 1215. Later the deliberations of the Council of Trent
(1545 –1563), which defended the sacramental system and encouraged fre-
quent communion by the laity meant that confession, which was a necessary
prerequisite for communion, became the privileged method of religious ac-
culturation.6 Confession involved the priest in a dialogue with an individual
whose boundaries were redefined precisely by this process of constructing
and narrating the passing of time and the actions that occurred in this tem-
poral space. New Spanish nuns would have been used to giving a written
account of their conscience to their confessor, and many vidas written by
men use this kind of material as a primary source for the biographies of their
pious spiritual daughters.7
There may be several reasons why confessors obliged women to write
rather than simply to leave the recounting of sins to the usual auricular form.
The most obvious was that it allowed a more precise evaluation of the au-
thenticity and orthodoxy of the narratives recounted. The confessor caught
up in the production of saints and venerable persons was able to sanction or
to claim credit for the spiritual adventures of his confessants much more
authoritatively if there was a text upon which to base his judgment. Given
that the normal condition of being a woman in this period prohibited access
to writing in all but the most extraordinary of situations, it is important to
note that the condition of the nun seems to have enforced writing upon cer-
tain women. The audience for this kind of writing was very particular, how-
ever, and most nuns certainly never saw their manuscripts go into print.8
Their audience could, nevertheless, be fairly large, consisting of the various
confessors who were the addressees of many nuns’ writings, the entire body
of ecclesiastic authorities entitled in theory to keep track of such spiritual
narratives, and the convent community itself, which would often circulate
manuscripts among its members for didactic purposes. Although sor Sebas-
tiana ostensibly addressed her letters to a particular confessor, the privacy of
this form would have been well understood by all to include a considerable
number of people as potential readers.
‘‘Enforced’’ is certainly the correct word in relation to many nuns’ writings
if we are to attribute more than purely rhetorical compliance to the many
38 • Colonial Angels

protestations of unwillingness proffered by women in this situation, from

Catherine of Siena to Sta. Teresa to sor Sebastiana herself. The trope of
writing as suffering belongs to a Christian tradition that associated martyr-
dom with spiritual enlightenment, and in this context, it was clearly in-
tended to secure belief in the writer’s words.9 Sor Sebastiana’s pain is the
guarantee of her truth, and such truthfulness is important to prove because
the process of writing exposes the nun not only to the censure of her confes-
sors but to that of the Holy Office. Although references are indirect, fear of
the Inquisition certainly plays a part in sor Sebastiana’s reluctance to write.
That this fear was well founded is apparent from the very real persecution
of beatas falsas y embaucadoras [feigning holy-women impostors] in which
this institution was involved in this period.10 So the emotive and moving
voice that Valdés is so keen to preserve was considerably less unconstrained
and spontaneous than his description might lead us to believe.11
Although the censorious eye of the Inquisition watched vigilantly over
sor Sebastiana’s expression of her voice in writing, her narrative can also be
seen to be influenced by more oblique and less dramatic, but equally strong
forces—those of generic form. At one point in the letters, sor Sebastiana
suggests that her confessor actually provides her with models on which to
base her writing.12 The extant letters are indeed very coherent in structure
and fairly repetitive. Although sor Sebastiana’s use of a thematic template
provided by her confessor is not out of the question, what can only be de-
scribed as the individuality of the language and tone of the epistles rules out
any mechanical copying. Sor Sebastiana’s verse, which is transcribed in vari-
ous sections of the letters, can also be considered as marking her as an in-
dependent writer. The poems are all devotional and fall into very traditional
lyric types. They show a powerful command of rhythm that recurs in various
prose passages in the letters. Moreover, both the verse and the letters are
indeed full of lively expressions, as Valdés has advertised, and it is these
expressions, ‘‘¡Oh, cómo quisiera ser una santa!’’ 13 which leave us with the
strong sense of sor Sebastiana’s individual presence as an author. Often, they
are exclamations of despair or inadequacy, and in one case an autoaccusation
of heresy. Sor Sebastiana could not have been unaware of the resonance of
such vocabulary in this context, and her use of it reveals a confidence in her
own ability to manage the codes governing the representation of spiritual
experience. The extreme terms she employs and the emphasis on emotion
to secure belief, however, underline the vulnerability of this entire enterprise
 From the Confessional to the Altar • 39

of saintly self-representation. Reason, not emotion, was, of course, the bet-

ter guarantee of truth, but the fact that women’s access to full rationality was
held in doubt in the period means that sor Sebastiana’s claim to truth could
indeed only legitimately be made through this risky strategy of deploying
emotion. In the universe of spiritual experience, emotion enjoyed a privi-
leged position, but sor Sebastiana’s expression of it remained problematic.
Holy women were frequently in danger of seeming to be feigning or simu-
lating, and the invocation of strong emotion as the touchstone of feminine
truth constituted something of a paradox. The wide dissemination of the
figure of a woman dressed in a nun’s habit, which badly conceals her vulpine
feet, doing an act of charity, as an icon of hypocrisy in the period shows how
popular the conflation of religious dissembling and femininity had become.14
In contrast to the modest pamphlet containing sor Sebastiana’s letters is
José Eugenio Valdés’ hagiography of the nun that was clearly intended for a
large audience. The book runs to nearly four hundred printed pages and as
a frontispiece has a grand engraving of sor Sebastiana gazing devotedly at a
Christ child in a cradle. Behind the nun, high on a shelf, are the books that
make up her spiritual library, and the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove
hovers over her inclined head, illuminating her thoughts. In his prologue,
Valdés says sor Sebastiana’s brother Maya commissioned the book from him,
and it would seem reasonable to suppose that Maya identified an interest in
promoting his sister’s spiritual fame. Maya’s collection of Sebastiana’s letters
and his commissioning of a hagiography, the printing costs of which were
financed by devotees of the nun, certainly fits very much into the pattern of
investments made by elite family and religious groups in the colony to pro-
mote the cult of individuals who would bring them prestige in the present
and divine grace for the hereafter. The nuns of Mexico City in the eigh-
teenth century professed a style of spirituality consonant with the dynastic
concerns of their benefactors and of the aristocracy—the class from which
they themselves overwhelmingly came. This kind of religious practice gave
prominence to anniversary masses and to intercessionary and commemora-
tive prayers and served to strengthen the bonds between spiritual and earthly
patronage and prestige. It is therefore no surprise to find that sor Sebasti-
ana’s brother was himself employed as a confessor in his sister’s convent, but
the networks of kinship and solidarity that crystallized around the publish-
ing of a hagiography of sor Sebastiana encompass a far wider community
than her immediate family. Sor Sebastiana was in fact promoted as a par-
40 • Colonial Angels

ticularly virtuous criolla nun; an exemplar of piety with which to vindicate

the orthodoxy—spiritual, cultural, and political— of this sector of colonial
society.15
Mexico City, the viceregal capital of New Spain, was saturated with
convents, monasteries, and other religious institutions in this period. It was
a place where the presence of the Counter-Reformation Church in every
sphere of life was hard to ignore. The many church buildings would have
been a very concrete manifestation of the imposition of civilization—that
is, of Spanish culture, religion, and politics on the erstwhile pagan Méxica
capital. Numerous encomiastic and apologetic books of this period sing the
praises of the city, extolling its perfect urban design (its streets laid out in
grid plan, its fountains evenly distributed, its vistas pleasantly interspersed),
and the magnificent convent buildings are often at the center of these per-
orations.16 This kind of extended praise, of course, betokens more than a
lively interest in architecture, and as so many critical studies of baroque cul-
ture have shown, space is power.17
If we consider the convent from this symbolic perspective of urban plan-
ning as the embodiment of social, political, and religious ideologies, then
the tradition of female asceticism that led to the establishment of the first
Christian convents can be seen to be in direct opposition to the male tradi-
tion. Female asceticism grew not from the notion of removal from the city
to the desert, as in the case of the monks, but was based precisely on an idea
of retirement within one of the most significant of the city’s institutions: the
household. By immuring themselves in the home, women were meant to
bring down grace upon a community, and the withdrawal and immobility of
virgin women was metaphorically associated with the integrity of their bod-
ies, which came to have an exceptionally charged significance. There was
always, of course, a demographic political dimension to this, with convents
becoming repositories for women who could not marry ‘‘honorably’’—that
is, in accordance with their status. This became particularly important in the
Indies, where not only class was an issue but also race. Hence, the American
convent literally was a fortress for racial and cultural values.
Once enclosed, these women and their institution were moving proof of
the resounding civility of a society that could regulate its own reproduction
so successfully that many of its women could be reserved in marriage for
the Deity. And most prodigiously, these extraordinary women showed piety
bordering on the holy, making convents the producers of saints. The im-
 From the Confessional to the Altar • 41

portance of a native production of saints in the Spanish Americas as a way

of confirming their spiritual conquest is self-evident, and the speed of Sta.
Rosa of Lima’s canonization is testament to the enthusiasm of the Church
itself in this project. So José Eugenio Valdés’ overblown rhetoric could al-
most be anticipated when he describes sor Sebastiana’s birth as the most
magnificent of the splendors with which God, in His mercy, had seen fit to
grace the city of Mexico. In Valdés’ account of sor Sebastiana’s life, the saint-
liness of this criolla nun is portrayed as being of enormous symbolic worth,
the jewel that sets off the value of the viceregal capital, the seal confirming
its civility. Although having ‘‘otherworldly’’ referents, these kinds of con-
cerns are, of course, ultimately very mundane, directed as they are to notions
of cultural and religious hegemony and to the consolidation of imperial
power and of colonial identity. Sor Sebastiana, predictably, does not share
these concerns, or at least not in her writing. On profession she would in
fact have declared herself, as every nun did, to be removed from the world
tamquam vera morta, and her writing is valuable for such worldly enterprises
precisely in the measure that it is the writing of someone dead to the world,
someone who because of their distance from it, could mediate between it
and the Almighty.
The dilated American empire, so rich in mineral wealth, may well have
found its spiritual touchstone in the criolla sor Sebastiana according to Val-
dés, but his own mining of the textual treasure left to him reveals a rather
more anxious relationship than that suggested by his optimistic rhetoric.
In fact, caution rather than triumph defines the tone of most of the rela-
tionships between confessors and spiritually inclined female confessants for
which we have any evidence in this period. The suspicion surrounding false
mystics and spiritual women in general was strong, and the Church’s desire
to regulate the production of writing about such subjects is evident from
Urban viii’s Bulls of 1625 and 1631 that no hagiographies be published of
pious persons who had not been officially recognized as such. Neverthe-
less, the publishing of strictly-speaking unauthorized vidas was prodigious
at this time, and their reliance on the kind of source Valdés uses was very
frequent.18
Valdés’ task as the writer of a hagiography based on these sources is dif-
ferent from that of the scribe or that of an objective historian. It involves the
manipulation of these sources as well as of others, and such an elaboration
of the narrative denotes how his relationship to the truth of sor Sebastiana’s
42 • Colonial Angels

writing has less in common with historical notions of the integrity of source
material and more with an interpretative approach that is in itself creative.19
Valdés’ description of sor Sebastiana’s childhood, for example, with details
of her breast-feeding habits and miraculous escapes from accidents is com-
pletely absent from her own writings and is almost certainly more of a rhe-
torical gesture signaling sor Sebastiana’s saintliness than a real account of her
early years. A similar hagiographic commonplace, which is reproduced by
Valdés and not mentioned by sor Sebastiana and which is more probably a
piece of propaganda for Tridentine reforms and access to devotion, is her
conversion during a sermon. The sermon inspires sor Sebastiana to request
confession, and she spends two hours recounting her sins, deciding to pro-
fess at the end of it. In this anecdote, Valdés’ concern is for the verisimilar,
not so much for the historically accurate; but this should not be interpreted
as leaving his writing in a disembodied realm. Paradoxically, the constraints
involved in preparing a narrative of sor Sebastiana’s life for general public
consumption actually lead Valdés to be more factually informative than sor
Sebastiana herself on occasions. Thus, it is he who supplies the information
that sor Sebastiana’s parents were candle makers in order that the reader may
make sense of an early miracle where she escapes death by drowning in a pot
of molten wax. This information is absent from sor Sebastiana’s account of
the miracle, it being assumed the reader of the letter, her confessor, would
know her family background.
The description Valdés gives of the spectacular effects of sor Sebastiana’s
trances where holy fire rises up from her chest is a good example of the
different relationship to truth displayed in the book and in the letters.
Valdés’ account conforms perfectly to hagiographic tradition and is in fact
rather tame, but no such description is to be found in sor Sebastiana’s writ-
ings, where it would constitute an impious assertion of her own sainthood.20
Valdés’ writing was, of course, also constrained by theological rules and reg-
ulations lending legitimacy to some spiritual experiences and not to others.
The long list of all the saintly qualities exhibited by sor Sebastiana’s visions
that he appends to their description makes this apparent. The list is modeled
on the parameters set up in Gerson’s De probatione spiritum for distinguish-
ing false from true spiritual visions, and Valdés’ citation of Gerson makes
vivid his need to insert what he writes into a tradition of acceptable and holy
works.21 Adherence to the genre’s form is thus taken as signifying the or-
thodoxy of the events described, and hagiography certainly provided Valdés
 From the Confessional to the Altar • 43

with a canon of authoritative texts. It is to these texts’ repetitive structure

and formal characteristics that he often appeals to legitimate the content of
his own writing.22
The correct composition of a hagiography is thus clearly a matter of ut-
most importance. The possibility of the salvation and redemption of the
reader depends upon it. In writing a hagiography, Valdés entered a series of
complex theological debates where each point or interpretation had to be
upheld by a learned gloss. This notion of illustrating and explaining a text is
analogous to the confessor’s role as interpreter of a nun’s confession and,
indeed, to Valdés’ own relation to sor Sebastiana’s writing. His annotations
and addenda serve to place her in a tradition of both writing and saintly
predecessors. Valdés is precise about what spiritual methods sor Sebastiana
follows, reproducing the sections of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises that she
found most useful. Sor Sebastiana’s devotion to this kind of oración metódica,
as it is called by Andrés Martı́n, is counterpointed by her reading of Pedro
de Alcántara, one of the main exponents of a more contemplative style of
prayer whose works were censored in the Index of 1558.23 In fact, Valdés links
sor Sebastiana not only to Alcántara but to Catherine of Bologna and to
Sta. Teresa, each of whom had come under censure from sections of the
ecclesiastical hierarchy that wanted to eradicate any traces of iluminismo or
recogimiento in the saints carried to the altars.24 The fact that all of sor Se-
bastiana’s letters also describe her devotion to Loyola’s more reputable spiri-
tual methods saves both her and Valdés from the charge of exhibiting a con-
templative style ‘‘para mujeres de carpinteros’’ [for the wives of carpenters]
as Fernando de Valdés, the composer of the 1558 Index, characterized con-
templative spirituality.25
The efforts in Valdés’ hagiography to escape the scandalous and exhibi-
tionistic traits associated with pious women and the popular cults they elic-
ited are to be identified throughout his book. Instead of catalogs of mira-
cula, Valdés gives us learned disquisitions about the theory of penitence, the
power of diabolic visions, and, most bizarre of all, the possible volume of
the angelic voices sor Sebastiana hears.26 As is usual in the lives of saintly
women, eucharistic miracles and visions are the most theologically delicate
to recount because of the implicit threat they constitute to the priest’s privi-
leged relation with God, and Valdés is cautious about attributing literal truth
to these events, preferring to see them as metaphorical confirmations of sor
Sebastiana’s piety.27 The desire to shed the superstitious elements associated
44 • Colonial Angels

with popular versions of the genre meant that Tridentine hagiographies

placed much value both on historical accuracy and on intellectual tradition,
multiplying learned biblical and classical references in order to place their
narratives within a recognized canon of legitimate works. This drive for
historical precision and formal decorum in hagiography, however, can be
seen as being in conflict with the equally important imperative to inspire
devotion. Juan Luis Vives’ disapproval of the Legenda aurea by Jacobus de
Voragine is instructive in this respect. Punning on its title, Vives calls the
work ferrei oris, plumbei cordis [iron-mouthed and leaden-hearted], criticisms
directed not only at the ‘‘folkloric’’ quality of the historically inaccurate nar-
rative but at its inability to engage or move the reader.28 For Vives, it was
the great classical works of biography— of patricians and generals—which
should have served as models for Counter-Reformation hagiography, the
resulting vida being both elegant and true. Though Vives envisages the re-
cuperation of rhetoric in his ideal hagiography, he also recognizes that the
power of rhetoric to persuade and move to devotion and virtue (what Vora-
gine’s clumsy text does not do) is inextricably linked to its power to lie and
to be inaccurate (what Voragine’s text does so well).29
The didactic purpose of hagiography then can be understood to place its
author in this awkward position, caught between the role of conscientious
historian and that of effective preacher. In the prologue to sor Sebastiana’s
vida, Valdés emphasizes the historical truth of his account by stressing the
trouble he has gone to to find accurate sources as well as how methodical his
approach has been.30 To a great extent, of course, Valdés’ claims to historical
accuracy and truth are substantiated by his use of sor Sebastiana’s writings
as primary sources for his own. In this primordial sense at least, his book
does not efface sor Sebastiana’s letters, but rather presents itself as a kind of
commentary on the truth they enclose. Valdés’ reliance on sor Sebastiana’s
written testimony as truth comes across dramatically when he rests his case
for her abject humility on the entire corpus of her letters, written to fulfill
the vow of obedience. Their very existence annuls his need to convince the
reader any further:

Los sesenta argumentos que ofrezco son otras tantas cartas que escribió a
sus confesores. Porque cada una de ellas es prueba de su humildad. No
puedo dar testimonio más cierto que ellas mismas. Leerlas y admirarse de
su abatimiento, todo es uno; porque no puede ser menos que admirarse el
leerlas.31
 From the Confessional to the Altar • 45

This exaltation of a woman’s writing as source of truth relies, however, on

the writing’s simplicity and innocence. Valdés’ comment on sor Sebastiana’s
verse is indicative of an attitude to female spiritual writing that valorized it
only insofar as it remained the inscription and confirmation of the woman’s
docta ignorantia. He cites from her poetry, making clear that he includes it
not for its artistic merit but for its sincerity and emotiveness.32 Valdés’ ap-
probation of sor Sebastiana’s writing must thus be understood as in some
sense depending on sor Sebastiana’s own declared aversion to it. Hence the
relish with which he describes her apprehension and the analogy he draws
between her writing and the extraordinary penitential practices she also un-
dertook. Writing in this context signals absolute submission to Divine Will,
and the pain and suffering it causes are a guarantee of the (female) writing
subject’s authenticity.33 It is interesting to note that both nun and confessor
express the same emotions about women’s writing in this context. Indeed, it
is only by expressing such orthodox opinions that either of them can sanc-
tion such writing.34
But the orthodoxy of the writing nun was impossible to guarantee uncon-
ditionally, and it is interesting that Valdés should take refuge in his role as
faithful historian in order to distance himself from any theoretical errors sor
Sebastiana’s experience or her writing might contain:

Lo que aconteció a la Madre Sebastiana no sé si fué milagro, o prodigio,

refiérolo como consta de los instrumentos que tengo en mi poder.35

Valdés’ most emphatic defense of his own authorial integrity relies on a very
fluid interpretation of his role as ‘‘historian.’’ Sometimes this means ‘‘inter-
preter,’’ sometimes simply ‘‘scribe,’’ but this solution is very much an interim
one that works within the confines of the vida as a book. Valdés’ role as
confessor and preacher, however, means that the notion of truth in the writ-
ing of hagiography will always also refer to the text’s effect, to its reception
and to its extratextual life, where it is expected directly to influence other
lives. The didactic function of Valdés’ writing means the problems of rheto-
ric and figuration must always be considered from the point of view of re-
ception as well as production, and it is here that the persuasive character of
rhetoric and representation in general become most ambiguous, just as Vi-
ves’ consternation with the Legenda aurea made apparent.36
Valdés’ art can both save through persuasion and damn through lying, but
it is impossible to have one effect without the other. This doubleness in
46 • Colonial Angels

words cuts against the humanist optimism that Ciceronian civility might
indeed repair the ravages of the Fall. It is clear that the power to ‘‘make-
believe,’’ displayed by writings on spirituality like Valdés’ or sor Sebastiana’s,
could slip dangerously into a power of ‘‘make belief.’’ Valdés resists this deg-
radation of his own didactic enterprise by using the metaphor of other
mimetic practices. He expresses disdain for painting and instead praises
sculpture—a distinction that attempts to distance the effects of his didactic
project from those of ‘‘pure’’ representation in painting by associating them
instead with the more tangible (and violent) mimetic work of sculpture,
which actually transforms matter. Thus, his account of the construction of
sainthood remains tied to the world. Even its destruction of the body, by its
very fury, leaves the representation of saintliness as inescapably somatic:

Porque no querı́a ser santa de lienzo que salen formadas con los suaves
tientos del pincel, y con la delicadeza de los coloridos, sino santa de escul-
tura, hecha a golpes de la fierra y de la azuela, a heridas del escoplo, a
surcos del sormón, a tiranı́as de la gurbia; y por fin, hacerse pedazos y
dividirse toda, para ser santa a rigores.37

The violence of Valdés’ metaphor for the ‘‘fashioning’’ of sainthood with

its distrust of any representational system that would try to communicate
the process, takes us to the very heart of the instability that reigned in the
confessional relationship and in the writings that emerged from it. The vir-
tuous woman’s contacts with her spiritual fathers clearly constituted a site
where various kinds of influence and power were negotiated and where the
male clergy’s desire to control female spirituality reveals something of its
own vulnerability. Raymond of Capua’s relation to Catherine of Siena is a
keystone for understanding how the dynamic of such relationships worked.
It is significant that Raymond’s life of Catherine, the Vita e dialogo published
in Venice in 1517, was one of the more popular items of hagiographic lit-
erature among the nuns of New Spain, many chronicles citing it explicitly.
Raymond’s respect for Catherine’s piety can be taken as an expression of the
kind of privileged access to the Divine attributed to women by these learned
clergymen. The spiritual women were considered by their confessors to be
‘‘empty vessels.’’ That is, they were considered to have no active role or vo-
lition in their communication with God, they were simply the instruments,
the mediating agents through whom the Divinity spoke and who, when
 From the Confessional to the Altar • 47

their status became saintly enough, could be transformed into objects of

devotion. To be responsible for a saintly woman in the role of her confes-
sor became a matter of considerable prestige. But the public applause at-
tached to being the promoter of a holy nun did not always reflect the priest’s
confessional relation to his penitent. Indeed, as Raymond’s prostration at
Catherine’s feet and his calling her ‘‘mother’’ make apparent, the balance of
power in the more private relationship could easily be reversed. Given the
extraordinary holiness attributed to these women, this reversal was very
ambiguous, being both very hard to accept fully but impossible to condemn
outright.
Perhaps to demarcate boundaries in the relationship more clearly than they
appear in the example of Raymond and Catherine, the role of the confessor
had gradually confined itself in the Tridentine period to one of proportion-
ing the theoretical knowledge of a correct spirituality. Meanwhile, the fe-
male confessant had become the privileged locus of a correct practice of this
regulated devotion. This sexual division of spiritual labor is eloquently set
out in Valdés’ description of the perfect confessor not as a participant but as
a guide.38 More than information was being exchanged by confessor and
confessant, and Valdés’ extravagant metaphors make this clear. The confes-
sor as deep-sea diver looking for the pearls of virtue, as the walking stick
leading the blind person, played a symbolic social role that resonated in
spheres much wider than the private one of the confessional. What though
if the confessor were to find the perfect pearl? If the blind person being led
turned out to be endowed with divine sight through revelation?
The problem of the confessional relation was in essence this: that it was
mobile. Of course, the great majority of confessional relations were very
stable, and the hierarchical organization was never challenged. Nevertheless,
the relation did harbor the potential for upsetting this stability, and it ap-
peared in fact able to overturn the most sacrosanct of sexually determined
roles that located the priest above the nun. Although men’s more direct ac-
cess to divinity was in theory assured by their exclusive privilege of conse-
crating the host and administering the sacrament of communion, the sub-
jection of certain priests to certain so-called saintly women seemed to place
even this in doubt. Predictably, it was the sexual and emotional charge of the
confessional relation that was held responsible for this mutability.39 Luis de
Granada, who had himself fallen victim to the spiritual charms of a nun,
identifies the danger of the confessional relation lying precisely in this ne-
48 • Colonial Angels

gotiation of roles and identities that were usually givens, stable categories in
the ecclesiastical hierarchy of things. Thus, he declares in De las caı́das pú-
blicas, a sermon composed in response to the Inquisition’s condemnation of
the nun he had admired and written a hagiography of, that the very obedi-
ence a devout woman gives to her confessor may become a threat.40
Valdés is opaque on this delicate matter, but sor Sebastiana’s letters are
much more eloquent about the ties that bind her to various of her spiritual
fathers. For example, she expresses concern that a certain confessor will be-
have in an unexpected manner in the confessional and writes that she is
upset if she perceives any difference between the attitude she anticipated
and the one he displays.41 This emotional dependence on the confessor is
itself subject to all the doubts that accompany sor Sebastiana’s own spiritual
progress. Her comments reveal a very complex way of managing the bal-
ance of power in the relationship. Like the majority of her contemporaries,
sor Sebastiana acknowledges the confessor’s superiority, indulging him with
phrases of formulaic modesty and humility. She simultaneously declares
however (leaving no room for contestation) that in this particularly small
and insignificant matter—the progress of her own soul to salvation—she is
the only one privy to the truth of the matter.42 Unsurprisingly, the most clear
mark of sor Sebastiana’s autonomy in her writing is expressed in relation to
these men who oblige her to write and who must then deal with the real
consequences of her individuality and freedom in spiritual matters:

. . . con un enojo con Vuestra Paternidad, como si tuviera la culpa de

todo mi mal, estando inocente de lo que me pasaba . . . y ası́ tenı́a ver-
güenza, como también el que a Vuestra Paternidad le parecı́an muy mal
mis cosas; y que si yo volviera, ya no habı́a de tener consuelo y que sólo
lo preciso dirı́a, que lo demás era peligroso. De repente me daba un abo-
rrecimiento a mi Padre de mi alma, que lo querı́a despreciar con malas
palabras. Estaba como un gentil.43

In this instance, there is almost a sense of the ‘‘world-turned-upside-down’’

in sor Sebastiana’s writing, a world where a woman gives her opinion of
learned men and feels disgust for their opinions. Here the confessors are
pawns in sor Sebastiana’s emotional tumult, or as she describes it, foils that
the Devil uses in his personal battle with the nun. These moments reveal the
very real distress that often characterized the confessor-penitent relation-
 From the Confessional to the Altar • 49

ship. This psychological turmoil is, however, resolutely inscribed in its so-
ciohistorical context, and we have seen previously how even strong emotion
was regulated and codified in this kind of writing in the period. Moreover,
the links that united nuns and their confessors in the colonial city were not
exclusively personal but took place within a social and religious system that
was also affected by any disturbances in the relationship between priest and
penitent.44 We have seen the symbolic weight that Valdés attaches to pro-
moting sor Sebastiana as holy criolla. The priest metaphorically extends this
criolla nun’s holiness to the land that gave her birth, his rhetoric claiming
for it the fruits of a true evangelization that purges New Spain of its pa-
gan antecedents. Consequently, any anomaly in the confessional relationship
that ‘‘produces’’ such holiness, puts at risk not only the relationship itself but
this ambitious apologetic project that Valdés has constructed upon it. The
New World was already too much the world-turned-upside-down, and any-
thing less than absolute orthodoxy and consonance with the authoritative
model (social, religious, or rhetorical) was in danger of being unacceptably
deviant.
Valdés and sor Sebastiana provide plenty of evidence of how ambiguous
and complicated the project of representing sanctity was in the New World
context. It is significant, moreover, that the ambiguity settles in the same
kinds of textual ‘‘space’’ in both their writings: that of the illustration or
description of the exemplary. In Valdés’ writing, the passages where the
apologetic argument is made and combined with the spiritual one are char-
acterized by the use of analogy and metaphor that serve to align the nun’s
virtue, piety, and so forth, with the New World. Thus, the perception of the
New World as different from the Old is rallied precisely to confirm the or-
thodoxy of practices and persons described. Analogously, the saintliness of
women—so different from men, so removed from the masculine ideal—is
taken as astounding, as exceptionally convincing.
The role the exemplary plays in the hagiographic narrative and in the
apologetic narrative is then the same. In both cases, the paradox of exem-
plarity (the model that is unique and yet held up as the desired standard)
mediates phenomena (the saint, the New World) that are not usually regis-
tered by the accepted codes of representation or understanding. In the reli-
gious texts produced in the colonies in the period, the Indies often figure as
the metaphysical example to end all examples. America is thus paradoxically
a hyperfertile ground for evangelization and the end of all such projects. The
50 • Colonial Angels

New World is both Eden and the place of the Apocalypse, an attitude most
obviously perceptible in the Franciscan Order’s millenarian enthusiasm to
convert the Indians.
The plot of sor Sebastiana’s profession in Mexico City is then an illustra-
tion of the fundamental differences between entering a convent in the Old
World and in the New, as well as a standard hagiographic piece designed
to show her fortitude and patience. When at one point in her career, sor
Sebastiana is placed in the only convent for Indian women in Mexico City,
that of Corpus Christi, the Indian nuns petition for her to be removed.
Valdés explains the reaction of the cacique nuns who want her to leave not in
terms of the Devil setting obstacles in the way of our pious heroine but
instead as a perfectly understandable action, given the social context he has
described, in that each ‘‘racial’’ group of nuns in the city had to fight for its
own territory.45 The Peninsular concern with pureza de sangre is clearly at
issue here, but in the American context it is articulated by a variety of blood
groups, each of whom is anxious to vindicate its ‘‘purity.’’ Every convent in
New Spain had indeed in some sense to demarcate its territory: racial, finan-
cial, and spiritual.46 This worldliness of the cloister and its links to other
New Spanish institutions has been mentioned previously and is dramatized
by sor Sebastiana’s difficulties in finding a convent that will accept her and a
patron who will provide a dowry. While awaiting a patron, sor Sebastiana is
taken in by the viceregal household and is clearly something of a success
with the noble women of the court. Her virtue and piety make her a celebrity
but do not guarantee hard cash. When an offer is finally made, it is to place
her in the convent of the Brigidines, a very recent foundation at the time,
and as a lay nun rather than one of the choir nuns. The strings attached to
the dowry are not explained by sor Sebastiana or Valdés, but they allow one
to speculate that not even a recognized holy woman could easily find finan-
cial support in a society where the interests of the monastic and social elite
were so intertwined they permitted very little negotiation.47
Sor Sebastiana finally professes in the convent of San Juan de la Peniten-
cia, and it is from here that most of the letters are written. It is her spiritual
home, and she belongs to it much like its other miraculous images and relics
that also serve to mediate between heaven and earth.48 Sor Sebastiana’s
holiness thus has a very practical use and is represented by Valdés as being
something of a miracle in this erstwhile land of idolatry. He reproduces the
topoi of wonder and admiration at the Spanish expansionist mission that
 From the Confessional to the Altar • 51

has brought such goods to America and exclaims over the particularity of
this virtuous nun, saying she is a ‘‘curiosity’’ and ‘‘marvel’’ that could only be
found in such a New World.49
Valdés’ account of the images and relics in sor Sebastiana’s convent, how-
ever, make it apparent that things New Spanish, even saintly nuns, their
convents, and their miraculous statues, were always in danger of going na-
tive, of sliding back into pagan prehistory. For example, a figure of the
Christ child that the nuns turn to worshiping after it intervenes miraculously
during an earthquake is described by Valdés as having ‘‘bewitched’’ the good
women. This type of emotional attachment, especially if described in terms
more usually associated with the demonic, is certainly not suitable for a com-
munity of nuns in a city so relatively recently purged of idolatrous and dev-
ilish practices.50 Valdés is, of course, more than aware of the dangers of such
words; and in his account of another image, the Niño de la madre Sebastiana,
which actually belonged to sor Sebastiana, he attempts to narrate the poten-
tially superstitious while resituating it within the field of the orthodox. The
image grows miraculously, and Valdés excuses himself from not being able
to prove this as he had not measured it before or after the event. Despite his
awareness of the empirical evidence that could be marshaled to substantiate
such a miracle, he insists that the image would be worthy of devotion under
any circumstances.51
Valdés’ writing is designed to construct Mexico City as a spiritual and
political utopian space, and it is, of course, sor Sebastiana’s life, her experi-
ences as the exemplar of holy New Spanish womanhood, and the commu-
nity in which she lives that serve to confirm the existence of such a space.
Using the symbol of the city and the holy women it enclosed as proof of
civility and orthodoxy is, however, not achieved smoothly by Valdés, as has
been noted. Sor Sebastiana’s employment of this symbolism in her writing
proves to be equally compromised and complicated. For example, her de-
scription of the choir—which could be considered the heart of the convent’s
enclosure, as it was where the nuns would pray in community—reveals this
sacrosanct space to be inhabited by strange noises and bizarre plays of alter-
nating light. The explanation is, of course, predictable: this is the Devil tor-
menting sor Sebastiana. Yet the rhetorical effect such descriptions have is to
make strange and uncanny what should be the most familiar and intimate
part of the cloister.52 In sor Sebastiana’s nights, the wild beasts of the desert
and scavengers of the urban world (both places symbolically most in oppo-
52 • Colonial Angels

sition to the enclosure of the cloister) actually break into it and settle at its
center.53
Similarly, her descriptions of houses that were spaces designated for a
more generalized and lay female enclosure in this period are charged with
an uncanniness that is in excess of the dramatization of the rejection of
worldly vanities such passages usually serve.54 This is even more apparent in
sor Sebastiana’s descriptions of Mexico City, which appears to be a very
different place from that written of by Valdés. In sor Sebastiana’s account,
the public areas that are described as dark, immense, and yet oppressive are
strangely devoid of people in what are very powerful figurations of both
limitless space and claustrophobia.55 There are also various references to
mud and swamps that may be descriptions of how sor Sebastiana remem-
bered the city to look after the prolonged floods that devastated it in the late
seventeenth century. The disconsolate tone in which the impassable streets
covered in detritus and the black and high walls that close in around her are
described is so charged with emotion, however, that it seems to betoken
more than the narration of an unpleasant memory.56 Other accounts of the
city by the nun confirm this:

. . . me vi en un lugar espantosı́simo, cómo él era no sabré decir, pero para

darme algo a entender, serı́a como el más triste barrio de los más retirados;
era muy grande, y habı́a muy pocas casitas que de verlas se arrancaba la
Alma [sic] de tristeza: andaban unos que parecı́an hombres, muy zancu-
dos, hablando en lengua que no se entendı́a: vi una cosa muy alta que
parecı́a torre que no sé decir cómo era; allá en lo último habı́a como tab-
ladito en donde estaban bailando y saltando. . . .57

In this version of Mexico City, there are very few houses, and the only land-
mark is an enormous tower with a stage where people dance and jump. The
thin dreamlike men who walk across these empty squares and streets speak
a language sor Sebastiana does not understand. This civic space has simply
nothing in common with the city celebrated by Valdés, and it is certainly
not recuperable for his civilizing and aggrandizing project. Sor Sebastiana’s
rhetoric cannot serve the purpose of creating the notion of a civil and ortho-
dox society by describing the ideal metropolitan environment in which it
would unfold, as her hagiographer’s text seeks to do. Instead, her writing
introduces doubt and instability into any representation of such ideals, and
 From the Confessional to the Altar • 53

particularly into the imperial project of celebrating the successful evangeli-

zation and civilization of the New World through such encomia.58
Both sor Sebastiana’s writing and that of Valdés are caught in this impos-
sible trap of asserting difference (as extraordinary virtue) while guarantee-
ing conformity. Moreover, their writing activity takes place in a milieu pre-
dominantly hostile to female spirituality and the excesses and superstitions
it conjured up. The manifestation of such spirituality in the New World
represents the replaying of a resolutely Old World set of concerns—the
theological and political associations surrounding female piety—in the New
World, where they all take on a distinctively different incarnation. The writ-
ings of the nun and the hagiographer, because of their Mexican context,
allow an identification of the specifically American cultural and political
stakes involved in the association of femininity with dissimulation that the
controversy over women’s spirituality focused on.
In most European accounts of America throughout the early modern
period, manifestations of femininity in the New World were usually char-
acterized as excessive and hyperbolic and had come increasingly to receive
the ‘‘scientific’’ blessing of theoreticians of climate. What then would be
the place of the phenomena of feigning holy women in the Americas? A
condemnatory aside from the New Spanish Inquisition, judging an in-
stance of dissimulated sanctity in 1537, gives a good indication of how the
ideas of excess and hyperbole could characterize as much the subject—the
accused ilusa —as those pronouncing the verdict. The Inquisition’s rhetoric
is extreme:

. . . en esta tragicomedia no hay otra cosa que tramoya y aparato de virtud,

y el asco y fetidad [sic] de la lujuria de esta mujer . . . tiene más amor
propio que una beata.59

This constellation of accusations is completely damning—sexuality, sem-

blance, and self-love—and makes vivid the tragicomedy in which women
often ended up playing the lead if they essayed a spiritual persona in the
New World.
In sor Sebastiana’s writing practice, the problem of representing her spiri-
tual persona and its exemplarity is most particularly felt in relation to the
exercise of authorship itself. The act of narrating herself, her life, is unbear-
ably painful for sor Sebastiana, and many of her letters are, in fact, about the
54 • Colonial Angels

impossibility of such a project. Among the consequences of this discomfort

with the act of representation are the strange rhetorical movements by which
sor Sebastiana manages to write fear and instability not only into the heart
of such a symbolic space as the cloister but also into that of the colonial city
itself. This much would seem to indicate that the nun’s narrative of her own
spiritual history and of her colonial context can never be combined with the
triumphalist rhetoric so common to the majority of texts telling the story of
the progress of religion in the New World. Inevitably, Valdés’ history, elabo-
rated on the text of sor Sebastiana’s own version of her life, is not any the
more immune to narrative hitches and difficulties. The epistolary legacy left
by sor Sebastiana to her hagiographer is an unquiet one, and its unruliness
is especially evident when Valdés attempts to place sor Sebastiana’s virtue in
its cultural and geographic context. In an aside on the devotion the citizens
of Mexico City display for masquerades, Valdés’ heavy insistence on associ-
ating femininity with childishness, and both with bewitchment and gal-
lantry, seem forced attempts to persuade us that these feasts are nothing but
pleasing frivolities. These entertainments were, of course, no more or less
superstitious than many Peninsular ones at the time, but Valdés’ preciosity
immediately makes us aware of the enormous cultural ‘‘work’’ needed to es-
tablish Spain in New Spain:

. . . son desempeños, al fin, de la galanterı́a Mexicana, brujerı́as y juguetes

con que divierten a la Señora México, que aunque señora y grande, le
gustan mucho estas diversiones.60

The figure of sor Sebastiana as holy criolla, the New World woman re-
splendent in virtue and piety, clearly had many colonial hopes pinned to
it, for surely it was only this woman who could resist the labyrinth of signi-
fications, and their peculiarly feminine charms, that her land suggested.
Writings with this figure at their center, however, immediately entered their
own masquerade and wrought the transformations in terms of content, of
structure, and of rhetorical figure, which representations of the saintly lives
of sor Sebastiana by herself and by her hagiographer make apparent.
c h a p t e r 4

The Exemplary Cloister on Trial:

San José in the Inquisition

. . . las descalzas nos preciamos tanto de obedientes y rendidas a nuestros prelados que
no admitiéramos en ésto malas doctrinas, que tuviera quien las tuviese . . .1

In 1661 the archbishop of Mexico City, Mateo de Burqueiro, wrote a letter

to the Holy Office concerning the Carmelites in which he ‘‘let it be under-
stood that the nuns held various erroneous and heretical ideas.’’ 2 This explo-
sive letter, of which there is no copy in the Mexican Inquisition archives,
initiated the trial of the convent. The only documents from the archbishop
actually extant in the file are two letters concerning the appointment of
confessors in San José, one written in 1657 and one in 1659. In the let-
ter of 1657, the archbishop discusses the virtue of non-Carmelite confessors,
while in the later one he justifies the appointment of confessors who are not
Carmelites to positions in San José.
The Inquisition trial soon makes it clear that these matters—the charge
of heresy and the religious affiliation of confessors in the convent—are in-
timately linked. The trial is certainly about Church authority and hierarchy
and extremely revelatory about how the familiar conflict between secular and
regular clergy was replayed in the New World. However, the requests from
the Carmelite nuns for Carmelite confessors also reveal an extraordinarily
strong emotional bond between the male and the female branches of the
order. This transforms the interest of the trial from being only another in-
sight—however valuable—into the church politics of the New World, into
an instance illuminating a much less familiar issue: the gendered emotional
56 • Colonial Angels

dimension of religious allegiance. In some senses, of course, the question of

emotion and allegiance is also an ‘‘Old World’’ inheritance, and indeed the
experiences of Sta. Teresa, and the rule and confessional practices of Car-
melite convents in the Peninsula, are continually invoked during the San
José debacle. An important source of information on this matter, one that is
simultaneously cited and censored by the New Spanish nuns, is Sta. Teresa’s
own book on the foundation of her convents, Libro de las fundaciones, written
at the behest of her confessors.3
It remains extraordinary and shocking, however, to find the Carmelite
convent of San José in the Mexican Inquisition, accused of heresy. Trials for
heresy against an institution rather than an individual were rare, and the idea
that doctrinal error was to be found in one of the showpieces of the colonial
state must have been deeply distressing.4 Indeed, the situation inside San
José and the convent’s relation with the archbishop seem to have come to a
head extremely quickly. On 23 January 1661, one of the nuns in San José,
Andrea de San Francisco, wrote a letter denouncing the nuns who favored
having male Carmelites exclusively in the convent as confessors. She gave
this to her own confessor, a criollo from Tasco called Luis Becerra, who
came before the Inquisition formally on the twenty-seventh. He brought not
only her letter, but two supporting letters by the nuns Teresa de Jesús and
Marı́a de los Angeles. Meanwhile, on the twenty-fourth, Margarita de San
Bernardo, one of the leading nuns of the pro-Carmelite group, had again
antagonized the archbishop by requesting a Carmelite confessor. On the day
following Luis Becerra’s formal denunciation of them, sor Margarita and the
other members of this pro-Carmelite faction wrote to the king asking for
his support. In less than a month, the affair had escalated from an internal
ecclesiastical wrangle to a fully fledged political conflict involving Church
and Crown authorities in both the Old World and the New.
Throughout February, the interrogation of witnesses took place, and Luis
Becerra was questioned during March and April. The truncated file ends
with a request from Becerra to be released from the Inquisition’s prison. No
further documents relating to this episode of San José’s history are to be
found in the catalog of the Inquisition files. The matter remained unresolved
in terms of an Inquisitorial verdict, but as in so many of the administrative
and bureaucratic stalemates of colonial government, this implied an effective
victory for one party: in this case the archbishop who had accused the nuns
and who clearly retained his authority over them and their convent.5
 The Exemplary Cloister on Trial • 57

The fact that the heresy the nuns stand accused of is tied to questions of
authority that are not only religious but concerned with issues of gender,
involving as they do the women’s obedience to male clerics, is the principal
interest of the trial. Transgressions of authority in this period were particu-
larly execrable in women in general, and in nuns in particular. Sta. Teresa
herself emphasizes the hierarchical relation between prelate and nuns in
trenchantly conservative terms.6 Nevertheless, she is sophisticated in her ap-
praisal of the politics governing such relations, and her sometimes abstract
characterization of authority is often nuanced by her recognition of the re-
sponsibilities the prelate owes the community of nuns in his role as ‘‘true
father’’ to them.7
Sta. Teresa’s Libro de las fundaciones is marked by caution and by a de-
sire not to implicate itself in direct criticism of the ecclesiastical authorities.
Thus, it does not mention names, except to praise, and attempts to avoid
comment on the political events in the midst of which the religious order
found itself embroiled. It is clear, however, that the first Carmelite founda-
tion was supported by the bishop of Avila, Alvaro de Mendoza, and by the
general of the Carmelites, Juan Bautista Rubeo de Ravena, and that this
support was crucial for its success. It is also apparent that opinion was di-
vided in the Carmelite Order about the Discalced branch, which made mat-
ters very awkward for Sta. Teresa. The fact that there were no male Dis-
calced Carmelites was something of a worry for the saint and, at least in this
text, her efforts to appoint men of her liking and so extend her influence
over the male Carmelites is evident. She thus writes very openly about the
convenience of a male foundation:

. . . porque tenı́a más deseo de que se hiciese el monasterio de los frailes

que el de las monjas, por entender lo mucho que importaba, como des-
pués se ha visto.8

Unfortunately, it was clear that the institutional dependency of the male

Discalced Carmelites on the rest of the Carmelite Order brought it close to
ruin. With no constitutions of their own, each monastery governed itself as
it saw fit, and Sta. Teresa wrote eloquently on how such heterogeneity of
practices led to disagreements and divisions that came close to extinguish-
ing the reform before it had properly begun.9 Eventually, constitutions were
written specifically for the male Discalced branch, but the political climate
58 • Colonial Angels

did not favor reform. Sta. Teresa herself was effectively imprisoned by the
Carmelite general chapter that, basing itself on the dictates of the Piacenza
chapter of 1575, virtually declared war on the Discalced branch.
In Spain the division within the Carmelite Order was the reflection of a
division within the Church itself between clergy who obeyed the king in his
efforts to reform the Church, and those clergy who gave their allegiance to
Rome and defended the universality of Trent. The conflict of interests is
exemplified by the coincidence in 1567 of the departure from Rome of Juan
Bautista Rubeo, the Carmelite general, to reform the order ‘‘internally,’’ with
the granting to the Spanish monarchy of the Bull In prioribus, which gave
power to the regular clergy to visit and reform Carmelite monasteries. This
division between what was effectively a state Church and the representatives
of the Universal Church from the papal Curia, led to absurd situations in
which friars expelled by Rubeo were rehabilitated by the Consejo Real and
given important posts within the Carmelite hierarchy.10
Immediately after Sta. Teresa’s death, the situation became even more
extreme. It is difficult to give a precise account of events within the Dis-
calced Carmelite Order, as much of the documentation surrounding what
came to be known as the ‘‘Incidente de la Consulta’’ (the Consulta being a
body created to centralize the government of the order) was destroyed.11
What is clear is that the chief Discalced nuns, Ana de Jesús and Ana de San
Bartolomé, took up adversarial positions on many issues. By far the most
difficult and controversial of these was the question of the government of
the female convents of the order. Ana de San Bartolomé was in favor of
government by the male branch, considering it to be the best way of achiev-
ing spiritual correctness, while Ana de Jesús feared it would mean the loss of
the traditional freedom enjoyed by the female branch. The quarrel split the
Discalced nuns into two groups: Ana de Jesús; Jerónimo Gracián, who had
pushed the Carmelite general chapter to accept the primitive constitutions
for the reformed order; and San Juan de la Cruz on one side; and Ana de
San Bartolomé and Nicolás Doria, Gracián’s very conservative successor, on
the other. Each faction claimed to be the legitimate spiritual heir of Sta.
Teresa. Despite gaining papal approval for their mission, the Ana de Jesús
faction suffered persecution at the hands of the order itself. In 1592 Gracián
was expelled; San Juan de la Cruz was temporarily sent to a faraway hermit-
age as a penance; and Ana de Jesús herself was subjected to a rigorous Visita
of her convent and eventually confined to her cell for three years. It is not
 The Exemplary Cloister on Trial • 59

improbable that in appointing her to organize the foundations in France and

the Low Countries, the order was trying to put as much distance as possible
between itself and this unruly nun.
The conflict over the control of the female Carmelite convents, in all its
complexity, was thus in a very real sense a direct legacy of Sta. Teresa her-
self.12 In the New World, however, the power struggle between the Crown
and the Church and between the secular and the regular clergy did not re-
main at an institutional level, coming instead increasingly to be expressed
in terms of the influence exercised in the colony respectively by Peninsular
Spaniards and Creoles.13 In previous chapters, the importance of these di-
visions in New Spanish society has been made patent, as has the fact that
the convent communities were not exempt from such worldly discord. In
this chapter, the criollos and gachupines are set at each other’s throats once
more in the struggle of binary opposites we have encountered before, but in
this case the division seems to have more depth to it, seems in fact to reveal
more of what social and demographic histories of the period have taught us
was a radically heterogeneous society.
In this context, it must be emphasized that already by the mid-seven-
teenth century the criollos of New Spain clearly felt they belonged to a coun-
try and culture that was in many respects completely different to the mother
country, but in as many others again, a reconstitution of it. This pull of
the Old World in the New results in what appears to be the replaying of the
‘‘querelle des anciens et modernes’’ in the Indies, where the modernity of the
gachupines lies in their not being connected directly to the land but instead
involved in commerce.14 The re-creation of archaic social structures in the
New World society would clearly have influenced all sorts of social and po-
litical relations. The fortunes of the concept of pureza de sangre in the In-
dies is a case in point. The Inquisition sources examined encourage a much
broader interpretation of the notion as one that embraced the idea of honor
almost on feudal terms and most certainly tied it into a complex system of
social class.15 Purity and nobility of blood had definitely become mixed and
necessarily very resonant concepts at the time in the hybrid society of the
Indies. The New World saint, moreover, was certainly not exempt from
these contradictions that encourage us to read beyond the descriptions ga-
chupı́n and criollo to the more complex systems of social organization that
existed.
The great value of Inquisition sources comes, of course, precisely from
60 • Colonial Angels

this documenting of the ‘‘underside’’ of the cultural project in the Americas:

the deviation from the model, the failure of transmission—in this particu-
lar case, the representation of the heretical convent and the heterodox nun.
Nevertheless, it is crucial to keep in mind how circumscribed the Inquisi-
tion’s activities in the cultural field of the colonies were. In 1571 in Mexico, a
decree was passed removing Indians from the jurisdiction of the Inquisition.
The most important fact about the Inquisition in the New World is thus
that its social reach and influence were predominantly restricted to policing
the faith of a limited, if heterogeneous, ethnic and cultural group: the non-
Indians in the colony.
This meant that the types of cases that came to trial in the New World
Inquisition were substantially different from the Old World ones.16 Inter-
estingly, even heresy seems to be different in America. Basically, there were
no great heretics in the New World; the vast majority of Inquisition cases
concerned the occasional Protestant, usually a northern European sailor or
pirate blown off course.17 Only when the heretic seems to be about to enter
a community or become a social force does the Inquisition take any real
interest in him or her. The implications of this for events in San José are
evident. On this occasion, it seemed that an entire community of women of
the New Spanish elite was about to be engulfed in a breach of ecclesiastical
and ‘‘natural’’ authority. Moreover, such a breach was taking the form of that
particularly transgressive phenomenon we have encountered previously: a
heterodox feminine spirituality.
The persons chiefly intended to regulate the spirituality of women were,
of course, their male confessors, and clearly the ideal confessor, his ideal
confessant, and the ideal relation between the two were at the center of the
Inquisition’s scrutiny. The questions asked of nuns and of the only confessor
examined, Luis Becerra, confirm the strategic role of the confessor as con-
tributing to the ideal convent government, a government that was under-
stood to be both political and spiritual. How could any of this, however, be
taken to mean that a nun’s personal preference for confessing with certain
individuals was heretical?
There are three documents that appear in the Inquisition file concerning
requests from nuns in San José for Carmelite confessors. Two are letters
addressed to the archbishop by, respectively, the founding mother, Mariana
de la Encarnación, and by Margarita de San Bernardo. The third document
is a declaration to the Tribunal by Marı́a de San Leocadia. All of these nuns
 The Exemplary Cloister on Trial • 61

were on their deathbeds when they wrote, and the dramatic nature of this
sort of petition should be kept in mind. The dying nuns, preparing to make
a general confession that would review their whole lives, assert their need
for a specific kind of spiritual comfort. Their souls are about to enter pur-
gatory, and the unstated, but clearly present, implication is that their salva-
tion depends on their request being granted.18
By anchoring their requests in a rhetoric of personal need and the fulfill-
ment of a rigorous religious practice, these nuns clearly hoped to be able to
foil any accusations of heterodoxy. This does not mean Mariana de la En-
carnación’s letter is not also strongly positive in its assertion of her need for
a Carmelite confessor. The founding mother does not rest her defense on
the notion that it ‘‘would do no harm’’ for the nuns of San José to confess
with Carmelites. She argues instead that it is their right, a right founded in
history and supported by tradition. The Carmelites, she states, have always
desired to be ruled by the male branch of the order, and, she claims, God
himself intervened to tell Sta. Teresa that she should submit the convents in
Avila to the rule of the male Carmelites as soon as was possible.19 Sor Mari-
ana claims that she has heard that nominating a confessor is a free choice.
At this point in a person’s life, the founding mother argues, the selection of
a confessor should be left to individual conscience, rather than be dictated
by religious hierarchy.20 She is, however, quick to defend herself against any
charges of theological error that the claim might suggest by saying that there
is no doubt in her mind that any priest, of any order, is able to absolve her
sins; it is merely that a fellow Carmelite would be more suitable.21 Intelli-
gently, this woman is eager to represent her personal preference as obedi-
ence—alternately to tradition, to a founding figure, and, in the last instance,
to God himself.
To consolidate their position, these nuns also appeal to the other principal
figure of authority in the period—the king. The Inquisition file contains
two letters to the king: one of 1657, which predates the scandal with the
archbishop by four years, and another written during the Inquisition process
itself in 1661. The letters concentrate on the issue of the confessor’s experi-
ence and particular expertise. In the letters, the nuns bring to the king’s
attention the fact that they are in the New World—a place generally held
to be hostile to religious perfection. They reproduce derogatory notions of
the nature of the Mexican population in order to bemoan that, at this crucial
juncture, no New Spanish Sta. Teresa is to be found.22 There are, however,
62 • Colonial Angels

very virtuous and perfect Carmelite fathers, and logically, the letters argue
that it is only through the guidance provided by these men that the New
World Sta. Teresas will be formed.23 In these nuns’ opinion, only the edu-
cation and care of the Carmelite fathers can amend such an irregular and
precarious situation as that of a cloistered female community in the Ameri-
cas. This is a very polished and elegant argument, immediately striking the
tone of impartiality, careful not to accuse the secular clergy of faults, and to
ascribe the convent’s problems to the context in which it finds itself. The
geographical location of the convent in the New World serves to confirm
the need to enforce the rule of the priests of the order: the unorthodox set-
ting calls for ultraorthodox behavior.
It is the testimony of Luis Becerra, confessor to the faction of nuns sup-
porting episcopal rule rather than Carmelite rule in the convent, that pro-
vides an explanation of why such a seemingly innocent preference for certain
confessors could be construed as a doctrinal error. In the letter in which he
denounces the pro-Carmelite nuns, Becerra stresses that their stubbornness
in persisting with their request is no proof of fortitude or strong emotional
need but instead reveals that the dislike they have for the secular clergy is
in fact theologically founded. Becerra asserts that the behavior of the nuns
could be born out of a rejection of the purity and integrity of the Catholic
faith.24 This rather guarded suggestion (he is careful not to make a direct
accusation) soon turns into untrammeled fantasy, with Becerra imagining
the terrible consequences of these nuns being allowed to continue in their
disobedient ways. If they only consider themselves to be under the authority
of Carmelite fathers, what would happen if there were no Carmelite bishop
to guide them? They would, of course, Becerra reasons, usurp the privilege
of ordination.25 But this is not the end, for the attitude of these nuns would
have consequences for women in other religious orders. Becerra suggests
that any nuns who had professed under a secular cleric rather than one from
their own order, if they were to follow the teachings of the rebellious Car-
melites, could consider their vows null and void and go off and marry the
first man they met.26 In a final and grandiosely anxious rhetorical flourish,
Becerra claims that the pro-Carmelite nuns will come to challenge even the
power of any pope who was not a Carmelite if their requests for exclusivity
in confession are indulged any further.
Luis Becerra’s interrogation begins the day after he presents his written
denunciation and continues for at least three months and probably more.
 The Exemplary Cloister on Trial • 63

He is the only person imprisoned by the Inquisition, and the documents

show how antagonistic the judges are toward him. Becerra’s letter of de-
nunciation is taken to pieces: he is made to retract, rephrase, and modify
almost all of it. His behavior as a confessor is investigated minutely. The
main thrust of the questioning implies that he himself has created the divi-
sions in the convent, that he is responsible for the anarchic situation inside
it, and most seriously, that he has corrupted his confessants in order to fur-
ther his aims. It is significant that the Holy Office should devote so much
time and attention to Becerra, and we may speculate that its concern is re-
lated to broader considerations in the Church at the time regarding the qual-
ity and ‘‘professionalism’’ of clergy.27
Becerra’s chief confessant is the nun Andrea de San Francisco, and he
presents her letter along with his own when he first officially denounces the
goings-on in San José to the Holy Office. The Inquisitors are certainly sus-
picious of Becerra’s actions as a confessor, but this does not mean that they
exonerate his confessant from responsibility in any error that might have
been committed. Sor Andrea’s evidence before the Tribunal consists of both
written testimony and oral examination in various audiences. Her position
is not a strong one. The Inquisition took note of the charges she brought,
but her being in disagreement with her own convent superiors clearly cast
doubt on the authority of any of her statements. A good nun is an obedient
one, and Andrea de San Francisco is disobedient. Her behavior and her
declaration, however much they may be justified, distance her from the fig-
ure of the exemplary nun to be found in the didactic texts and hagiographies
of the period.28 Perhaps the entire point is, however, that the exemplary nun
could never be represented in the context of the Inquisition.
Not surprisingly, Andrea de San Francisco begins by trying to explain
why she is in such an anomalous position in her convent. She tells how she
was at first in agreement with the nuns who wanted to place the convent
under the authority of the Carmelite fathers, believing that this would bring
it greater spiritual perfection; therefore, she even worked to persuade others.
When she realized that the nuns were not behaving honestly, however, she
decided to oppose them.29 Andrea de San Francisco’s moment of realization
comes when she asks to read a letter the community has been given to sign
by these nuns in order to further their cause. The letter, which employs some
very wild rhetoric, is full of insults addressed to the secular clergy and con-
tains scurrilous rumors about the archbishop, alleging that someone who
64 • Colonial Angels

leads such a dissipated life could not hope to teach discipline, that someone
who does not pray could not hope to teach meditation, that someone who
drinks so heavily could not hope to teach abstinence.30 These parts of the
letter had been kept hidden from its signatories, and only by insisting on
seeing the complete text does sor Andrea discover the ruse. In her testi-
mony, this will become Andrea de San Francisco’s preferred mode of self-
representation: a willing and obedient nun who discovers, little by little, the
machinations of a group of unscrupulous women in the convent. This nar-
rative structure enables her to fit into the role of the hagiographic heroine or
reformadora, who sees the evil in a convent and tries to remedy it. Sor Andrea
presents herself as the innocent who is disabused of her devout and pious
conception of convent life by the behavior of the nuns she has come to call
the Hijas de la Orden because of their support for the Carmelite confessors.
She is the naive novice who thought she was about to enter a paradise when
she professed, only to discover that the convent’s internal constitution owed
much more to the world than to Eden.31
Paradoxically, the absolute loss of paradise, at least in hagiographic terms,
resonates as much in sor Andrea’s simple description of the evil nuns as
gachupinas as in the behavior she ascribes to these women. In sor Andrea’s
introduction of such brute ‘‘naturalism’’ as the question of birthplace (in this
colonial context indivisible from its concomitant cultural and political asso-
ciations), the abandonment of the universal narrative of virtue characteristic
of classic hagiography is confirmed.32 In Andrea de San Francisco’s narra-
tive, San José is depicted as riven into a network of alliances based on coun-
try of birth, family, and affection. The interdependence of these bonds is
exhibited continually in her testimony. Although she restricts herself to two
categories: gachupı́n and criollo, it is possible to see that these broad catego-
ries contain nuanced perceptions of social class, of ‘‘honor,’’ and of status
more generally. A perfect instance of this is given during sor Andrea’s criti-
cism of Bernarda de San Juan, who becomes the bête noire of her testimony.
For Andrea de San Francisco, the gachupina nun is a ‘‘mujer de poca obli-
gación y de menos religión’’ [a woman of little honor and less religion].33 At
this point, the Inquisitors must have asked sor Andrea to elaborate on what
she meant by honor. Her explanation is surprising, for the cloister is com-
pletely forgotten here. The measure of virtue and honor remains purely
secular and totally marked by social status. Moreover, it is substantiated by
personal experience and family ties. Bernarda de San Juan is of little honor
 The Exemplary Cloister on Trial • 65

and less religion because her father is an employee of a butcher, and her
grandmother, though admittedly born in Spain, sold candles from her
home. Sor Andrea is sure this information is correct because her own father
knew someone whose slaves bought candles and meat from sor Bernarda’s
grandmother and father.34
The baseness of the gachupina nuns and their supporters is also evident
from their rewriting of the chronicle of San José and the history of the Car-
melite Order in New Spain. In the revisionist version, the path is prepared
for what is represented as the pro-Carmelites’ saintly cause. Thus, before her
profession, Bernarda de San Juan is told that San José is not subject to the
obedience of the order but that of the secular prelate. This is described as
disappointing her, and she, in the manner of reforming heroines, promises
to remedy the situation once she is in a position of authority. Andrea de San
Francisco, in her account, is acutely aware of the power of this kind of his-
torical revision and rewriting and points out that this revisionist version is
used in the convent as spiritual reading at recreation.35 Not only do the Hijas
de la Orden invent apocryphal stories to suit their purpose, they also mis-
interpret the writings of Sta. Teresa. Andrea de San Francisco, sure about
her own ‘‘reading’’ of the Holy Mother, declares that an early version of Sta.
Teresa’s Visitas has been removed from San José because it was clear from
this version of the text that the saint subjected herself and her first convents
willingly to the authority of the secular clergy.
Sor Andrea’s description of how the Hijas de la Orden work to impose a
kind of history in which only their point of view is represented, forms part
of her accusation that they continually pervert the Truth. Apart from re-
writing the foundation chronicles, they also manipulate the pious devotions
in the convent. This involves changing the affections the nuns feel for a
particular saint as well as physically transforming images of saints in the
convent. Thus, San Nicolás de Tolentino is replaced in the affections of the
servant nuns by San Anastasio, a Carmelite servant friar for whom the ga-
chupina nuns lay on a feast and celebration.36 Similarly, pictures that featured
friars in Franciscan habits are painted over with the habit of St. Elias. Other
pictures of Holy Fathers, dressed as Carmelites, are also commissioned.37
Significantly, it is in relation to this rewriting of history that sor Andrea
finally makes something approaching a doctrinal accusation against the Hi-
jas de la Orden. She describes how these nuns tell the story of a Carmelite
convent in Spain that manages to survive not taking communion except
66 • Colonial Angels

from the male Carmelites, though this means they only take the Host, and
make the confession it requires, once every six months. Apparently, the
Mexican Carmelite friars explain that it is possible to remain so long without
full confession because a mental confession is enough to pardon the sins and
failings of a year. This claim is a direct challenge to the authority of the
Church, and, not surprisingly, sor Andrea says she told her confessor Jacinto
de la Serna immediately about this ‘‘doctrine,’’ as she herself terms it.38 At
this point, sor Andrea is asked to give detailed information—to provide the
names of those present at the recreation when the story was told, to explain
the form recreation took exactly in San José, to describe what she means
precisely by ‘‘doctrine.’’ 39 In this particular case, she seems simply to equate
‘‘doctrine’’ with ‘‘teaching.’’ Sor Andrea says that the gachupina nuns do not
understand the ‘‘doctrine’’ of Sta. Teresa on obedience but interpret it as
applying only when they are subject to the rule of the order.40 Significantly,
Andrea de San Francisco emphasizes that these nuns not only say this but
‘‘practice’’ it. Clearly, this is the damning combination as far as ‘‘doctrine’’ is
concerned. The conjunction of theory and practice confirms that the pro-
Carmelite nuns are mistaken and conveniently provides the material evi-
dence through which sor Andrea can unmask them not only as misguided
but as malevolent. They, therefore, can be utterly condemned.41
These representations of the wicked convent community constitute a
lively narrative picture built up around the genres of testimony, eye-witness
account, and confessional letter and are strongly marked by the forensic
rhetoric so much in evidence in Inquisition procedure.42 As a result, we have
a vivid impression of the discord in San José. We have transcriptions of the
insults and dialogue bandied by nuns and prelates, details of people’s family
backgrounds and histories—all in all, an account of convent life far removed
from the apologetic chronicle or hagiography. Nevertheless, the power of
this genre as an archetype remains and is invoked particularly effectively by
the pro-Carmelite nuns when they defend themselves against Andrea de
San Francisco’s charges. Hagiography provides them with a model against
which to measure all of sor Andrea’s failings, and the testimony of these
nuns presents nothing less than a full-blown ‘‘antihagiography’’ in order to
discredit their critic.
There are two communal letters from this group of nuns, defending
themselves against the charges Andrea de San Francisco has made against
them and, in turn, denouncing her as the cause of the convent’s misfortunes.
 The Exemplary Cloister on Trial • 67

In these writings, sor Andrea is the antitype of the virtuous and saintly nun.
Other models of sinful womanhood are also evident. Perhaps a matter of
surprise is that nuns should apply the misogynist topoi of the day so easily
to one of their number, particularly since this was a trial and any accusations
could very easily be used against them if they were to lose their case. From
one perspective, however, the choice to pin the argument to a personal level
is completely intelligible. These nuns wish to argue for the primacy of the
Carmelite Order—a religious grouping that existed to enforce a rule that
guaranteed to bring the individual salvation. Their example of what horrors
can happen if the Carmelite rule is disregarded is clearly to be found in a
fallen individual—in this case, Andrea de San Francisco. The gravity of the
situation may be gauged by the apocalyptic terms employed by the Hijas
de la Orden in their second communal letter to the Tribunal, in which they
despair over ever reforming sor Andrea and invoke Sta. Teresa’s warning
that, in a year of ‘‘relaxed’’ government, even the most virtuous of convents
can fall into an abject state and never be rehabilitated.43
The inversion of the hagiographic norm is extraordinarily rigorous in this
letter. Andrea de San Francisco’s childhood is described as one of wildness
and turbulence of spirit. Significantly, her visit to a convent as a young girl,
an erstwhile commonplace opportunity to describe precocious saintliness in
hagiographies, is in her case a premonitory sign of the future disturbance
she will cause in San José. She terrifies the nuns of San Jerónimo, whom her
parents have taken her to visit on a Sunday outing, by pretending to be able
to see fairies.44 Not surprisingly, the mature nuns in San José detect this wild
spirit in sor Andrea immediately and recommend she not be allowed to pro-
fess. Unfortunately, according to the letter, their advice is disregarded. The
convent community is not pusillanimous, however, and tries to save sor An-
drea by educating her unruly nature. She is represented as embodying a chal-
lenge to the Carmelite rule that is at once institutional and spiritual and that
the nuns of San José must rise to.45 The Carmelite discipline, described as a
brake [el freno], is intended to hold sor Andrea’s spirit within the strictures
of the rule.
In the account of the chaos that they believe Andrea de San Francisco
has brought to the convent, the Hijas de la Orden employ another inversion
of a hagiographic commonplace: instead of silence, loquacity.46 Logically
enough, sor Andrea is represented as loose not only with her tongue but
with all kinds of communication. She does not respect the cloister at all.
68 • Colonial Angels

This disrespect ranges from her abuse of her position as doorkeeper (which
she exploits in order to communicate with her family and other influential
people—a charge she has herself made against others) to the worldliness of
her desires as a nun. She is described in this letter as a ‘‘career’’ nun, wanting
to be a great reformer like Sta. Teresa and planning it carefully with the
support of her family and well-placed patrons.47 Thus, she parades around
the convent making gestures and holding little ritual ceremonies that disturb
the peace of the cloister and draw attention to the persecution she imagines
herself as suffering.48 Sor Andrea also stands accused of deliberately cor-
rupting the community by using dissimulation, con modos y trucos, an attri-
bute more usually accorded to the devil. Moreover, her choice of victims is
particularly contemptible. She chooses novices, who are the most vulnerable
members of the community, as well as other nuns who are weak [algunas
flacas y de menos observancia].49 The Inquisitorial context of these declara-
tions should not be forgotten. The description of this kind of theatrical and
dissembling feminine piety, especially in a convent, would immediately have
aroused the suspicion of the judges.50
The argument constructed on hagiographic lines, however, does not re-
main at this level of types and antitypes throughout the letter. At certain
points, the effects of disunion are vividly represented in very practical and
‘‘naturalistic’’ terms. From the commonplace that sor Andrea should forget
her worldly family and think only of her new religious family after her pro-
fession, the letter moves on to describe the hagiographically less formulaic,
but utterly moving and convincing reason why. Andrea de San Francisco
should remember that it is her brothers and sisters in religion who will ac-
company her in the hour of death [le han de poner la candela de bien morir
en la manos] and not the acquaintances and patrons outside the cloister.51
Apart from her fellow Carmelites, she is utterly alone and exposed in this
world.
Similarly, the hagiographic commonplace of the convent hierarchy turned
upside down by a rebellious nun is not devoid of a ‘‘naturalistic’’ and emo-
tional dimension in these testimonies. The most obvious and startling de-
partures from the image of the convent suspended in harmonious spiritual
government and decorum are the gritty and prosaic references to birthplace
and provenance that Andrea de San Francisco stands accused of making.
The letter blames her for introducing this pernicious language of division
into the convent, making a difference between gachupinas and criollas.
 The Exemplary Cloister on Trial • 69

Moreover, apparently she does not limit herself to distinguishing between

the two groups in this way but invokes the derogatory connotations attached
to the terms. Thus, when her offer of forming an alliance is refused by a
criolla nun, sor Andrea says the entire criolla community of the convent has
failed to prosper because it has ánimos apocados y de indias [the weak will
characteristic of people born in the Indies].52 In Marı́a de San Cirilio’s tes-
timony, this charge is repeated. On this occasion, Andrea de San Francisco
is accused of having said that a nun who did not stand her ground and who
changed her mind during an election was an india.53
Although the Hijas de la Orden may have had as an ideal a saintly com-
munity in which birth and provenance had no influence, it is clear that this
group of nuns also used the terminology of birthplace as a way to define and
demarcate boundaries. As a result, the most obvious insult that could be
made against Andrea de San Francisco is that her birth (rather than her
virtue) makes her unsuitable to be a Carmelite. Effectively enough, she is
eventually insulted in precisely this way, and in an impressively violent man-
ner, by Catalina de la Cruz. In her letter of testimony to the Inquisition,
sor Catalina complains that Andrea de San Francisco is ungrateful and that
her behavior constitutes a reaction to the fact that the convent accepted her
without a dowry, rescuing her from the ‘‘rubbish pile’’ [el muladar] from
which she came.54
In many other accounts, however, this social explanation is abandoned for
a more traditionally hagiographic one: Andrea de San Francisco is evil. The
inversion of the hagiographic model is complete. Not only does the evil nun
have an evil nature (over which she has no power), but she also has an active
malevolence that involves her in particularly damnable activities marked by
their artifice and calculation. Thus, Ana de San Bartolomé describes Andrea
de San Francisco as having been adverse to the Carmelite rule from the day
of her profession and as having a nature inclined toward excess and indul-
gence rather than the strictures of Carmelite life.55 The final stroke to this
damning picture is provided by Marı́a de San Juan’s metaphor of the family.
Andrea de San Francisco is described as a monster who, in her rebellion
against the order, reneges on the most basic claims of family, rejecting her
‘‘mother,’’ ‘‘brothers,’’ and ‘‘sisters.’’ 56
There seem to be two independent rhetorical logics working in these tes-
timonies concerning sor Andrea. In one, the convent really does exist as a
‘‘no place’’ of heavenly bodies possessing no culture, no family relations, and
70 • Colonial Angels

no language, and so constituting a place where Andrea de San Francisco’s

invocation of the world is particularly evil and unwelcome. Thus, in Marı́a
de San Juan’s testimony, sor Andrea rubs people’s social and familial back-
grounds in their faces [sacándoles sus linajes], introducing the language of
place of birth into the convent. This is described as a revelation of unpleas-
ant things, things that have been, or should have been, erased in the clois-
ter.57 This argument belongs to a very pure reading of hagiography, where
Andrea de San Francisco represents the negative image of everything that
constitutes the model. The second type of logic is concerned with a kind of
reasoning and narrative substantially extraneous to the pure hagiographic
model. It concentrates precisely on the details of linajes disdained by the
first type of logic, examining the minutiae of social context. This version of
events in San José relies on exempla and naturalistic narrative, both of which
can be seen as connected to a notion of personal experience and subjective
knowledge that is promoted by the Inquisition context, the structure of tes-
timony, cross-examination, and so forth.
There is a proliferation of narratives telling the story of what brought San
José to trial, each using a slightly different strategy and appealing to different
generic forms for inspiration. There is, in fact, only one narrative moment
at which all the stories of nuns in the trial react in the same way. This reac-
tion, curiously enough, implies a reversion to the most archetypal of hagio-
graphic commonplaces as far as women are concerned: the topos of docta
ignorancia. Significantly, this compulsive narrative move made by every nun,
disregarding the ‘‘side’’ they are on, is triggered when the women are pressed
by the Inquisitors into describing what exactly constitutes the heretical be-
havior in San José. Describing doctrinal evil in their midst is not an easy
task. There is no clear-cut hagiographic model to be followed, and suddenly
the ‘‘sides’’ in the trial seem to be transformed from nuns against nuns into
nuns against Inquisitors.
Toward the end of Andrea de San Francisco’s testimony, she is asked di-
rectly what exactly are the doctrines that she alleges are not admitted in the
convent because they are ‘‘secular’’ rather than ‘‘Carmelite.’’ 58 In reply sor
Andrea simply repeats that some of the nuns refuse to give obedience to the
secular clergy, claiming they should be subject to the friars of their own order
and not to strangers. Sor Andrea does not indulge in theory but states that
the Hijas de la Orden have little respect for the archbishop and that they
ridicule members of the secular clergy who come into the convent to con-
 The Exemplary Cloister on Trial • 71

fess them.59 She has said this during her previous audiences, and the Inquisi-
tors insistently ask for more details about the precise doctrine these pro-
Carmelite nuns hold. Sor Andrea refuses to elaborate, referring them back
to her audiences, saying that the ‘‘doctrines’’ are evident from the evidence
she has given.60 The only addition she makes is to emphasize that the Hijas
de la Orden have been told that when confessing with the secular clergy,
they should not divulge any breaking of the Carmelite rule because the secu-
lar priests will misunderstand and misinterpret it. Sor Andrea implies that
this kind of advice had certainly been considered heretical by certain eccle-
siastical authorities at one point, at least by some sections of the clergy. She
recounts how, during one of the vicereine’s visits, the Hijas de la Orden say
such disrespectful things about the secular clergy that one of the persons
present, the chaplain Cristóbal de Luna, is driven to pronounce that esta
doctrina es herética.61 Sor Andrea further consolidates her case by claiming
that other Carmelite fathers have told her that such beliefs are erroneous
and abominable.62 She, of course, does not hazard a personal opinion.
The Inquisitors go on to pose the most crucial question: does sor Andrea
consider what the Hijas de la Orden say about confession to be orthodox? 63
Given the exact wording of this question, Andrea cannot respond to it affir-
matively. She is very precise and says she has not heard anyone express doc-
trinal opinions in the convent [sólo lo que tiene dicho de pedir confesores
Carmelitas], only that, as she has said, these nuns ask to be confessed exclu-
sively by Carmelites.64 She continues to refuse to enter into a doctrinal dis-
cussion, or to offer a judgment, and stands by what she has already said. Sor
Andrea reiterates that she definitely has not heard the Hijas de la Orden say
that members of the secular clergy are unable to absolve them in confession.
The same question is posed to several nuns who testify against the Hijas
de la Orden. Given that every ordained priest has the power to absolve sins,
the fact that the nuns seem to have placed this in doubt is, ultimately, the
reason why the Inquisition is present in the convent. Without exception, the
nuns reply with the same distance and refusal to engage with the precise
terms of the question that characterizes Andrea de San Francisco’s answer.
Thus, Clara del Santı́simo Sacramento refuses to enter into a discussion
about the possible issues of faith behind the behavior of the Hijas de la
Orden, saying that she has not asked them the reason why they act as they
do, nor have they offered to provide one. What does reemerge from sor
Clara’s reply is the gravity of the breach. The Hijas de la Orden say that
72 • Colonial Angels

confessing with a non-Carmelite is like trying to confess in Basque— com-

pletely incomprehensible.65 Clara del Santı́simo Sacramento also repeats—
on firsthand evidence, since she was herself present—the claim that Marı́a
de Sta. Inés said to the vicereine that she would rather confess with a lay
Carmelite friar than with a secular priest. However, sor Clara mitigates the
strength of this anecdote, which could be construed as containing some ele-
ments regarding doctrine, by saying that she is sure the comment was ‘‘only
an exaggeration.’’ 66
While Marı́a de los Angeles makes no reply at all to the question, Marı́a
del Niño Jesús’ answer could be taken as emblematic of the hermeticism
displayed by the nuns when asked about matters of doctrine. She claims only
to be able to remember having overheard sor Francisca de San José (and this
some two years before) declare on her way into a confessional inside which
confessor Mercado, a secular clergyman, may or may not have been, that she
could not confess with secular clerics, though she gave no reason for this
that Marı́a del Niño Jesús can recall.67 Any accusation contained here dis-
solves in the tentativeness and opacity of sor Marı́a’s language.
The second question that is posed initially to Andrea de San Francisco and
then repeated to various of the other nuns is also concerned with whether the
Hijas de la Orden ascribe special priestly powers to the Carmelite fathers—
a belief that could be condemned as heretical because of its implication that
other religious orders were somehow less spiritually qualified.68 Sor Andrea’s
answer to this question is in a similar vein to the one she gave to the previous
question—a refusal to repeat its terminology and a reaffirmation of what
she has declared in her previous audiences. On this occasion, Andrea de San
Francisco is willing to offer only an observation, rather than an accusation,
and uses different terms from those of the question. Thus, she claims that
the Hijas de la Orden think that only the Carmelites are appropriate confes-
sors because they keep the same rule, and also because they consider them
to be the most spiritually perfect and saintly persons in the Church.69
Sor Andrea’s curt reply is the most expansive; both Marı́a del Niño Jesús
and Marı́a de los Angeles simply state they have never heard, understood, or
known of any such doctrine being held in San José. It is again apparent that
the nuns refuse to enter a discussion in the terms set up by the Inquisition.
They are astute enough to know what heresy is, and thus they fall back on
the supposed ignorance of women as a strategy. Their silence, however, is
 The Exemplary Cloister on Trial • 73

also eloquent—in part because it stems from a tradition that makes wom-
en’s ignorance a sign of their intelligence and virtue. This tradition was, of
course, governed by certain forms, and the answer to the question given by
Sta. Teresa’s namesake in San José is very interesting in this context because
the Mexican Teresa de Jesús uses the well-established and widely diffused
mystical lexicon pertaining to water and religious illumination. Such an
idiom was clearly the legitimate one for a nun’s spiritual expression and
makes any declaration resonate profoundly. Thus, the powerful effect of the
words of the New Spanish Teresa de Jesús when she says that she has heard
the pro-Carmelite nuns claim that the Carmelite fathers are the ‘‘fountain’’
of true religion and that to learn from anyone else is to drink from dirty and
muddied puddles.70
Teresa de Jesús’ reply maintains a ‘‘distance’’ from the accusation implicit
in the Inquisitors’ question, both by using this specialized vocabulary and by
replying in an anecdotal rather than substantial manner. She never hazards
an opinion or interprets facts but instead attempts only to present them.
Teresa de Jesús’ statement is more about her own reaction than about the
doctrinal correctness of the Hijas de la Orden—a move away from any pre-
tense of possessing abstract knowledge to the assertion of subjective experi-
ence and sensation, which has been apparent throughout these replies. She
concludes by saying that she has nothing further to add as she avoids all such
conversations because they make her inquieta [ill at ease].71 That the source
of this disquiet is both very personal and spiritually entirely legitimate is
clear from another comment in her statement. She discusses how the con-
versations she overhears about confession plunge her into doubt about the
legitimacy of her own confessions, and at this moment, something of the
genuine distress that this institutional wrangle has caused in the convent can
be sensed in her words. This nun feels she tells her confessor simply and
honestly about her faults, but these fights in the convent have made her
come to doubt the validity of her own confessional practices.72
As in all the previous testimonies, the nuns are patently loath to accuse
each other blatantly of heresy, though they are quick to levy charges of laxity
and sinfulness. Teresa de Jesús, in her reply to the Inquisition’s question on
the teaching of heterodoxy in the convent refutes the idea that the nuns hold
any doctrinal position whatever. In her opinion, their complaints about the
secular clergy have nothing to do with metaphysics but concern solely prac-
74 • Colonial Angels

ticalities; the nuns supporting rule by the Carmelites and confession by them
do so only because they assume the Carmelite monks know what is required
of Carmelite nuns better than any secular clergyman could.73
This concern to demote the terms of the debate from theory to practice
and from doctrine to religious discipline is perhaps the only point in com-
mon between the warring factions in San José. As such, its significance
should not be underestimated. It clearly unites the nuns in a representation
of their convent and the spirituality within it as being removed from the
theoretical qualifications of piety proper to the Inquisitors’ terms of refer-
ence—and instead as inhabiting an enclosed feminine world where spiritu-
ality is experienced in a range of communal religious practices.
From these Inquisition records, it is evident that the convent is a site of
conflict, both notionally and in reality. Sta. Teresa herself had divided her
original convent through her insistence on reform, fulfilling her role as ha-
giographic reformadora perfectly. She also initiated the trope of the convent
as a place of dissent.
One interesting facet of the transmission of this culture of reform is evi-
dent in Andrea de San Francisco’s testimony. In her searing criticism of the
activities of the gachupina nuns in the convent, Andrea de San Francisco
alludes to this Teresian tradition of reform, representing the mundanity of
the pro-Carmelite nuns as deflecting the reformed order away from its ori-
gins and into relaxed ways. She turns the usual categories inside out. In this
version, the Old World women are ‘‘impure,’’ and it is the transplanted reli-
gion, made vigorous by its American context, that is the true representation
of the original Discalced rule. Sor Andrea can thus conveniently make use of
the positive connotations of the New World on this occasion. The land of
evangelical enterprise, she argues, is certainly not the place to re-create the
sins of the Old World but one in which to extend the reformed ‘‘new’’ order.
Thus, sor Andrea’s comments throughout the trial can be linked very closely
to principles of Teresian reform, but this reform should be understood to
include even the dissent implicit in the concept. The New World Carmelites
inherit a fractured tradition and reproduce it as fractured, but the terms of
fissure are different and specific to New Spain.
The Inquisition records examined here provide a fascinating counter-
history to the chronicles of the convent that formed the basis of the previous
chapter concerning New Spanish Carmelites. The fact that two such ex-
treme versions of life in San José are available is extraordinary, and it high-
 The Exemplary Cloister on Trial • 75

lights the uncertainty surrounding the traditional generic forms used to rep-
resent institutions and people in the Old World, when their transplantation
to the New World confronted them with a different subject matter. Curi-
ously, the breaking down of hagiography as the master narrative in which to
tell stories of nuns and their convents, which happens both in the chronicles
and in the Inquisition, results in similar rhetorical consequences: a greater
degree of ‘‘naturalism’’ or ‘‘realism’’ in terms both of material detail and of
psychology and emotions. And yet the main narrative axes, around which
such representations are built, continue to be the same: the relation of the
individual to the community and the New World social context that con-
structs these individuals and communities through specific cultural, racial,
and social categories.
c h a p t e r 5

Cacique Nuns:
From Saints’ Lives to Indian Lives

La divine Providence par ce en cecy s’est voulu montrer omnipotente, que depuis que
la mere du monde Eve nouvelle nasquist, qui fut environ l’an de grace 1500 ans, elle ha
plus descouvert le monde, & principalement des Indes, que par 5500 ans auparavant
n’avoit esté faict. . . . pour attendre que la fontaine de l’esprit divin feust incorporée en
generale maternité au monde.
Guillaume de Postel, Les très merveilleuses victoires des femmes du nouveau monde
(Paris, 1553)1

Hecha ya mención de la buena de Petronila [una india], no hay razón para no hacerla
de otras humildes y pequeñitas que hoy en la corte del Supremo Rey de los Reyes serán
muy grandes.
Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Parayso occidental (Mexico City: Juan Luis
de Ribera, 1683)2

Among the works of the prolific French humanist Guillaume de Postel is

Les très merveilleuses victoires des femmes du nouveau monde, a book in defense
of women. Postel’s work, considered wild and heretical in its own time, is
coolly descriptive about the worldly motivations driving the conquerors of
America. In spite of this unpropitious background, he deems Providence to
have been at work in the discovery of the New World and argues that the
general coincidence of Columbus’ voyage with the birth of Joan of Arc sig-
nals the global victory of an immanent feminine principle [anime] that will
cure the world of its ills and prepare it for the Second Coming.
More than one hundred years later, Postel’s radical optimism is notably
 Cacique Nuns • 77

absent from the writing of the Mexican humanist Carlos de Sigüenza y

Góngora, though he too was engaged in a similar task of defending women’s
virtue in the context of the New World. Sigüenza y Góngora feels driven to
justify his inclusion of the hagiographies of Indian women in the chronicle
he is writing of the convent of Jesús Marı́a, the only religious foundation for
women in the city to enjoy royal patronage. Even his recurrence to the topos
of the meek inheriting the kingdom of heaven does nothing to dispel the
genuine discomfort evident in the patronizing tone he employs.
That Postel’s somewhat unusual stance toward the New World and to-
ward women in general should have caused scandals in scholarly and theo-
logical circles is unsurprising. One facet of his thought, however, remained
traditional: its cultural context. His curious reinterpretation of Neoplatonic
and Gnostic notions of woman, though intellectually associated with and
perhaps prompted by the discovery of the Americas, was still a European
idea of femininity. When set beside Sigüenza y Góngora’s pragmatic vindi-
cation of the real women of the Americas, that is aboriginal women, it be-
comes clear that these women, who literally embodied racial and cultural
difference, posed conceptual problems considerably more difficult for tra-
ditional systems of knowledge to assimilate than any of Postel’s exuberant
theorizing.3
That Sigüenza y Góngora’s attempt to rescue Amerindian women for
European scholarly thought should be framed in the context of a convent
chronicle is significant. It is as though the only possibility for women of
another race to enter such conceptual schemes (which, insofar as they con-
cerned themselves with women at all, were renowned for their misogyny
rather than anything else) was as that ultimately exemplary woman, the nun.
This chapter concentrates on the history of ideas surrounding both the no-
tion of woman and of the Indian in the cultural politics of the imposition of
the Spanish empire. It focuses more particularly on the idea of a cacique nun
(a woman of the indigenous elite)—something that implied the revision of
the debates mentioned above, forcing them to consider the gender dimen-
sion of the colonization and evangelization of the Americas. What was at
stake, both materially and symbolically, in the project of founding a convent
in Mexico City specifically for Indian women? In order to answer this ques-
tion, the way in which the speculative debates on the nature of woman and
of the Indian interacted with ecclesiastic policy and practice in the colonies
toward Indians and toward Indian women in particular has to be examined.
78 • Colonial Angels

The historical legacy of these debates consists primarily of the testimonies

of certain priests asked to give their opinion on the feasibility of such a
foundation. Hagiography was the genre most usually employed for the rep-
resentation of female virtue in this post-Tridentine period. These testi-
monies, however, were written in terms drawn from speculative discourses,
both Christian and classical, concerned with the nature of man and of civi-
lization, rather than as saintly lives. What exactly did this change of genre
imply in terms of defining the ‘‘subject’’ being written about? How did
the novel rhetorical construction of these testimonies contribute to what is
known about the place of Indian women in the actual practice and politics
of evangelization and acculturation? 4
The theological understanding that woman was inferior to man by na-
ture, but his equal by divine grace, was largely uncontested in this period.
Judged by this standard, women who professed as nuns were exceptional
creatures who displayed an extraordinary degree of virtue that dispensed
them from the usual frailties of their sex. The status of a nun as exceptional
and in some sense outside the rule of nature meant that, on occasions, she
could even be endowed with spiritual knowledge usually inaccessible to most
men. In an analogous fashion, the New World itself provided a series of
exceptional situations that confounded normative notions of spirituality by
surpassing them. A land of erstwhile idolatry, it was ripe for conversion,
religious conquest, and, in some accounts, the readying of humankind for
the Second Coming. Given such circumstances, the paradox that the privi-
lege of being considered capable of monastic profession should have first
been accorded to Indian women rather than to Indian men is perhaps not so
surprising. Though Indian men carried out certain basic religious offices as
secular priests, there is no record of them having ever officially professed as
monks, and no attempts were made to found monasteries specifically for
them in this period. It is then with the philosophical and political debate
surrounding the founding of the convent of Corpus Christi for noble Indian
women in 1728 that this chapter is concerned.5
The idea of founding some kind of religious establishment for the female
Indian population had been present from the beginning of the Spanish co-
lonial enterprise in Mexico. In 1530 six Spanish nuns made the journey from
the Peninsula to the New World to set up a school where young Indian girls
would be taught. Four years later in 1534, Archbishop Montúfar brought
eight beatas from Spain to be teachers, and in the following year Catalina de
 Cacique Nuns • 79

Bustamante, one of the original eight, paid for three more beatas to travel to
New Spain to set up another school. Simultaneously, schools were set up to
educate young Indian boys, the idea being that the Indians educated in these
establishments would marry one another and that the Spanish evangelical
mission would be thus accomplished. This attempted incursion into the very
heart of Indian culture, family structure, and social organization was a com-
plete failure, and the schools lasted only about ten years. The girls who had
been educated in them (when their parents could be coerced or convinced to
allow them to attend) were considered unmarriageable by the wider Indian
community. The Indian elite refused to send their eldest sons to the schools,
fobbing the Spanish authorities off with second sons or even the sons of
servants.6 Clearly, though the educational route may have seemed to be the
royal road to cultural and religious assimilation, it quickly revealed itself to
be filled with unexpected difficulties.
The enterprise of founding another such institution had then to be carried
out with care and after considerable research. All the priests who were asked
to testify worked in a specific ecclesiastical area, the jurisdicción of San Pablo,
and the Indian women who eventually became the four founding mothers
of Corpus Christi came from precisely this area. From several of these tes-
timonies, it is clear that building work for the convent was near completion
(leading one to suppose that in certain circles the success of the initiative was
a foregone conclusion) and that it enjoyed the backing of the Franciscan
Order (to which the convent eventually belonged) and of the viceroy, the
marquis of Valero. Considerable opposition to the foundation arose, how-
ever, based on practical grounds rather than any theoretical or philosophi-
cal argument, from the Consejo de Indias, the Cabildo of Mexico City,
and from the Real Audiencia, the body that solicited the testimonies of the
priests.7 The professional opinion of the city’s treasurer, for example, is very
negative. He lists a number of previous foundations in other cities of a simi-
lar character that have been unsuccessful. The information he gives about
the lack of adequate executive support and the poor supervision accorded
them provides insight both into the critical financial situation of the city and
into how the proposition to found another mendicant convent clearly pre-
sented considerable pressures for an already overextended administration.
Corpus Christi, posing as it did both financial problems and what the trea-
surer called ‘‘formal’’ difficulties (an allusion no doubt to the theological and
juridical implications of allowing Indian women to profess as nuns) was cer-
80 • Colonial Angels

tainly not an immediately attractive proposal.8 Here I will concentrate pre-

cisely upon the difficulties defined as ‘‘formal’’ by the city treasurer and on
how the philosophical debate they gave rise to was represented, rather than
on a detailed account of the material history of the foundation. Nevertheless,
it is important to remember that the financial and political background ex-
acerbated and influenced the political and theological debate.
The priests obliged to consider such a proposal embarked on a process of
analysis and writing that led them into scholarly realms considerably re-
moved from the traditional schema for expressing and conceptualizing fe-
male virtue in a conventual context—hagiography—and into more general
and complex debates about human nature not only in the sciences of the-
ology and medicine but also of jurisprudence.9 Hagiography had always been
connected to these disciplines, being in its inception a varied genre that en-
compassed writings of many kinds: from those of legal import designed to
substantiate claims to sanctity, to stories conceived of primarily for liturgical
purposes and to be read out during religious ceremonies, to accounts of mi-
racula, the wondrous events connected to the saint’s tomb or his or her relics.
Nevertheless, as we have seen, the Counter-Reformation’s use of hagiogra-
phy as one of its principal tools in the battle against heresy meant that the
genre became much more uniform and that any serious dialogue with other
disciplines was reduced to formulaic references. After the Council of Trent,
the hagiography, officially backed and vetted by the Curia, was intended
for wide consumption and designed to be the most suitable and orthodox
vehicle for representing spiritual virtues, especially those corresponding to a
monastic context.10 The step ‘‘backward’’ into a more speculative discourse
made by the testifying priests who abandon the genre is an indication that
the finely tuned and highly formal rhetoric of hagiography in this period was
simply not adequate for conceptualizing the issues at stake.11 In part, this
speculativeness can no doubt be attributed to the continuing novelty of the
question being posed. Though two hundred years might have passed since
the ‘‘discovery’’ of the indigenous peoples of America, their ‘‘qualities’’ and
their ‘‘nature’’ remained the subject of debate.12
Certain of these novelties, in relation to Indian women, could clearly
be something of a shock for European men who had difficulty considering
women outside the paradigm of marriage, even if they accepted the mysti-
cal doctrine of virginity as a divine gift. Although the Indian society that
 Cacique Nuns • 81

the Spanish colonizers encountered was organized through sexual divisions,

these were clearly different from those of the Old World. Notably, the ma-
triarchal systems of inheritance and of social organization of many of the
peoples of the Méxica empire were seriously disturbing to the conquista-
dores and missionaries alike, for whom marriage, not motherhood, consti-
tuted the chief relationship binding the sexes.13 The tacit assumption was
that the origins of civil society were to be found in the family and the sexual
differentiation of roles that constituted the father as its natural ruler. This
structure was reproduced in the metaphors used to describe the relationship
to the Godhead of women who took religious vows. Nuns were not outside
the paradigm of marriage; they, in fact, married the ultimate husband and
became the brides of Christ. Unsurprisingly, the power enjoyed by Indian
women in pre-Conquest family life and social organization made their dis-
tance from this model startlingly clear. How then was it possible to make of
such a woman a nun?
For several of the testifying priests, the answer to such a question was
self-evident; the attempt should not even be made, for to do so was to act
counter to the weight of precedence and the Natural Law that it revealed.
Their testimonies are a somewhat simplified and degraded echo of the great
sixteenth-century theologian Francisco de Vitoria’s classic exposition of the
situation in his comments on why women should not be ordained as priests.
Vitoria explains that what convinces him most of the unsuitability of women
(he has previously cataloged a series of biblical and classical texts as well as
the dictates of several church councils) is the fact that, ‘‘in all the long process
of the years, and with all the abundance of good, wise women, the Church
has never tried to raise any woman to ecclesiastical power or office.’’ 14 It is
precisely when there has been abundant opportunity for doing a thing and
yet that thing has not been done, that it must be assumed to be neither
lawful nor possible.
This debate about the scope of Natural Law is at the center of Vitoria’s
discussion of the legitimacy of the Spanish Conquest of the Americas in two
lectures, De Indis and De Indis relectio posterior, sive de iure belli. The value
of precedent, however, was clearly something radically challenged by the
very existence of the New World. And the attractions for an evangelical
mission of founding a convent for Indian women—however unprecedented
an action—are all too obvious. The convent for Indian nuns would be of
82 • Colonial Angels

strategic use in restoring a degree of symbolic ‘‘order’’ to the disorder that

New Spain, as a place, posed to two significant categories of difference: that
of gender, dividing women from men, and that of politics, which divided
civilization from barbarism. The journeys of male saints may certainly have
been understood to imply an entry into a different world, an abandoning of
the city for the desert, but the presence of convents and their inhabitants in
the Indies was supposed to signify precisely the imposition of civilization.
The tradition of female asceticism that led to the establishment of the
first Christian convents came not from the notion of removal from the city
to the desert, as in the case of monks, but was based precisely on an idea of
retirement within the city itself. More accurately, this was often conceived
of as retirement within that civically significant institution: the household.
By immuring themselves in the home, women were meant to bring down
grace upon a community, and the withdrawal and immobility of virgin
women was one metaphorically associated with the integrity of their bod-
ies, an integrity that came to have an exceptionally charged significance. As
Peter Brown writes, the female body was the most alien body of all for the
male, and when consecrated to virginity, ‘‘it could appear like an untouched
desert in itself: it was the furthest reach of human flesh turned into some-
thing peculiarly precious by the coming of Christ upon it.’’ 15 The desire to
name the convent for Indian women ‘‘Corpus Christi’’ resonates in this con-
text; its foundation would signify in some sense that the incarnate Word had
descended upon the doubly alien bodies of Indian women.
Such a foundation, however, required serious consideration of what or
who this Indian woman was, and what or who she would become as a nun.
The traditions that governed scholarly thought about women in the Early
Modern period are generally recognized as having been the last to succumb
to any kind of historical contextualization. Where woman was the subject of
theological, legal, or medical discourse, the exegetical spirit continued to
manifest itself in the kind of cross-referencing and commentary where lan-
guage was assumed to have an objective status of truth.16 Nevertheless, the
fact that the female subjects of these New World testimonies on the nature
of woman were also Indian, and lived in an acculturated world, seems to
have meant that theoretical discourse about them ceded to historicism and
its related demands: comparativism and relativism. In the particular case of
Indian nuns, it appears that the paradigm governing the conceptualization
 Cacique Nuns • 83

of woman, which in other contexts thrived well into the eighteenth century,
was challenged because it had to be considered along with a paradigm that
proved to be marginally less powerfully embedded in Western thought—
that governing the conceptualization of non-Europeans.
In the Early Modern period, Western ways of classifying human beings
consisted both of physiological factors and of elements of social organiza-
tion. The classifications that resulted from this amalgam of classical and
Christian thought were complex and sexually differentiated. Any judgment
on the nature of the Indian (man or woman) was, therefore, not only a mat-
ter of strategic expediency related to the political and economic stakes of the
colonial context, but an issue of transcendental proportions that involved
questioning both the classical and the Christian models of humanity. In this
light, the fact that many of the testifying priests turn to somewhat frag-
mented but recognizable versions of the theory of Natural Slavery to discuss
the spiritual potential of Indian women, rather than to the model provided
by hagiography, becomes meaningful.17
Despite its universal embrace of humanity, the Catholic Church was no
stranger, as an institution, to refined hierarchies and stratifications. The con-
gregatio fidelium may have been open to all, but each occupied a defined
place within it. As a result, any use of the topoi of Natural Slavery had to be
careful not to endorse the theory completely. Such an endorsement would
have meant that the Indians, as natural slaves, were inferior and incapable
of change, and both of these premises were in direct contradiction with the
evangelical teachings of the Church. The matter of whether the indigenous
peoples were fully rational—and, therefore, admissible to the congregation
of the faithful and eligible for eternal salvation—had been resolved favor-
ably by the papal bull Sublimus Deus of Paul iii in 1537.18
The fact that universalizing theories gradually ceded to a comparative
spirit in the colonial context is a well-accepted notion in the intellectual
history of the Americas. These ‘‘universal’’ theories were, however, always
predicated on one crucial differentiation: that of sex. That this dichotomy,
and the binary differences it gave rise to, was ‘‘natural’’ is best expressed by
Aristotle, for whom:

. . . wherever there is a combination of elements, continuous or discon-

tinuous, and something in common results, in all cases the ruler and the
84 • Colonial Angels

ruled appear; and living creatures acquire this feature from nature as a
whole. . . . Again, the relationship of male to female is that the one is by
nature superior, the other inferior, and the one is ruler, the other ruled.19

In the testimonies of the priests, this deep-seated acknowledgment of sexual

differentiation is conjugated with the other manifold differences provided
by the New World (of race, of culture, etc.).
The connections were easy enough to see.20 Aristotle himself had made
the analogy between the inferiority of women and children to adult males,
on the one hand, and the inferiority of all barbarians to adult (Greek) men,
on the other. Both women and children were in a sense incomplete men
and, as such, considered as minors before the law because neither could fully
exercise their reason (though male children were, of course, guaranteed a
transition from this state if they grew to adulthood). Predictably, this anal-
ogy leads two of the priests who testify against the foundation to interpret a
law designed to protect Indian landowners from losing their property by
requiring that a qualified judge approve transactions over a certain given
amount, as proof that the Indians were considered as minors by the Span-
ish authorities in juridical terms.21 The wording of the statute referred to,
drafted in 1571–1572, in which the judge is described as mayor [older/more
experienced] certainly encourages the idea of the Indians standing in need
of the paternal protection of Spanish law.22
If a person were a barbarian and a minor before the law, her also being a
woman made her disenfranchisement from full rationality all too obvious.
This ‘‘double’’ alienation of Indian women (by virtue of their sex and their
race) from any place in the spiritual hierarchy, and particularly from such an
exalted one as religious profession, appears frequently in the testimonies and
in many guises. The significance of cities and communal life in the colonies
has been emphasized before, and it is not surprising to find priests who are
unsympathetic to the foundation of the convent using arguments about the
barbaric past of the Indians to prove that they are incapable of the civility
necessary for life in a Christian city, or in a Christian community. If this is
true for the men, the reasoning is that it is doubly so for Indian women. In
these arguments, the countless descriptions of the magnificence of the Méx-
ica capital and the complexity of its metropolitan life are abandoned for a
representation of the Méxica as pastoralists rather than agriculturalists. Evi-
dently, the women of this nomadic people could not claim the honor of
 Cacique Nuns • 85

calling themselves the ‘‘daughters of Jerusalem’’—to which all nuns living in

convents were entitled.23 Alejandro Romano derides Amerindian civiliza-
tion as consisting mostly of persons living in the wild mountains or in ‘‘little
farms.’’ In Romano’s experience, Indians have resisted living in the com-
munities that missionaries established for them, a circumstance he ascribes
to their uncivilized state, making clear that it renders them unable to govern
themselves. Having proved how uncivilized Indians were, and largely re-
main, he asks if their women can in all seriousness be thought capable of
living in community and of governing themselves.24
Both the arguments relating to civilization and to legal status are fairly
refined discussions that attempt to analyze, and thereby prove inferior, in-
digenous culture and its people. The one difference that is so absolute it does
not bare subjection to this reasonably sophisticated process of contextuali-
zation and comparison is somatic: the Indian woman’s body is simply a
female body, an inversion, exaggeration, or deformation of the male, de-
pending upon which patristic or classical authority is invoked. For Felipe de
Abarca, who pursues the idea that women present ‘‘extreme’’ incarnations
of male qualities, this means that the noble Indian women admitted to the
proposed convent (his neat collapsing of nobility, legitimacy, and purity is
significant) will be doubly ‘‘Indian,’’ that is, supremely docile and timorous.25
In contrast, Diego de Moza uses the opposition male/female to argue that
women’s constitution is not the extreme but the inversion of its male cor-
relative. Thus, the fact that all Indian men naturally incline toward evil
means that all Indian women will equally naturally be inclined toward good,
and should, therefore, be allowed to profess immediately.26 He continues in
this vein, pursuing a binary logic that allows him to condemn Indian men
as lascivious, prey to the malign influence of the climate of the Americas,
and to defend Indian women as chaste, their natural ‘‘opposition’’ to the
male safeguarding them in this instance from the pernicious effect of the
environment.27
In this context, the sacrament of communion becomes significant, having
at this stage in Counter-Reformation thinking been transformed into a kind
of litmus test of orthodoxy. In the Spanish colonies, the sacrament’s materi-
ality had become the subject of legislation, it being licit to make the Host
out of only certain types of grain, European wheat in preference to Amer-
indian corn.28 The Eucharist’s materiality clearly posed questions of cultural
specificity, and one would have expected the materiality, or rather the physi-
86 • Colonial Angels

cality, of the communicant’s body to have posed them also. The controversy
that had always surrounded excessively frequent communion and the at-
tempts to limit access to the sacrament are evidence enough of how atten-
tion to the communicant’s consumption of the divine body and blood high-
lighted anxieties about the human body that were not solely religious.29
Hence, Antonio Pérez’ lengthy discussion about the cleanliness of Indian
women and the care they take in preparing themselves before communion.
His defense of these women reveals how closely notions of purity, eating,
and sexual continence were tied to the care of the body, and how this in turn
was a sexually differentiated body. Indian women’s chastity and their habit
of fasting on Saturdays are thus judged as being consonant with the purest
Hebrew tradition regulating the behavior of virgins. Their fasts are broken
only because of sickness, thirst, or pregnancy. On the actual day of commu-
nion, they prepare their bodies, carefully cleanse the paths they will take to
church by placing incense burners at the crossroads, talk to no one, and stay
inside the church, their arms crossed and their eyes lowered, until midday.30
In order to be received, the sacrament required a degree of inner and outer
purity on the part of the communicant that any woman, traditionally con-
sidered to be more subject to her passions, would find difficult to achieve.
From these few examples of the meeting of Christian and classical
thought, it becomes obvious that the exegetical spirit, and the hierarchical
conception of society common to both, could result in impressive argu-
ments alleging the inferiority and ineligibility to certain offices of indige-
nous peoples (and especially of their women). José de Guevarra is the most
sophisticated in deploying the power of these two traditions. He exploits
both to argue that certain Christians—the Indians—are indeed inferior,
while simultaneously highlighting the providential base of his thought, thus
avoiding the merest hint of any heretical belief in communities of the elect.
Guevarra argues that God created human beings with qualities in propor-
tion to their abilities, but this does not mean that their liberty is in any way
affected, for they are completely free within this providential system. Nev-
ertheless, it is a system that allows for inequalities. In it, some spiritual paths
are more perfect than others, and some persons are more spiritually gifted
than others. The force of Guevarra’s argument is that of consonance and
decorum; each person must follow the path most fitting for his or her abili-
ties, which may of itself not necessarily be the most perfect one. Given the
inconstant nature of the Indians (a natural failing that he attributes to them),
 Cacique Nuns • 87

it is clear that they are unfit for a religious vocation and will win their spiri-
tual rewards following a different, more lowly, path.31 The pragmatic con-
clusion to these arguments is given by Antonio Xavier Garcı́a, who suggests
that the Indian women should be made beatas or tertiaries of the Franciscan
Order, instead of professing as full choir nuns.32
The kind of stratification of the congregatio fidelium being proposed by
these priests, though in absolute philosophical terms quite a complicated
stance to sustain, was in fact part of the very fabric of the everyday life
of the Church, in the Old World as well as in the New. The Counter-
Reformation’s determination to ‘‘educate’’ the masses who had succumbed
to superstition, and thus become vulnerable to heretical teachings, is the
most patent example of a well-accepted notion of the spiritual ‘‘weakness’’
of certain members of the Christian community. The analogy between the
barbarian and the ignorant peasant was widely used long before the ‘‘discov-
ery’’ of America, but it clearly became politically more charged in the colo-
nial context. The accompanying analogy between the rustic’s privation of
meditative powers and the woman’s lack of deliberative faculties (which
made both more suited to devoutness rather than to higher spiritual pur-
suits) could obviously also be used to organize misogynist thought more
rigorously in relation to Indian women. If the range of spiritual capacities
thought fitting for Indian man as a result of this syncretic analysis was lim-
ited, Indian woman was doubly barred by the classic misogynist logic that
cast her as the weaker sex.
Thus, though proving the intelligence and rational ability and, therefore,
the spiritual capacity of Indian men was a delicate conceptual task, proving
that of Indian women was twice as difficult. Not only had their advocates to
battle against the image of Indians as barbarians, there was also another
traditional notion to contend with: that all women, regardless of race, were
foolish and irrational. Those priests arguing against Indian women’s spiritual
capacity to profess as nuns had this impressive body of received knowledge
to rely upon, and many of them exploited it with considerable skill. For
example, José de Guevarra questions the talent displayed in painting by In-
dian men and declares he finds them incapable of the higher arts of theology,
rhetoric, and philosophy where mimetic ability by itself is not sufficient.33
Guevarra’s comments connect to classical and biblical traditions that held
that, as a group, barbarians and women of all races, along with idiots and
some mythical creatures such as St. Anthony’s faun, possessed a mimetic
88 • Colonial Angels

potential of the highest degree and could thus display great skill of the me-
chanical intellect. Nevertheless, they were considered incapable of totally
autonomous thought and so unable to excel in the spheres of speculative
intellect. Clearly, a judgment as severe as this about the intellectual capacity
of the Amerindians places the whole educational dimension of evangeliza-
tion in question. Guevarra’s advocation of the fitting type of devotion of
which Indians are capable is equally revealing. His description of their in-
nocent piety is that of the devout fool, of the child, or—by logical exten-
sion— of the woman.34 The feminization of the entire Indian spiritual po-
tential means, of course, that Indian women are left with very little spiritual
ability at all, victims once again of the double bind of sex and race.
Nevertheless, to avert accusations of heresy, any Christian proposal of a
hierarchical ordering of the difference presented by the New World’s origi-
nal inhabitants had to avoid being too deterministic. In other words, what-
ever the hierarchy, divine grace had to be allowed to work in its mysteri-
ous ways, occasionally undoing what was most certain and astounding the
mighty with the power of the weak. José de Acosta’s (1540 –1600) comments
in book 1 of his De procuranda indorum salute (1596) illustrate how the anal-
ogy between Amerindians and Castilian peasants could be mobilized to re-
cuperate the former for the educational mission so naturally extended to the
latter. He argued that even in Spain itself, there were men born in villages
who, if they remained among their own kind, made no intellectual progress.
If they went to school, however, or to court, or even to an important city,
they immediately stood out for their ingenuity and ability.35
In this respect, the misogynist logic casting woman as inferior to man
could also be mobilized in her favor. In this scenario, woman becomes the
perfect tool through which to show the miraculous workings of divine grace,
whose power was so great it could even overcome the manifold weaknesses
of femininity. Devotion, which was considered a particularly feminine qual-
ity because its virtue did not lie in any particular mental attribute but rather
in its lack, meant that when divine grace worked upon it, it was paradoxically
transformed into the gift of spiritual prophecy. Because of her ‘‘natural’’ pas-
sivity, Aristotelian thought confined women’s virtue to those qualities as im-
perfect as she was herself (chastity, modesty, endurance) and the Christian
reinterpretation of them occasionally allowed for the miraculous conversion
of weakness to strength, women being understood to embody these virtues
in a manner inaccessible to men. Antonio Pérez refers to the strong women
 Cacique Nuns • 89

of biblical tradition, arguing that Judiths and Deborahs abound in New

Spain, and he cites Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus to emphasize the
orthodoxy of his statements.36
The testimonies regarding the spiritual capacities of Indian women divide
up neatly according to religious affiliation. Those opposing the foundation
of the convent are written by Jesuits, while the favorable testimonies have
Franciscan authors. As the convent was meant to be a Franciscan founda-
tion, it is no surprise to discover that the Franciscans support it. Why all the
Jesuits should be against the foundation is less evident, however. The posi-
tion of both religious orders with respect to the acculturation of the Indians
and their spiritual potential shifted throughout the period. Although the
Franciscans were usually sympathetic toward the Indians and in the first
years of evangelization were fiercely enthusiastic, even early works by Mo-
tolinı́a (1500?–1569) and his follower Jerónimo de Mendieta (1525 –1604) put
forward the view that the Indians were children and thus required perpetual
tutelage, a condition making them unfit for the priesthood. In contrast, in
the late eighteenth century, various Jesuits—notably Francisco Javier Cla-
vijero (1731–1787)—wrote works in defense of the Indians and Creoles that
refuted claims about the pernicious effects of the climate of the Indies on
character.
The ‘‘rediscovery’’ of idolatry and the subsequently renewed attempts to
extirpate it (a political and religious policy that took place primarily in Peru
but also in New Spain in the early seventeenth century) highlight the differ-
ent philosophies of acculturation espoused by the Franciscan and Jesuit Or-
ders. This fact may be the key to understanding their radical disagreement
over the foundation of Corpus Christi.37 During the extirpaciones, the Jesuits
revealed their skepticism about the Indians being able to be anything other
than Indians (something that did not, of course, prevent them from being
good Christians). The Franciscans, however, saw evangelization as neces-
sarily involving the communication of a political and cultural identity. Thus,
for the Jesuits, the notion of an Indian nun was a nonsense, something that
would complicate their missionary goal, while for the Franciscans, the In-
dian nun symbolized the achievement of their several goals.38
Irrespective of the eventual aim of the testimony, and regardless of the
religious affiliation of its author, the priests’ accounts all share the character-
istic of abandoning hagiography as an authoritative model of representation.
Nevertheless, there does exist a significant difference in rhetorical approach
90 • Colonial Angels

between the favorable and the negative testimonies. The negative accounts
tend to foreground their appeal to the authority of a universalist theory and
its scholarly tradition, whereas the positive ones, while not ignoring this
tradition, succumb quickly to descriptive and experiential terms upon which
their claim to truthfulness is placed. These differences should not be over-
emphasized, however, for what strikes the reader the most in the testimonies
are the densely textured narratives produced, irrespective of their eventual
conclusion. Testimonies forced, as in the nature of every legal document,
one specific outcome; but the narratives that wind their way to these inevi-
table conclusions do so through extraordinarily complicated and crooked
paths, filled with inconsistencies and characterized most faithfully by their
confusion and profusion of facts, examples, and anecdotes.
In one sense, it is quite obvious why the ‘‘truth’’ of the evangelical mission
should make such strong appeals to an extratextual confirmation of itself,
however chaotic and disorganized, as it does in many of the testimonies in
favor of the foundation. Though a religion of the Book, Christianity’s com-
munity was one of belief, necessarily extendible and communicable—a com-
munity built on conversion not birth, radical change not kinship. Though in-
tricately hierarchical and weighted with scholarship, it was obliged to allow
space for dynamism and mobility. As a result, the very ‘‘difference’’ of the
Amerindian peoples who came to be included in the congregatio fidelium
could be interpreted as an unprecedented opportunity for proving the truth
of the Word. The representation of such encounters produced narratives
whose difference from the usual genres refracted the unusualness of the situ-
ation that gave rise to them.39
In such situations, only an eyewitness account could be considered an
authentic one, and the missionary priests giving their opinions in this par-
ticular case are certain that this is precisely what is required of them: a
personal account. Thus, Antonio Pérez contests the vulgar commonplaces
spread by the ignorant about the Indians by saying that his own experience
as a priest to these people has shown him how mistaken such opinions are.40
A more sophisticated version of this authorizing strategy is apparent in his
accounts of specific Indian women who have displayed their virtue by living
like nuns without actually professing. Pérez describes a school for Indian
girls that seems to be a de facto convent; but at the end of his description,
he abandons the factual tone in favor of a strongly emotive account of how
the Indian women’s chaste behavior amazes him, leaving him at a conceptual
 Cacique Nuns • 91

loss. This comment, clearly directed at an equal (a man, a Spaniard) is meant

to create a sense of complicity between Pérez and his reader, securing belief
for the former’s information.41
Clearly, this strategy can also be used to disqualify Indian women from
profession as nuns. Having put forward the classic and philosophically re-
spectable argument that Indians were inconstant and lacking in spiritual for-
titude, José Marı́a de Guevarra caps his argument with an anecdote from his
personal experience, moving the force of his reasoning from the general to
the specific, and telling the story of an Indian woman who had put herself
forward as a founding mother. She was placed by her confessor in the house
of a devout woman, so she could live a retired life; but she proved unable to
withstand even this degree of enclosure and left to return to her own home.42
In the testimonies, favorable judgment of the female sex does not usually
signal any really radical thought about women’s virtue but, in fact, involves
a reinterpretation of various extremely traditional ideas of femininity. The
most notable in relation to empire—and to the vulgarizations of the theory
of Natural Slavery that have been discussed before—is the championing of
the contractual nature of marriage. The analogy between a husband’s role
as steward of his wife—and the stewardship of all Indians that fell to the
Spaniards as a result of the ‘‘natural’’ dependence of the Indians—meant
that logically the Indian most easily maneuverable and open to conversion
was the Indian woman. So, while the missionaries conceded that the In-
dian woman was virtuous, her virtue was tied to her submission within any
contract.43
This very specific notion was complemented by more general ideas of
the role of women in the household and in the education of children. Mor-
alists of the period wrote at length on the importance of breast-feeding and
considered maternal milk capable of transmitting religious values.44 On the
Peninsula, it was recommended that children not be given to wet nurses
because the population was full of Jews and moriscos, and it was safer for a
Christian mother to feed her own child.45 The household, and Christianity
itself, of course, was marked by a particular culture and this, in the colonial
context, made it the obvious place upon which to build the foundations of a
civil community. The priests in favor of the convent place great emphasis on
the ‘‘double’’ mission that women’s education in Christianity entails and the
double profit it brings: both spiritual and political—a service to God and to
the Spanish king.46
92 • Colonial Angels

Once again, women’s ability to learn and to transmit is tied to a conser-

vative notion of femininity. That uncivilized persons were wholly the crea-
tures of their passions was a commonplace, and their enslavement could only
be remedied by education and environment. Women, of whatever race, were
already a sex too closely tied to their passions and as such presented a par-
ticularly difficult case. The priests insist in these documents, however, that
Indian women are receptive to their doctrinal teachings and are able to im-
prove. In this case, the babbling barbarian and the querulous woman are
doubly needy subjects for an education in rational speech. For Antonio
Pérez, the ability of certain indigenous women, alienated as they were from
the Logos because of their sex and their race, to learn Latin and to speak it
‘‘better than their natural language’’ was clearly a reason to celebrate the
action of divine grace.47 Indian women in their virtue were one of the true
‘‘marvels’’ of the New World. Their innate intellectual capacity is illustrated
by their ability to copy actions and learn quickly from examples. These
commonplace talents, cited by the priests, are ones that once again confine
women to the lower faculties of the deliberative intellect. Thus, Antonio
Pérez manages only partially to communicate the notion of sin to the female
members of his congregation. They understand it to mean exclusively carnal
sin and are incapable of conceiving its wider implications. Nevertheless, he
claims that, in accordance with the accepted virtues of their sex, they are
extremely zealous and devout and once informed of the evil of this sin, never
fall into it.48
In all the accounts, the references to pagan history display the radical
mobility of the Indian past in Spanish hands and show how, under the dif-
ferent requirements of each priest’s political agenda, its degree of ‘‘civiliza-
tion’’ and in fact its very nature as ‘‘past’’ could change. The strategic use of
indigenous history in this way also, of course, indicates the centrality of the
foundation of Corpus Christi in the debate as to whether the Indies were
truly Christian (and civilized) or continued to be pagan (and barbaric). The
fact is significant that both the positive and the negative testimonies break
down into what could be termed broadly historicist accounts of this debate.
To understand the implications of this historicist narrative turn, it is useful
to return to the implications of the extirpaciones de idolatrı́as discussed ear-
lier. The extirpaciones proper took place in Peru and were, overwhelmingly,
a Jesuit enterprise. In Mexico the extirpaciones never spread so successfully,
no doubt because of the stronger Mendicant presence and the fact that the
 Cacique Nuns • 93

evangelical mission had had more time to impose itself in New Spain. Nev-
ertheless, the panic generated by the rediscovery of idolatry was shared by
the two viceroyalties, and its management was not exclusively a Jesuit ac-
tivity. Although there is clearly a political interpretation to be made of the
Jesuit preeminence in at least the Peruvian extirpaciones, here I will concen-
trate on the effects the philosophical and religious mind-set of the extirpador
implied for the representation of the colonial context, for the writing of its
history, and for the way its future came to be envisaged.
Whatever the attitude to indigenous cultures, the rediscovery of idolatry
was a moment for a kind of concentration upon them that had been aban-
doned since the first missionary efforts. The extirpadores were asked to write
reports very much like the ones discussed here: first-person narratives that
placed enormous value on empirical evidence and observation. The nature
of the evidence and of what was observed also constituted a great innovation
in the way of ‘‘thinking’’ the Indian people and their culture, the extirpadores
becoming interested in how tradition was communicated and transmitted
from one generation to the next.49
The testimonies about the foundation of a convent for Indian women
form a body of texts that sheds greater light on the object of study of the
extirpadores. Here the questions of how culture is transmitted, how the habi-
tus in which religious practices are carried out is constructed, and of what
the place of personal inventiveness and autonomy is in all this recover a
gender dimension, precisely because they are asked in relation to women.
The personal accounts of the priests concentrate primarily on the female
reception of the Word in the New World, and on how this Word is inter-
preted and practiced by Indian women. The catalytic role women are seen
to play in the process of transmitting religious (and by implication cultural)
norms is eloquently described in Antonio Pérez’ testimony. He claims that
women have been quick to assimilate all the new religious practices, em-
bracing them so fervently that they erase any past idolatrous customs, calling
the ‘‘new’’ Christian practices their ‘‘customs.’’ 50 Already in the New World
chronicles, from Las Casas to Torquemada, the fear of an atavistic idolatrous
historical memory can be identified, and the only solution to this cultural
problem of accommodating a disturbing past is that of exchanging the old
custom for a new one: straight substitution. Nevertheless, the field of custom
was obviously a fluid one, and if it so readily changed from idolatrous to
Christian, it might just as easily change back. This fear of the fluidity of the
94 • Colonial Angels

field of cultural practices and customs is in great part responsible for the
obsession with purity that many of the writings of the period display. It is
most certainly why the planned convent is reserved for ‘‘pure’’ Indian women
and would not admit those of mixed race. Nevertheless, this purity was at
odds with an evangelic mission that had by this point in the Conquest and
colonization become synonymous with cultural negotiation.
The priests who were asked their opinion on the foundation of Corpus
Christi acknowledge the presence of a racially and culturally heterogeneous
society, a mestizo New World, however much they may have as a model
the static victory of the Word that should have imposed its universal values
throughout the empire. The plan to found a convent for Indian women un-
avoidably raised questions about the concept, direction, and success of the
entire evangelical mission. It also required that the agents of the evangeliz-
ing project reflect on Indian society in ways that took into account issues of
gender and that asked them to communicate their knowledge in a specific
type of discourse that could claim the authority of truth. This they achieved
not through the traditional rhetorical strategies usually associated with the
defense of feminine virtue but instead through what could be described,
not entirely inaccurately, as the provision of something approaching objec-
tive information.
In this sense, the testimonies provide magnificent examples of what Carlo
Ginzburg, following Bakhtin, calls ‘‘dialogic’’ accounts.51 They are represen-
tations of the colonial context that, when confronted with the absolute dif-
ference and reality of the New World, are unable to reproduce a ‘‘monologic’’
image of universality, be it theological, political, or cultural. Precisely be-
cause of this, they have a privileged access to this reality. Antonio Pérez’
testimony provides a complete example of how complex these tensions can
be. In his writing, they are resolved into a style of reporting that moves
continuously from tradition to commonplace to personal experience in order
to produce an authoritative opinion. Of course, in the moments of transition
between these styles, the insights into the cultural context that Ginzburg
attributes to the ‘‘dialogic’’ text can be glimpsed.52 Pérez begins by general-
izing about the Indian population of the colony and then moves swiftly on
to the exceptions he has personally witnessed to these universal rules.53 He
goes on to allude to theories of bodily humors, as well as to the ‘‘strong
women’’ of biblical tradition, and makes clear that he considers Indian
women included in the grace God can dispense to the frailer sex to make it
 Cacique Nuns • 95

capable of heroic acts. The slippage between a scholarly disquisition on

sexual difference, backed up by biblical precedents, and the examples nec-
essary to promote the virtue of women who are racially different is evident
in his writing.54
Another instance of this ‘‘dialogic’’ quality of description is provided by
the discussion of alcohol consumption. The problem of alcoholism among
the Indian population in New Spain was an acknowledged facet of late co-
lonial reality and clearly was a consequence of the acculturation of the Indi-
ans.55 In the testimonies of the priests, Indian alcoholism and the connection
between its increase and the Christianization of the Indian population is
presented as a fact. But significantly this is conceded only in order to em-
phasize the miraculous abstinence of Indian women from drink. Antonio
Pérez’ testimony provides an excellent example of this new narrative style.
His general argument about the virtue of Indian men and women explodes
in several directions at once. There is a historicist review of the traditional
use of alcohol in Indian society and the changes wrought by contact with
the Spaniards; a semiscientific account of the medicinal uses of alcohol con-
sidered to be licit; and a description of the violence Indian women were
subject to from their husbands, who forced them to join in the drinking.
This kind of narrative captures perfectly the transformation of intimate con-
fessional knowledge into general information and of theoretical assertion
into contextualized personal account.56 Though the supporters of the foun-
dation, in their enthusiasm, are quick to publish the success of evangeliza-
tion, their accounts provide evidence of the uncomfortable realities that the
evangelical mission created in its cultural interchanges.
Francisco de Vitoria argues for the need to assert the legitimacy of the
relationship between the Spanish Crown and the Church, on the one hand,
and between Spain and its newly acquired empire, on the other, in order to
counter these uncomfortable realities of imperial rule. A curious aside on the
legitimacy of marriage serves to illustrate his point:

. . . Take the example of a man who is uncertain whether he is legally

married to a particular woman. A doubt arises: is he bound to perform
his conjugal duty with the woman? . . . He consults the experts; the an-
swer is an emphatic negative. Nevertheless, the man decides on his own
authority to disregard their verdict from love of the woman. Now in this
case the man certainly commits a sin by having intercourse with the
96 • Colonial Angels

woman, even if it is in fact lawful, because he is acting wilfully against

conscience. It must be so, because in matters which concern salvation
there is an obligation to believe those whom the Church has appointed as
teachers, and in cases of doubt their verdict is law.57

The example establishes a clear hierarchy with the wife submitting to the
husband, and the husband to the Church fathers. The lesson is clear: claims
to property and authority over women, and by analogy over empires, have
to be approved of by ecclesiastic learning and judgment. Vitoria uses this
example of the legally dubious marriage later in the lecture to make the same
point about the need to substantiate the legitimacy of relations of property
and authority in the New World. He emphasizes that Tradition, in the guise
of the experience of wise men, should be invoked as the ultimate authority
in these matters. In very general terms, one could say that the novelty of the
New World—and the intellectual and philosophical revolution and reevalu-
ation it implied—lies behind Vitoria’s anxiousness to secure its place within
the familiar conceptual systems. Why, though, does woman and the correct
legal and moral relationship to her appear at the heart of this worry in the
guise of irrefutable example?
The testimonies of the priests concerning the foundation of Corpus
Christi allow us to address this question from a very precise angle, examin-
ing how Tradition, embroiled in the practicalities of empire as well as the
niceties of theory, attempted to legitimize its relationship with the real pres-
ence and symbolic significance of Indian women. The question of whether
such Indian women were fit to become (Spanish) nuns prompted replies that
abandoned the strictures of any tradition and its overarching or universaliz-
ing rhetoric. Although the accounts opposing the foundation of the convent
do appeal in the first instance to scholarly authority and tradition, they also
include narratives of lived experience and subjective perception to support
their stance. The favorable accounts invert the importance of these tech-
niques, giving prominence to personal testimonies that supply the empirical
evidence for what can be deduced by induction from classical and biblical
narratives about femininity within a colonial framework. In both cases, the
affinities between the New World’s novelty, the colonizing mission played
out in it, and the narrative modes associated with each, may be interpreted
as signaling the demise of grand narratives in this context and, paradoxi-
cally, to point to their resurrection and success as heterogeneous narrative
 Cacique Nuns • 97

forms. Writing, like other social practices in the colonies, both reflected the
new reality and constructed it. The New World in this sense was less an
imagined community (that is, a clearly defined and planned commonality)
than an invented one: one made up on the spot and responsive to immedi-
ate demands and unavoidable circumstances. The Americas were a world in
which rhetorically and theoretically decorous forms—and the complemen-
tarily civilized and harmonious society they were supposed to embody—
were continuously fractured and reconstituted.
Afterword

. . . estos santos caballeros profesaron lo que yo profeso, que es el ejercicio de las armas;
sino que la diferencia que hay entre mı́ y ellos es que ellos fueron santos y pelearon a lo
divino y yo soy pecador y peleo a lo humano.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote (1615) 1

Don Quijote’s analogies between spiritual and chivalric quests and religious
and secular battles is comforting to the scholar studying Early Modern reli-
gious sources—an enterprise that is frequently justified by a similarly ana-
logic argument, claiming that religious sources constitute in some sense a
sacralization of the social cosmos. Analyses based on this type of approach
tend to concentrate on structural issues and broad description, but in Colo-
nial Angels I have sought instead to look at the individual adventurers and
their stories. The spiritual adventures which these New World protagonists
attempt take place in an atmosphere of extreme religious upheaval. They are
stories born of extraordinary circumstance. It could be said that the evan-
gelization of the New World was the Council of Trent’s ultimate testing
ground, just as much as it was Catholic Spain’s ultimate reconquista. As a
result, the narratives reveal not only the confrontation with the New but of
the Old with itself. They are both journeys to exotic lands and voyages of
return to origins.
The New Spanish convents and their pious heroines inhabit a universe
intricately patterned with tensions concerning gender and race, religious val-
ues and secular hierarchies, spiritual aspirations and mundane inducements.
The history of these convents and their inhabitants is multiplied into many
voices: the confessors, the nuns, the missionaries, the inquisitors. They prof-
fer a different history of empire to the familiar one—a history of the detail,
of the local, of the quotidian, perhaps even of the private—and certainly one
that embodies the tensions of center and periphery that were always inherent
 Afterword • 99

in the imperial project. Subsequent philosophers of empire would confirm

the impossibility, both practical and theoretical, of a hegemonic grip over
something as extended and diverse, both geographically and culturally, as
the Spanish empire. In the stories retold, we can see how attempts were
made to hold all these contradictions together, at least at the level of narra-
tive, and how such narratives did not necessarily define themselves through
their opposition to or rejection of empire and cultural hegemony. Neverthe-
less, precisely because women and colonial society were their subjects, the
narratives always in some way, in this case in their very heterogeneity, rep-
resented the margins of any project of transcendent union.
Not that rhetorical tropes could bring down the empire in any real polit-
ical sense or liberate the women who wrote them. What they could do is
create, and this book has sought to render some of this creative vitality back
to both women as writers and to representations of them. Traditional con-
fessional historians of the Mexican Church have, of course, been quick to
dismiss the accounts of mystic trances, romantic stories, and the fantasies
inspired by wicked Voltaire about colonial convents and nuns. Nevertheless,
such fictions, as we have seen, had already crept into colonial accounts them-
selves. It was clearly impossible to maintain the purity of representations of
the cloister when they were pressed into the transparently political and cul-
tural uses we have identified.
The profound changes in European society in the period of the discovery
and colonization of the New World were also, unsurprisingly, a moment for
radical innovation in the narration of such changes. One could simply say,
in narrative itself. The passage from Don Quijote makes clear how powerful
such combinations of historical change and innovation in fictions and stories
can be, pointing out that the difference between his own adventures and
those of a saint is a question of ends rather than means; that the ironic and
picaresque techniques of his antichivalric narrative are shared by innumer-
able hagiographies of the period. Naturally then, the difference that makes
Don Quijote’s adventures the first novel in Spanish and not another piece of
baroque devotional literature is not purely a question of literary form but
one of historical context too. It is also, of course, why the adventures of the
women we have reviewed are not uncomplicated tales of angelic success or
of imperial triumphs but instead are complex stories of personal experience
and colonial realities.
Letter from Juana de Sta. Teresa denouncing her fellow nun Andrea de San Francisco to the
Inquisition, circa 1661. Inquisition, vol. 581, exp. 1. fl86r. Courtesy of Archivo General de la Nación,
Mexico. q
Appendix 1

Confessional Letters of sor Sebastiana Josefa de la Santı́sima

Trinidad. Circa 1744–1757. Biblioteca Nacional, Mexico.

Given constraints of space in the appendix, I have selected short excerpts

from sor Sebastiana’s letters rather than reproducing a single one. Although
this practice, of course, obscures the form of her epistolary writing, what
is lost in terms of integrity of the genre, I think is amply made up for in
terms of communicating its variety and scope. As in the transcriptions
throughout the book, I have modernized spelling and punctuation for ease
of reading.
The Biblioteca Nacional in Mexico City has fifty-nine letters written
by sor Sebastiana. On average, each has between five and seven thousand
words. The excerpts in Appendix 1 total just over seven thousand words.
I have divided the appendix into topics that reflect the general narrative
movement of the majority of the letters; they begin with a reflection on
the act of writing itself, then follow with a description of the spiritual
experiences sor Sebastiana has undergone. Usually, both of these moments
in the letters are interspersed with invocations to the confessor, or to God,
or to herself, which I have gathered under the topic ‘‘Deseos/Desires.’’
Finally, sor Sebastiana occasionally mentions the convent itself and the
other nuns, sometimes even describing her relationship to them. These in-
frequent references clearly hold enormous interest for anyone concerned
with the social and historical context in which sor Sebastiana wrote. They
are reproduced in the section ‘‘La comunidad del claustro/ The Convent
Community.’’
102 • Colonial Angels

La aventura de la escritura
Dulce Jesús ¿es posible que padezca tantas ansias, y para mayor tormento me
mande la obediencia que escriba, y que lo haga a fuerza y con desconsuelo
tanto que mejor tomara padecer un tormento, que tomar la pluma; y más
experimentando tanto susto y embarazo que poniéndome a ello ni papel ni
tinta; servı́a sólo para mancharme, y no parecerme que me convengan estas
cosas? Pero por obedecer a Vuestra Paternidad me olvidaré de todo lo que
me viene al pensamiento. (l6 f 49)

Mi dulcı́sima madre y maestra Marı́a Santı́sima me facilite con su gracia lo

que me manda la Santa Obediencia.
Sea todo lo que a mi pasa para gloria del Todo Poderoso, que es muy
liberal para con todos y lo es conmigo, mereciendo menos; que tan mal me
he sabido aprovechar de los bienes que me ha hecho [que] como ignorante,
no los he sabido estimar. Me habı́a parecido imposible volver a tomar la
pluma, por muchos motivos suficientes, que me pusieron en mucho temor;
a más de los muchos que siempre he tenido para escribir. Y de lo escrito
tengo bastantes desconsuelos, que sabe Dios que ya lo hago por obedecer;
venciendo todo lo mal que me parecen mis cosas, que es cierto, que en mı́
no hay cosa de provecho. Y si por beneficio de la bondad de Dios me da
buenos deseos, no los ejecuto como debiera, para mayor vergüenza mı́a;
que al presente me ocupa tanto, que mi alma esta tan encogida y el corazón
tan atemorizado que no acierto a lo que tengo que hacer, que hasta de tratar
cosa buena, me parece agravio por mi maldad; pero me veo precisada a obe-
decer, sin saber cómo. Que se haga la voluntad de Dios, y me reciba la amar-
gura que me atormenta; que me tiene atontada para decir los admirables
beneficios que obra Dios en esta miserable; deteniéndome mi cobardı́a y
mucha ignorancia. Y por otra parte me mueve con suave fuerza su amor. (l22
f 110 –111)
Con tan bien ordenadas razones se manifiestan todas las necesidades que mi
alma padece y unos amorosos sentimientos tan verdaderos y ardientes. Con
tal abundancia de razones y todas tan acomodadas al intento y sin el uso
de la lengua, se entiende en un modo claro muy diferente de éste que usa-
mos; porque sin ver ni apercibir ninguna voz, es tan verdadero todo lo que
se entiende, que es para alabar a Dios. ¡Qué enamorada queda el alma! ¡Qué
 Appendix 1 • 103

firme en la sabidurı́a y Divino poder! Pero, ¡qué temor, qué vergüenza, qué
conocimiento tan profundo para despreciar todas las cosas de esta vida como
basura, como de verdad lo es, todo lo que en breve se ha de acabar por mucho
que el mundo lo estime! (l51 f 322)

Estando siempre con el desconsuelo de mi mucha maldad, y con un gran

beneficio de llevarlo todo, por muy grave que sea, con paz interior, sin al-
borotarme, por más que me aflijan el corazón las amarguras, tristezas, y todo
lo que se está ofreciendo, que a veces no se cómo entenderme en este labe-
rinto de mi pensamiento, donde se me consume la esperanza de tal modo
como si para mı́ no hubiera Dios, ni pudiera servirme. Son tan graves los
pensamientos, que me acobardan para levantar el corazón, y por no dar gusto
al Enemigo le digo: ‘‘Siendo tan gravı́simas mis culpas, es más la misericor-
dia de Dios. Y espero de su Divina Grandeza que me ha de perdonar y no
ha de permitir que me engañen tus mentiras.’’ Y haciéndole desprecio mi
alma, con temor de ser tan miserable, le pido con vergüenza a Dios no
me falte con su Divina Gracia, porque es cierto que me veo en evidente
peligro por lo mucho que me persigue el Enemigo. Y más, turbándome los
sentidos, mirando tanto enredo de cosas tan extrañas y otras tan penosas
que no se pueden decir, ni entender cómo cabe tanto en el pensamiento que
me revienta la cabeza, y pudiera perder la paciencia si la grandeza de Dios
no me hubiera hecho el beneficio de no perder paz exterior ni la interior.
(l42 f 264)
La purı́sima luz de nuestra soberana reina Marı́a alumbre mi alma y me
asista con todo. Con esta mucha tontera me suspendo, sin saber, ni entender
lo que por mı́ pasa; y me ocupa la vergüenza, conociendo que de mi vida tan
desbaratada no tengo qué poder decir, porque todos son disparates. Y Vues-
tra Paternidad me confunde, sabiendo las cosas que me está mandando que
escriba, y teniendo tan perdida la memoria que por unas se olvidan otras, y
siempre es lo menos de lo mucho que Vuestra Paternidad me apunta, que
ponga lo más acertado. Me parece que todo se quemara para asegurarme de
muchos peligros y mentiras, de malicia y de ignorancia; que de mi maldad
todo puede ser para hallarme más cargada en la otra vida como lo estoy aquı́,
padeciendo sin provecho, como un bruto que estorba y le dan golpes y no
entiende, y lo siente pero no aprovecha, como no entiende, se queda dando
trabajo. (l57 f 343 –344)
104 • Colonial Angels

Recogimiento y visiones
Y vi interiormente como una laguna que de las aguas salı́an unas manos muy
feas y negras que me hubieran cogido porque yo estaba muy pegada a la
orilla. A este tiempo vi a mi Señor, puesto en la cruz, y con mucho amor,
bajó un brazo y abrazó mi alma que estaba en el lado del corazón, con mucha
seguridad. Y el otro brazo le quedó pendiente de la cruz. Su amorosı́simo
rostro, muy humilde, inclinado a mi lado y muy lastimado pero muy lindo,
y sus ojos bellı́simos arrasados en lágrimas que le salı́an como hermosı́simas
perlas que causaban ternura y grande amor. (l24 f 131)

Y la veo con la hermosura de reina y majestad de señora, ricamente vestida

y también compuesta, y tal gracia que la hace más linda el bellı́simo rostro,
humilde y alegre, con un modo de mirar tan gracioso, modesto, y muy señor.
El pelo muy lindo, que le adorna con mucho primor: unas hondas que le
asientan por su divino rostro hasta bajo de los hombros con mucho luci-
miento y todo recogido por el cuello. El pelo ensortijado todo; la hermosura
y bizarrı́a es admirable, toda linda, hermosı́sima y virtiendo alegrı́a con algo
de resplandor del blanco y nácar de su bellı́simo rostro. (l24 f 132)
Y no se cómo diga lo que siente mi corazón, que es un desfallecimiento,
con suave aliento, que en el padecer hallo descanso. Pero conociéndome
tan para nada, con gusto recibiera que a este cuerpo pesado Dios lo casti-
gara con enfermedad que de ella muriera, que me atormenta vida mal em-
pleada. Del parecer parece que hago y no se hace nada, las noches en
miedos y fatigas y repugnancias las paso en el coro, que es una lástima, que
pudiera hacer mucho y no hago nada. Cuando entro en el coro ¡qué pensa-
mientos tan diversos, qué cosas pasan de perder la paciencia; con apariencia
que dan espanto! Con los golpes son los sustos que entiendo no volver,
porque temo que por mı́ se alborote el convento. Y porque me han visto; que
es vergüenza. Los peligros de matarme cuando sin saber se acaba la vela y
ando sin saber por donde. ¡Cosa temerosa! que me confunde. ¿Cómo será
ésto? y lo que más siento es que sin luz, me estoy lo más de la noche, esper-
ando que me cojan. Me asusto, pero no tengo alientos de pararme. Debo de
ser una de dı́a y otra de noche, según las [batallas] que padezco y la profun-
didad de allá dentro. A tiempos da Dios en estas noches unos tan conocidos
movimientos que el alma y cuerpo se estremecen y hasta los pelos se erizan.
(l15 f 86)
 Appendix 1 • 105

En este conocimiento estaba cuando se armó tan espantoso ruido que toda
me asusté y el corazón temblando. Daban unas carreras, como si se hicieran
pedazos y tiraran con todo el coro bajo, dando unos tronidos como bombas
que allı́ reventaban y como zastillos [sic] y salı́an unas voces o chillidos como
de rabiosas monas (ası́ me he querido explicar y digo cómo ello fué) que en
el silencio de la noche sonaban con más espanto y congoja que me quedé
espantada. (l25 f 136)

Como me veo tan gravemente metida en pensamientos de mundo, como si

me entrara en las casas de los ricos, ası́ veo todo lo que hacen; cómo entran,
y salen y cómo son servidos en el regalo de la mesa, con el gusto que viven y
todo cuanto puede pasar lo estoy mirando y entendiendo con tanta viveza
como si fuera cierto. Se me va la atención de lo que rezo. Que no me en-
tiendo con tanto como se me pone delante, que sólo Dios me puede dar
paciencia. (l33 f 195)
Y ası́ estoy, como con hambre de tratar con Dios y de tenerlo en mi corazón;
y este deseo quita el amor a todas las cosas de esta mortal vida, envidiando
muy diversas, a las que toda su vida han aprovechado en amar lo mejor y lo
verdadero, que es la vida de mi alma, Dios, que no se cómo todos no le aman,
y lo dejan todo, que no pierden nada. [ ] Y cómo quisiera decir esto; pero
qué mal parece en mı́, con mis locos pensamientos; tales que me sacan a las
fiestas y plazas, comiendo de los puestos muchos que hay en tales funciones,
que las veo y las tuviera por ciertas, sino me hallara en este coro. (l9 f 72)

Halléme privada y ajena de todos los sentidos; andando por unas calles que
no se podı́a dar paso, de un asqueroso lodo y arcos. Las paredes muy altas y
negras, muchos hombres andaban y yo entre ellos, muy espantada y llena de
confusión, sin saber lo que me habı́a sucedido, ni esperanzas de salir de tan
grave aflicción, que no es posible decir cómo yo estaba, y lo mucho que
padecı́. Cuando me sentı́ libre y me hallé en el coro, me parecı́a imposible.
Con mucho encogimiento para mi alma y muy espantada (porque me habı́a
parecido muy cierto haber estado mucho tiempo) no me hallaba merecedora
de estar libre, y con el sosiego y amor que mi alma tenı́a a mi Dios. ¡Qué
ternuras, qué palabras, qué agradecimientos y alabanzas y dulzuras! Y más
cosas, que ya Vuestra Paternidad puede conocer. (l23 f 129)

Estando en este dilatado campo de dolorosas memorias, sin saber cómo, me

vi en un lugar espantosı́simo, como él era, no sabré decir, pero para darme
106 • Colonial Angels

algo a entender, serı́a como el más triste barrio de los más retirados; era muy
grande, y habı́an muy pocas casitas que de verlas se arrancaba la alma [sic] de
tristeza. Andaban unos que parecı́an hombres, muy zancudos, hablando en
lengua que no se entendı́a. Vi una cosa muy alta que parecı́a torre que no se
decir cómo era. Allá en lo último habı́a como tabladito en donde estaban
bailando y saltando que se quedaban en el aire. La luz era como cuando
va llegando la noche, pero bastante para verlo todo, que habı́a sombras que
me asombraban. Lo que padecı́ en este desamparo, tan sola que ninguno se
acercaba a mı́, y todo lo estaba mirando y agonizando, con tan horrorosos
tormentos y dolores tan intorelables que me parece imposible que los haya
en esta vida. (l24 f 134)

En una calle muy ancha habı́a una fuente de agua en que estaban lavando (la
luz era poca). Andaban unas mujeres, como que salı́an a misa. Iba una con
su saya parda, toda tapada con su manto, y muy alta. Yo, pensando que era
la que habı́a visto lavando, la llamaba tres veces, por su nombre, y no me
respondió, volvió la cara con mucha cólera y al verle tan espantosa y la nariz
grande con punta dije: ‘‘Este es el diablo.’’ Allı́ me hubiera caı́do muerta del
espanto tan horroroso, que no se cómo decir los tormentos tan atroces. ¡Qué
agonı́as tan mortales sentı́a en el corazón y con un pavor y miedo que me
estaba sofocando sólo de lo que habı́a visto! Que por no haberlo visto, hu-
biera padecido las penas del infierno. Estando con este mortal miedo y ho-
rrorizada de cara tan fea, que me parece imposible que pueda haber cosa tan
espantosa, deseaba que en el mimso instante se me hubiera borrado del pen-
samiento tal cosa. (l25 f 136 –137)

Deseos
¡Oh, cómo quisiera ser una santa! Con qué ansias me quisiera ver libre del
pesado estorbo del cuerpo y de estos pensamientos mundanos que me atur-
den sin provecho, sin pensar en cosa buena. Sólo me quedo insensata y tan
disgustada y sin esperanza de Dios que en nada hallo consuelo. La vida me
es pensosa, la muerte, que se tarda, siendo breve. No me hallo con las gentes,
y me alivio estando sola, que para pasar siempre sin consuelo es cosa dura.
(l10 f 74)

Con qué ansias desea mi alma infundir esta verdad a todas las gentes, y en
especial a todas las religiosas, que me dan lástima verlas tan cuidadosas de
 Appendix 1 • 107

que no les falten las cosas temporales, que parece les falta el tiempo para
procurarlo y pedirlo a las personas de afuera, sujetándose a muchas penali-
dades, que todas se podı́an excusar dejándose a la providencia divina, con
seguridad que no se puede olvidar un Padre tan poderoso que de verdad nos
ama. (l31 f 173)

Como soy tan ruin, no aguantan mis flacas fuerzas el mucho peso que me
oprime con grande fatiga, que me veo en puntos de perder la paciencia y de
hablar disparates y dejarme perder, porque nada me aprovecha. [Soy] tan
furiosa en la rebeldı́a de todo lo malo que doy bramidos como si fuera el más
rabioso bruto, padeciendo penosas ansias que me dejan como una simple.
(l37 f 221)

Se me ha dado tan claro conocimiento del fin de las cosas de esta mortal vida
que todos lo saben, pero yo me pensé dueña de todas las estimaciones, her-
mosa con todos los adornos de la naturaleza y riquezas de la tierra, muy
conocida y alabada, y todo muy al vivo me movió a entender la brevedad con
que todo se acaba por mucho que dure. ¿Y de qué sirven las admiraciones de
los primores y divertimiento [sic] si en un instante todo se acaba? (l6 f 49)

Pocos dias me duró este alivio y paz, viniendo a mi alma tan horrorosa tem-
pestad de congojas que no me entendı́a de desconsuelo, con un enojo con
Vuestra Paternidad, como si tuviera la culpa de todo mi mal, estando ino-
cente de lo que me pasaba. Yo no se decir las amarguras que mi alma padeció,
que estaba traspasado el corazon de dolor sin poder más del ansia, tan sus-
pensa que no podı́a hablar una palabra ni rezar, con un golpe en el corazón
que bramaba, y conociendo que no me convenı́a que me confesara Vuestra
Paternidad. Sentı́a mi bobera haber dicho los pecados y todo [lo] demás sin
necesidad sino habı́a de proseguir, y ası́ tenı́a vergüenza, como también el
que a Vuestra Paternidad le parecı́an muy mal mis cosas; y que si yo volviera,
ya no habı́a de tener consuelo y que sólo lo preciso dirı́a que lo demás era pe-
ligroso. De repente me daba un aborrecimiento a mi padre de mi alma, que
lo querı́a despreciar con malas palabras. Estaba como un gentil. (l26 f 146)

La comunidad del claustro

Doy principio con lo que me manda la santa obediencia que presto, y al pie
de la letra, deseo ejecutar sino fuera tonta, que apenas acierto como ha de
108 • Colonial Angels

ser; y por tener todas mis cosas aborrecidas. Que como sino fuera, quisiera
estar olvidada y con mucha razón; que de nada sirvo, ni de tantito alivio a
la comunidad porque de la celdita al coro no paso a más, y a lo sumamente
preciso, sin ver ninguna cosa de lo que hacen en el convento de festejos, ni
se cómo es todo el convento, y lo preciso con muy poco cuidado, sin cono-
cer a las niñas ni mozas, algunas y muy pocas conozco. Pero atiendo tan
poco, que parece que no estoy en lo que veo, que me quedo como si no viera
nada. Cuando me veo por cosa precisa con las religiosas, y que me hablan,
no las entiendo de vergüenza que como no estoy hecha a hablar, estoy
como extraña y siempre apresurada, que no puedo sosegar hasta estar sola,
que me parece se pierde el tiempo; pero conociendo el favor que recibo
de que me tengan en su compañı́a, igualándome en el hábito que traigo y
en que me den lo que a todas, para mantenerme. Que me alegrara que para
mı́ faltara, por no tener necesidad, que para lo que yo merezco de lo que
desecharan tuviera bastante. Pero conozco que nada tengo, que el estar en el
coro y pisar el convento es gracia, y lo agradezco. (l28 f 154 –155)

Y me veo muy fatigada, por no hallar salida para despegarme de las personas
que tanto me atormentan, pues sin voluntad mı́a he tenido a esta hermana
que habrá mas de diez años; y en ellos todo ha sido atormentarme con la
continuación de muy graves enfermedades, dando con ellas bastante trabajo
a la santa comunidad, y con la necesidad de haber de entrar padres a ayudarla
a bien morir. Para mi mayor tormento, velándola todas las noches y dias sin
más descanso que el tiempo que asistı́a con la comunidad a las horas y mai-
tines; y ası́ sólo podı́a cumplir con el oficio divino, por darme la Divina
Majestad tan grande martirio en ver padecer a la enferma sin poderle dar
alivio y estar todo a mi cuidado, que no podı́a faltar a lo mucho que se ofrecı́a
de servir [ ] porque estoy en lugar de moza. Y lo hago con mucho gusto,
pero con mucho trabajo, porque me faltan las fuerzas. Y lo que padezco con
esta enferma es mucho más, por ser preciso que esta cruz sea de participan-
tes, y haber de tolerar los diferentes pareceres y disgustos que me atarantan
y no puedo entender cosas de sentimientos, y faltar a la paz, que es la vida
del alma. (l55 f 336 –338)

Estoy sin poder sosegar con los temores de la enfermera, que ya no se cómo
entenderme; y haber de tratar y contratar con las gentes, disimulando la pro-
fundidad de mi desconsuelo, tratándolas con amor y agradeciéndoles la ca-
ridad que me hacen. Pero el Enemigo las tienta con enojo y sentimientos de
 Appendix 1 • 109

cosas, que yo ni se, ni entiendo. Dios lo permite para ejercicio de paciencia,

que bien se ha menester, con las persecuciones y desabridas palabras que han
pasado a decirme tan graves cosas delante de varias religiosas, que no me
atrevo a decirlas, que sólo ası́ se pudieran decir; que todo lo malo yo lo hacı́a.
Y al entender de esta persona, no habı́a cosa en el convento tan para nada,
mentirosa, aulladora, puerca, inútil, engañando para que me tuvieran por
santa. Decı́ame tanto, que pocas veces me decı́a mi nombre. Yo le procuraba
dar gusto y servirla, sin darme por agraviada, mas no valı́an mis diligencias
para contentarla, con grandes agravios me pagaba el amor que le tengo. No
podı́a reprimir la cólera que le precipitaba. (l55 f 339)

Estando en Betlém hubo grandes funciones de visitas de arzobispos y de

virrey; que se aderezaba la casa de curiosas alhajas; de músicas, y graciosas
loas y danzas y muchos divertimientos [sic] tan de gusto, que las mejores
personas entraban que gustaban de la gracia especial que han tenido para
todo. De todo, nada vi ni oı́. Los alborotos, que por esto se ocasionaban, me
disgustaban, pero me lo callaba; conociendo que yo estaba como si no estu-
viera; como inútil, que no servı́a para estar entre señoras. Poca cuenta se
hacia de mı́, que para mı́ era consuelo. Era tan poco lo que miraba; que
muchas entraban y estaban bastante tiempo y se salı́an sin conocerlas, ni
saber cosa, que me las mentaban pensando que las hubiera visto. Con la
precisión de servir algunas pocas enfermas, a veces me salı́a sin ver lo que
habı́a; muy curiosos aderezos de casas, y me salı́ sin verlas, y muchas cosas
se ofrecı́an; de donde se sacaba tener poco que hablar, como sucede hablar
de lo que se ha visto, y notar algunas faltas. De no ver, se guarda mejor
el silencio, que es muy importante para no pecar de muchos modos, y muy
provechoso. (l22 f 117)

The Writing Adventure

Sweet Jesus, is it possible that I should suffer so many anxieties and that for
my greater torment I be commanded to write and obliged to do so, with
such unwillingness that I would rather suffer another torment than endure
the use of a pen? Especially as I feel so frightened and embarrassed that
when I sit down to do it, the paper and pen only serve to stain me, and to
confirm to myself that these things are not suitable for me? But in order to
obey Your Grace, I will forget everything that comes to my mind. (l6 f 49)
110 • Colonial Angels

May the grace of Holy Mary, my mother and teacher, aid me to do what
holy obedience commands.
May everything that happens to me be for the greater glory of the Al-
mighty, whose liberality extends to everybody, and certainly to me, though
I deserve less, not having profited from the favors He has shown me, my
ignorance preventing me from recognizing their value. It seemed impossible
to take up the pen again, having sufficient reasons to be very frightened, on
top of the many that I have always had about writing, and I regret very much
what has already been written. God knows I only do it in order to obey,
overcoming how bad my things seem to me—which is true—for in me there
is nothing worthy. If God’s kindness allows me good intentions, I never fulfill
them as I ought, causing me even greater shame. At present this preoccupies
me so much that my soul is so withered and my heart so frightened that I am
incapable of doing what I have to. Even having to do a good thing seems to
exacerbate my wickedness, but I must obey, without knowing how. May God’s
will be done, and may He receive the bitterness that torments me and has
me befuddled, unable to speak of the admirable benefits that God has
wrought in this miserable one, my cowardice and great ignorance stops me,
but at the same time, His love moves me with its sweet force. (l22 f 110 –111)

My soul’s needs manifest themselves with such well-ordered reasons and

such true and ardent loving feelings, with such an abundance of justifications
and so fitted to the purpose, and all without using language, that everything
is understood in a very clear way, far different to the one we use. For without
perceiving a voice, everything is truly understood; praise be to God! How
enamored the soul is! How solid in knowledge and divine power! And how
great the fear and shame, how profound the knowledge that we should dis-
dain the things of this life as if they were rubbish, as they truly are, for
everything that exists will soon enough be finished, however much the world
esteems it! (l51 f 322)

[I am] still suffering from sadness at my great evil, and yet with the great
benefit of being able to cope with it all, however grave, with interior peace,
without becoming distraught, no matter how much bitterness and sadness
afflicts my heart. With everything that is happening, sometimes I do not
know what to make of this labyrinth of my thoughts where all my hope is
consumed so completely; it is as if there were no God for me, and He could
 Appendix 1 • 111

not help me. My thoughts are so grievous that they make me cowardly and
unable to lift up my heart. But in order not to satisfy the Enemy I say to
him: ‘‘Though my guilt is extreme, God’s mercy is greater. I hope that His
Divine Majesty will pardon me and will not allow your lies to deceive me.’’
My soul thus dismissing him, fearful of being such a miserable thing, I shyly
ask God that His divine grace should not fail me, for it is true that I am in
real danger from the Enemy who persecutes me so much. Moreover, my
senses are overcome perceiving such a confusion of very strange things, and
others so sad that they cannot be expressed or understood. So much squeezes
into my thoughts that my head feels as if it is exploding, and I would lose
my patience had not the might of God given me this gift of not losing ex-
terior or interior peace. (l42 f 263 –264)

May the pure light of our sovereign queen Mary illumine my soul and help
me with everything: With this great befuddlement I find myself suspended,
without knowing or understanding what is happening to me. Shame over-
comes me, knowing that I am able to say little about my disorganized life,
for everything in it is foolishness. Your Grace confuses me, you already
know the things you order me to write and my memory is so bad that I have
forgotten some and remember others. They are always only a part of the
whole that Your Grace notes that I should write down accurately. I wish
everything could be burnt to safeguard me from many dangers, lies, malice,
and ignorance. Because of my wickedness, it is very possible that I should
find myself more tormented in the next life than I am in this, suffering as I
do like a beast that annoys and is punished with blows but does not under-
stand; it feels them, but does not learn, and as it does not profit by them, not
understanding, it gives only more trouble. (l57 f 343 –344)

Prayer and Visions

I saw in an interior mode something like a lake. From the water came ugly
black hands that could have caught me because I was very near the shore.
At that moment I saw my Lord on the cross, who with great affection low-
ered an arm and embraced my soul that was on the side of my heart, com-
forting me greatly. His other arm remained on the cross. His loving face,
very humble, inclined toward me, was terribly injured, but very beautiful;
112 • Colonial Angels

his wonderful eyes bathed in tears that fell like beauteous pearls, inspired
tenderness and profound love. (l24 f 131)

I see her with all the beauty of a queen and majesty of a great lady, dressed
richly and so gracefully composed that her face appears more beautiful,
humble, and happy, with a way of looking so charming, modest, and sover-
eign. Her hair was lovely, decorating her with great style, waves coming
down her divine face just below her shoulders with much grace, and all tied
back around her neck. Her hair was curled, its beauty and style admirable,
she was completely exquisite, lovely, and gave off happiness with the re-
splendent white and pink of her beautiful face. (l24 f 132)

I do not know how to express what my heart feels; it is a fainting, with a

gentle sigh, so that in the suffering I find comfort. But knowing myself
unworthy, I would willingly accept that this heavy body be punished by ill-
ness and die from it because nothing torments me more than my useless life.
As far as appearances are concerned, it looks as if I do nothing; the nights
in the choir pass amidst fear and fatigue and disgust. It is such a waste be-
cause I could accomplish many things and instead do nothing. When I go
into the choir, I have so many different thoughts, so many things make me
lose patience with their terrible apparitions, with blows causing me such
frights that I resolve never to go back for fear of disturbing the entire con-
vent. They have seen me, and it is shameful. The danger of killing myself,
when the candles go out and I walk about without knowing where; it is
terrible! I am confused at how this is so; all I know is that for the greatest
part of the night I am without lights, worried that they will find me. I get
frightened but I do not have the strength to stand up. I must be one person
by day and another by night according to the battles I undergo and the depth
there is inside there. Sometimes God causes certain familiar movements that
make my soul and body tremble, and even my hairs stand on end. (l15 f 86)

I was in this state when such a terrible noise began that I became terrified
and my heart trembled. They ran about as if they were tearing themselves to
pieces and bringing the lower choir down. Such groans like bombs explod-
ing and like fireworks. Voices and screams like rabid monkeys (I have ex-
plained myself in this way and thus am telling how it was) that in the silence
of the night they resounded with such fright and pain that I was terribly
shocked. (l25 f 136)
 Appendix 1 • 113

I find myself so utterly immersed in worldly thoughts it is as if I went into

rich people’s houses and saw all they did. How they come and go, how they
are feasted at table, with what indulgence they live. Everything that happens
I observe and perceive so vividly it is as if it were real, and my attention
wanders from my prayers. I cannot cope with everything that is put before
me, only God can give me patience. (l33 f 195)
So I am like this—hungry to be near to God and to have Him in my heart.
This desire takes away any love for the things of this mortal life, wanting
very different things; things such as those cherished by people who have
dedicated themselves to loving the best and the truest thing that is the life
of the soul. I do not know how everyone does not love it, and leave the rest,
for they lose nothing. I so want to say this, but it ill befits me, with my crazy
thoughts that drag me out to parties and public squares, where I eat from
the many stalls that there are on such occasions, and I see them so clearly
that I would believe they were real if only I did not find myself in this choir.
(l9 f 72)
Stunned and lacking all senses, I saw myself walking through streets difficult
to move through. There was disgusting mud. There were arches, the walls
were huge and black. There were many men, and I walked among them,
very frightened and confused, not knowing what had happened to me, and
without any hope of getting out of such an affliction. It is impossible to say
how I felt and how much I suffered. When I felt that I was free and found
myself in the choir, it all seemed impossible. My soul was very cowed and
frightened (for it seemed true that I had been there for a long time), and I
did not think I deserved to be free and enjoying the comfort and love that
my soul received from God. What tenderness, what words, what giving of
thanks and showering of praises, what sweetness! And many other things
that Your Grace may understand. (l23 f 129)

Dealing with this extensive subject of painful memories, not knowing how,
I found myself in a terrifying place. It is impossible to describe it, but to
make myself understood I will say it was like the saddest, most remote quar-
ter of a city. It was very big and there were very few houses, to see them
pained the soul with sadness. What looked like long-legged men walked
about speaking an incomprehensible language. I saw a very high thing that
looked like a tower, I do not know how else to describe it. At the top there
114 • Colonial Angels

was something like a stage and they were dancing and jumping up in the air.
The light was like when night is coming, but enough to see everything by,
and there were shadows that amazed me. How I suffered in this desolation,
so alone that no one came close to me, and I was looking and agonizing over
everything, with such terrible torments and intolerable pains that it seems
impossible that such things can exist in this life. (l24 f 134)
In a very broad street, there was a water fountain in which some women
were washing. The light was very dim. It was as if they had just come from
mass. One wore a dark cloak, completely covered by her scarf. She was very
tall. I thought she was one of the women I had seen washing, and I called
her by her name three times. She did not answer me and eventually turned
her head in anger. When I saw her terrifying face with a huge pointed nose,
I said, ‘‘This is the devil.’’ I would have fallen down dead there and then
from the terrible fright. I cannot describe the dreadful torments. My heart
felt such deadly agonies and such a shock and fear that I was suffocating
only from what I had seen! I would have rather suffered the pains of hell
than have seen it. Being thus mortally frightened and horrified by such an
ugly face that it seemed impossible to me that a terrifying thing like that
should exist, I wished that at that very moment the memory of it could be
erased from my mind. (l25 f 136 –137)

Desires
Oh how I wish I were a saint! I desire so much to see myself free of the
heavy distraction of this body and of all these worldly thoughts that assail
me without profit, without a thought for anything worthy. I feel foolish and
so displeased and without hope of God that nothing consoles me. Life is
hard to bear; death though brief takes too long to arrive. I am uncomfortable
with people and find ease only by myself, though to be like this, without
succor, is a hard thing. (l10 f 74)
With what yearning my soul wants to teach this truth to all people and
especially to all nuns. I pity their concern and anxieties about being deprived
of temporal things. It seems they never have enough time to search for them
and ask for them from people outside, exposing themselves to many troubles
that they could avoid by entrusting themselves to divine providence, in the
certainty that such a powerful Father who loves us so truly could not forget
us. (l31 f 173)
 Appendix 1 • 115

I am so base that my waning forces cannot withstand the heavy weight that
presses me down causing me such great tiredness that I am on the verge of
losing my patience and saying foolish things and letting myself go because
nothing is of any use to me. The rebellion of all evil things is so strong that
I grunt like the most rabid beast and suffer such pitiful anxieties that they
leave me like a simpleton. (l37 f 221)
I have been given such a clear understanding of the end of all things in this
mortal life, things that everyone knows. But I had thought myself the pos-
sessor of all admiration, beautified with all the decorations of nature and
wealth of the earth, renowned and praised. And I was moved to understand
very vividly that all this ends with extreme brevity, however long it might
last. Of what use are admiration, courtly gestures, and enjoyment if in an
instant all is finished? (l6 f 49)

This peace and calm lasted only a few days, my soul entering such a storm
of regrets that I could not understand my desolation. I felt so much anger
against you, my Venerable Father, as if you were responsible for all my pains,
though unaware of all that was happening to me. I cannot describe the bit-
terness that my soul suffered; my heart was pierced by pain so much so that
I could do nothing because of the anxiety. I was so suspended that I could
not say a word or pray, having such a wound in my heart that I cried out. I
knew it would be better not to confess to you, Father, for I was sorry that in
my foolishness I had told you these sins and everything else when there was
no need as they were not to go on. So I was ashamed, and also of the fact
that my things seemed wicked to Your Grace, and if I were to go back to
you I would get no consolation, for I would say only what was necessary, the
rest being dangerous. Suddenly I would feel such disgust for the Father of
my soul that I would want to insult him with bad words. I was like a gentile.
(l26 f 146)

The Convent Communit y

I will begin what saintly obedience requires of me, and I want to do it
quickly and to the letter, only I am stupid and can hardly accomplish it
properly because I hold all my things in great disdain. I would want to be
ignored as if I did not exist, and this would be fitting because I am good for
nothing, not even being able to comfort the community just a little bit. I go
out from my small cell to the choir only when necessary, without looking
116 • Colonial Angels

around, seeing none of the festivities they have in the convent. I am not even
aware of what the convent is like, knowing only those bits that are absolutely
necessary and even those not well. Of the little girls and young women, I
know only a few. But I pay such little attention that it seems as if I see
nothing. When I have to see the nuns for a specific thing, and they speak to
me, I cannot understand them because I am so embarrassed and not made
for speaking. I am like a stranger and always in a great hurry, and I cannot
calm down until I am alone. But I am aware of the great favor they do me by
having me in their company, raising me to the status of their order and that
they give me the same things they give everyone else to nourish me. I do not
need it all and am only worthy of the leftovers; that would be plenty for me.
But I know I have nothing of my own and that to be in the choir and to step
inside the convent is a gift, and I am grateful for it. (l28 f 154 –155)
I am very tired as I cannot find any way to free myself from the people that
torment me. Without wishing it, I have had this sister with me for ten years,
during which she has tormented me with continual serious illnesses that
have also disturbed this saintly community because of the repeated need for
priests to come and administer the last rites. For my greater torment, I have
had to sit up with her every night and day, with no other break than when I
went with the community to pray and to matins. Even like this, I could only
recite the divine office, for His Divine Majesty had given me such a martyr-
dom of seeing the sick nun suffer without being able to ease her pain, and of
being solely responsible so I could not fail to do the many things that were
required. I am like a servant, and I do it with much pleasure but also with
much trouble for I am very weak. What I endure with this sick nun is ter-
rible because it is a cross I bear in which many participate. I have to hear
and tolerate different opinions and preferences that confuse me, and I can-
not bear these problems of favoritism and preference for they break the
peace, which is the true life of the soul. (l55 f 336 –338)

The anxieties proper to being a nurse leave me without any moment of calm,
and I do not know how to cope. I have to talk and deal with people while
disguising the depth of my despair, treating them with love and thanking
them for the charity they show me. But the Enemy tempts them with anger
and strong feelings about things that I neither know or understand. God
allows this in order to exercise my patience. I have really needed this, given
the persecutions and ugly words that have come to be said to me in front of
 Appendix 1 • 117

various nuns. I do not dare repeat them, they could only be said because of
this (demonic inspiration); claiming I did every evil. In this person’s opinion,
there was nothing more worthless in the convent: a liar, moaner, dirty, use-
less, feigning so as to be thought a saint. She would call me so many things,
she hardly ever pronounced my name. I tried to please her and serve her
without letting it be understood that I was hurt, but my attentions did not
please her, and she would pay back the love I feel for her with great insults,
not able to contain the anger that I drove her into. (l55 f 339)

While I was in Bethlehem, there were great ceremonies, visits by the arch-
bishops and by the viceroy. The convent was adorned with elaborate deco-
rations, music and gracious masques, dances, and many entertainments. All
this was done with such good taste that the most noble people, who appre-
ciated such graciousness, came to the convent. Of all this, I neither heard
nor saw a thing. The disturbances that were caused by such things upset me,
but I said nothing, knowing that I was there as if I did not exist; useless, not
serving any purpose amidst these ladies. Little notice was paid me and this
was a great comfort. I looked about me so little that many women entered
(the convent) and were there for a long period of time and left again without
my having known them. They would mention them by name, thinking I
knew them, and I did not know them. Sometimes when attending to the
sick I would leave (the cell) without having seen any of the rich decorations,
I would go having seen nothing and noticed none of the many things that
happened. Due to this, I have little to say in the usual way one sees things
and talks about them, noting certain faults. By not seeing, one keeps a more
perfect silence, which is very advantageous and is also necessary so as not to
sin in many different ways. (l22 f 117)
Appendix 2

Archivo General de la Nación. Ramo Inquisición. Vol. 581,

exp. 1. Autos hechos en el convento de San José de religiosas
Carmelitas Descalzas de esta ciudad sobre una carta escrita
a la superiora de dicho convento por el señor arzobispo don
Mateo de Buqueiro en que daba a entender se tenı́a por las
religiosas algunos errores y heregı́as, 1661.

Andrea de San Francisco

07/feb/1661

Dijo que en estos dos dias de fiesta antecedentes ha encomendado a Nuestro

Señor muy de veras este negocio. Y no quisiera en ninguna manera que se
ofrecieran materias en que hubiese de tocar a las honras de nunguna persona,
cuanto menos de prelados y de monjas sus hermanas, y de religiosos. Pero
que como quiera que el Santo Oficio viene a inquirir; no es bien que la
inocencia padezca, y los culpados queden con victoria; y ası́ se ha determi-
nado de decir [ ] en el Santo Tribunal todo lo que ha sabido y entendido
desde que entró religiosa en este convento, segura de que todo quedará en
secreto, y ası́ dice:

Que cuando esta declarante entró en este santo convento, que a los nueve de
enero próximo pasado de este año de 661 hizo 27 años, entendiendo que
venı́a al cielo, o por lo menos a donde seguramente habı́a de alcanzar la
salvación; hallóle en grande alteración y bandos porque la madre Mariana
 Appendix 2 • 119

de la Encarnación, [ ] fundadora de este convento que habrá trece años

que murió, y la madre Inés de la Cruz, que fue la otra fundadora

[f 88r]

que murió el año de 633, y vinieron del convento de Jesús Marı́a de esta
ciudad a fundar este convento, movidas de Dios Nuestro Señor, se conser-
varon en suma paz y hermandad hasta que entraron estas madres gachupinas
que fueron la madre Bernarda de San Juan, ya difunta, la madre Marı́a de
Santa Inés su hermana, la madre Margarita de San Bernardo, y la madre
Ana de San Bartolomé, y pusieron discordia entre esas dos madres funda-
doras. Y la dicha madre Bernarda era mujer muy entendida y capaz, y se
habı́a criado en la compañı́a en el palacio de la condesa de Montalbán, y
pasó a esta Nueva España en un navı́o con religiosos Carmelitas Descalzos
que venı́an a ésta su provincia, de que cobró grande afecto a dichos religio-
sos, y ellos a la dicha madre Bernarda de San Juan y a la dicha su hermana,
Marı́a de Santa Inés. Con que luego dichos padres estando ya en esta ciudad,
trataron de que se les diese el hábito en este convento a las dos dichas her-
manas; como con efecto se hizo por medio de la madre fundadora Inés de la
Cruz, que pidió a Juan de Castillete que las nombrase por sus capellanas de
dos [capellanı́as] que dotó perpetuamente en este santo convento. Y la dicha
madre Inés de la Cruz, como era gachupina y natural de Toledo, les cobró
grande afición. Y la dicha madre Bernarda de San Juan, que como ha dicho
tenı́a buenas partes naturales y atractiva, ganó de manera la voluntad de la
dicha madre Inés de la Cruz que acabada de profesar y muy joven la puso
por tornera. Cosa que maravilló al padre fray Marı́a Calollete,
[f 88v]

religioso Agustino y hermano de la dicha madre Inés de la Cruz. Y a la dicha

madre de Santa Inés la hizo pedagoga de las novicias, siendo ası́ que entró
de catorze años de edad, y [ ] años en el noviciado, con que se hecha [sic]
de ver qué edad tendrı́a para ser pedagoga; y aún maestra de novicias, porque
la dicha madre Inés de la Cruz, que era priora y maestra de novicias estaba
muy enferma y no podı́a acudir al oficio. Y que las demás religiosas en que
habı́a muy grandes siervas de Dios que habı́an vivido como unas bestias sin
discurso, sujetas a la obediencia, viendo lo que pasaba con dichas dos her-
manas Bernarda de San Juan y Marı́a de Santa Inés, se comenzaron a in-
quietar y a tener envidia, y acudieron a la otra fundadora, la madre Mariana
120 • Colonial Angels

de la Encarnación, viéndose que no tenı́an cabida con la madre Inés de la

Cruz. Y la dicha madre Mariana de la Encarnación, después de haber tenido
grandes controversias con la dicha madre Inés de la Cruz con que se ha
cavado la paz de las dichas madres fundadoras recurrió a [ ] Francisco
Manzo, pidiéndole que quitase de maestra de novicias a la madre Marı́a de
Santa Inés, porque [de] dos novicias que tenı́a sólo querı́a tener que la una,
que era la dicha Ana de San Bartolomé, que por ser gachupina la querı́an
mucho y hacı́an mucho por ella, y la otra que era Teresa de Jesús, que era
criada de Querétaro, la querı́an echar del convento. Y dicho senor arzobispo
quitó el oficio a dicha madre de Santa Inés
[f 89r]

y puso en él a la dicha madre Mariana de la Encarnación, que lo habı́a sido

de todas las religiosas que habı́a en el convento, menos [de] las dichas dos
gachupinas hermanas Bernarda de San Juan y Marı́a de Santa Inés que las
agregó ası́ la dicha madre Inés de la Cruz. Y que desde entonces quedó esta
comunidad partida y las cuatro gachupinas Bernarda de San Juan, Marı́a de
Santa Inés, Margarita de San Bernardo, y Ana de San Bartolomé, por haber
muerto en este tiempo la dicha madre Inés de la Cruz, publicaron y dieron
a entender y lo dijeron al dicho Juan de Castillete que habı́a muerto la dicha
madre Inés de la Cruz, su hermana, la dicha madre Mariana de la Encarna-
ción, por haberle quitado el oficio de maestra de novicias a la dicha Marı́a
de Santa Inés. Y que ası́ que tomó el hábito esta declarante, reconoció esta
división. Y sucedió que dicho arzobispo Francisco Manzo quitó con des-
honor el oficio de capellán de dicho convento al dicho don Alvaro de Cue-
vas, que fue después deán de la Iglesia Catedral de esta ciudad [ ], señor
obispo de Oaxaca, cuya virtud y espı́ritu es bien conocido en este reino. Y
que la causa está [ ] para Dios, aunque tuvo de ella noticia esta declarante,
y fue el evitar una grande ofensa de Dios Nuestro Señor, que estaba para
suceder en este convento, la cual noticia le dieron a esta declarante la dicha
madre fundadora Mariana de la Encarnación y las madres Catalina de Cristo
y su hermana Francisca de San José. Y puso en su lugar el señor arzobispo
Manzo, [ ]F[ ] Miranda, grande aficionado

[f 89v]
de las cuatro gachupinas, que de mercader que habı́a sido en la ciudad de la
Puebla se ordenó, e hizo mucha las partes de las dichas cuatro madres con
 Appendix 2 • 121

dicho señor arzobispo Manzo. Y que sucedió que la dicha madre Catalina
de Cristo escribió una carta al dicho don Alvaro de Cuevas, significándole
el sentimiento con que estaban la dicha madre fundadora Mariana de la
Encarnación, ella, y Francisca de San José su hermana, y las demás reli-
giosas de lo que le habı́a sucedido; y que el dicho don Alvaro Cuevas escribió
otra en respuesta a la dicha madre Catalina de Cristo, diciéndole, entre
otras cosas, que como dicho señor arzobispo Manzo le habı́a quitado la
ocupación que tenı́a en este convento sin interés alguno, le habı́a de
quitar Dios a dicho arzobispo su mitra. Y que teniendo noticia las cuatro
madres gachupinas de esta respuesta, que paraba en poder de la madre
Leonor de San Diego, religiosa del convento de Santa Isabel, Franciscanas
de esta ciudad, le escribieron un billete contrahaciendo la letra de la dicha
madre Catalina de Cristo; en que le decı́a que dicha Catalina de Cristo y
Francisca de San José su hermana estaban en la reja del coro bajo de la
iglesia aguardando la dicha respuesta que tenı́a en su poder, con que la
dicha madre Leonor de San Diego se la envió y paró en poder de las dichas
cuatro madres gachupinas, que dieron con dicho papel en manos del dicho
arzobispo Manzo;
[f 90r]

que viendo lo que contenı́a y escribı́a el dicho don Alvaro de Cuevas, con-
cibió grande ira contra él, y contra las religiosas que le comunicaban, y den-
tro de breves dias comenzó dicho señor arzobispo a tener la visita de este
convento, la cual fue muy larga y con toda contra dicha madre Mariana de la
Encarncación. Y puede esta declarante certificar de sı́ que siendo novicia
entonces, le insistieron el principal el dicho padre Miranda (por cuya boca
hablaban las dichas cuatro gachupinas, y la madre Inés de la Madre de Dios,
cuñada de las dichas Bernarda de San Juan y Marı́a de Santa Inés que iban
haciendo gente, y dicho padre Miranda las confesaba) y no podı́a esta de-
clarante hablar a las religiosas por [ser] novicia; que levantase falso testi-
monio a la santa madre fundadora, Mariana de la Encarnación, entrando
pidiendo a dicho señor arzobispo maestra de novicias, porque la dicha fun-
dadora era una relajada que no guardaba en nada la regla, ni trata[ba] jamás
que de regalarse y quebrantar el silencio, poniéndole grandes premios en esto
el dicho padre Miranda. Y aunque esta declarante le decı́a que esto no era
ası́ verdad; le decı́a que aquello no importaba, pues ası́ era, y que él habı́a
dicho a dicho señor arzobispo Manzo que esta declarante le habı́a de dar
122 • Colonial Angels

noticias de la dicha fundadora y maestra de novicias. Y cuando llegó la vez

de que entrase esta declarante a visitar [ ]

[f 90v]

el señor arzobispo, con mesura, a que dijese todo lo que habı́a visto de su
maestra, y con verdad, mirando a Dios, le dijo lo que habı́a de verdad, y las
faltas que habı́a advertido en otras religiosas, y que después de esto le in-
quietaron el ánimo a esta declarante dichas gachupinas (conviene a saber,
Bernarda de San Juan, Marı́a de Santa Inés, y Margarita de San Bernardo, y
la dicha madre Inés de la Madre de Dios, y el dicho padre Miranda) dicién-
dola que se habı́a excomulgado por no haber declarado ante el dicho señor
arzobispo todo lo que ellas y él querian. Y la absolvió el dicho padre Mi-
randa. Y que acabada la visita se hizo elección de priora y salió la madre
Beatrı́z de Jesús, natural de esta ciudad, y pusieron por su priora, sin votos, a
la madre Bernarda de San Juan. Y tuvieron el dicho señor arzobispo en lo
interior del convento, [ ] los dos capellanes, dicho padre Miranda, y [el]
licenciado Manuel Téllez, un capı́tulo que duró cuatro horas, a que mandó
que asistiese la novicia (que era esta declarante) y en él discurrió con gran-
des palabras sobre la pretensión de dar la obediencia a los padres Carmeli-
tas Descalzos, y trujo aquel lugar de los, [ ] cuando los israelitas pidieron
[ ] que le habı́a mandado Dios a Samuel [ ] les dijese que no le habı́an
despreciado a Samuel sino del mismo Dios, y sacó los [ ] la carta de res-
puesta de dicho don Alvaro de Cuevas, y jurando por su [ ], dijo que
habı́a estado por llevar [ ]

[f 91r]

[ ] quemarle en las espaldas de la carta. Y después se siguieron entre la

dicha su priora Bernarda de San Juan, y las dichas dos hermanas Catalina de
Cristo y Francisca de San José, y Mariana de Santa Leocadia (que está al
presente tullida), grandes recensiones por haber dicho de la dicha su priora
que la habı́an puesto en un oficio siendo tan recién profesa, y que no sabı́a
ni habı́a leı́do latı́n ni romance, y sólo deletreaba; porque cuando entró
monja, ni aún el abece sabı́a, ni ceremonias del coro, y se lo escribieron a
dicho arzobispo. Y era el que enandra [sic] el fuego el dicho padre Miranda,
y dicho arzobispo puso reclusas en sus celdas a la madre fundadora y a las
dos hermanas, y a la madre Santa Leocadia, más tiempo de dos meses, que
 Appendix 2 • 123

fue en cuaresma, sin que oyesen misa ni sermón ni se confesasen, con cen-
sura para que ninguna religiosa las comunicase. Y después las sacó de la
reclusión y a larga penitencia. Y que antes de pasar un año quitaron el oficio
de priora a al dicha madre Beatrı́z de Jesús, desacreditándola con el arzo-
bispo, y una de las culpas graves que le pusieron fue que habı́a escrito un
papel al padre fray Alvaro de Jesús, Carmelita Descalzo de esta ciudad, pre-
guntándole algunos particulares de observancias de la orden, en que era muy
nimia [ ];

[f 91v]

lo cual supo el señor arzobispo por medio de dichas madres gachupinas, y

como le cogió desabrido al dicho arzobispo de la resistencia que la dicha
madre priora Beatrı́z de Jesús hizo sobre no admitir un breve de Su Santidad
el que trujo la marquesa de Cadereita (entonces virreina), para poder entrar
en los conventos de religiosas, viniendo en ello los prelados y los conventos,
le quitó el oficio de priora a la dicha madre Beatrı́z de Jesús, y puso por
presidenta a la madre Bernarda de San Juan. Y que es de notar la astucia de
dichas madres gachupinas, que dieron cuenta a dicho señor arzobispo de este
papel escrito a Carmelita Descalzo para derribar a la dicha madre priora,
como la derribaron, y por otra parte estaban tratando de que se les diese la
obediencia, pues en la crónica manuscrita (cuyo autor es fray Antonio de la
Madre de Dios), tocante a las fundaciones de conventos de Carmelitas Des-
calzos de esta Nueva España, que se trujo a este convento y se le leyó a la
comunidad de dos a tres de la tarde por lección espiritual, como se acos-
tumbra, se pone la larga vida de la dicha Bernarda de San Juan (por ser ya
difunta). Se dice de ella que cuando le propusieron los padres Carmelitas el
que entrara monja en este convento, preguntó si estaba sujeto al ordinario o
a la orden, y diciéndole que al ordinario, le dio gran disgusto. Y desde en-
tonces habı́a tenido en su mente hacer cuanto pudiese porque estuviese a la
orden, como lo hizo siempre

[f 92r]

hasta que le cortó la vida, como se puede ver. Y que ası́ que se vio por presi-
denta la dicha madre Bernarda de San Juan, comenzó a entrar la dicha mar-
quesa de Cadereita, porque como se habı́a criado en el palacio de la condesa
de Montalbán, era amiga de cosas de palacio, y [de] dar gusto a dicho señor
124 • Colonial Angels

arzobispo. Y que de las venidas de la dicha marquesa de Cadereita a este

convento resultaron graves escándalos en este convento, por la mucha co-
municación que en él tenı́a dicha señora marquesa con el dicho señor arz-
obispo, tanto que obligó a esta declarante a decirle a su confesor, el dicho
padre Miranda, que ¿cómo las dichas madres gachupinas, por ganar la vo-
luntad del prelado, venı́an en una cosa tan fea como que en este convento
tuviesen tanta comunicación entre dicho arzobispo y la señora marquesa de
Cadereita? Porque apenas venı́a dicha señora marquesa de Cadereita a este
convento, cuando luego a [ ] se venı́a el señor arzobispo, y que por eso
habı́a quitado dicho señor arzobispo del oficio de priora a la dicha madre
Beatrı́z de Jesús y puesto por presidenta a la dicha Bernarda de San Juan,
que por ser mujer de poca obligación y de menos religión venı́a en un caso
tan feo como en lo de dicha comunicación. A que le respondió el dicho padre
Miranda que a un prelado no se le podı́a ir a la mano, ni estorbárselo. Y que
ha dicho que dicha madre de San Juan era de poca obligación porque su
padre, Pedro Bermudo o Bermudes, siendo obligado de la carnicerı́a Gabriel
[ ] de la Cruz, tuvo a su cargo en Tacuba la carnicerı́a
[f 92v]

y casaba las vacas. Y lo mismo hizo su hijo Cristóbal de la Casa, que allı́ ganó
dinero. Y su madre doña Ana de Lima, que todos eran de España, vendı́a
velas en Tacuba en una puerta de su casa. Y que lo supo por la comunicación
que su padre de esta declarante, Francisco Fernández de Segura, y toda la
gente de su casa (que vivı́an en una estancia de la jurisdición de Tacuba)
tenı́an con el hijo de Cristóbal de la Casa [y] con su madre. Y los esclavos
de su padre de esta declarante iban a comprar carnes y velas. Y que ası́ que
se fue a España el dicho señor arzobispo Manzo, por haber quedado por
vicario entonces de todos los conventos de monjas el doctor Luis de Sifuen-
tes, hizo elección de priora en la madre Francisca de San José; y que con esta
ocasión de ausencia del señor arzobispo, escribió la dicha madre Catalina de
Cristo a la dicha su tı́a Leonor de San Diego, que ¿cómo habı́a dado la dicha
carta del doctor don Alvaro de Cuevas? Y lo mismo [ ] hizo para que el
padre Manuel Téllez también se lo preguntase. Y ella dijo que por un papel
de su misma letra de Catalina de Cristo, en que decı́a las razones referidas,
que habı́a enviado carta; con que se descubrió el enredo. Y esta vez trató con
esta declarante con harto sentimiento de este sujeto. Y que habiendo aca-
 Appendix 2 • 125

bado su tiempo de priora la dicha madre Francisca de San José con hartos
trabajos

[f 93r]

y contradicciones y una continua guerra con dichas madres gachupinas Ber-

narda de San Juan, Marı́a de Santa Inés, Margarita de San Bernardo, y Ana
de San Bartolomé; que en este tiempo trajeron a los padres Carmelitas a este
convento, porque en tiempo de dicho señor arzobispo Manzo habı́a más de
6 años que ni aún en la iglesia entraban. Se trató de elección de priora siendo
vicario el deán don Diego Guerra, que por estar muy al cabo de su vida dio
comisión para ello al doctor don Pedro de Solı́s Calderón, canónigo de esta
santa iglesia. Y pretendió mucho ser priora la dicha Bernarda de San Juan, y
viendo que no podı́a salir, echó la elección por su cuñada, la madre Inés de la
Madre de Dios. Y en tiempo de esta priora se hicieron dueñas las madres
gachupinas de este convento, y se trató con viveza y atrinco [sic] el que se
diese la dicha licencia a las [ ], y se hiciesen los informes de que trató en
su primera [ ]. Y que en tiempo de la dicha madre priora Francisca de
San José, como tiene ya dicho, comenzaron a venir los dichos padres Car-
melitas Descalzos. Y entre ellos un fray Andrés de los Santos, que fue bien
conocido en este reino, que hacı́a pláticas al convento, siempre ensalzando a
las Hijas de la Orden, que eran y son las dichas madres gachupinas, que
siempre se intitulan las Hijas de la Orden y que no lo diesen [ ] a la madre
fundadora

[f 93v]
Mariana de la Encarnación, llamándola ‘‘aquella vieja endemoniada’’ porque
no la tenı́an por afecta a estas pretenciones, si bien hacı́a lo que podı́a, que
tenı́a ojos, firmando lo que daban a firmar. Y que de ver que dichos padres
Carmelitas apoyaban a unas por Hijas de la Orden y a otras las afrentaban,
se le crecieron muchos bandos en este convento. Y el dicho padre, fray An-
drés de los Santos, trataba con grande desprecio a las dichas Catalina de
Cristo, y Francisca de San José, y a esta declarante, y a Teresa de Jesús, y a
Beatrı́z de Santiago, porque obedecı́an al prelado ordinario. Y que al aca-
bado su trienio la dicha madre Inés de la Madre de Dios, el señor obispo
don Juan de Palafox, que era gobernador de este arzobispado, volvió a elegir
a la dicha madre Beatrı́z de Jesús. En la plática que hizo al capı́tulo que tuvo
126 • Colonial Angels

interior, volvió a tratar con el mismo lugar de la escritura que trajo el señor
arzobispo Manzo, de que le habı́a de pesar de andar en estas pretenciones.
Y visitándose esta declarante se acuerda que le dijo dicho señor don Juan de
Palafox, tratando de esta pretención de dar la obediencia a la orden, y de las
grandes inquietudes que causaban en las almas de las religiosas, le dijo estas
razones: ‘‘Mi hija, que éste ha sido ardid del demonio para, [a] tı́tulo de
perfección,

[f 94r]

destruir lo espiritual y temporal de esa casa.’’ Y que luego al primer año

quitaron el oficio de priora a la dicha madre Beatrı́z de Jesús el dicho canó-
nigo doctor don Pedro de Solı́s, que era vicario de este convento, por orden
de dicho don Juan de Palafox que estaba en la Puebla. Y movió esta quitada
el padre fray Juan de los Reyes (que le parece era provincial de dichos padres
Carmelitas, y era muy amigo de dicho don Juan de Palafox), a petición de
dichas madres gachupinas, y lo sabe porque ası́ se trata la voz pública entre
las monjas de este convento. Y aún a esta declarante le habló sobre ello la
madre Ana de San Bartolomé, pidiéndole el voto para priora para la dicha
madre Bernarda de San Juan, que de allı́ a tres meses la eligieron por priora.
Y que siendo priora vino por arzobispo de esta ciudad el doctor don Juan de
Mañozcar [sic], y en este tiempo de este priorato fueron los informes tan
sangrientos que tiene dicho en su primer año. Y por ser muy tarde se cesó.

Andrea de San Francisco

She said that in the feast days immediately preceding this, she offered this
business up to Our Lord very fervently. She hopes that in no way will any-
thing touching on the honor of any person, and especially not that of priests
or of her sister nuns, or of friars come up. However, if the Holy Office is
investigating, it is not good that innocence suffer and the guilty remain vic-
torious, and so she has determined to tell this Holy Tribunal everything she
has known and understood since she became a nun in this convent, certain
that it will remain secret, and so she says:

That when this witness entered this holy convent, which on the ninth of
January of the next year following this year of 1661, will have been twenty-
seven years ago, she believed she was entering heaven, or at least somewhere
 Appendix 2 • 127

where she was sure to find salvation. She found it in great division and dis-
union as Mother Mariana de la Encarnación, the founder of the convent
who died thirteen years ago, and Mother Inés de la Cruz, the other founder
[f 88r]

who died in 1663 (both of whom came from the convent of Jesús Marı́a in
this city to found this convent, moved by God our Lord) kept themselves in
complete peace and sisterhood until these gachupina 1 Mother Bernarda de
San Juan (deceased), Mother Marı́a de Santa Inés her sister, Mother Mar-
garita de San Bernardo, and Mother Ana de San Bartolomé, came into the
convent and sowed so much discord between these two founding mothers.
The said Mother Bernarda was a very clever and capable woman and had
been brought up in the courtly company of the palace of the countess of
Montalbán, and she traveled to New Spain in a ship with Discalced Car-
melite friars who were coming to their province; as a result of which she
became very attached to the said friars and they to her and to her sister, the
said Mother Marı́a de Santa Inés. So much so that later, when they were in
this city the said friars tried to get this convent to admit the two said sisters,
which in effect was done through the intervention of the founding Mother
Inés de la Cruz, who asked Juan de Castillete to name them as beneficiaries
of two grants that he gave in perpetuity to this convent. The said Mother
Inés de la Cruz, as she was a gachupina born in Toledo, became very attached
to them and the said Mother Bernarda de San Juan who, as she has declared,
had such an appealing nature and was so attractive, won over the will of the
said Mother Inés de la Cruz so completely that though she had just pro-
fessed and was very young, she was put in charge of the gate—some-
thing that amazed Father Marı́a Calollete,
[f 88v]

an Augustinian friar and brother of the said Mother Inés de la Cruz. She
also made the said Mother de Santa Inés adviser of the novices, even though
she entered being only fourteen years of age and with only [ ] years of
novitiate, from which one can see what kind of age she had to be an adviser,
or even a teacher of novices, because the said Mother Inés de la Cruz, who
was prioress and teacher of novices, was very ill and could not do her job.
The other nuns—among whom there were some very faithful servants of
God—had lived like beasts without reason, subject to the vow of obedience,
128 • Colonial Angels

witnessing what was happening with the said two sisters Bernarda de San
Juan and Marı́a de Santa Inés. These nuns became disruptive and were en-
vious, appealing to the other founding mother, Mother Mariana de la En-
carnación, as it was clear they could not get anywhere with Mother Inés de la
Cruz. And the said Mariana de la Encarnación, after having great argu-
ments with the said Mother Inés de la Cruz that shattered the peace be-
tween the founding mothers, appealed to Francisco Manzo, asking that he
remove Mother Marı́a de Santa Inés from the post of teacher of novices as
of the two novices they had she only really wanted to have one, the said Ana
de San Bartolomé, to whom they were very attached and for whom they did
a lot because she was a gachupina, while they wanted to throw the other
novice, Teresa de Jesús, who had been born in Querétaro, out of the convent.
The said archbishop took the post away from the said Mother de Santa Inés
[f 89r]

and appointed the said Mother Mariana de la Encarnación, who had been
teacher to all the nuns in the convent except the two said gachupina sisters
Bernarda de San Juan and Marı́a de Santa Inés, who had been introduced
into the convent by Mother Inés de la Cruz. From this moment, the com-
munity was divided. When the said Mother Inés de la Cruz died, the four
gachupinas Bernarda de San Juan, Marı́a de Santa Inés, Margarita de San
Bernardo, and Ana de San Bartolomé said publicly and let it be known,
telling the said Juan de Castillete, that the said Mother Mariana de la En-
carnación had killed the said Mother Inés de la Cruz, their sister, by taking
away the post of teacher of novices from the said Marı́a de Santa Inés. As
soon as she took the habit, this witness was aware of this division.
It so happened that the said archbishop, Francisco Manzo, dishonorably
dismissed the chaplain of the said convent, don Alvaro de Cuevas, who af-
terward became dean of the cathedral church of this city and bishop of Oa-
xaca, and whose virtue and spirit is well known in this kingdom. The reason
for this, which this witness learned, was in order to avoid a great injury to
God our Father that was about to take place in this convent; this informa-
tion being given to this witness by the said founding Mother Mariana de la
Encarnación and the Mothers Catalina de Cristo and her sister Francisca
de San José. Archbishop Manzo put in his place F. Miranda (who had been
a merchant in Puebla before taking orders) and who was a great devotee
 Appendix 2 • 129

[f 89v]

of the four gachupinas and who recommended the said four nuns highly to
the said Archbishop Manzo.
It chanced that the said Mother Catalina de Cristo wrote a letter to
the said Alvaro de Cuevas, telling him of the feelings of the said founding
Mother Mariana de la Encarnación, herself, her sister Francisca de San José,
and the other nuns with regard to what had happened, and the said don
Alvaro Cuevas wrote in reply to the said Mother Catalina de Cristo saying
among other things that as the said Archbishop Manzo had taken away
from him the unsalaried post he held in the convent, God would take away
his miter from the said archbishop. The four gachupina nuns, having learned
of the existence of this reply, which was in the keeping of Mother Leonor
de San Diego, a nun in the Franciscan convent of Santa Isabel in this city,
wrote her a note, forging the said Mother Catalina de Cristo’s handwriting,
in which they said that the said Catalina de Cristo and Francisca de San
José, her sister, were at the grille of the choir under the church, waiting to
receive the said reply she had in her keeping. With this, the said Mother
Leonor de San Diego sent it, and it ended up in the power of the said four
gachupina nuns who delivered the said letter into the hands of the said Arch-
bishop Manzo.
[f 90r]

Seeing what it contained and what the said don Alvaro de Cuevas had writ-
ten, he became furious with him and with the nuns he corresponded with,
and in a matter of days the said archbishop organized an ecclesiastic visit of
the convent that was very long and mostly directed against the said Mother
Mariana de la Encarnación.
This witness can declare from firsthand experience that when she was a
novice, Father Miranda insisted (speaking for the four gachupinas and
Mother Inés de la Madre de Dios, sister-in-law of the said Bernarda de San
Juan, and Marı́a de Santa Inés, who were gathering people to their side and
whom he all confessed) that she give false testimony about the saintly found-
ing Mother Mariana de la Encarnación, and this witness could say nothing
to the nuns because she was a novice. She was to go in and ask the arch-
bishop for a teacher for the novices, saying that the said founding mother
130 • Colonial Angels

was relaxed in her mores and did not keep the rule, being only concerned
with indulging herself and breaking the vow of silence. The said Father Mi-
randa insisted on this, even though this witness told him that this was not
true. He said that that was not important because that was the way things
were, and that he had told the said Archbishop Manzo that this witness
would give him news about the said founding mother and teacher of novices.
When the moment came for this witness to inform

[f 90v]
the said archbishop, she told him everything she knew about her teacher in
measured tones and with complete truthfulness, aware of God’s presence.
She told him what was true and what were the faults she had noticed in the
other nuns. After this, the said gachupinas destroyed this witness’ peace of
mind (that is, Bernarda de San Juan, Marı́a de Santa Inés, Margarita de San
Bernardo, the said Mother Inés de la Madre de Dios, and the said Father
Miranda). They told her she had excommunicated herself by not telling the
archbishop everything they, and he, wanted. The said Father Miranda ab-
solved her. The visit having finished, there was an election for prioress, and
the Mother Beatrı́z de Jesús, of this city, was elected, but they put Mother
Bernarda de San Juan in the position, without having another election. The
said archbishop and the two chaplains, the said Father Miranda and the
licenciado 2 Manuel Téllez, had a chapter inside the convent that went on
for four hours and where they ordered the novice—meaning this witness—
to attend. In this chapter the archbishop spoke with passionate words about
the attempt to submit the convent to the obedience of the Discalced Car-
melite fathers, invoking the commonplace of when the Jews asked [ ]
God why He had sent them Samuel, they had not shown disrespect toward
Samuel but toward God Himself. He took out don Alvaro Cuevas’ reply,
swearing by his [ ] that he had been on the point of [ ]

[f 91r]

burning the letter upon his back.

Thereafter, there were enormous arguments [recensiones] between the said
prioress Bernarda de San Juan and the two said sisters Catalina de Cristo
and Francisca de San José and Mariana de Santa Leocadia (who at present
is disabled) about their having said that their said prioress had been given a
position when she had so recently professed, and did not even know how to
 Appendix 2 • 131

read Latin or Castilian and could only just write; for when she became a nun
she did not even know her alphabet or any of the ceremonies of the choir.
They wrote all this to the said archbishop, and the one fanning the flames
was the said Father Miranda. The said archbishop sent these nuns, the
founding mother and the two sisters and Mother Santa Leocadia, into iso-
lation in their cells for more than two months during Lent, preventing them
from hearing mass or any sermon, and not allowing them to confess, with a
further order that no nun communicate with them. Afterward he took them
out of isolation and into a long penitence, and before the year was out they
took the priorate out of the hands of the said Mother Beatrı́z de Jesús, dis-
crediting her with the archbishop. One of the grave faults they attributed to
her was that the said Mother Marı́a de Santa Inés had written a letter to
Friar Alvaro de Jesús, a Discalced Carmelite of this city, asking him some
details about the duties of the order of which she was very observant [nimia].

[f 91v]
The archbishop learned of this through the said gachupina nuns, and as he
was displeased by the resistance the said prioress Beatrı́z de Jesús had shown
over not accepting a letter from His Holiness that the marchioness of Cade-
reita (vicereine at the time) had shown in order to be admitted into con-
vents, and that had been accepted by the prelates and the convents, he took
away the office of prioress from the said Mother Beatrı́z de Jesús and re-
placed her with the Mother Bernarda de San Juan. The cunning of these
gachupina nuns is remarkable; they notify the archbishop of this letter ad-
dressed to a Discalced Carmelite friar in order to topple the said prioress as
they did, and at the same time they themselves were trying to get themselves
considered as subject to the Discalced Carmelites.
In the manuscript chronicle about the foundation of Discalced Carmelite
convents in New Spain, written by Friar Antonio de la Madre de Dios,
which was brought to this convent and read aloud to the community be-
tween the hours of two and three as a spiritual lesson as is customary, there
is an account of the long life of the said Bernarda de San Juan, deceased.
This says that when the Carmelite fathers offered her entry to this convent,
she asked if it were subject to the secular clergy, or to the order. Having been
told it was subject to the secular clergy, she was very displeased, and since
then had had in mind to do as much as she could so as to subject it to the
order, which she did always
132 • Colonial Angels

[f 92r]

until her life was cut short, as can be seen.

As soon as the said Mother Bernarda de San Juan was prioress, the said
marchioness of Cadereita started coming to the convent; as she [Bernarda
de San Juan] had been brought up in the countess of Montalbán’s palace,
she liked all things courtly, and also liked to please the said archbishop. The
visits of the said marchioness resulted in serious scandals for this convent
due to the excessive encounters that the said marchioness and the said arch-
bishop held in the convent. So frequent were these, that this witness was
forced to comment to her confessor, the said Father Miranda, on how it was
possible that in order to win over the archbishop the said gachupina nuns
had fallen into accepting such an ugly thing as was the immoderate com-
munication that took place in the convent between the said archbishop and
the marchioness of Cadereita. No sooner did the said marchioness of Cade-
reita come to the convent when immediately the archbishop arrived, and it
was for this reason that the said archbishop had removed the said Mother
Beatrı́z de Jesús from the office of prioress and replaced her with the said
Bernarda de San Juan, [f or the latter was] a woman of little discipline and
less religion, who fell so easily into tolerating such an ugly thing like the said
communication. Father Miranda replied to this saying that one could not
stay a prelate’s hand nor hinder him. And what she has said about the said
Mother de San Juan being of little discipline was because her father, Pedro
Bermudo or Bermudes, who worked for the butcher Gabriel [ ] de la
Cruz, was in charge of the butcher’s shop in Tacuba,

[f 92v]
and he herded the cows, as did his son Cristóbal de la Casa, who earned his
keep there. They were all from Spain, and his mother, doña Ana de Lima,
sold candles from the door of her house in Tacuba. This witness knew all
this from conversations her father, Francisco Fernández Segura, and all the
people from her house (they lived on a farm in the jurisdiction of Tacuba)
had with Cristóbal de la Casa and his mother. Moreover, the slaves of this
witness’ father would go there to buy meat and candles.
As soon as this said Archbishop Manzo went to Spain, Dr. Luis de Si-
fuentes, having been elected as vicar of all the convents, held an election for
prioress in which Mother Francisca de San José was elected. Taking advan-
 Appendix 2 • 133

tage of the archbishop’s absence, the said Mother Catalina de Cristo wrote
to her said aunt Leonor de San Diego asking how it was that she had given
over the said letter from don Alvaro de Cuevas, and she also arranged for
Father Manuel Téllez to ask her. Leonor de San Diego said that she had
sent it because of the note in Catalina de Cristo’s handwriting that gave the
reasons already referred to, and so the riddle was resolved. On this occasion,
she spoke very angrily about this subject with this witness.
The term of office of the said Mother Francisca de San José’s priorate
came to an end amid many troubles
[f 93r]

and arguments, and continual war against the said gachupina Mothers Ber-
narda de San Juan, Marı́a de Santa Inés, Margarita de San Bernardo, and
Ana de San Bartolomé. During this time, they brought Carmelite fathers
into the convent, for while the said Archbishop Manzo had ruled, more than
six years had passed since a Carmelite father had so much as entered the
church. Being near the end of his life, Dean don Diego Guerra acting as
vicar, charged Dr. don Pedro de Solı́s Calderón, canon of this holy church,
with holding elections for prioress. The said Bernarda de San Juan was very
keen to be elected prioress, and seeing that she would fail, she voted for her
sister-in-law the Mother Inés de la Madre de Dios. During this priorate,
the gachupina nuns made themselves owners of the convent, and a great deal
of energy and resourcefulness was devoted to gaining the license for the [
] and to getting the reports which she spoke of in her first [declaration].
In the term of the said prioress Francisca de San José, as she has already
declared, the said Carmelite fathers began to come to the convent. Among
them was a certain Friar Andrés de los Santos, who was well known in this
kingdom and who preached in the convent, continually praising the said
Daughters of the Order who were and are the said gachupina nuns; they
always call themselves ‘‘Daughters of the Order’’ but never called the found-
ing mother

[f 93v]
Mariana de la Encarnación by this name, instead calling her ‘‘that possessed
old hag,’’ for they believed that she was not in favor of this project, even
though she did what she could while she could still see, signing what they
gave her to sign. Given that the said Carmelite fathers supported some nuns
134 • Colonial Angels

as Daughters of the Order and insulted others, many factions grew in the
convent, and the said priest Friar Andrés de los Santos treated the said Cata-
lina de Cristo and Francisca de San José, this witness, Teresa de Jesús, and
Beatrı́z de Santiago completely disrespectfully because they obeyed the secu-
lar prelate.
The three-year term of the said Inés de la Madre de Dios being over,
Archbishop Juan de Palafox, who was governor of this archbishopric, re-
elected the said Mother Beatrı́z de Jesús. In the speech he gave to the private
chapter, he again used the same reference from Scripture that Archbishop
Manzo had used, warning that they would pay heavily for persisting with
their project. This witness remembers during her interview with the said
don Juan de Palafox that she mentioned the great anxiety that the project to
submit the convent to the obedience of the order was causing many of the
nuns’ souls, and that he replied with the following: ‘‘My daughter, this has
been a ploy of the Devil in order to
[f 94r]

destroy this house spiritually and temporally under the guise of a search for
perfection.’’
In the first year the said canon Dr. don Pedro de Solı́s, who was vicar of
this convent, removed Beatrı́z de Jesús from office under orders from the
said don Juan de Palafox, who was in Puebla. It seems that Father Friar Juan
de los Reyes, who she thinks was provincial governor of the male Carmelites
and a great friend of the said don Juan de Palafox, engineered this removal
at the request of the said gachupina nuns. She knows this because it was
spoken of publicly among the nuns of this convent. Even Mother Ana de
San Bartolomé talked to this witness about it, asking for her vote in favor of
the said Mother Bernarda de San Juan for prioress. Within three months
they elected her as prioress, and being prioress, Dr. don Juan de Mañozcar
became the archbishop of this city. During this priorate, the very bloody
events happened that she has declared as taking place in her first year. It
being very late, the court adjourned.

Ana de San Bartolomé

Lo que siento y he conocido siempre de la hermana Andrea de San Francisco
es un natural inquieto, poco humilde, inclinado a vanidad, presumiendo de
 Appendix 2 • 135

sı́, muy pagada [sic] de su gran capacidad y juicio, haciéndose reformadora

cuando con ella no han podido todos los prelados y preladas que han tenido
que corregir su natural travieso; porque de las nuestras más correcciones [sic]
saca quejas y agravios que las preladas le hacı́an, que todas la querı́an mal
porque ella procura o querı́a lo más perfecto. Con esto inquieta a la comu-
nidad que la tiene bien conocida, y saben todas las religiosas su modo de
proceder tan contrario a la religión del Carmen. Está tan ciega con sus pa-
siones que no conoce los daños tan grandes que ha causado y está causando
a este convento, desacreditando con su lengua en cuanto puede la buena
opinión y fama de las religiosas. Y esto en particular con la madre Marı́a de
Santa Inés, de quien toda esta ciudad tiene grande estima y veneración por
las muchas partes y capacidad que Dios ha puesto en esta religiosa; por lo
cual he conocido en la hermana Andrea de San Francisco una envidia, no-
table en todo el convento, y esto da a entender a los de afuera, que la tienen
conocida por sus palabras poco recatadas y mal consideradas, sin atención a
Dios y a sus obligaciones. Ha llegado a tanto la inclinación y mala voluntad
que esta hermana nuestra tiene a esta madre, poniendo lengua con infamia
en su honor, levantándole graves testimonios con que la tiene desacreditada
con el prelado, a quien tiene tan ciego y engañado que en todos sus sinietros
informes le ha dado crédito, con que se ha hecho a sı́ mismo mucho daño en
haberse dejado engañar de un mal juicio. En otra ocasión supe y oı́ de boca
de la madre Mariana de la Encarnación, fundadora de este convento, lamen-
tándose de la mala conciencia y poco temor de Dios con que esta hermana
hablaba de la madre Marı́a de Santa Inés, me dijo estas palabaras: ‘‘Mis dos
manos meteré en un fuego por ella.’’ También me dijo en esta ocasión: ‘‘¡Ay
hija! qué dolor serı́a que saliese de entre nosotras presidenta, no lo permita
su Divina Majestad, encomiéndele a Dios muy de veras que le dé luz para
que se salve.’’ En otra ocasión oı́ de tan inquieta a esta hermana y indignada
con la
[f 180v]

madre priora, que era entonces Marı́a de la Encarnación, religiosa nuestra y

observante de sus leyes. La causa de su indignación no fue más que mandar
la prelada que acudiese a la misa conventual en ocasión que estaba hablando
en el torno con una hermana suya seglar, a quien dijo la esperara o volviera
después, mas la prelada no le consintió volver. Causóle esto muy gran pesa-
dumbre e inquietud, que mostró por las palabras que le oı́ decir, que Dios la
136 • Colonial Angels

vengara, que a su Divina Majestad pedı́a justicia y venganza, que el prelado

los habı́a todos amenazado, al convento y a la prelada, y a las que lo habı́an
sido, encaminando estas palabras a la madre Marı́a de Santa Inés, con quien
ella muestra tan declarada aversión que siendo dos veces priora, le dio harto
en qué entender con su natural inclinación a conversaciones de seglares, con
que anda esta hermana inquietando a las preladas y a la comunidad. En
cuanto quiere, hace su voluntad, sin tener quien la corrija. Al prelado tiene
engañado; hace más de lo que ella manda; de la prelada es ella prelada; con
esto anda todo al revés. A estas hermanas legas las tiene engañadas y opues-
tas a la comunidad que, siendo como son de profesión humilde, las ha hecho
capitulares, sacando leyes contra las de la religión, que prohı́be y manda que
estas hemanas no puedan dar voto ni tener voz ni consejo en nada. Y siendo
esto ası́, las ha inquietado y metido en cuantos males procura hacer al con-
vento. Con esto las trae turbadas, y sin atención a sus leyes y obligaciones
que les prohibe y hace exentas de estas inquietudes en que esta hermana las
mete, causando con esto notable inquietud a toda la comunidad. Todas sus
trasas y afán de todad su vida es en orden de huir de la observancia y estre-
chura de la orden de su religión, que tanto ha repugnado, y cada dı́a la con-
tradice más, sabiendo lo que a Nuestra Santa Madre le dijo Cristo Nuestro
Señor de un sólo convento que tenı́a al
[f 181r]

ordinario; que si no procuraba ponerlo a la orden, vendrı́a presto en relaja-

ción. Pues, ¿qué se puede esperar de éste donde está la hermana Andrea de
San Francisco sino que está en gran riesgo de perderse? Si Dios, quien es por
su infinita misericordia, no se compadece de estas almas y pone este con-
vento a la orden, no hay duda sino [que] enflaquecerá y descaerán las almas
por falta de la doctrina y pasto espiritual de nuestra sagrada religión, que
tanto hace esta hermana por desterrarla de esta casa; pero no se matará por
conservar las penitencias de la orden, y a las asistencias del coro, que más
inclinada es su naturaleza a blandura y regalo que a aspereza y rigores. Esto
vive muy satisfecha de sı́ y de su desahogo, y no tan sólo es anojada [sic], sino
temeraria en sus palabras, pues se atrevió a llamar al confesor que nos con-
fiesa (que es un clérigo muy ajustado y temeroso de Dios) [y] le reprehendió,
diciéndole que cómo nos absolvı́a, con otras cosas que callo, porque lo es
mucho. El cuanto asombrado [sic] de ver tal osadı́a en una religiosa con
hábito de Carmelita. Todo esto no es nada para lo que sabe y conoce la
 Appendix 2 • 137

comunidad de esta hermana. Dios la reduzca a la verdad y conocimiento de

ella. En dos ocasiones he procurado hablar a esta pobre hermana con amor
y hermandad, compadecida de su desbaratamiento, por ver si la podı́a redu-
cir a la unión y paz; con que la he convidado dos veces. Le dije, ‘‘Hermana
Andrea de San Francisco, mucho me pesa de sus desconsuelos. Por amor de
Dios, que se aquiete.’’ Apenas me dejó decir la palabra cuando volvió a mı́
con una resolución, y me dijo, ‘‘Dios volverá por mi’’ o ‘‘me vengará,’’ no me
acuerdo bien cuáles de estas palabras dijo. Como la vi de tan enconada im-
penitencia, que hiciera un acto de humildad y mortificación en el refetorio,
la cojı́ [a] solas y le pedı́ con las manos puestas, por Jesucristo y Santa Marı́a,
que hicera aquella mortificación delante de la comunidad, [que] quedarı́a
edificada si mostraba rendimiento y humildad. A ésto me miró con inclina-
ción y nada le ha aprovechado. Aprovéchele la gracia de Jesucristo. Y por ser
verdad, lo firmo de mi nombre.
Ana de San Bartolomé

Ana de San Bartolomé

What I feel and have always known about the sister Andrea de San Fran-
cisco is that she has a turbulent nature, lacking in humility, inclined to
vanity, proud of herself, and very convinced of her great capabilities and
intelligence, making herself out to be a reformer when not a single prelate
or prioress who has had to correct her unruly nature has been able to cope
with her. For from all of our corrections, she infers complaints and griev-
ances done to her by the prioresses, saying that they all disliked her because
what she wanted or tried to obtain was utmost perfection. With this she
disturbs the community who knows her inside out, and all the nuns know
her way of going about things—so contrary to the Carmelite religion.
She is so blinded by her passions that she ignores the huge damage she
has caused and is causing in this convent, discrediting with her tongue
whenever she can the good opinion and name of the nuns, and in particular
that of Marı́a de Santa Inés, who is esteemed by all in this city and is ven-
erated for the many qualities and capacities that God has given her. For this
reason I have noted in sister Andrea de San Francisco an envy that is evident
to the whole convent. She tells these things to people outside the cloister,
who have come to know her by her unguarded words, ill-considered and
heedless of God and the obligations owing to Him. The bad propensity and
138 • Colonial Angels

wicked intentions that this our sister feels toward this nun Marı́a de Santa
Inés have reached such a point that she has spoken infamously of this
mother’s honor, raising grave and false testimony against her. Using this she
has discredited Marı́a de Santa Inés with the prelate, whom she has so ut-
terly blinded and deceived that he believes all her sinister reports, doing
himself much harm by allowing himself to be taken in by such wicked opin-
ions. On another occasion I understood and heard from the mouth of
Mother Mariana de la Encarnación herself (founding mother of this con-
vent) complaints about the wicked conscience and little fear of God with
which this sister talked about Mother Marı́a de Santa Inés. She said these
words to me, ‘‘I would put both my hands into the fire for her,’’ and she also
said to me at this time, ‘‘Oh, my daughter, how painful it would be if she
among all of us were to be elected prioress, may His Divine Majesty prevent
it. Pray to God very fervently that she may be given light in order to save
herself.’’
On another occasion, I heard this sister to be very distraught and indig-
nant with Marı́a de la Encarnación, who was the mother prioress at that
time and very observant of the rule. The cause of her indignation was noth-
ing more than that the prioress had ordered that she attend mass in the
convent when she was at the grille talking to a secular sister of hers whom
she told to wait or to come back later; but the prioress did not allow her to
come back, and this made her (Andrea de San Francisco) very unhappy and
distraught, which was clear from the words I heard her say. She invoked God
to revenge her and demanded justice and vengeance from His Divine Maj-
esty, saying that the prelate had threatened the entire convent and the pri-
oress, and those who had been prioress (meaning by these words Mother
Marı́a de Santa Inés). She has such an open aversion for Marı́a de Santa
Inés that, the two times the latter was prioress, she gave her much trouble
with her natural predilection for conversation with secular people—a thing
with which this sister disturbs the prioresses and the community.
She does what she wishes whenever she wants, having no one to discipline
her. She has deceived the prelate so utterly that he does most of what she
wants; she is the prioress of the prioress, and so everything is upside down.
The lay sisters have been deceived by her and set against the community.
Their profession being a lowly one, she has raised them to the status of
chapter nuns, inventing laws that are against the rule, which prohibits and
bars these sisters from voting or giving an opinion or any advice on anything.
She has stirred them up in this way and involved them in all the evils she
 Appendix 2 • 139

plans for the convent, so making them turbulent and inattentive of their laws
and obligations that prohibit them from the concerns in which this sister
embroils them. With all this she causes an incredible disturbance to all the
community.
All her work and the whole purpose of her life is dedicated to escaping
the observance and strictness of the order of her religion, which she has so
repudiated and which every day she contradicts more, though she knows
what Christ Our Lord said to Our Holy Mother about a convent that was
subject to the secular prelate. He said that if she did not try to put it under
the authority of the order, it would soon fall into relaxed ways. Well, what
hope can there be for this one where sister Andrea de San Francisco is?
Nothing but certainty that it is at risk of damning itself. If God through his
infinite mercy does not have pity on these souls and puts this convent under
the authority of the order, there is no doubt but that it will weaken, and the
souls will fall off through lack of the spiritual doctrine and nourishment of
our Holy Religion that this sister does so much to exile from this house,
though she would be incapable of exerting herself [lit. killing herself ] to
conserve the penitences of the order and the attendance at choir, for her
nature is more inclined toward softness and ease than toward hardness and
rigor.
She lives very contentedly with her lack of inhibition, and not only is she
angry but also bold in her words. She dared to summon the confessor who
confesses us all and who is a very upright and God-fearing cleric, repre-
hending him, asking how could he absolve us, and other things that I will
leave in silence, they being too much. He was amazed to see such boldness
from a nun wearing the Carmelite habit, but this is nothing in comparison
with what this community knows and has experienced from this sister. May
God reconcile her to truth and to knowledge of herself.
On two occasions I have tried to talk to this poor sister with love and
sisterliness, full of sympathy for her ruinous state to see if I could reconcile
her to union and peace. Thus I have approached her twice, saying ‘‘Sister
Andrea de San Francisco, I am very sorry about your afflictions, for God’s
sake calm down.’’ She hardly let me say a word when she turned toward me
resolutely and said ‘‘God will return for me’’ or ‘‘God will revenge me’’—I
cannot remember accurately which of these words she said. As I saw her so
intent on not repenting, I came up to her when she was alone and asked her
with my hands uplifted, and for the sake of Jesus Christ and his Holy
Mother, to do an act of humility and mortification in the refectory in front
140 • Colonial Angels

of the community. I said she would be edified if she showed abjection and
humility. At this she looked at me irately, and told me that what I said was
of no benefit to her. May the Grace of Jesus Christ be of some benefit to
her. In proof that this is true, I sign my name.
Ana de San Bartolomé

María de San Juan

[f 181v]

Digo como religiosa Carmelita Descalza, que preguntada en qué manera nos
inquieta o ha inquietado la hermana Andrea de San Francisco, respondo que
ha 14 años poco más o menos que estoy en este convento, y en dicho tiempo
he experimentado por experiencia propia, como diré después, y por haberlo
oı́do decir a religiosas antiguas y que desde su noviciado conocieron dicho
sujeto, que es una religiosa de espı́ritu muy inquieto y poco acomodado al
estilo de Carmelita Descalza, antes en todo contrario. Y ésta juzgo es la causa
de haberse opuesto a la pretención que todo este convento tiene de dar la
obediencia a su religión para su mayor observancia y reparo de los daños que
todas experimentamos el dı́a de hoy por haber el señor arzobispo quitado la
doctrina de nuestros religiosos Carmelitas en púlpito, confesionario, y plá-
ticas espirituales; con tanto extremo que hasta en artı́culo de muerte los ha
negado, con notable daño de nuestra mayor perfección, e inquietud y des-
concierto de toda la comunidad, experimentando y sabiendo por evidencias
ciertas que todo ha procedido de temerarias y siniestras relaciones que esta
religiosa ha hecho al prelado. Y de lo mismo el haber el señor arzobispo
quitado a la madre superiora que por muerte de la prelada (originada de
pesadumbres que por abusos de dicha religiosa le dió el señor arzobispo,
como es notorio a este convento), y puesto en su lugar contra el gusto de la
comunidad, y sin votos, a una religiosa que aunque buena no [era buena]
para prelada, por ser muy tı́mida e inabilitada con la cortedad de vista, que
es tan grande que ni registrar papel ni escribir puede, siendo especial punto
de nuestras leyes para las preladas el registrar todas las cartas y papeles que
se traen al convento. Esto nos sirve de inquietud y desunión con dicha reli-
giosa, como lo es también la oposición que ha tenido siempre con sus pre-
ladas, detrayendo [sic] de todas sus acciones, y publicando entre las cuditas
[sic] para malquistarlas, que procedı́an con pasión y ambición, sacándoles
 Appendix 2 • 141

[f 182r]

sus linajes, cosa tan indecente y aborrecible en nuestra religión; introdu-

ciendo en este convento las oposiciones de mujeres de España y de esta
tierra, poniendo malos ánimos y de unas con otras, con que ha causado muy
poca unión en algunas, hasta que se reconoció ser deması́as de este sujeto. Y
esto no ha sido con dos o tres preladas, sino con todas las que en discurso de
14 años he visto. Y esto mismo le dije en una ocasión a ella misma, porque
me molestaba sobre que dijese a un prelado que una religiosa estaba enferma
de pesadumbres que la prelada le habı́a dado. Todo era en orden a malquistar
dicha prelada, y no constándome a mı́ que aquello fuese ası́, y que no admitı́a
las excusas que yo le daba, en 3 o 4 ocasiones que en la materia me habló, le
dije con enojo, ‘‘Hermana Andrea de San Francisco, por amor de Dios que
se vaya y no me venga a dar tales consejos, porque es una religiosa que de
cuantas preladas ha alcanzado, de todas la he visto decir mal. Y no puede ser
que todas sean malas, y use caridad buena y no al contrario. Y ası́ no me
venga jamás con más consejos de esos, y Dios me libre de religiosa que todas
las preladas son malas de su boca.’’ Fuese muy colérica, diciendo algunas
palabras que por no alargarme no digo. Y entendiendo esto le sirviera de
escarmiento, no lo fue, antes en otra ocasión que estando yo con necesidad
de hablar al prelado le escribı́ un papel, enviándolo al torno con una religiosa
para que lo despachase, y sabiendo que ella lo habı́a abierto y escrito en él,
[se] lo pedı́ a Pedro de Vig [ ] que lo llevaba. Y abriéndolo, hallé que le
escribı́a en mi mismo papel al prelado el daño de la prelada, diciéndole que
por allı́ me ganarı́a. Y yo hice pedazos dicho papel, no queriendo se llevase,
de que ella se enojó mucho con el dicho Pedro de Vig [ ], que ¿por qué
me habı́a dado el papel? Y en otra ocasión me habló con tanta temeridad de
un prelado y prelada, que espantándome yo de lo que me decı́a, si bien no
creyéndolo, me dijo otro dı́a, ‘‘Hermana Marı́a de San Juan, aquello que le
dije ayer, claro está que no serı́a tan malo como pareció, y ası́ no lo piense.
Use caridad.’’ Respondı́le yo, ‘‘Hermana Andrea de San Francisco, no tiene
que decirme, que yo nunca lo creı́, y esa religiosa de quien me habló tiene
muy asegurado su partido, y ası́ no tiene que darme satisfacción.’’ Concluyo
con decir que rara ha sido la vez que me he puesto a hablar con ella que no
haya salido con menoscabo de mi alma y detracción de la prelada. Y por
último, la presidenta que hoy tenemos, habiéndola hecho el señor arzobispo
(por consejo de la hermana, y siguiéndose
142 • Colonial Angels

[f 182v]

en todo por sus órdenes, aunque sea con menosprecio propio) la trata con la
indecencia que es notorio a la comunidad. Esto y mucho más que pudiera
decir en esta materia me ha sido causa de poca unión con esta religiosa. Y
también la oposición y poco amor a nuestra sagrada religión del Carmen [en]
palabras y obras, como lo experimenta hoy este convento. Y esto mismo ha
procurado sembrar en las demás, y hablo por experiencia propia, que en con-
versaciones le he oı́do. Y no habiendo hallado en las religiosas coristas quien
la siguiese, sino ha sido la hermana Teresa de Jesús, y la madre presidenta,
se ha metido con las hermanas de velo blanco, queriéndolas introducir a que
asistan en las reprehensiones y visitas que los prelados hacen a la comunidad,
no dándoles nuestra religión sagrada más facultad que de meras sirvientas;
no dándoles para nada más que para el ministerio a que vinieron del servicio
de la comunidad. Y para ésto se ha valido de aparentes obras de caridad,
aunque contra nuestras leyes, y también con los consejos del doctor Serna,
que juzgo ha sido la causa, porque antes que le comunicaran estaban tan
deseosas de nuestra religión y hacer las diligencias que las demás hacemos,
que con sumo gusto firmaron cartas que en orden a este intento se escribie-
ron a nuestro Rey y Señor. Y la hermana Marı́a de los Angeles dijo una y
muchas veces que ella dirı́a al señor arzobispo, como la primera del con-
vento, las diligencias que de sus principios habı́an hecho nuestras fundadoras
de ponerlo a la obediencia de la religión, para su mayor perfección, y otras
muchas cosas en orden a esto. Y lo mismo la hermana Marı́a del Niño Jesús,
y la hermana Bernarda de la Presentación, de que hoy las vemos tan contra-
rias con la comunicación de la dicha Andrea de San Francisco y de Serna,
que entrando en las recreaciones cuando se junta la comunidad [y discute]
de los provechos del alma y mayor perfección nuestra que nos será el estar a
nuestra religión, enmudecen y no hallan qué decir las que solı́an hallar tantas
conveniencias en ello. Y no me espanto, porque quien da oı́do a la dicha
hermana Andrea de San Francisco, siempre sentirá mucho que decir en esta
parte. Y por no repetir cosas de un mismo género, no lo hago. Como es Dios
testigo de ello, y que en esta materia ni en otras no digo más que lo que ha
pasado por

[f 183r]
mı́ con esta religiosa, pudiendo decir lo que he visto con otras. Y lo dejo
porque cada una dará cuenta de sı́, y todas estas cosas fuerza [ ] que nos
 Appendix 2 • 143

causa desunión e inquietud, viendo un mostra [sic] que es contraria a su

misma madre la religión, y a sus hermanos y hermanas, y a nuestra santa
madre Teresa de Jesús, que nos dejó por palabra y obra tantos ejemplos en
esta materia. Pues un convento sólo, no paró ni cesó, siguió hasta que le hizo
dar la obediencia a la religión, y esto con particular mandato de Dios, que le
dijo se relajarı́a sino se unı́a con los demás que estaban sujetos a la religión.
Y a todo esto adelante, la hermana [ordena] sus dictámenes mirando al in-
terés propio, y no al común, y mayor gloria de Dios. También he experi-
mentado en esta religiosa un espı́ritu tan inquieto, ası́ en las elecciónes o
recenciones de novicias y visitas de prelados, que causaba en las demás desa-
sosiego, porque andaba de unas en otras inquietando de tal manera que en
una ocasión de elección de prelada, estando ya para elegir, aguardando el
prelado en el coro bajo, a mı́ y a otra religiosa nos puso en aprieto de echar-
nos por una ventana porque se puso en el cabo del dormitorio, aguardando
que saliésemos de las celdas, nomás que para inquietarnos. Y como tiene
tanta eficacia en lo que habla, nos restamos [sic] a salir de las celdas, viendo
que ya no podı́a ser menos, sin responderle a palabra que nos dijera. Y ası́ lo
hicimos. Muchas cosas que pudiera decir de este género dejo, y sólo digo
que habiendo la madre superiora llamado al Santo Tribunal de la Inquisi-
ción, por escrúpulos que le causó una carta del señor arzobispo, diciéndole
una nochea la hermana Teresa de Jesús que ‘‘¿no sentı́amos el haber traido la
Inquisición a casa?’’ Y respondiendo yo, que lo oı́, ‘‘[que] el convento no ha
perdido nada en que el Santo Tribunal haya venido, y harto trabajo fuera
que tuviéramos que temer,’’ tomó la demanda la hermana Andrea, y respon-
diéndome muy colérica dos o tres veces, ‘‘no ha perdido nada, pues aguarde
que yo los llamaré.’’ Respondı́le yo, ‘‘llámelos muy en ora buena, que yo soy
cristiana y no tengo qué temer.’’ Ultimamente, digo que Dios es testigo que
cuanto ha que he dicho va sin encarecimiento, y que no lo dijera sino fuera
para que se conozca lo que este convento pasa y ha pasado.

María de San Juan

Being asked in what way sister Andrea de San Francisco disturbs us or has
disturbed us, I reply as a Carmelite nun that I have been in this convent for
about fourteen years and during that time I have experienced for myself, as
I will declare later, and I have heard from nuns who have been here a long
time and have known her since her novitiate, that said subject is a nun of
very turbulent spirit, little accustomed to the style of the Discalced Carmel-
144 • Colonial Angels

ite, but instead contrary to it in everything. I judge this to be the reason for
her opposing the project that the whole convent has to subject itself to the
order, for the good of its greater observance and repair of the damage that
all of us experience at this time due to the archbishop having deprived us of
the doctrine of our Carmelite priests in the pulpit, confessional, and spiritual
lectures; so extreme is this ban indeed that even for the administration of
the last rites he has forbidden their coming. This has caused notable damage
to our greater perfection, as well as the distress and bafflement of the whole
community that has experienced and knows by undeniable proofs that all
this comes from bold and sinister reports that this nun has given the prelate.
Moreover, the archbishop removed the mother superior from her position
that she held due to the death of the prioress (which itself was occasioned,
as is well known in this convent, by the troubles the archbishop caused her,
misled by the abuses of the said nun) and replaced her against the will of the
community (and without an election) with a nun who, though good, was
not fit to be prioress as she was too timid and lacking in skill, and so short-
sighted that she could not even read or write a letter. It is a particular point
of our laws that the prioress should check all letters and papers that are
brought into the convent, and so this disability causes us distress.
All of this sets us against the said nun, another reason being the opposi-
tion she has always manifested against her prioresses, belittling their actions
and making public among [ ] in order to discredit them by saying that
they were guided by passion and ambition, invoking their family back-
ground—a totally indecent thing and completely alien to our religion—
introducing the opposition between women from Spain and women from
this land into this convent, setting one against the other in such a way as to
cause divisions among some, until it was realized that these were the excesses
of this particular nun. She has done this not only with two or three prior-
esses, but with all those I have known in my fourteen years of experience. I
said this to her on one occasion when she was insisting that I tell a certain
prelate that a nun had been made sick by the troubles a prioress had given
her, in order to discredit the prioress. As I was not at all sure that this was
true, and as she would not accept the excuses I gave her on the three or four
occasions she talked to me about this, I said angrily to her, ‘‘Sister Andrea
de San Francisco, for God’s sake go away and don’t come and give me such
advice, for I have seen that you are a nun who speaks badly of every prioress
she has known, and it’s not possible that they are all bad. You should be
 Appendix 2 • 145

more charitable and not the opposite, so don’t come to me anymore with
such council, and God save me from a nun in whose opinion all prioresses
are bad.’’ She left very angry, saying some words that I will not repeat in
order not to go on for too long, and I hoped this would serve as some warn-
ing to her. This was not so. Instead, on another occasion when I needed to
talk to the prelate I wrote him a paper and sent it to the gate with a nun so
that she could send it off. I knew that Andrea de San Francisco had opened
it and written on it, and so I asked for it from Pedro de Vig [ ] who was
delivering it, and opening it I saw that she had written damaging things
about the prioress in my own letter, saying that that was the way I could be
won. I ripped the said paper to shreds, not wishing that it should be deliv-
ered, at which she was very angry with the said Pedro de Vig [ ] because
he had given me the paper. On another occasion she spoke to me so boldly
about a prelate and a prioress that I was totally shocked by what she said,
even if I did not believe it. Next day she said to me, ‘‘Sister Marı́a de San
Juan, what I said to you yesterday is of course not as bad as it seemed and so
don’t think it is so; be charitable.’’ I replied, ‘‘Sister Andrea de San Francisco,
you don’t have to tell me as I never believed it and that nun you spoke about
can be very sure about having support so you don’t have to convince me of
anything.’’ I will end by saying that few have been the times I have spoken
to her when I have not come off with some damage to my soul and some
detraction done to the prioress.
Finally, the prioress we have now (who was appointed by the archbishop
on the advice of the sister, her orders being carried out in every respect) is
treated shamefully by her in a way that is well known to all the community.
This and much more that I could say on this matter have been the cause of
my little alliance with this sister. Another reason is the opposition and scant
affection she has shown toward our sacred Carmelite religion, both in words
and in deeds, which even up until this day the convent community experi-
ences. She has tried to foment this opposition and lack of love in the other
nuns, and I know this from my own experience, as I have heard her say as
much in conversations. Not being able to find anyone among the choir nuns
who would follow her except for the sister Teresa de Jesús and the mother
superior, she got involved with the lay sisters. She wanted to make them part
of the disciplinary audiences and inspections that the priests carry out in this
community when our sacred religion does not allow them this function, only
that of being servants, banning them from anything other than what they
146 • Colonial Angels

came to do which is minister to the community. In order to do this, she has

used apparent acts of charity that are against our laws. I judge this and the
advice of Dr. Serna to have been the cause of their change, for before they
communicated with Dr. Serna they were as impatient for our religion and
to do the necessary things that all the rest of us did, that they signed all the
letters that were written to the king, our lord, for this purpose, with great
delight. Sister Marı́a de los Angeles said not once but repeatedly that she, as
the oldest nun in the convent, would tell the archbishop of the things that
had been done from its foundation by our founding mothers in order to
submit it to the obedience of the order so as to bring it to greater perfection,
as well as about other matters pertaining to this. The sisters Marı́a del Niño
Jesús and Bernarda de la Presentación agreed with this, and now we see
them so set against it, no doubt due to the dealings they have had with the
said Andrea de San Francisco and Serna. This is so much the case that when
they come into the informal meetings in which the community gathers to
discuss the benefits to the soul and the greater perfection we will attain if we
have our religion, they are silent and find nothing to say in its support when
before they found so many benefits. This does not surprise me, for whoever
has listened to the said sister Andrea de San Francisco will always feel
strongly about this. But so as not to repeat the same kind of thing I will not
continue.
As God is my witness, on this matter and on others I say nothing except
what has happened to me personally with this nun, although I could say
what I have seen happen with others. I leave this so that each one can give
her own account. Undoubtedly these things have brought about disunion
among us, and it distresses us to see a monster who is opposed to her own
mother religion, her sisters and her brothers, and Our Holy Mother Santa
Teresa de Jesús, who left us in words and deeds so many examples in this
matter. She did not stop or desist in her efforts for one sole convent, she
carried on until she made it submit to the obedience of the order, and this
was with the specific command of God, who warned that it would become
relaxed if it did not join the others that were subject to the order. In every-
thing I have described beforehand, the sister’s opinions were formed on the
basis of self-interest, rather than on the good of the community or the
greater glory of God. I have also known this sister to have a disruptive spirit
during elections, examinations of novices, and inspections by prelates; on all
these occasions she caused great unease in the other nuns, for she would go
 Appendix 2 • 147

from one to the other troubling them to such a degree that on one occasion,
when elections were held for prioress, just when the votes were about to be
cast and while we were waiting for the priest in the lower choir (myself and
another nun) she importuned us so much that we thought of escaping
through a window, as she was lying in wait at the end of the dormitory for
us to come out of the cells. This was in order to upset our peace of mind,
and as what she says is so persuasive we had no choice but to leave the cells,
deciding not to reply to whatever she would say to us. And so we did.
I could say many other things of this kind, but I leave them, and say only
that the mother superior having called in the Inquisition because of doubts
that a letter from the archbishop had caused her, Andrea de San Francisco
had said one night to sister Teresa de Jesús if we were not sorry for having
brought the Inquisition into the house. Having overheard this, I replied that
in my opinion the convent did not lose anything by the Holy Tribunal’s
coming, and that it would hardly be necessary for us to be frightened. Sister
Andrea took up the question, and she answered me very angrily saying two
or three times, ‘‘Well, so it hasn’t lost anything then; well, wait and see be-
cause I’ll call them.’’ I replied, ‘‘Call them as quickly as you like for I am a
good Christian and have nothing to fear.’’ Finally, as God is my witness,
nothing I have said has been elaborated, and I would prefer not to have said
anything except that what has happened and happens in this convent should
be known.
Appendix 3

Archivo General de la Nación. Ramo Historia. Vol. 109,

exp. 2, ff. 8–56 (1723). Diligencias ejecutadas en virtud de la
real cédula de su majestad sobre la licencia pedida por el
excelentı́simo señor marqués de Balero, virrey y gobernador y
capitán general que fué de este reino, para la fundación de un
convento para religiosas de San Francisco en esta ciudad.1

Manuel Pérez
Mándeme Vuestra Alteza le informe qué inconveniencias o conveniencias
pueden seguir de la nueva erección del convento de religiosas [ ] que se
ha labrado junto a la alameda de esta ciudad para indias caciques que quieran
tomar el hábito. Por razón de la experiencia que me asiste de la naturaleza,
propiedades, y costumbres de las indias y obedeciendo tan [ ] digo:

Lo primero, que no sólo no le hallo inconveniente para que las indias puedan
ser religiosas, pero le hallo muchas utilidades. Que no tenga inconveniente
consta porque el que pudiera haber (y es el que se pretexta para pedir este
informe) es lo rudo de su naturaleza y la inconveniencia que en ella se infiere.
A lo primero digo que más difı́cil y más perfecto es el estado de sacerdocio
que el de la monja y estámoslo en lo [sic] muchos indios en esta ciudad,
sacerdotes y muy perfectos, luego en su proporción, no estorba su [ ]a
ellas para los menos [sic] que en efecto que el sacerdocio, pues a ellos no se
les estorba ser sacerdotes [ ]
 Appendix 3 • 149

Lo segundo, que tan no es vileza la que se les nota que en esta jurisdicción
de San Pablo tengo dos de las que están ya admitidas para dicho convento
que a la fecha de ésta saben rezar ya el oficio divino, que me consta; luego,
no es su vileza tanto como se quisiera ponderar por quien quisiera impedirles
este bien.

Lo tercero, en ellos lo más de su vileza depende de su malicia [ ] del vicio

de la embriaguez a que están connaturalizados, y vemos que muchos de ellos
lo deponen [ ] que llegan al estado de sacerdotes. Y la experiencia de
veinte y siete años me lo ha mostrado que en este vicio en que ellos son tan
fáciles y que éste usa de su vileza, ellas son tan no fáciles, puede decirse que
por doscientos indios suele embriagarse una, y esta una nunca es de las don-
cellas, porque éste no es caso [ ] verlas ebrias, y habiendo de ser de este
estado las que se eligen para religiosas, por ningún modo puede temerse la
embriaguez. Luego, ni por ese comino puede no dárseles [ ] dicho fin.

Lo cuarto, el recién conquistado este reino estando ellos tan toscos y rudos
como se deja entender, tanto que hubo de expedir una bula el señor Paulo V
en que mandó los tuviesen por racionales, que era porque llegaron muchos a
dudar si lo eran. Y entonces dice el doctı́simo padre fray Juan Bautista de la
religión de mi reverendo padre San Francisco, en el cómo de ser monjes
[advierte] que en el colegio de Sta. Cruz (hoy es Santiago de Tlatelolco)
habı́a indios que llegaron a saber perfectı́simamente latı́n y a ser muy doctos.
Después de doscientos años de cultivo, y mucho más los de esta ciudad con
el mucho comercio de españoles, ¿por qué no creeremos que hayan ya des-
terrado su natural ignorancia y rudeza? Y si ellos la han desterrado siendo
(como es cierto) más inclinados que ellas a embriaguez y a otros muchos
vicios, ¿por qué no creeremos que ellas, que no son tan inclinadas, tengan
menos rudeza y mucha habilidad?

Lo segundo que puede pretextarse es su inconstancia o poca perseverancia,

y si es esto, no tome el hábito en ningún convento ninguna española, pues
hemos visto muchas que han salı́dose en el año de la aprobación o noviciado;
porque no debe reputarse inconstancia de la india que se saliere pues no se
reputa de muchas españolas que se salen. Digo más, que aún más debiera
temerse esta poca perseverancia de las españolas que de las indias. Para esto
hay todas estas razones: la primera, que el no perseverar, si era porque ex-
150 • Colonial Angels

trañaran en el convento la falta del regalo del siglo, las españolas por pobres
que sean tienen sin comparación más regalo en sus casas que las indias
aunque éstas sean ricas, porque las indias rara es la que come pan sino torti-
lla, carnero muy pocas, gallina aunque tengan muchas en sus coradillos [sic]
jamás las prueban, chocolate es muy difı́cil sino sólo su bebida de atole.
Luego, si vemos que muchas españolas perseveran y profesan en conventos
de instituto muy estrechos sin echar [de] menos el regalo de sus casas, las
Indias que no tienen regalo que echar [de] menos, ¿cómo no perseverarán?

La segunda razón, si el no perseverar es por lo rı́gido de la clausura, más

clausura tienen las indias (mayormente las doncellas) que las más encerradas
españolas, porque me consta que se suelen (si no hay permiso a qué salir)
estar dos y tres y más dı́as sin salir de sus casas sin haber hecho voto de
clausura; pues éstas ven [que] a lo que entran es a estar encerradas como
las religiosas en otros conventos, ¿por qué negaremos que puedan hacer el
ánimo, pues ven que tan religiosas han de ser éstas como las que ven en los
demás conventos?

Mı́rase (que ya yo lo he oı́do) que ¿qué entienden ellas [de] el voto solemne
de castidad, pobreza, obediencia y clausura? Respondo dos cosas; la una que
¿qué entienden ellos, o qué entendı́an de los demás misterios de nuestra
santa fe? Y no obstante se les ha explicado por los ministros evangélicos y ya
en su [ ] lo perciben (que esto es innegable) luego con la explicación po-
drán percibirlo. Lo segundo, que yo conozco indias que en el modo que
pueden percibir y explicarme, han hecho voto de perseverarse doncellas y no
casarse, y mostraré en caso necesario indias de dicha jurisdicción, doncellas
viejas que nunca se han casado. Luego, si sin el cultivo y explicación de lo
que es voto hacen esto, con su explicación, harán aquello.

Por último señor, yo no hallo inconveniente alguno en dicha erección, an-

tes sı́ la utilidad del bien que a muchas de ellas se les hará, pues si es cierto
que muchas son malas o no son muy buenas, es porque no han tenido esta
ocasión que ahora se les ha ofrecido, y lo que muchos dirán que es incon-
veniente, no es sino no estar en uso. Pero las cosas, mucho más las bue-
nas, merecen principio; puesto lo que en el mundo hay [de] bueno [en]
algún principio parecı́a difı́cil y hoy está ya fácil. Sólo lo hacerlo y [ ]
proseguirlo.
 Appendix 3 • 151

Además que ellas son por su naturaleza humildes, obsequiosas, y trabaja-

doras, y creo que estas tres cosas y las demás virtudes las conservarán con
gran facilidad. Esto es lo que según la experiencia me ha enseñado puedo
decir de tan buenas obras, que creo que será muy del servicio del Señor, salvo
se puede tener otro motivo que yo no lo alcance. Porque aún el de que no
puedan guardar el voto de la castidad, que es el que pudiera pretextarse,
según mi larga experiencia es para ellas el más fácil, pues en el fuero sacra-
mental doy gracias a Dios de ver lo difı́cil que son en su fracción, y no sólo
difı́cil pero las más de las doncellas, aunque tengan ya edad capaz de malicia,
parecen incapaz de impuridad; con que por camino alguno yo no hallo in-
conveniente en el que han de ser muy perfectas religiosas y que sea el con-
vento que se ha erigido en pocos años un emporio de virtudes. Esto es lo que
me parece. Vuestra Alteza determinará y mandará como siempre lo mejor.

Manuel Pérez
Your Highness commands that I inform you of what disadvantages or ad-
vantages can result from the new convent recently built on the main avenue
of this city for noble Indian women who want to take the habit. Given the
experience of the nature, qualities, and customs of Indian women, which
aids me in this task, and obeying such an order, I say:

First, that not only do I not find any inconvenience in Indian women pro-
fessing as nuns; rather, I find many benefits. That there is no inconvenience
is evident, for the only one there could be (which is the one given in order
to solicit this report) is the rudeness of their nature and the disadvantage
that is inferred from it. To this, I say that the priestly calling is much more
difficult and perfect than that of the nun, and that many [ ] Indians in
this city are priests, and with utmost perfection. Therefore, proportionately,
their [nature] cannot prevent the women from taking a calling that is less
than the priesthood, for Indian men are not prevented by it from becoming
priests.

Second, what is manifest in them is so unlike lowness that in this jurisdic-

tion of San Pablo, I have two who have already been admitted into this
convent, and who at this moment know how to recite the Divine Office, and
152 • Colonial Angels

I can vouch for this. Therefore, their lowness is not such as those who would
like to refuse them this privilege lead us to believe.

Third, in them (the Indians) the worst of their lowness comes from their
wickedness [ ] of the vice of drunkenness to which they have become
accustomed, and we see that many of them overcome it [ ] reaching the
priesthood. Twenty-seven years’ experience has shown me that this vice into
which Indian men fall so easily and which exploits their lowness, Indian
women do not fall so easily into. It can be said that for two hundred Indian
men that get drunk, there is only one Indian woman, and this one is never a
virgin,2 for these are never to be seen drunk. And as the women chosen to
be nuns will be from this unmarried estate, there is no reason whatsoever to
fear drunkenness. Thus, it is impossible to deny them said aim for a reason
not worth peanuts [lit.: a cumin seed].

Fourth, when this kingdom was first conquered, the Indians were very un-
couth and rude, as is well known; so much so that Paul V had to expedite a
Bull in which he ordered that they be considered rational because many had
begun to doubt that they were. And so the very learned Father Fray Juan
Bautista, of the order of my Reverend Father St. Francis, in this matter of
becoming monks, reports that in the school of Sta. Cruz (today Santiago de
Tlatelolco) there were Indians who came to know Latin perfectly and be-
came very learned. After two hundred years of cultivation, and more so, of
the Indians of this city, and because of the great commerce with Spaniards,
why are we not to believe that they will have exiled their natural ignorance
and rudeness? And if they have exiled it being (as is true) more inclined to
it than the women, and to drunkenness and many other vices, why are we
not to believe that the women, who are not so inclined, will be less rude and
more talented?

The second objection possible is their inconstancy or little perseverance, and

if it is this, then no Spanish woman should take the habit in any convent,
for we have seen many who have left in the first year of trial or novitiate.
Then Indian women who leave should not be reputed inconstant if the many
Spanish women who leave are not reputed so. I add that in fact this lack of
perseverance should be feared more in the Spanish women than in the In-
dians. For this, there are all these reasons: the first, that of not persevering,
if caused by missing the comforts of the world in the convent, the Span-
 Appendix 3 • 153

ish women, poor as they may be, have incomparably more comfort in their
homes than the Indian women, even if these be rich, for it is rare for Indian
women to eat bread, instead they eat tortillas; very few of them eat lamb,
and though they may have chickens in their yards, they never taste them;
they drink chocolate very rarely, having instead their drink of atole.3 There-
fore, if we see that many Spanish women persevere and profess in convents
with very strict rules without missing the comfort of their homes, how will
Indian women who have no comfort to miss fail to persevere?

The second reason, if the failure to persevere is because of the strictness of

the cloister, the Indian women (especially those unmarried) are more clois-
tered than the most locked-up Spanish women; I can vouch that if they have
no permission to go out, they can be inside their houses for two or more
days, without having taken a vow to live encloistered. As they understand
that they are entering the convent to be encloistered like other nuns in con-
vents, how can one deny that they have the spirit, for one can see that these
women will be as religious as the women in other convents?

It is said (and I have already heard it), what do they understand of the sol-
emn vow of chastity, poverty, obedience, and cloister? I have two replies.
The first, what do they understand, or what have they understood of the
other mysteries of our Holy Faith? Nevertheless, it has been explained to
them by the evangelical ministers and already in their [ ] they perceive it
(and this is irrefutable), then with explanation, they will be able to perceive
it. The second, that I know Indian women who in their own way of under-
standing and explaining to me have already made a vow to remain virgins
and not marry. And I can, if necessary, point to old women in this jurisdic-
tion who have remained virgins and never married. Therefore, if they do
this without the meaning of the vow being cultivated in them or explained
to them, then with the relevant explanation, they will do the latter (profess
as nuns).
Last, Sir, I find no disadvantage whatsoever in such a foundation, rather the
usefulness of the benefit that it will bring to many (is apparent to me), for if
it is true that many Indian women are bad or not very good, it is because
they have not had the opportunity that is now offered to them, and what
many deem to be unfavorable is only in fact unfamiliar. But all things, and
especially good things, deserve a beginning, for what there is in the world
154 • Colonial Angels

that is good, in its beginning may have seemed difficult, but today is easy.
One need only do it and [ ] continue it.

Moreover, they are by nature humble, submissive, and hardworking, and I

believe that they will keep these three things and the other virtues very
easily. This is, according to what experience has taught me, what I can say
about such good works, for I think it will be to Our Lord’s honor, unless
there is some other reason that I have not understood. Even the one of their
not being able to keep the vow of chastity, which could be alleged, according
to my long experience, is in fact the easiest one for them to keep. In the
Holy Court, I thank God that one may see how they break it with difficulty,
and not only with difficulty, but in fact the majority of the virgins, though
they are of an age to be capable of malice, seem incapable of impurity. So
saying, I find it in no way inconvenient that they become very perfect nuns,
and that the convent that has been built become an emporium of virtues.
This is what I think. Your Highness will determine and order, as always, the
best thing.

Alejandro Romano
Me mandó Vuestra Alteza, por auto de vuestro Real Acuerdo, que expresase
mi parecer en orden a una fundación de religiosas caciques que se intenta en
esta imperial ciudad de México, y obedeciendo como debo a este mandato,
digo que no hallo disposición en las indias, antes sı́ positiva ineptitud, para
ser religiosas, por las razones siguientes:

son las religiosas unas señoras cristianas, que deseando conseguir la perfec-
ción de todas las virtudes, profesan de vivir en comunidad y en perpetua
clausura debajo de la obediencia de una prelada que las obligue a guardar los
tres votos comunes a todos los religiosos, y otras reglas y estatutos que se
juzgan ser medios eficaces para conseguir su fin. Para nada de todo ésto yo
veo disposición en las indias.

Primeramente, no tienen natural para poder vivir en comunidad, como lo

manifiesta su modo antiguo y presente de vivir, pues antes de la venida de
nuestra Santa Fe a estas tierras (quitados los que vivı́an
 Appendix 3 • 155

[folio not numbered]

en compañı́a de sus reyezuelos), los demás moraban en los montes y en

rancherı́as pequeñas como aún acostumbran los gentiles, los cuales, aunque
después del santo bautismo, a costa de mucho trabajo de sus ministros se
hayan reducido, se vayan reduciendo a pueblos, siempre han conservado y
conservan en gran parte su natural disposición a la vida asociable e incivil.
Pues cada uno fabrica su casa bien distante de la del otro, lo puede haber de
una de estas dos razones: o porque no tienen paciencia y providencia para
sufrir y [disimular] alguna molestia de vecino, o porque no sean notadas sus
acciones. O por lo uno, o por lo otro, que es lo más verosı́mil. Y si el natural
de los indios es tal que no pueden sufrir el vivir uno al lado de otro ¿cómo
podrán acostumbrarse las indias a vivir juntas en una casa expuesta cada una
a la vista de todas que le noten sus acciones para que se las corrija su prelada,
y obligada a asimilar y a sufrir las molestias de todas?
Falta también, generalmente hablando de los indios, la constancia de ánimo
en sus buenos propósitos, como nos enseña la experiencia, y aunque ésta
faltara, no lo hiciera manifiesto la razón porque la facilidad en mudar de
parecer y de voluntad se origina, como enseñó Sto. Tomás, de la imperfec-
ción del entendimiento en conocer los objetos. Por esta razón los ángeles
[f 33r]

clara y perfectamente conocen las cosas, son muy tenaces en sus juicios y
afectos; y por la misma razón vemos en los hombres que los más cortos de
entendimiento son también más expuestos a mudar de parecer y de voluntad.
Siendo pues notoria la suma cortedad de entendimiento en los indios, a la
cual se sigue como su propiedad la inconstancia. ¿Quién no ve la ineptitud
que tienen las caciques para el estado religioso, el cual dice perpetuidad en
el ejercicio de virtudes muy arduas y repugnantes a la humana naturaleza?
Confirma este discurso la experiencia, porque no hay duda que es más fácil
y menos repugnante a la humana flaqueza el cumplir con las obligaciones de
casado que con las de religioso, y con todo, apenas se hallará india casada
que no se haya arrepentido de serlo. Y muchas de ellas se arrepienten tan de
veras que dejan para siempre a sus maridos. Por lo cual yo no veo como
pueda dictar la prudencia que mujeres tan inconstantes profesen estado de
156 • Colonial Angels

religión y de clausura perpetua, el cual pide mucha constancia de ánimo y no

menor fortaleza que falta también generalmente en las indias, por cuya causa
son ineptas para el estado religioso, pues éste es estado de mortificación de
todas las pasiones, y de un continuo anhelo a la abnegación de la propia
voluntad; lo cual no se puede conseguir sin una gran fortaleza de ánimo,
efecto en gran parte del entendimiento, que descubre
[f 33v]
a la voluntad lo honesto de las virtudes, escondida a los sentidos, y con éso
la alienta y esfuerza a mortificar sus apetitos desordenados. Por esa razón
todos los padres y directores de espı́ritu encargan tanto la meditación de las
verdades eternas a los que tienen en su cuidado; porque sin ésta no puede
haber fortaleza en el alma; sin fortaleza no puede haber mortificación, y sin
mortificación es locura el pretender alcanzar virtud alguna. Siendo pues no-
torio que el entendimiento de las indias es cortı́simo, es también manifiesto
que son incapaces para bien meditar de sı́ mismas las verdades eternas y
consiguientemente que les falta la fortaleza de ánimo tan necesaria para
mortificar las pasiones y para llevar no solamente la cruz que el Señor mandó
cargar a todos los cristianos como medio necesario para alcanzar el cielo,
mas también la más pesada y más difı́cil para llevarse (y por éso no quiso que
fuese obligatoria sino de consejo) cual es la de los religiosos, que por más
agradar al Señor prometen con voto varias cosas muy arduas y difı́ciles de
ejecutarse. Que las indias sean de entendimiento tan corto que no puedan
meditar y discurrir seriamente sobre las verdades de nuestra fe, me lo ha
enseñado la experiencia de treinta años que las manejo; pues por diligencias
que he hecho para enseñarlas el modo de meditar, todas han salido vanas y
sin fruto.
Dudan los doctores [de la Iglesia] si sea válido o no el voto de castidad que
hace quien es sumamente inclinado a la incontinencia

[f 34r]
y muchos de ellos, muy graves, afirman que no, fundados en que este voto
respectivo a tal persona non est de meliori bono [sic], ni puede ser sacrificio
agradable al Señor por faltarle la sal de la prudencia. Yo no quiero que estas
razones valgan para probar en las indias la incapacidad de ser religiosas, por
la suma dificultad que han de hallar en cumplir con todas las obligaciones de
 Appendix 3 • 157

este estado, pero ¿quién podrá negarme que dichas razones a lo menos con-
vencen que no se les debe permitir el que profesen dicho estado, que les
puede ser ocasión más de tropiezo que de provecho espiritual?
Ni a esto satisface con decir que la gracia divina y no la luz de nuestro dis-
curso es la que enfrena y sujeta nuestras pasiones; porque la gracia no sola-
mente obra en nosotros, mas también con nosotros, y ordinariamente se
acomoda a la naturaleza, como nos enseñan los doctores [de la Iglesia], los
cuales también afirman que de los talentos naturales que el Señor ha dado
[ ] alguna persona, se puede elegir el empleo a que le destina en su Iglesia.
Constándonos pues el corto alcance de las indias para conocer lo honesto
de las virtudes propias de las personas religiosas, no debemos esperar que el
Señor supla su falta natural con luz extraordinaria, sino juzgar que no las
quiere para tal estado, supuesto que les negó el talento del entendimiento y
discurso tan necesario según el orden de su providencia ordinaria para alcan-
zar las virtudes religiosas.

Pero sobre todo yo no veo en las indias rastro tampoco de aquella gran
prudencia y cordura que se requiere en una superiora para gobernar a una
comunidad
[f 34v]

de mujeres incapaces y en las súbditas para obedecer a una prelada de la

misma calidad. Porque para bien gobernar a gente incapaz, se necesita en
quien gobierna de gran conocimiento de las inclinaciones y disposiciones del
ánimo de cada una de sus súbditas, como también de mucho disimulo, pa-
ciencia, y destreza, llevando a cada una por su camino, sufriéndole muchas
faltas sin perjuicio empero del bien común; calidades que no se pueden es-
perar sino casi milagrosamente en una superiora india de poquı́simo alcance.
Y menos se puede esperar en las súbditas incapaces aquella heroica humil-
dad, paciencia y obediencia ciega que se requiere para sufrir a una superiora
ignorante y consiguientemente indiscreta.

Este pues, muy poderoso señor, es mi parecer en orden a la nueva fundación

que se intenta, y creo que del mismo parecer han sido y son cuantos supe-
riores de religiones han habido hasta ahora y hay en este inmenso reino,
porque siendo los indios capaces de ser religiosos, siendo también natural-
mente tan humildes, con todo, ningún superior los ha querido ni los quiere
158 • Colonial Angels

admitir aún por legos en su religión, por ser mucha su incapacidad, incon-
stancia, y flaqueza de ánimo, razones que deben tener más fuerza hablando
de las indias, por ser de sexo más imperfecto.

También juzgo que este parecer es conforme al juicio que de esta gente han
hecho los supremos gobernadores de ella, ası́ eclesiásticos como seglares,
porque aquellos considerando su gran flaqueza

[f 35r]

en vencer sus pasiones, nacida en gran parte de su poco alcance, los han
eximido de la obligación de guardar algunas leyes eclesiásticas que obligan a
todos los cristianos, y esto por la misma razón, considerándolos como a pu-
pilos y menores, dan por nulos sus contratos hechos sin consentimiento de
quien está en lugar de su tutor. México, 20 de mayo de 1723.

Alejandro Romano
Your Highness, through your Royal Act, ordered that I should give my
opinion about the foundation of a convent for noble Indian women that is
planned in this imperial city of Mexico, and obeying this command as I
must, I say that I find nothing that predisposes Indian women to become
nuns. On the contrary, I find them positively unfit for the following reasons:

Nuns are Christian ladies who, wishing to achieve perfection in all the vir-
tues, profess that they will live in a community and perpetually encloistered
under the obedience of a prioress who will oblige them to keep the three
vows common to all religious, and other rules and statutes that are deemed
effective means of achieving this end. I see nothing predisposing Indian
women to any of this.

First, they do not have the right nature to live in communities, as is apparent
from their ancient and present manner of life, for before the coming of our
Holy Faith to these lands (not counting those who lived

[folio not numbered]

in the company of their little kings), the rest lived in the mountains and in
small farms. And the gentiles continue like this, even though after Holy
Baptism and thanks to the enormous hard work of their ministers, they may
 Appendix 3 • 159

have begun to conform to living in towns. For the most part, they maintain
their natural proclivity for asocial and uncivilized life. For each one builds
his house very far away from any others. For this there may be one of two
reasons; either they have no patience or faith in being able to suffer and pass
over any irritation from their neighbor, or they do not want their behavior
to be observed— one or the other, whichever is truer. And if the nature of
the Indians is such that one cannot bear to live next to the other, how will
Indian women get used to living together in a house where each one is ex-
posed to everyone’s gaze, and where all their actions will be observed so that
the prioress can discipline them, and where they will be obliged to accept
and suffer all the vexations of the other women?

Generally speaking, constancy of spirit in their good intentions is also lack-

ing in Indians, as experience teaches us. And even if this were lacking, rea-
son cannot compensate for it as the facility to change one’s mind and wishes
comes, as St. Thomas taught, from the imperfect understanding of things.
For this reason angels
[folio not numbered]

know things clearly and perfectly and are very certain in their judgments and
feelings. For the same reason, we see that those men who lack understanding
are also more likely to change their minds and wishes. As the Indians’ grave
lack of understanding is well known to all, it naturally follows that they will
also be inconstant. Who cannot fail to see that the noble Indian women are
unfit for profession, which requires that very arduous virtues, alien to human
nature, be exercised constantly?

This argument is supported by experience, for there is no doubt that it is

easier and less alien for weak human nature to fulfill the obligations of a
married person than those of a religious. Despite this, it is almost impossible
to find a married Indian woman who does not repent being so, and many of
them repent so sincerely that they leave their husbands forever. Due to this,
I cannot see how prudence will allow that such inconstant women profess
as religious and vow eternal cloister, things that require great constancy of
spirit and no little strength—something that is also generally lacking in
Indian women. For this reason, they are unfit for the religious estate, as this
requires the mortification of all passions and the continual desire to abne-
gate one’s self-will. This cannot be achieved without great strength of spirit,
160 • Colonial Angels

something that is in large part a consequence of understanding, for under-

standing reveals

[f 33v]

to self-will the value of virtues that are hidden from the senses, and so en-
courages and urges self-will to mortify its disorderly appetites. For this rea-
son, all priests and spiritual directors strongly recommend that those in their
care meditate on the eternal truths, for without this meditation there can be
no strength in the soul, without strength there can be no mortification, and
without mortification it is madness to pretend to reach any virtue at all. It
being well known that the understanding of Indian women is very limited,
it is also manifest that they are incapable of meditating by themselves on the
eternal verities; consequently, they lack the strength of spirit so necessary for
the mortification of passions and for carrying not only the cross that Our
Lord commanded all Christians to carry as a necessary means of reaching
heaven, but also the most heavy and most difficult cross to bear, the cross
borne by religious (who in order to please Our Lord promise solemnly many
hard and difficult things) which Our Lord did not wish to make obligatory
but discretionary. Thirty years’ experience of dealing with them has shown
me that Indian women have such little understanding that they are unable
to meditate or reason thoughtfully on the verities of our Faith. Every effort
I have made to teach them meditation has been in vain and without success.

The Doctors of the Church doubt whether a vow of chastity made by a

person extremely inclined to incontinence is valid

[f 34r]

and many of them, all very grave, affirm that it is not, basing (their judg-
ment) on the fact that such a vow, in relation to such a person non est de
meliori bono and cannot be a pleasing offering to Our Lord because it lacks
seasoning [lit.: the salt of ] with prudence. I do not wish that these reasons
be used to prove that Indian women are incapable of becoming nuns because
of the extreme difficulty that they will find in trying to fulfill all the obliga-
tions of that estate, but who will deny that these reasons at the very least
convince one that they should not be allowed to profess, for it will certainly
rather be the occasion of spiritual misadventure than benefit?
 Appendix 3 • 161

It is not enough to say that it is Divine Grace and not the light of our rea-
son that reigns in and subjects our passions. For Grace does not only work
within us but also with us, and usually it molds itself to Nature, as the Doc-
tors of the Church teach us, also affirming that of the natural talents that
God has given a certain person, choosing how one is destined to serve in
His Church is one. The little understanding that Indian women can have of
the honest virtues appropriate to religious persons is evident to us, so we
should not hope that the Lord will compensate for their natural lack with
extraordinary light; instead, we should interpret that He does not mean
them for this estate given that He denied them the talent of understanding
and reason usually so necessary for achieving religious virtues according to
the system of His ordinary providence.

But above all, I do not see in the Indian women any sign of that great pru-
dence and rationality that is needed from a mother superior in order to gov-
ern a community

[f 34v]

of incapable women and that is in turn needed from these women when
under the authority of a similarly incapable mother superior. In order to
govern incapable people well, the person governing must know the inclina-
tion and disposition of each of her subjects thoroughly and must have much
discretion, patience, and skill, leading each one in the most appropriate path
and suffering many injuries without sacrificing the common weal. These
qualities are not to be hoped for, except perhaps miraculously, from an In-
dian mother superior of little understanding; and even less can it be hoped
for from her nuns, incapable as they are of that heroic humility, patience,
and blind obedience which is required to suffer an ignorant and conse-
quently indiscreet mother superior.

This then, most powerful Sir, is my opinion with regard to the new foun-
dation that is planned, and I believe that every superior of every religious
order that has ever existed in this immense kingdom has been and is of my
opinion. Although Indian men are capable of being religious (being natu-
rally humble), despite this, no superior has wanted to admit them or wants
to admit them—not even as lay brethren of their orders, principally because
of their great incapacity, inconstancy, and weakness of spirit; all of which
162 • Colonial Angels

reasons should bear more weight in relation to Indian women, they being of
a less perfect sex.

I also judge this opinion to be in accordance with the verdict passed by the
supreme governors of this people over them, both ecclesiastic and secular,
for considering their (the Indians’) great weakness
[f 35r]

in overcoming their passions (this being the fruit of their lack of understand-
ing), they have exempted them from the need to keep certain ecclesiastical
laws that bind all Christians, and for this same reason, judging them to be
youths and minors, they consider as null any contracts they make without
the consent of the person who acts as their tutor. Mexico, 20th of May, 1723.
Notes

Preface

1. Sahagún (1988, 2 : 629).

2. On ecclesiastical reform in Mexico, see Lavrin (1965).
3. My thanks to Stacey Schlau for sharing this anecdote with me.
4. Kathleen Ross’ (1993, 4 –7) discussion of what constitutes Creole literature is in-
teresting in this context because it tries to see what role women (nuns) and writing by
and about them played in creating a literary tradition.
5. Of course, Sta. Teresa is herself the inheritor of a tradition of writing by women.
See Surz (1995).
6. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648 –1695), called by contemporaries ‘‘the tenth Muse,’’
poet, playwright, and leading intellectual figure, first entered the novitiate of the Car-
melite convent of San José. She withdrew, however, and eventually professed in the con-
vent of San Jerónimo. See Lavrin (1991) for a discussion of sor Juana’s ‘‘originality’’ in
relation to the didactic models of the period. For an attempt to trace sor Juana’s literary
sisters in colonial America, see Monguió (1983).
7. A great deal of interesting work has been done on the female writing tradition in
the Hispanic world. The foundational study remains Untold Sisters by Arenal and Schlau
(1989) with its concept of the ‘‘mother tongue’’ and its tracing of genealogies linking
women writers across cultures and time. Kathryn Joy McKnight’s book on the Bolivian
mystic, Madre Castillo, Mystic of Tunja (1997), follows in this tradition, invoking com-
munities of female readers and writers in order to situate her subject. My work is slightly
different in emphasis from these two books, as I seek to see how women writers and
readers participated in a broader colonial cultural and intellectual world. I do not intend
by this to erase differences of gender, but instead to see how they worked in practice in
the period, affecting what both men and women could do. See Ross (1993, 152 –153) for a
similar position.
8. Arenal and Schlau (1989, 351) discuss the need to investigate the particularity of
colonial Latin American texts but offer only analogies to painting in the period, which
164 • Notes to Pages 1–6

according to them incorporates ‘‘indian elements.’’ In relation to the particular social

context of colonial society, they describe this as both more unsettled and more rigid than
that of Spain. McKnight (1997, 83) takes up this point, suggesting that the ‘‘relaxation’’
of convent government is perhaps a specifically colonial issue and may be linked to the
peculiar material situation of most New World convents, which meant they could not
live up to ideals of absolute poverty. McKnight (1997, 156) also argues that the Teresian
models of righteousness and persecution had an especially strong attraction in the New
World, where she maintains the Counter-Reformation took place in an atmosphere of
heightened intensity.

Chapter 1
1. Letona (1662, 86 – 87). [Suffice it to say that impelled by her ardent fervor for the
salvation of souls and zeal to see the Faith spread and by her desire for martyrdom, she
traveled by sea and land for six thousand leagues, a thing most wondrous for a woman
and a nun]. All translations are mine. The punctuation and spelling of both printed and
manuscript sources has been modernized for ease of reading.
2. Quoted in Caro Baroja (1978, 190). [From pilgrim woman to prostitute there is
but little distance.]
3. A version of this chapter first appeared in History and Anthropology (1996).
4. Pardo (1676, chap. 3).
5. Salmerón (1675, chap. 4, 16).
6. Castillo Graxeda (1692, chap. 27, 125).
7. See le Goff (1981, 311).
8. Le Goff (1981, 311).
9. Pardo (1676, 121).
10. Pardo (1676, 77).
11. For the ossification of hagiography as a literary form, see Vauchez (1981).
12. Anon., Vida de la venerable virgen sor Ana Marı́a de San José (1641, 82v) [Sometimes
I felt I was lifted up; I do not know by whom, and being in ecstasy I could see myself,
dressed in the habit and in the way I usually am. I could see how they lifted me, as if I
were someone else. This happened to me many times, traveling through the air as if
flying, and sometimes I find myself among a multitude of Indians of various nations, and
I have the Christian doctrine in my hand, and they are on their knees, listening].
13. This discussion may principally be traced in the analogies continually drawn by
Spanish jurists from Vitoria to Francisco de Ugarte between the pagan ambition to civi-
lize the world and the Christian dream of an empire of the converted.
14. See Anthony Pagden (1991, 148) on this logic of substitution: ‘‘. . . the process of
reducing distance by direct substitution was an enduring feature of most early European
efforts to steady the initially vertiginous experience of being in a (new world).’’ Cf. also
 Notes to Pages 7–11 • 165

the idea of the ‘‘place’’ in hagiography as non lieu in Certeau (1977, 287). ‘‘Il renvoie les
lecteurs à un (au-delà) qui n’est ni un ailleurs ni l’endroit même où la vie de saint organise
l’édification d’une communauté.’’
15. Sta. Catalina, ‘‘Crónica’’ (Manuscript chronicle kept between circa 1620 and 1663,
127). [Who can imagine that passengers traveling light to their destination should seek
comfort in hotels and inns? Well, our house is an inn on our way to our destination which
is eternity.]
16. Certeau (1977, 285): ‘‘L’histoire du saint se traduit en parcours de lieux et en chan-
gements de décors; ils déterminent l’espace d’une (constance).’’
17. Flores Valdés (1707, 246r).
18. Peña (1728, 24). The ‘‘strong woman’’ is a particularly resonant and apposite sym-
bol for these nuns, whose evangelical and ‘‘political’’ role in Spain’s empire building finds
an ennobling model in the biblical mujeres varoniles, Judith and Deborah. The compari-
son also makes the male author’s interpretation of the Spanish mission in the Indies
transparent: the chosen people being led to wildernesses they then evangelize.
19. Cf. also the ability of the very presence of the nuns to ‘‘neutralize’’ the stereotypi-
cally lewd masculinity of sailors, thus making the ship less of a ship and more of a con-
tinuation of the cloister. Anon., Relación histórica de la fundación de este convento de nuestra
señora del Pilar . . . (1793, 79). The events recounted take place in the early 1700’s.
20. See Vauchez (1981) for an explanation of this change in the official review of re-
quests for beatification and canonization.
21. See Pagden (1991, 152). See also Ross’ (1993) extensive discussion of Carlos de
Sigüenza y Góngora’s attempt to secure an authoritative narratorial voice for his writing
on two ‘‘illegitimate’’ subjects—women and the New World.
22. Rosa Figueroa, ‘‘Crónica sucinta del Convento de Sta. Clara de México’’ (1755,
manuscript, unpaginated). [What we see is always associated with Truth and what antiq-
uity or distance sees of our news is always sublime in its grandeur—a saying which wise
Horace used in his Ars Poeticae, adding that admiration was more easily conceded when
the eyes were witnesses than when only the ears had heard.]
23. A difference that also largely corresponds to the sex of the author, most printed
works being by men, the manuscript writings by women.
24. Vida, Agustina de San Juan, in Sta. Catalina, ‘‘Crónica’’ 48v – 49.
25. Salmerón (1675, chap. 16, bk. 3, 103). [The day of the Holy Innocents, 1630,
Mother Isabel de la Encarnción was very tired from her torments and pains, especially
the one in her side. At ten o’clock at night, the nurse went in to see her . . . on this
occasion, the prioress arrived. She was there in the cell along with two other nuns keeping
the patient company when the latter sat up in the bed as if she were well, leaned against
the pillow, and remained entranced, with her face and eyes so beautiful and illumined
that she seemed an angel.]
26. Peña (1728, 29). [Those who have traveled and experienced the dangers of the sea,
166 • Notes to Pages 12–17

consider this! And those who have not, marvel at what these poor nuns suffered, for if
the inconveniences and troubles of an ocean voyage are great, so much the greater those
undergone by the nuns because of the strictness of their rule and the excessive enclosure
of their cloister.]
27. Salmerón (1675, Postscript 123).
28. Sta. Clara, ‘‘Crónica’’ (1755, unpaginated).

Chapter 2
1. [Mexico: a city honorably deserving that her name has reached the remotest parts
of the universe on the echoes of Fame. She has become the head and metropolis of
America not so much because of the wonderful pleasantness of her location nor for the
incomparable beauty of her spacious streets, nor the opulence and courage of her ancient
kings, nor the number and gravity of her courts, nor the gifts that heaven has benignly
distributed to her sons, but thanks to this and innumerable other temples with which her
expansive area is adorned and could thus easily be mistaken for the empyrean heaven,
both because of the sacrifice and tribute owing to God, which are sent continually to
Him from them in the form of praises and because they are inhabited by those who live
in celestial purity] (Sigüenza y Góngora 1683, conclusion to bk. 1).
2. [Having arrived at the house, we went into a courtyard. The walls seemed to me
to be falling down, but not as much as they proved to be when daylight came. I did not
know what to do, as I realized it was not a suitable place in which to erect an altar. We
looked for nails in the walls, and finally, after much work, we found enough. Some people
fitted hangings, we cleaned the floor, and we were so quick that when dawn came the
altar was in place, the bell hanging in a corridor, and mass was immediately sung] (Teresa
de Jesús, Libro de las fundaciones, Garcı́a de la Concha, ed., 1982, chap. 3).
3. Cf. Arenal and Schlau (1989, 303) for the centrality of Sta. Teresa as a validating
model for writing/founding activities.
4. The most significant of these writings are transcribed and translated in Arenal and
Schlau (1989).
5. Avendaño, ‘‘Crónica’’ f 1. The manuscripts are to be found in the Archivo Histó-
rico del Convento de San José, hereafter ahcsj. My thanks to Manuel Ramos Medina,
who made transcriptions of various documents available to me.
6. See Inés de la Cruz, ‘‘Fundación’’; Mariana de la Encarnación, ‘‘Fundación’’; and
Avendaño, ‘‘Crónica’’ ahcsj.
7. Mariana de la Encarnación, ‘‘Fundación’’ (63). This argument is reproduced by
Méndez with a long comment on how the only perfection possible is the perfect obser-
vance of the rule professed, thus attempting to avoid any insinuation that the nuns con-
sider the Conceptionist rule as in some way less holy than the Carmelite one. Méndez,
‘‘Historia de la Fundación’’ (46v, ahcsj).
 Notes to Pages 17–20 • 167

8. Mariana de la Encarnación, ‘‘Fundación’’ (75, ahcsj).

9. The relics of Gregorio López were paraded through the streets during the cere-
mony of the taking of legal possession of the new convent. (Méndez, ‘‘Historia de la
Fundación’’ 22, ahcsj). The continued ecclesiastical and political favor shown toward San
José should be noted. As abbess, Bernarda de San Juan enjoyed the patronage of Arch-
bishop Palafox. (Cf. Méndez, ‘‘Historia de la Fundación’’ 72, ahcsj). On the political and
cultural value of the Carmelite Order, see Olwen Hufton (1995, 370). ‘‘It may be that the
order was regarded as intrinsically Spanish, the product of a proven saintly mystic [. . .]
To put a daughter in the Carmelites was then a political statement, one of allegiance to
a country and its cultural creations.’’
10. Relación, in Ramos Medina (1990, 197). This rather elaborate reading of the de-
ployment of the image of Santiago is encouraged by the text itself, which describes how
such images should be interpreted. The importance of the intellectual explanation of such
visual displays in the period is discussed at length in Maravall (1990, especially sec. 4,
‘‘Los recursos de acción psicológica sobre la sociedad Barroca’’). And Mexican examples
come easily to mind: the texts of sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Sigüenza y Góngora
explaining the respective triumphal arches they designed for the entry of a viceroy, or that
of Cervantes y Salazar for the funerary ceremonies on the death of Charles V. For an
account that questions monolithic theories of the power of the image in the period, such
as those of Maravall, and concentrates on the colonial context, see Taylor and Pease, eds.
(1993).
11. The Teresian voice differs in emphasis in both these texts. See McKnight (1997,
148) on how, given the changes in female enclosure after Trent, the Teresian voice of
Libro de las fundaciones (1982), with its independence and often its disregard for ecclesi-
astical authority, is impossible to imitate faithfully. In some sense, Sta. Teresa contrib-
uted to these changes in enclosure and could thus be seen as proscribing for others the
powers she herself enjoyed.
12. See the anonymous ‘‘Relación de unas cositas, . . .’’ (194, ahcsj). Reading was a
process fraught with moral dangers, however. Juan Luis Vives (1492 –1540) wrote wor-
riedly about the untrammeled fantasy such an activity could cause and about the impos-
sibility of punishing the type of sin that was experienced in the very act of reading. See
Ife (1985) for a review of contemporary attitudes to the process of reading.
13. Critical appreciation of this style ranges from the patronizing—praising Sta.
Teresa’s ‘‘delicacy’’—to works that attribute considerable rhetorical dexterity and strat-
egy to her.
14. For a discussion of the Teresian text’s multiple narratives, see Weber (1990,
128 –134).
15. Libro de las fundaciones, Garcı́a de la Concha, ed. (1982, chaps. 15, 19, 25).
16. Mariana de la Encarnación, ‘‘Fundación’’ (82, ahcsj).
17. Sigüenza y Góngora (1683, 44v).
168 • Notes to Pages 21–23

18. Sánchez Llora (1988, 372). Raquel Chang Rodrı́guez (1982, xii) claims the early
autobiographies in chronicles, reports, and letters to be the foundation of a distinctive
Latin American novel that she characterizes as: ‘‘una escritura transgresora y a la vez
participatoria de diversos modelos historiográficos y literarios’’ [a writing that at once
transgresses and participates in various historiographic and literary models]. More spe-
cifically, see Ross (1993, 112) on historical /fictional approaches to narration in the convent
chronicle, in particular how female subjects eliminate the need for documentation and
so, paradoxically, because the narrative is about nuns ‘‘it can stretch into the realm of
profane discourse.’’
19. [As a novice she was in charge of the chicken run, and one day as she gave them
bran, the bell rang for communion. As she was meant to be praying at the service, she
hurried in order to finish, but the cockerel ran into the sack of bran, preventing her from
closing it. Anxious, she hit him on the head with the ladle, and he dropped down dead.
The poor novice stuck his head in the bran and went to communion, asking God for the
life of the cockerel, with great faith that she would be granted it. When she came out of
the choir, she went to see her deceased and found him strutting spiritedly the length of
the run] (Méndez, ‘‘Historia de la Fundación,’’ marginal note to f 81v, ahcsj). Cf. Ben-
nassar (1982, chap. 11) for an account of the relation between oral and written culture in
the period.
20. Certeau (1977, 278).
21. Certeau (1977, 283).
22. Cf. Weinstein and Bell (1982, 141).
23. Ross (1993) concentrates on this issue, investigating how Carlos de Sigüenza y
Góngora attempted to write a decorous New World history out of the vidas of nuns.
24. St. Augustine (1978, 14).
25. St. Augustine (1978, 34).
26. Maclean (1980) provides an overview of theological, ethical, and scientific texts of
the period.
27. [I will have to make use of some comparisons which, being a woman, I would
prefer not to do and to write simply what I am ordered to, but this spiritual language is
so difficult to speak for those who like myself have no learning, that I will have to find
some way and probably the greater part of the times the comparison will not fit; at least
such clumsiness will serve to amuse Your Grace] (Sta. Teresa de Jesús, Vida, Chicharro,
ed., 1990, 192 –193).
28. The exempla used by Mendicant preachers (whose sermons Sta. Teresa confesses
a penchant for) were frequently condemned for their lack of decorum in this period. Cf.
Chicharro (1989, 52). See also sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’ description of the kitchen as a
philosophical and scientific classroom in ‘‘Respuesta a sor Filotea’’ (an autobiographical
text modeled on hagiographic forms) for an instance of how such extrascriptural ex-
 Notes to Pages 23–25 • 169

amples could be manipulated—in this case in order to reevaluate the feminine domestic
sphere. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1989, 827 – 847).
29. Vauchez (1981, 41).
30. Cf. Diane Purkiss’ (1992) argument (indebted to Lacan’s interpretation of Sta.
Teresa).
31. The importance of interpreting marginal spiritualities such as that of women or
that of the ignorant ‘‘mass’’ as creative rather than simply as deviations from the norm is
emphasized by Ruggiero (1993, 89).
32. [Her understanding rose to such heights on such occasions that she herself mar-
veled at what she reasoned (which was usually in the most gentle and elegant verses),
exclaiming she would say, ‘‘What is this! Who has made of me a poet? Who illuminates
my simple understanding and suggests such words to my clumsy tongue?’’ ] (Sigüenza y
Góngora 1683, 88). Later, there is another description of Marina de la Cruz’ ‘‘possessed’’
speech that emphasizes its elegance and order, a rhetorical dexterity that leaves even the
learned letrados silent with amazement. Her speech is clearly far removed from the ‘‘non-
sense’’ of mystical transport (Sigüenza y Góngora 1683, 93). See also Inés de la Cruz’
ability to understand Latin through divine intervention though she can normally neither
read nor speak it.
33. Méndez, ‘‘Historia de la Fundación’’ (55v, ahcsj).
34. Lavrin (1993).
35. For an eloquent explanation of the ‘‘risks’’ involved in representing such spiritu-
ality for apologetic purposes, see Peña’s (1728) comment in Trono Mexicano: ‘‘Aunque lo
substancial de la virtud no consiste en visiones, raptos, revelaciones y profecı́as, porque
siendo sentimientos extraordinarios puede mezclarse en ellos algún engaño, y fuera li-
viandad de corazón el dar luego crédito a esas cosas, también es temeridad el condenarlas
sin suficientes indicios y despreciarlas, cuando los efectos que dejan y causan en el alma
son virtuosos y humildes, y los fines son santos.’’ [Though what is substantial in virtue
does not consist of visions, raptures, revelations, and prophecies, these being extraordi-
nary feelings and liable to become mixed with some falsity and it would be superficiality
of heart to give credit to such things, it is also weak to condemn them without sufficient
reason and to dismiss them when the effects that they have and cause on the soul are
virtuous and humble and the ends are saintly] (Peña 1728, 197).
36. The Teresian tradition would have presented an inspiration in this respect, for
Sta. Teresa had modified hagiographic form in all her writings, thereby creating ‘‘mixed’’
genres.
37. This inversion where the saintly nun is tortured by her companions is a common-
place of conventual literature. Authors such as Sta. Teresa clearly manipulated the figure
for their own benefit.
38. Anon., Regla y ordenaciones (1635, unpaginated).
170 • Notes to Pages 26–29

39. The issue of reform and laxness must not be seen as confined to these two con-
vents or to the Franciscan and Carmelite Orders in particular, however, but as part of a
larger social and religious crisis that was to lead to extended ecclesiastical reform in the
eighteenth century. Asunción Lavrin’s (1965) summary of the main causes of this crisis
make apparent how deep-rooted the problems revealed in this particular instance were.
See Anthony D. Wright (1982, 142): ‘‘The integration of religious and civil life was pre-
dictably clearest in the case of female convents in Mexico where, by the eighteenth cen-
tury, nuns retained personal incomes, and convents employed lay agents to manage their
property and made loans at interest; a return to truly communal living was resisted.’’
40. For an orthodox opinion on the pernicious effects of the world for the nun, see
Méndez, ‘‘Historia de la Fundación’’ (62, ahcsj): ‘‘. . . porque más fácil es hacer un mil-
agro que remediar el daño que al religioso de la comunicación secular [sic] puede prov-
enir’’ [because it is easier to do a miracle than to salvage the damage that a monk or nun
can suffer from communication with lay persons].
41. Margarita de San Bernardo, ‘‘Escritos’’ (143, ahcsj).
42. Sigüenza y Góngora (1683, vida of Marina de la Cruz, unpaginated). Cf. Poutrin
(1987) for an attempt to read the history of childhood and its emotions from hagiographic
narrative while respecting the genre’s symbolic structure.
43. Méndez, ‘‘Historia de la Fundación’’ (2v, ahcsj). See also Méndez’ (4v) descrip-
tion of the friendship between the two founding mothers as disembodied: ‘‘De dos in-
strumentos unı́sonamente templados (dice Plinio) sin que los toque la mano, el aire basta
para que ambos suenen con melodı́a uniforme’’ [Of two instruments tuned together
(Pliny says) without a hand touching them, it is enough that the air (touch them) for
them both to sound with the same melody] (Méndez, ‘‘Historia de la Fundación’’ 4v
ahcsj).
44. For an example of how elite families and convents formed a complex social net-
work in New Spain, see Loreto López (1991).
45. Inés de la Cruz, ‘‘Fundación’’ (46, ahcsj).
46. Sigüenza y Góngora (1683, 172, vida de Petronila de San Hildefonso).
47. Mariana de la Encarnación, ‘‘Fundación’’ (73, ahcsj).
48. I use honor here in the global sense ascribed to it by Maravall (1990) when he
discusses honor as being the defining characteristic of Spanish preoccupations with
sexual, cultural, political, and social orthodoxy in the period.
49. [. . . Virgin Capuchin ladies, Creoles, legitimate daughters of the spirit and breath
of the first Capuchin mothers, so that Europe might see that there are fitting vocations
in America, because even though the influences, the food and the air can debilitate
strength to such an extent that the complexions of bodies become more delicate, Grace
is powerful enough to form gigantic spirits] (Peña 1728, 253). The theory of the climate
of the Indies affecting its inhabitants was articulated as early as 1570 by Bernardino de
Sahagún.
 Notes to Pages 30–34 • 171

50. See Pagden (1987, 85).

51. Sigüenza y Góngora (1683, 75). For a similar complication of theoretically tran-
scendental narrative values by very worldly concerns, see McKnight’s (1997, 73) descrip-
tion of how Madre Castillo’s vida describes cultural practices that contradict the domi-
nant prescription for holy femininity.
52. Mariana de la Encarnación, ‘‘Fundación’’ (73, ahcsj).
53. Mariana de la Encarnación, ‘‘Fundación’’ (70, ahcsj).
54. Mariana de la Encarnación, ‘‘Fundación’’ (92, ahcsj).
55. [Arguing about the Indies and Spain, setting one country above the other, is to
fulfill to the letter what the mystical Doctor of the Church Sta. Teresa says: that it is like
arguing over whether one soil or another is better for making sun-dried mud or simple
mud. Let us try and forget countries—I speak to every monk and nun, those of us who
have promised to crush and stamp beneath our feet the world and its vanities] (Méndez,
‘‘Historia de la fundación’’ 11, ahcsj).
56. ‘‘Sobre cuál es la mijor tierra, que no es otra cosa sino debatir si será para lodo
bueno u para adobes’’ [about which is the better soil, an argument that is nothing other
than to debate what soil is better for simple mud or for sun-dried mud walls] Camino
de la perfección, in Madre de Dios and Steggink, eds. (1967). Cf. Bilinkoff (1989) for the
social and political context in which the first Carmelite foundations unfolded.
57. [That while he was prelate he would not consent to the foundation of a convent
that professes to be so perfect by spoilt, chocolate-guzzling criollas. That we (the criollas)
would bring three or four servants each to serve us] (‘‘Fundación 70 –71, ahcsj).
58. For more on these racial commonplaces, see Alberro (1990). Cf. the opinion that
chocolate, apart from an indigenous food, was an aphrodisiac and the references made in
many Inquisition trials to its being used as an ingredient in love potions prepared by
women. The history of the ‘‘gendering’’ of chocolate in the pre-Conquest to colonial
period is very intriguing. For the Méxica, chocolate was a drink for warriors preparing to
do battle, while in the colony its consumers had become predominantly women and the
substance consequently ‘‘feminized’’ (see Alberro 1992).
59. Peña (1728, 280; vida of Marı́a Josefa de Gracia).
60. Letona (1622, unpaginated).
61. [There is a legitimate custom in the Indies that everyone eats eggs and milk prod-
ucts during Lent and on other fast days. Thus the prohibition written into the rule will
not apply to this kingdom or to any other where there is a similar custom. This is most
definitely the case as the rule declares nuns should keep the customs of the region (they
come from)] (Letona 1622, unpaginated).
62. Letona (1622, bk. 2).
63. The biographical format of the vida may also be considered in this light. Maravall
(1990, 211) writes on the use of biography in the period by the ruling powers to sway and
educate the masses.
172 • Notes to Pages 35–38

Chapter 3
1. [End of quotation from the Venerable Mother, to whose thoughtful and effective
words in the narration of this event we do not need to add, for appending or putting in
anything would detract from the expressions and the liveliness with which she recounts
everything] (Valdés 1765, 58).
2. The number of works dealing with the writing of biography and autobiography
by women in this period is enormous. For an excellent overview of the writing of auto-
biography by Spanish nuns, see Herpoel (1987), Donahue (1989), Matter (1992), and Ja-
cobsen Schutte (1992). For the autobiographical writings of Mexican nuns, see Myers,
ed. (1993), Ferreccio Podestá, ed. (1984), Eich (1996), and Lavrin (1993). On the Hispanic
historical and literary context, see Goetz (1994) and Spadaccini and Talens, eds. (1988).
González Echevarrı́a (1980) provides a good introduction to the generic and rhetorical
complexities of New World autobiography. For an introduction to the intellectual and
devotional universe of the convent in which these writings were produced, see Zarri
(1990, 21–50). For an analysis of how autobiography written by women has changed and
developed as a subject for academic research and study, see Stanton’s article in Stanton,
ed. (1984).
3. For a similar methodological stance, see Ross (1993, 12 –13).
4. Cf. Claude Martin’s reworking of the writings of his mother, Marie de l’In-
carnation, into a hagiography of her for insight into how a woman’s unofficial text was
transformed by a man into a narrative worthy of publication and the different impera-
tives that dictated composition in each case. Martin is principally concerned in making
his mother’s words both doctrinally impeccable, by removing mystical terms, and rhe-
torically more decorous, by updating her antiquated Canadian /colonial French. Zemon
Davis (1995, 129 –132).
5. A selection of passages from sor Sebastiana’s letters is to be found in Appendix 1.
6. See Haliczer (1996) for an account of how confession was transformed after Trent.
Haliczer is principally interested in one aspect of religious acculturation through confes-
sion—the regulation of sexuality—but his argument provides insight into the more gen-
eral tensions and difficulties surrounding the exercise of power and authority in the re-
lation that is my concern here. For a broader account of the struggles with guilt and the
penitential regimes of people who had professed religious vows, see Delumeau (1983,
339 –363).
7. For an assessment of the vida espiritual as a literary genre, see McKnight (1997).
8. The most obvious exception to this generalization in New Spain is, of course, sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz, whose publishing history (significantly most of the published work
was secular in character) has much more of an affinity with the writing career of court
poets than with that of the average writing nun.
9. Significantly, early historians of America also used this trope of suffering in writ-
 Notes to Pages 38–42 • 173

ing to secure the authority of their accounts. See Pagden (1993, 67) on Las Casas and
Oviedo edging themselves, as close as they dared, ‘‘to a secularized, scientific analogue of
that state [martyrdom].’’ See also Phelan (1970, 59) on how the authority of experience
and that of Divine illumination is combined in Jerónimo de Mendieta’s writing: ‘‘Em-
pirical experience was not Mendieta’s only self-justification. He claimed that the Holy
Ghost had revealed to him certain insights into the character of the Indians. Mendieta,
consequently, spoke [. . .] both as a man of experience and as a mystic.’’
10. See Alberro (1988).
11. For a discussion of how criticism has evaluated the ‘‘autonomy’’ of Hispanic
women’s writing in relation to these constraints, see Ross (1993, 156), Arenal and Schlau
(1989, 15 –16), and Franco (1989, 15).
12. The manuscripts are held by the Biblioteca Nacional, Mexico City, and are num-
bered in the original (l31 f 180).
13. [How I wish I were a saint!] (l10 f 74).
14. Cesare Ripa’s accompanying text in his Iconologia (1603, 216 –217) makes the asso-
ciation of female spirituality and semblance absolutely clear: ‘‘la tesa china, con il velo che
gli cuopre la fronte, la Corona & l’offitiuolo, dinotano che l’hippocrito mostra d’essere
lontano dalle cose mondane & rivolto alla contemplatione dell’opere divine.’’
15. Bilinkoff (1989) examines the relation between Teresa de Jesús’ religious reforms
and the social structure of the city and convents in which it took place. Her argument
that instability in the social structure was conducive to reform is particularly resonant in
the very heterogeneous social context of eighteenth-century Mexico City.
16. Perhaps best known is Bernardo de Balbuena’s, La grandeza mexicana (1603).
17. See Maravall (1990). For a philosophical perspective, see Deleuze (1993). Franco’s
(1989) discussion of the transgression of public space by American ilusas and alumbradas
is very relevant in this context.
18. See Vallarta (1990) for an account of the production of didactic literature by a male
confessor from the writing of women in his spiritual care in New Spain.
19. For an interesting contrast, see Ross’ (1993, in particular chap. entitled ‘‘The Dis-
course of Paternity’’) account of Sigüenza y Góngora’s approach to women’s writings as
sources for his own.
20. Valdés (1765, bk. 1, chap. 5, 34).
21. Gerson’s treatise in Oeuvres Complètes (1974, 160 –164) was written in response to
another nun’s spiritual experiences—Bridget of Sweden’s visions. Gerson emphasizes the
circumspection with which novices in things spiritual, especially women and young
people, should be treated. Moreover, he warns against taking women’s prolix narrations
to their confessors too seriously. Note Valdés’ (1765, bk. 2, Intro. 131) echo of Gerson’s
terminology, opposing frivolity and emptiness (deleitación . . . vacı́a) to solidity and truth
(‘‘virtudes sólidas, sin fingimiento ni simulación’’). The Gerson reads: ‘‘Approbare enim
falsas et illusorias aut frivolas visiones pro veris et solidis revelationibus, quid indignis,
174 • Notes to Pages 43–46

quid alienius ab hoc sacro Concilio?’’ (Gerson 1974, vol. 9 : 179). On the tightening and
rationalizing of procedures to ascertain the authenticity of visions experienced by women,
see Christian (1981).
22. Valdés (1765, bk. 1, chap. 13, 99).
23. See Martin (1975). For sor Sebastiana’s devotion for Loyola, see especially Valdés
(1765, bk. 1, chap. 18) and for her reading of Alcántara (bk. 2, chaps. 1 and 17).
24. For a review of Sta. Teresa’s relation to theology and theologians, see Steggink
(1982).
25. Quoted in Bataillon (1966, 702).
26. Valdés (1765, bk. 2, chaps. 21–24 and 26, respectively).
27. Valdés (1765, bk. 2, chap. 25, 348 –349).
28. Vives, De tradendis disciplinis (1531). The work was reprinted several times in the
seventeenth century. There is an English translation by Watson (1913).
29. See Conley (1990, in particular chap. 4: ‘‘Rhetoric and Renaissance Humanism’’).
30. Valdés (1765, bk. 1, 1).
31. [The sixty arguments which I offer are nothing other than the letters she wrote to
her confessors. Because each one is proof of her humility. I cannot give a truer testimony
than them. To read them is to admire her abjection, in fact, it is one and the same act,
for to read them is to be filled with wonder] (Valdés 1765, bk. 2, chap. 22, 307).
32. Valdés (1765, bk. 2, chap. 13, 241).
33. Valdés (1765, bk. 1, chap. 10, 58).
34. Valdés and sor Sebastiana’s agreement on this subject is an indication that we
should perhaps revise the usual critical reading of confessors as authoritarian dictators of
writing and nuns as writers of apparently orthodox but really secretly subversive texts.
Clearly, the relationship between nun and confessor, and between the writings of both,
was often collaborative and more in the nature of partnership than competition. On nuns’
writings as subversive palimpsests, see Ross (1993, 156 –157).
35. [I do not know if what happened to Mother Sebastiana was miraculous or prodi-
gious. I only narrate it as it appears in the documents I have in my power] (Valdés 1765,
bk. 2, chap. 29, 385). Cf. Valdés’ (bk. 2, Intro. 129) censure of the two types of confessor,
one accepting of mysticism and the other skeptical, and his advocation of a ‘‘reasonable’’
middle path to be taken by confessors.
36. Cf. Birge Vitz (1991) on how the move to a more Humanist hagiography is tied
to the reception of works. For an examination of how rhetoric complicates devotion, see
Arrasse (1981). See especially how the cult of the image turns into the reverence accorded
to the cultivated image in this period.
37. [Because she did not want to be a painted saint, of those that are formed by the
soft strokes of the brush and the delicacy of colors, but a sculpted one, made by blows
from the iron and the adze, wounds from the chisel, scratches from the scalpel, pains
 Notes to Pages 47–50 • 175

from the scorper, until finally, shattering herself into pieces and fracturing herself com-
pletely, she would be a saint made through suffering] (Valdés 1765, bk. 1, chap. 16, 115).
Cf. Perry (1991).
38. Valdés (1765, bk. 1, chap. 9, 60).
39. Peter Brown shows how even Ancient Christian friendships between devout
women and priests were the subject of scurrilous speculation, citing the example of Ori-
gen’s self-castration, an act intended to staunch such rumors. Brown (1989, 153 –167) links
this both to the concrete economic power widows wielded in the early Church and to the
more abstract fear in which femininity, because more ‘‘open,’’ condensed the deep pre-
occupation of male Christians with their own relations to the world. See also Haliczer
(1995).
40. The text of Fray Luis’ sermon is reprinted in Imirizaldu, ed. (1977); all references
are to this edition. Granada (1504 –1588) was possibly the most widely read of the mystical
authors of this period. He also generated substantial controversy. His assertion that
knowledge of God could only be reached on the paths of contemplation and not the
roads of practical religion was considered to have encouraged heretical beliefs such as
those held by the Alumbrados in Extremadura in the 1570’s. His works were some of the
first to be placed on the Index. Granada was deceived by the piety of Marı́a de la Cruz,
the prioress of the Dominican convent in Lisbon, who had emerged as a holy woman in
the early 1580’s. By 1582, after the annexation of Portugal by Spain, Marı́a was presenting
herself as mystical supporter of the Portuguese pretender, dom Antonio. She was even-
tually sentenced to perpetual exile in Brazil, having been found guilty of a variety of
crimes including feigned sanctity and seditious statements about the Spanish monarchy.
For information on the availability of Fray Luis’ works in the New World, despite the
ban placed on them, see Leonard (1949) and Hampe-Martı́nez (1993). Many of the nuns
mentioned in the convent chronicles and vidas examined make references to Granada.
41. l27 f 150.
42. l3 f 25.
43. [With so much anger against my Venerable Father as if he were responsible for all
my pains, though unaware of all that was happening to me. [. . .] and so I was ashamed,
and also of the fact that my things seemed wicked to Your Grace, and if I were to go
back to you I would get no consolation and you would say only what was necessary, the
rest being dangerous. And suddenly I would feel such disgust for the Father of my soul
that I would want to insult him with bad words. I was like a gentile] (l26 f 146).
44. Cf. Arenal (1985).
45. Valdés (1765, bk. 1, chap. 15, 108). There was already a history of Indian institutions
of this kind being eroded by the power of the Spanish authorities, and so the reaction of
the cacique nuns is interpreted by Valdés as a natural resistance to a heterogeneity that
will make their institution lose its particularity, and thereby its power.
176 • Notes to Pages 50–53

46. Limpieza de sangre had already become a term loaded with cultural and class values
in the Peninsula, and in the New World context its multivalent significations were even
more evident. See Bernand and Gruzinski (1993).
47. See Valdés (1765, bk. 1, chap.17) for his condemnation of the patron’s conditions.
The Brigidine convent was founded by Basque nuns and financed by Basque patrons—
clearly there was a strong sense of group identity and solidarity in the convent. Sor Se-
bastiana does not appear to have had the necessary connections.
48. Le Goff emphasizes the particularly ‘‘feminine’’ characteristics of this mediation,
citing the Virgin and St. Lutagard as especially effective mediators for souls in purgatory.
The role of the Beguines of Helfta in encouraging this idea of the ‘‘efficacy’’ of female
intervention in matters connected to purgatory is well established, and perhaps the great-
est exponent of the peculiarly feminine contribution to be made in freeing souls from
‘‘the third place’’ is Catherine of Genoa’s (1447 –1510) treatise on the subject (le Goff 1981,
482 – 483). On the power such mediation could bring to the Beguines, see Jo Ann Mc-
Namara (1991, 214): ‘‘by developing their powers to assist the dead, women of limited
means and worldly prospects put themselves firmly among society’s benefactors and out-
side the realm of the abject and needy poor.’’
49. Valdés (1765, bk. 1, Intro. 2, and chap. 1, 7).
50. Valdés (1765, bk. 2, chap.2, 141–142).
51. Valdés (1765, bk. 2, chap. 2, 142).
52. l15 f 85; see also l6 f 54.
53. l25 f 136. In this description, some of the animals are monkeys, which in the New
World were to be found both in the jungle and in the market place.
54. See Carrión (1994, 137) for an account of how Sta. Teresa’s descriptions of hell
serve to defamiliarize the domestic spaces usually considered so safe for women, thus
opening up the entire issue of the degree of autonomy permitted women in writing if
their rhetoric can be seen to have such violent effects on such sacrosanct symbols.
55. l28 f 155; l39 f 242.
56. l23 f 129.
57. [I found myself in a terrifying place. It is impossible to describe it, but to make
myself understood I will say it was like the saddest, most remote quarter of a city. It was
very big and there were very few houses; to see them pained the soul with sadness. What
looked like long-legged men walked about speaking an incomprehensible language. I saw
a very high thing that looked like a tower; I do not know how to describe it. At the top
there was something like a stage, and there were people dancing and jumping] (l24 f 134).
58. See McKnight (1997) for a description of how the Bolivian Madre Castillo’s writ-
ings vary in their concordance with social, religious, and political orthodoxy according to
their changing generic form.
59. [In this tragicomedy, there is nothing but appearance and the staging of virtue, as
 Notes to Pages 54–57 • 177

well as the rottenness and disgusting lust of this woman. She has more self-love than a
beata] (Quoted in Méndez 1989, 14).
60. [They are pleasures connected in the end to Mexican courtliness, spells, and toys
with which Lady Mexico, though a lady and an adult, likes to be amused] (Valdés 1765,
bk. 1, chap. 3, 18).

Chapter 4
1. [The Discalced (Carmelites) consider ourselves utterly obedient and meek toward
our prelates, and we would not allow bad doctrines to influence this, whosoever held
them] (Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Ramo Inquisición 581, exp. 1, f 30r;
hereafter, agn. Inq. Letter Mariana de la Encarnación, undated).
2. ‘‘Daba a entender se tenı́a por las religiosas algunos errores y herejı́as’’ (agn Inq.
581, exp. 1. Title). It would have been hard for the Inquisition to refuse a request for an
investigation from an archbishop, but, certainly in America, by no means impossible. In
his chapter on the Inquisition’s relation to the regular clergy, Richard Greenleaf (1969,
152 –157) makes clear that, on the initiative of Inquisitor Archbishop Montúfar, the regu-
lar clergy lost power in the colony. Greenleaf insists, however, that this did not mean
that the Inquisition was simply the tool of the episcopacy. In theory it was an indepen-
dent religious institution, able to act impartially in cases involving both branches of the
priesthood.
3. Teresa de Jesús (1982).
4. The convent of San Plácido in Madrid was tried in the eighteenth century. For an
account of a French example, see Certeau (1980).
5. See Pagden (1995) on the extensive discussions about the difficulties of adminis-
tering far-flung colonies undertaken by contemporary theoreticians of empire. The
Mexican Carmelites’ uncomfortable relation with ecclesiastic authority was to continue
in the eighteenth century. The convent of Sta. Teresa la Nueva, which was founded by
nuns from San José, came into conflict with José Lanciego y Eguilaz, a Benedictine arch-
bishop appointed in 1713. Lanciego y Eguilaz resolved his disagreement with the nuns in
a drastic manner by deposing the prioress, imprisoning her in San José, and eventually
(in a manner reminiscent of how Ana de Jesús was sent to found convents in the Neth-
erlands by the Spanish ecclesiastical authorities) dispatching her to Cuba as a founding
mother for the island’s first Carmelite convent. See Ramos Medina (1993).
6. ‘‘Visita de Descalzas,’’ in Obras Completas, Madre de Dios and Steggink, eds.
(1967, 647). It would not be unreasonable to suppose that the archbishops of Mexico City
would have been familiar with this text of Sta. Teresa’s.
7. Madre de Dios and Steggink, eds. (1967, 656).
8. [Because she preferred to found a monastery to a convent, as she was aware of the
178 • Notes to Pages 57–60

importance of it, something which was to be confirmed later] (Garcı́a de la Concha, ed.,
1982, 155). In fact, an entire chapter of the book is given over to the first male Carmelite
foundation (chap. 13): ‘‘En que trata cómo se comenzó la primera casa de la regla primi-
tiva y por quién, de los Descalzos Carmelitas, año de 1568.’’
9. Garcı́a de la Concha, ed. (1982, 199).
10. Sta. Teresa’s account of these political intrigues can be traced in her correspon-
dence, though references are, unsurprisingly, guarded (in Madre de Dios and Steggink,
eds., 1967).
11. For an introduction to the controversy, see Torres (1995, 9 – 42).
12. See Steggink (1965). For an account of the theological factors that influenced Sta.
Teresa’s relation with various prelates and how they transformed the gender hierarchy of
such relations, see Steggink (1982).
13. In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, division and animosity between gachu-
pines and criollos within the Franciscan Order, for example, were endemic and coincided
with the petitions for the renewal of encomiendas being requested by disgruntled lay crio-
llos. The problems within the Franciscan Order gave rise to debates on the nature of the
Indians and on the effects of the climate of the Americas, as well as punctilious legal
arguments about the rights of these various groups in the colony. The introduction of the
alternativa in 1624, a system whereby a criollo, a gachupı́n, and a gachupı́n who had pro-
fessed in the Indies were elected alternately to the leading offices of each Franciscan
province, only partially resolved the problem (see Brading 1991). The significance of the
conflict between the secular and the regular clergy extended beyond these internal eccle-
siastical differences, however, and some historians have traced the birth of a politicized
idea of ‘‘nation,’’ or at least of a criollo political identity to it. See Cuevas’ characterization
of the exclusion of Mexicans from high ecclesiastical office by the Crown as the final
humiliation that drove the criollos to fight for independence (Cuevas 1921–1926). See
also Lafaye (1974). For an interpretation that places the regular/secular conflict within a
solidly European tradition of ecclesiastical dispute, see Wright (1982, 121–146). Wright
points out, ‘‘Conflict between regulars and bishops [. . .] repeated, from the early sev-
enteenth century, yet another aspect of the overseas export of problems internal to the
Catholic church of the Counter-Reformation’’ (136).
14. See Pagden (1984, 51–93).
15. It could be argued that pureza de sangre in the New World is completely caught
up in an aristocratic problematic where there is truly only ever one pure blood: that of
the noble. The problem then becomes how to define the noble in the vertiginous social
universe of the Indies. On the concept of honor in the period, see Maravall (1979).
16. Cf. Alberro (1988, Intro.).
17. Alberro (1988, 86). See Bernand and Gruzinski (1993, 307) on the impossibility of
policing New World beliefs: ‘‘Un extraordinaire entrelacs de croyances que les autorités
de la Nouvelle-Espagne ne se préoccupent guère d’extirper, à la fois parce qu’elles savent
 Notes to Pages 61–64 • 179

l’entreprise irréalisable et parce que ce tourbillon d’images, d’espoirs et de rites ne se

métamorphose ni en un mouvement hérétique ni en une protestation sociale.’’ An at-
tempt to define a New World psychology, using Inquisition cases as ‘‘ethno texts,’’ can be
found in Escandell Bonet (1980), ‘‘Una lectura psico-social de los papeles del Sto. Oficio.’’
For an analysis of Inquisition trials involving heretical women that interprets the phe-
menon as a direct cultural imposition of Spanish norms, see Méndez (1989). The cases
she discusses are all late eighteenth century.
18. One would expect the archbishop to be particularly touched by this, in effect,
memento mori. Cf. Delumeau (1983, 363): ‘‘Ainsi, même pour les saints, la mort est par-
fois difficile et, à l’époque que nous étudions, la peur de l’au-delà fut d’abord et surtout le
tragique privilège d’une élite chrétienne.’’
19. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 5v: letter Mariana de la Encarnación, undated. This divine
injunction is, of course, the ultimate proof of Truth. Mariana de la Encarnación is prob-
ably referring to the last chapter of Libro de las fundaciones, where Sta. Teresa writes about
how a divine sign told her to change the obedience given by the convent in Avila from
the archbishop to the male Carmelites.
20. ‘‘. . . y también por haber entendido que es acto libre el de elejir confesor, espe-
cialmente en este trance’’ [and because I have heard it said that choosing a confessor is a
free act, especially in this circumstance] (agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 5r: letter Mariana de la
Encarnación, undated).
21. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 5r: letter Mariana de la Encarnación, undated.
22. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1: letter to the king, 29 August 1657, unfoliated.
23. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1: letter to the king, 29 August 1657, unfoliated.
24. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 198v: letter Luis Becerra, 27 January 1661.
25. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 199r: letter Luis Becerra, 27 January 1661.
26. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 199r: letter Luis Becerra, 27 January 1661.
27. Cf. Haliczer (1996, Intro.).
28. Andrea de San Francisco defends her actions in going to the Inquisition by say-
ing she was convinced to do so not only by other nuns in San José but by her own con-
fessors. She claims she pleaded with Jacinto de la Serna to wait until the archbishop
carried out a formal visitation to the convent (agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 118r: Andrea de San
Francisco, 11 February 1661). The declaration she gives on 7 February 1661 is reproduced
in Appendix 2.
29. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 81v: Andrea de San Francisco, 4 February 1661.
30. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 82r: Andrea de San Francisco, 4 February 1661.
31. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 87v: Andrea de San Francisco, 7 February 1661. The echoes
of a paradise lost are maintained by the description of the ideal concordance between the
original couple of founding mothers, the destruction of whose friendship brings disaster
to the cloister (agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 87v – 88r: Andrea de San Francisco, 7 February 1661).
According to sor Andrea, how far San José finds itself from Paradise increases under the
180 • Notes to Pages 64–68

government of these gachupinas and is evident from the unhappiness in the cloister. Not
only does one nun, Clara del Sacramento, want to hang herself, but most of the novices
leave, terrorized by Margarita de San Bernardo (agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 102r–102v: Andrea
de San Francisco, 9 February 1661).
32. It also, of course, reminds us of the original divisions between gachupinas and
criollas that were so evident at the time of San José’s foundation and that were discussed
in Chapter 2. It seems as if this divisiveness was built into the very heart of New Spanish
convents.
33. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 92r: Andrea de San Francisco, 7 February 1661.
34. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 92r–92v: Andrea de San Francisco, 7 February 1661.
35. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 91v: Andrea de San Francisco, 7 February 1661.
36. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 116v: Andrea de San Francisco, 11 February 1661.
37. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 117r–117v: Andrea de San Francisco, 11 February 1661.
38. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 114r: Andrea de San Francisco, 10 February 1661.
39. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 114v –115v: Andrea de San Francisco, 10 February 1661.
40. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 115v: Andrea de San Francisco, 10 February 1661.
41. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 115v: Andrea de San Francisco, 10 February 1661.
42. See Ginzburg (1992) on the Inquisitor as Anthropologist. See also Kelley (1987).
43. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 178v: Hijas de la Orden communal letter, 21 February 1661.
44. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 175r: Hijas de la Orden communal letter, 21 February 1661.
The gravity of this story’s implications in terms of sorcery and superstition in an Inqui-
sition context should not be underestimated.
45. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 175r: Hijas de la Orden communal letter, 21 February 1661.
46. Sus parlerias [her chatter] su buena labia [her big mouth] su deması́a en hablar [her
excessive talk] (agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 175r–175v, and Hijas de la Orden communal letter,
21 February 1661). Cf. also Juana de San Elı́as’ description of sor Andrea’s seductive
speech: ‘‘engañando con un modo tan parlero y halagueño que parece no hay mal en ella’’
[deceiving with a talkative and flattering manner that there seems to be no evil in her]
(agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 184v: letter Juana de San Elı́as, undated). Also Catalina de la Cruz,
‘‘habla todo el dı́a’’ [she speaks all day long], ‘‘es tan abundante en sus palabras que ahoga
a quien la oye’’ [she is so excessive with her words that she drowns anyone who listens to
her], and the incredibly damning, ‘‘decir palabras muy feas no de carmelitas descalzas
sino de mujeres perdidas de ese mundo’’ [saying ugly words, not those of a Discalced
Carmelite but of a lost woman of the world] (agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 160r–161v: letter
Catalina de la Cruz, 18 February 1661).
47. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 175v –176r: Hijas de la Orden communal letter, 21 February
1661, f 177r. The letter describes how sor Andrea manages to deceive the archbishop. He
takes her word as truth, according to the letter, and as a result neglects his duties to the
convent, never visiting them to find out what is really going on. The accusation is clearly
 Notes to Pages 68–72 • 181

one of ‘‘seduction’’; again a serious charge in these circumstances. The accusation of being
a self-conscious reformadora is repeated in Ana de San Bartolomé’s undated letter, an-
nexed to the communal one (agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 180r, as well as in Juana de Sta. Te-
resa’s, f 186v). Ana de San Bartolomé’s letter is reproduced in Appendix 2 along with a
letter from Marı́a de San Juan.
48. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 17: Hijas de la Orden communal letter, 21 February 1661.
49. [With stratagems and tricks ( . . . ) some weak nuns who were less disciplined in
religious observance] (agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 152r: Ana de San Bartolomé, 17 February
1661).
50. Cf. Juana de San Elı́as’ remark that Andrea de San Francisco called nuns who
disagreed with her judı́as for an equally inflammatory comment, given the context (agn
Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 184r: letter Juana de San Elı́as, undated).
51. [. . . these will be the ones to put the last candle into her hands on her deathbed]
(agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 176r: Hijas de la Orden communal letter, 21 February 1661).
52. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 176v: Hijas de la Orden communal letter, 21 February 1661.
53. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 190r: letter Marı́a de San Cirilio, undated. The ambiguity
‘‘indian’’/ ‘‘born in the Indies’’ is impossible to resolve, but the latter interpretation sug-
gests a far wider application of the stereotype that fits in with Alberro’s findings and ties
in with the gachupı́n claim that all criollos were Indians beneath the skin (Alberro 1992).
54. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 160r: letter Catalina de la Cruz, 18 February 1661.
55. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 151r: Ana de San Bartolomé, 17 February 1661.
56. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 183r: letter Marı́a de San Juan, undated.
57. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 181v –182r: letter Marı́a de San Juan, undated.
58. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 120v: Andrea de San Francisco, 11 February 1661.
59. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 120v –121r: Andrea de San Francisco, 11 February 1661.
60. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 121r: Andrea de San Francisco, 11 February 1661.
61. [This doctrine is heretical] (agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 122r: Andrea de San Francisco,
11 February 1661).
62. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 122v: Andrea de San Francisco, 11 February 1661.
63. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 124r: Andrea de San Francisco, 11 February 1661.
64. [Only what she has already said about asking for Carmelite confessors] (agn Inq.
581, exp. 1, f 124r: Andrea de San Francisco, 11 February 1661).
65. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 169r: Clara del Santı́simo Sacramento, 19 February 1661. The
great majority of the accusations leveled by the nuns remain at this allusive, often meta-
phorical level. They retell anecdotes that may be interpreted as having a doctrinal dimen-
sion, but they never make this dimension apparent themselves. Thus, Marı́a de los An-
geles, when answering the direct question of whether heterodox doctrines are held in the
convent, recounts how during a meal and extraordinary mortification she hears Catalina
de Cristo say that she was ‘‘losing her soul’’ because she was not fulfilling the Carmelite
182 • Notes to Pages 72–78

rule. She also says she has heard Margarita de San Bernardo say that no nun in the
convent was in a fit state for salvation because they were not fully Carmelites (agn Inq.
581, exp. 1, f 145r: Marı́a de los Angeles, undated).
66. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 169v –170r: Clara del Santı́simo Sacramento, 19 February
1661.
67. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 156r: Marı́a del Niño Jesús, 17 February 1661.
68. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 126r: Andrea de San Francisco, 11 February 1661.
69. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 126r: Andrea de San Francisco, 11 February 1661.
70. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 135r: Teresa de Jesús, 15 February 1661. In her testimony,
Marı́a de los Angeles uses exactly the same metaphor, this time in reported speech.
Clearly, the Hijas de la Orden themselves employed it (f 143r: Marı́a de los Angeles,
undated).
71. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 136r: Teresa de Jesús, 15 February 1661.
72. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 135v: Teresa de Jesús, 15 February 1661.
73. agn Inq. 581, exp. 1, f 134v –135r: Teresa de Jesús, 15 February 1661.

Chapter 5
1. [Since the birth of the new Eve in 1500, divine providence has shown her omnipo-
tence by allowing more of the world to be discovered, principally the Indies, which had
not been done for 5500 years . . . in the hope that the source of the divine spirit should
be incorporated into the world through this general mothering] (Reprinted in Geneva,
1970). The quotation is from this reprinted edition, pp. 50 –51. On Postel’s stature as a
thinker about ‘‘woman,’’ see Maclean (1980, 22 –26) and Screech (1953). On his concep-
tion of the New World, see Febvre’s comments (1982, 107 –122). A version of this chapter
first appeared in Gender and History (1997).
2. [Having mentioned good Petronila (the Indian), there is no reason not to mention
other humble little women, who today in the court of the Supreme King of Kings will be
very great] (Sigüenza y Góngora 1683, Preface).
3. The literature on the history of the indigenous peoples under colonial rule is vast.
A good overview, including a bibliographical essay, is provided by Gibson (1984). For
seminal accounts of indigenous acculturation in New Spain, see Lockhart (1992), Clen-
dinnen (1987), and Gruzinski (1988).
4. The testimonies of two priests, Manuel Pérez and Alejandro Romano, one for
and one against the foundation, are reproduced in Appendix 3.
5. Nancy M. Farris provides details of the relationship of the indigenous population
to the church hierarchy. She describes how an Indian community set up its own cult to
the Virgin, an activity connected to the Indian revolt in Chiapas in 1712. Earlier, in 1610
in another border region, the Yucatán, two Maya Indian men proclaimed themselves
 Notes to Pages 79–81 • 183

pope and bishop and ordained a number of other Indians. It was also usual for Indians
to officiate at ‘‘dry’’ masses (when the Host was not consecrated) whenever an officially
ordained priest was not available. Farris also cites the example of the apostate Maya in
the Tipu region who taunted visiting friars with claims that his people had their own
priests to celebrate mass using tortillas and pozole. Farris (1984, 318) identifies the defini-
tively negative shift in official Spanish policy toward the establishment of an indigenous
Catholic priesthood as taking place between the foundation of the Franciscan school /
seminary at Tlatelolco in 1536 and the first Mexican Provincial Council in 1555, after
which all such ideas were abandoned. See also Gruzinski (1991) on how the options taken
by wealthy Indians making their wills in the eighteenth century, especially the foundation
of capellanı́as, can be interpreted as strategies designed to ensure the ordination of male
members of their families.
6. Cf. Ricard (1992); see especially the chapters on the foundation of the seminary
for Indian boys in Tlatelolco. Cf. also Gonzalbo Aizpuru (1990).
7. See Cuevas (1921–1926, 4 : 189) and Muriel (1963).
8. This article is based on material consulted in the Archivo General de la Na-
ción, sección Historia, abbreviated hereafter as agn Hist. (agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2,
f 39v – 40r).
9. Cf. Pedro Valo de Villavicencio’s assertion that his Jesuit colleagues testifying
against the foundation have proved their case both in theological and legal terms, as well
as from personal experience (agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated).
10. José L. Sánchez Llora’s figures for the printing of hagiographic works in Spanish
revealingly set the peak years as the decades 1600 –1610, 1610 –1619, and 1620 –1629, with
a production of 79, 97, and 124 works, respectively. The figures for the last half of the
seventeenth century average about 40 works per decade, considerably higher than the
average production per decade for the whole preceding century, which is 13. Sánchez
Llora’s (1988, 375) figures are based on the library catalog of the Spanish humanist Nicolás
Antonio and are intended to give an idea of editorial activity rather than exact numbers
of publication. It was in this period of high production that the greatest number of ha-
giographies of women were published. For the ‘‘feminization’’ of hagiography as narra-
tive, see Vauchez (1981, 41).
11. For the formalization of hagiography as a genre, see Weinstein and Bell (1982) and
Caro Baroja (1978).
12. Of course, the New World’s novelty and the unknown consequences of its climate,
food, and so forth, became a subject of debate in connection with the huge Creole and
mestizo populations that had grown by 1700 (see Alberro 1992).
13. Maclean (1980, 57). The varieties of social organization of the peoples who made
up the Méxica empire should not be underestimated. It is, however, justifiable to make a
generalization in this case (see Clendinnen 1995). As for Spanish imposition of what they
184 • Notes to Pages 81–86

considered ‘‘natural’’ family structures, it is interesting to recall how many of the Indians
were forced to live in nuclear and patriarchal ‘‘units’’ in the hospitals set up by the early
missionaries, most notably Vasco de Quiroga’s in Santa Fe.
14. Vitoria, De potestate ecclesiastica altera, in Lawrance and Pagden, eds. (1995, 130).
15. Brown (1989, 271).
16. Maclean (1980, 81).
17. The classic study of the fortunes of Natural Slavery and other aspects of scholastic
thought concerning the Americas is Anthony Pagden’s, The Fall of Natural Man (1982).
18. Manuel Pérez mentions the papal bull in his testimony, though he mistakes the
pope, in order to impress how the utterly barbaric nature of the indigenous peoples had
caused many to doubt their rationality, obliging the Church to issue a binding statement
(agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated).
19. Politics 2.1254a28 –b2 and 3.1254b2 –16. (1995, 6 –7). It is interesting in this context
to note that the discussion that prompts such comments from Aristotle is on the ‘‘Natural
patterns of rule as a justification of slavery.’’ For an account of the recurrent appeal to
pairs of opposites of various sorts, both in general cosmological doctrines and in accounts
of particular natural phenomena in ancient thought, see Lloyd (1966).
20. Cf. the canonist Diego de Covarrubias’ (1512 –1577) statement that ‘‘all women are
natural slaves in relation to their husbands’’ (quoted in Pagden 1982, 46).
21. Alejandro Romano (agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, f 37v –38r) and Pedro Valo de Villa-
vicencio (agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, f 53r–53v).
22. Novı́sima de Indias (1571–1572, 27, bk. 6).
23. Cf. Brown (1989, 271).
24. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated.
25. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated.
26. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated. For an explanation of the classical genealogy
of this kind of argumentation from opposites, see Lloyd (1966, especially chap. 2, ‘‘The
Analysis of Different Modes of Opposition’’).
27. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated.
28. On the late medieval precedents for this legislation on the suitability of different
kinds of grain, see Rubin (1991). Cf. Francisco de Vitoria’s (1586, f 38v) explanation that
barley was an unsuitable cereal for making the Host, as it was not the food of men but of
beasts.
29. Rubin (1991, 147) describes how the frequency of communion was also a source of
concern for medieval theologians and how it changed from being an annual sacrament
(instituted by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215) to one permitted three times a year
(Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost) as long as it was accompanied by proper confession.
Discussions in this period about the appropriateness of sexual intercourse before receiv-
ing the Eucharist and the consensus that menstruating women should abstain from com-
munion underline how the materiality of the sacrament had always been a source of
 Notes to Pages 86–91 • 185

ambivalence. That it continued to be so during the Counter-Reformation and that such

ambivalence required that the sacrament’s practice be regulated carefully is also apparent
from the controversy surrounding the Jansenists, who wrote opposing what they charac-
terized as the Jesuit custom of administering the sacrament in a too frequent and indis-
criminate manner. Delumeau (1977, 107 –108) mentions Arnauld’s De la fréquente com-
munion (1642) in the context of the Jansenists’ perceived ‘‘rigor’’ but makes clear that this
was also a discussion central to thinkers like Charles Borromeo, whose orthodoxy was
never in question. See Zarri (1990, 87 –163) on frequent communion and women. Zarri
provides a closely argued account of the Italian ecclesiastical hierarchy’s interpretation of
this practice by spiritually inclined women in the early and mid sixteenth century as
constituting a threat to the (male) priesthood. Caroline Walker Bynum (1987, 56) pursues
a similar argument.
30. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated.
31. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, f 29r–30r.
32. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, f 37r.
33. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, f 29v.
34. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, f 30r. Cf. Delumeau, ed. (1992).
35. ‘‘Videmus, vel in ipsa nostra Hispania homines in pagis quibusdam natos, si apud
suos perseverent, ineptos haberi, ac ridiculos: eosdem traductos in scholas, aut curiam,
aut celebres urbes mirae soltertiae, in genio praestare, nemeni cedere’’ (Acosta 1596, 150).
36. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated.
37. For an interpretation of the rediscovery of idolatry in the Spanish viceroyalties,
see Bernand and Gruzinski (1992, 1993).
38. On the antipathy of José de Acosta ( Jesuit historiographer and founder of the
order’s first reducción in Peru in 1578) toward the idea of making Indians more Spanish on
the grounds that it would be ‘‘the downfall of everything,’’ see Pagden (1982, 164). See
also Girolamo Imbruglia (1983, 26) for the selective preservation of facets of indigenous
culture in the Jesuit reducciones.
39. For a general account of narrative transformations in the New World, see Green-
blatt (1992).
40. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated.
41. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated.
42. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated.
43. Diego de Covarrubias (1679, f 684v, f 685r, and f 673r) often makes this analogy,
both in order to prove Spanish authority over the Indians and in order to support argu-
ments for universal monarchy.
44. Vigil (1986, 135).
45. Caro Baroja (1978, 490).
46. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru (1987) argues that Indian women learned the lessons of
assimilation and acculturation much more quickly than their male counterparts. She links
186 • Notes to Pages 92–130

the fact that Indian women taught Christianity in convents were put into groups that
ignored indigenous customs of social segregation and hierarchy to the rapid decomposi-
tion of the indigenous elite. A similar argument that women were special vectors for the
transmission of cultural values is put forward by Solange Alberro (1988, 204) in relation
to Inquisition cases concerning Jews. Alberro claims the judaisante family—and particu-
larly the women in it—are a perfect metaphor of the process of assimilation and integra-
tion under way in the colony, and that in fact the very fabric of colonial Jewish religious
practice was transformed as a result of the domestic and feminine sphere becoming its
privileged space.
47. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated.
48. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated.
49. Bernand and Gruzinski (1992, 142). The authors also point out the importance the
extirpators made of the distinction between traditions they considered to have been in-
herited mechanically and those they perceived to be the result of transformations
wrought by personal initiative. Bernand and Gruzinski’s formulation is clearly indebted
to the work of Pierre Bourdieu and his notions of the quotidian and what he expresses as
the habitus. See Bourdieu (1990).
50. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated.
51. See Ginzburg’s (1992, 161) comments on the rejection of the ‘‘referential fallacy’’
by historians and his own optimism that ‘‘dialogic’’ sources may still hold information
about ‘‘something which we must call, faute de mieux, (eternal reality).’’
52. See the consequent resonance of Ginzburg’s (1992, 159) description of the ‘‘anthro-
pological attitude’’: ‘‘The essence of what we call anthropological attitude—that is, the
permanent confrontation between different cultures—rests on a dialogic disposition.’’
53. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated.
54. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated.
55. Corcuera de Mancera (1992).
56. agn Hist. vol. 109, exp. 2, unfoliated.
57. Vitoria, De Indis, in Lawrance and Pagden, eds. (1995, 235).

Afterword
1. Cervantes (1995, 459, Allen, ed.).

Appendix 2
1. Spaniards who have come to the Indies. From the Portuguese cachopo, meaning
small boy.
2. This title denotes that Téllez had a university degree.
THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK
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Index

Alcántara, Pedro de, 43 and psychological turmoil, 48 – 49

Aristotle, 83 – 84 sexual roles in, 47
confessor
Carmelites choice of, 61
character of, 139, 143 –144 emotional dependence on, 36, 48, 55
and communion, 65 – 66 as interpreter, 43
confessional practices of, 56, 66 convent community
establishment of in New Spain, 15 aggression in, 139 –140
and government of convent, 144 dissimulation, 68
history of in New Spain, 16 –17 disunion, 26, 64, 127 –129, 133 –134, 144,
and internal conflict, 58 –59 146 –147
male and female branch of, 57 –59 ethnic variety of, 29, 31, 33
and manipulation of history, 65 and family, 26, 28 –29
Catherine of Siena, Saint, 46 – 47 and gossip, 138, 144 –145
city hagiographic representation of, 25
and barbaric Indian past, 84 – 85, 158 – and humility, 115 –116
159 and obedience, 127 –128
role of convents in, 6, 14, 40 and particular friendships, 28
visions of, 51–52 snobbishness in, 132
clergy and surveillance, 144
and government of convent, 131, 139 and Teresian abolition of titles, 27
secular and regular, 55 and torment, 116 –117
climate and worldliness, 117
and excessive femininity, 53 convents
pernicious effects of, xiv, 32 ceremonies of foundation of, 18
religious vocation and, 29 conflict in, 74, 116 –117
colonial culture. See New Spanish culture ecclesiastic visit of, 129
colonial practices and election rigging, 130
orthodoxy of, x–xi and female asceticism, 82
and quotidian, 33 government of, 70 –72, 131
confessional relationship hierarchy in, 138, 145 –146
and acculturation, 37 images and relics in, 50 –51
instability of, 46 – 47 for Indian women, 78 – 80
200 • Colonial Angels

and political influence, xv food

punishment in, 131 chocolate, 32 –34
relaxation of, ix, 130, 138 –139 politics of, xiv
convent writings
adaptation of Teresian model, 21 gachupinas, xiv
as historical sources, xi–xii characteristics of, 30
sense of community in, 10 and conflict in convent, 128, 133
See also women’s writing and courtliness, 132
Counter Reformation and cunning, 131
hagiography in, 80 and honor, 64 – 65
influence of in New Spain, 40 privileges enjoyed in New Spain, 30 –31
and manifestations of spirituality, 22 and sexual innuendo, 132
role of confessor in, 47 Gerson, Jean, 42
criollas, xiv Granada, Luis de, 47 – 48
and apologetic New World project,
49 –51 hagiography
characteristics of, 31–32 antihagiography, 66 –70
and political power, 59 artifice, 69
symbolic worth of, 41 audience, 45
Cruz, sor Juana Inés de la, xii canon of authoritative texts, 42 – 43
Counter Reformation use of, 42, 44, 80
dialogic accounts, 94 –95 didactic purpose of, 9, 12, 44
eschatology, 4, 7, 12
empire heroine in, 64
cultural and religious hegemony, 41 and human nature, 80
history of, 98 juridical character of, 8
and narration, 99 and modernity, 34
role of city in establishment of, 6, and naturalism, 64, 68 – 69
52 novelistic discourse, 21
See also colonial practices reformer in, 68
ethnography, xiv, 4 and regulation of writing, 41
exemplary representation of social conformity, 22
ambiguity, 49 and silence, 67
and purgatory, 3 social context, 70
representation of America, 49 and St. Augustine, 22
extirpaciones, 89, 92 –93 and superstition, 43
transcendental narration, 4, 7
feminine spirituality travel narrative, xii
and bewitchment, 54
New World manifestations of, 53 Ignatius of Loyola, Saint, 43
See also New Spanish culture; women; Indias, xiii–xiv
women’s writing acculturation, 152
 Index • 201

alcoholism, 95, 152 identity, x

and Christian thought, 86 – 87 optimism, 76
and classical thought, 84 – 85 orthodoxy, 50 –51
communion, 85 – 86 saints, cult of, in, 39
and convent community, 158 –159 women’s spirituality, 61– 62
and extremes, 85 nuns
and Franciscan Order, 89 education of, 130 –131
and government of convent, 161 and persona of reformer, 137
inconstancy of, 159 and religious hierarchy, 62
intellectual capacity of, 92 and usurping of male privileges, 5
and Jesuit Order, 89
and marriage, 159 picaresque, 20 –21
and misogynist thought, 87 – 88 pureza de sangre
as nuns, 78 – 80 New World context, 50, 59, 93 –94
pagan history, 92 and Sta. Teresa, 29 –30
perseverance of, 152 purgatory. See exemplary
rationality of, 83
and understanding, 153, 160 –161 reform
virtues, 154 representation of, 25
weakness, 69, 162
Inquisition Teresa of Avila, Saint
confessor in, 60, 63 adaptation and transformation of liter-
in convent, 147 ary forms, 21
and dissimulated sanctity, 53 birthplace, significance of, 31
docta ignorantia, 70 –73 and convent government, 67
and doctrine, 66 and divine ordination of Mexican con-
fear of, 38 vents, 16
forensic rhetoric, 66 and feminine tradition, xi
and heresy, 60 and heroic virtue, 22
jurisdiction of, 60 influence of works on writing nuns, 19
and obedience, 63 intimate and personal style, 19
and literary and spiritual tradition, 15
martyrdom and practicalities of foundation, 15, 18
hagiography, 22 relation to prelates, 57
and journey to New World, 5 and secular clergy, 65
and Sta. Teresa in New World, 34 and simplicity in writing, 23
writing and, 38 and unity of convent community, 27
testimony
Natural Law, 81– 83 confessional letters, 44
New Spanish culture debates on Indies, 78
exemplarity, 78 Inquisition, 70
gender, 80 – 81, 91–92 literary genre, 2
202 • Colonial Angels

personal experience, 90 –91, 96 –97, audience, 37

154, 159, 160 and confessor, 36, 115
transmission of culture, xi and discomfort, 54
and Inquisition, 59 – 60 and docta ignorantia, 23, 70 –73
and women, 93 –94 and emotion, 38 –39, 114 –115
travel narrative, xii and exemplarity, xii
personal experience, 7 –11 and feminine tradition, 15, 35
pilgrimage, 7 and intimate and personal style, 19
and purgatory, 3 and naturalism, 10, 75
and obedience, 110
vida. See hagiography orthodoxy of narrative, 37
and personal experience, 73
women and personal need, 61
Early Modern notions of, 82 – 83 and reticence, 24
theological understanding of, 78 and simplicity, 45
women’s writing allusion to Sta. Teresa, 20
access to, xii and submission to God, 45
and anxieties, 109 and visions, 111–114
articulacy in, 24, 110