Alone at the Altar: Single Women and Devotion in Guatemala, 1670-1870 9781503604391

Citation preview

Alone at the Altar

This page intentionally left blank

Alone at the Altar Single Women and Devotion in Guatemala, 1670–1870

Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara

;

stanford university press stanford, california

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written ­permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Leavitt-Alcántara, Brianna, author. Title: Alone at the altar : single women and devotion in Guatemala, 1670–1870 / Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara. Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2017028675 (print) | lccn 2017030514 (ebook) | isbn 9781503604391 (electronic) | isbn 9781503603684 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: lcsh: Single women—Religious life—Guatemala—History. | ­Catholic Church—Guatemala—History. | Guatemala—Religious life and customs. | ­Guatemala—Church history. Classification: lcc bx1438.3 (ebook) | lcc bx1438.3 .l43 2017 (print) | ddc 282/.7281082—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028675 Typeset by Newgen in 10/12 Sabon

For Salvador, Mateo, and Joaquín

This page intentionally left blank

Contents

Tables, Maps, and Figures  ix Acknowledgments  xi Introduction  1 part i. spiritual capital: devotional ­n etworks and a religious renaissance  17 1. City of Women, City of God: Poor, Single, and Holy in Santiago de Guatemala  19 2. Unlikely Allies: Missionaries and Laywomen  41 3. Sex, Honor, and Devotion  72 part ii. shifting foundations: reform, ­r evolution, and spiritual renewal  99 4. To Educate and Evangelize: Laywomen, Clergy, and Late Colonial Girls’ Schools  103 5. The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena  134 6. “With Knives Drawn”: Gender, Devotion, and Politics After Independence  173 Epilogue  201 Glossary  207 Notes  209 Bibliography  263 Index  283

This page intentionally left blank

Tables, Maps, and Figures

tables 1. Number of will-makers per sampled years and per 20-year period  11 2. Number of male and female will-makers per 20-year period  11 3. Number of elite and non-elite female willmakers per 20-year period 14

maps 1.1. Map of colonial borders of the audiencia or Kingdom of Guatemala  23 1.3. Map of Santiago de Guatemala, ca. 1770  25

figures 1.2. Antonio Ramírez, Cathedral of Santiago de los Caballeros (Guatemala, 1678) 24 1.4. Frontispiece, Antonio Siria and José Toribio Medina, Vida de doña Ana Guerra de Jesús, escrita por el p. Antonio de Siria, y por encargo del gobierno de El Salvador reimpresa a plana y renglón, precedida de un breve prólogo, por J.T. Medina (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1925 [1716])  28

x

Tables, Maps, and Figures

3.1. Hermano Pedro de San José Betancurt, unknown artist (Guatemala, ca. 1720–1730) 84 3.2. Hermano Pedro de San José Betancurt, Estampa Suelta (looseleaf print, Guatemala, 1808)  85 5.1. Sor María Teresa Aycinena, unknown artist (Guatemala, ca. 1810–1820)  135 5.2. Pañuelo de 19 de agosto, 1816 (handkerchief from August 19, 1816)  139

Acknowledgments

This book was many years in the making and I am deeply indebted to various institutions, mentors, advisors, colleagues, friends, and family. Funding for this project came from multiple institutions. UC Berkeley’s History Department, Graduate Division, and the Muriel McKevitt Sonne Chair in Latin American History funded numerous summers in the archives during the earliest phases of my research. The Fulbright Hays Fellowship made it possible for me to spend a full year in the Guatemalan archives. Faculty Development funds from Centre College allowed me to spend two summers working with UC Berkeley’s microfilm files of the Archivo General de Centroamérica. The University of Cincinnati’s Faculty Research Grant and the Taft Research Center’s Summer Fellowship made it possible to do additional research in Guatemala, and the Taft Research Center Fellows Program gave me the invaluable gift of time to turn all that new research into this book. I realize now that the seeds for this project were planted long ago in a class on Women and Religion in Latin America taught by Michael Stanfield and Lois Lorentzen at the University of San Francisco. Those seeds found rich soil in the graduate program at UC Berkeley and I would like to thank my mentors, William Taylor and Margaret Chowning, for their generosity and unwavering support over many years. I could not have asked for better guidance. Their thoughtful comments and insightful feedback at every stage of the research and writing process always challenged me to think more critically and more creatively about my sources and my writing. I am particularly grateful for William Taylor’s encouragement to approach the study of history as a “restless discipline of context” that requires synoptic thinking and boundless intellectual curiosity. Margaret Chowning showed me the value of a well-written narrative and a good table, and helped me to get there. Bill and Margaret were also models of generous collegiality and I benefited greatly from a circle of supportive colleagues during graduate study, including members of the UC Berkeley

xii

Acknowledgments

Latin American Writing Workshop. How I miss that workshop. Special thanks go to Rosemary Joyce, Linda Lewin, Mark Healey, Walter Brem, Sylvia Sellers-García, Jessica Delgado, Kinga Novak, Stephanie Ballenger, Jennifer Hughes, Kari Zimmerman, Paul Ramírez, Sean McEnroe, Karen Melvin, Brian Madigan, Larissa Kelly, Eloina Villegas, Heather Flynn Roller, Julia Sarreal, Chuck Witschorik, Celso Castilho, Beatrice Gurwitz, Camilo Trumper, Dalia Muller, Ricardo Fagoaga Hernández, and Rus Sheptak. I would also like to thank the librarians and staff at the Bancroft Library who regularly helped me to navigate their rich collections and have always been quick with friendly smiles and words of encouragement. I am also indebted to numerous scholars and institutions in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico for their guidance and support during my research. During my first summer forays into research, Carlos Cañas Dinarte, Juan Pedro Viquiera, Mario Humberto Ruz, Haroldo Rodas, Artemis Torres Valenzuela, Don Rafael Flores Rubén at the Archivo General del Arzobispado of San Salvador, and the staff and researchers at the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamerica (CIRMA) generously introduced me to sources and archives that laid the foundation for the development of my research. The Archivo General de Centro América (AGCA) has been a home away from home during my long research trips to Guatemala. The archivists, researchers, and staff at the AGCA offered me daily support, guidance, and comic relief. I would especially like to thank Director Anna Carla Ericastilla for helping me to navigate the archive and think in new ways about women in nineteenth-century Guatemala. My research assistant Mirian Soyos critically assisted in the process of locating and photographing every will produced in Guatemala’s capital during thirteen different years. I would also like to thank René Johnston Aguilar for his collegial support and for putting me in contact with Carlos Ibarguen and Luis Alberto Cogley of the Asociación Pro-Beatificación de Madre María Teresa Aycinena. The Asociación generously provided me with digital access to their private collection of documents relating to Madre María Teresa Aycinena. Alejandro Conde Roche at the Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano “Francisco de Paula García Peláez” has assisted me numerous times over the years, both during research visits and with e-mailed inquiries from afar. The excellent support offered by the librarians and staff at the Benson Library at the University of Texas at Austin allowed me to get the most out of a very short research visit. Over the years, this book has benefited greatly from the feedback of numerous colleagues. Kari Zimmerman, Matthew O’Hara, Silvia Arrom, Edward Wright-Rios, Pamela Voekel, Kenneth Mills, Karen Melvin, Sylvia Sellers-García, Jessica Delgado, and Gretchen Starr-Lebeau all read

Acknowledgments

xiii

and commented on various drafts, articles, and presentations. I am thankful to the anonymous readers for Stanford Press who gave the manuscript a careful reading and provided valuable critiques. John Talmadge kindly provided me with advice on editing and the book proposal process. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by such a supportive department of colleagues at the University of Cincinnati. The History Department Research Seminar gave me opportunities to workshop new material. I am especially grateful to Isaac Campos, who provided feedback on various drafts of chapters and book proposals, and Erika Gasser, who read and commented on the entire manuscript and helped keep me sane during the writing process. It has been a true pleasure to work with the editorial staff at Stanford University Press. They have been prompt, professional, and supportive throughout this process. I would especially like to thank Margo Irvin, Nora Spiegel, Jay Harward, Gigi Mark, and Stephanie Adams. Writing a book can be a lonely affair at times, and I thank my large and amazing community of family and friends for pulling me out of my office cave. Of course, I would have achieved little in this life without my parents, Jim Leavitt and Vicky and Rory “Ry” Elder. They have provided me with endless moral support and instilled in me a love of learning. Over these many years, my mom’s support ranged from babysitting to editing to all manner of household projects. My big family, including those I grew up with and those I have had the honor to add through marriage, has kept me grounded and in good spirits and I am eternally grateful for their support. My Salvadoran family, especially the generations of single moms and lay leaders, helped me to imagine this world and showed me all the ways this history remains present with us today. Completing this book without the help of Carrie Heidlebaugh would have been infinitely more difficult. She corralled the chaos of our boisterous home with two small boys and a puppy, allowing me to stay sane and happy throughout this labor-intensive project. My circle of lifelong friends is a rock of support. I would especially like to thank Carrie Gordon, Shana Baggaley, Casey McCormick, María Jose Perry, Lois Lorentzen, Teresa Walsh, Kari Zimmerman, and Adriana Martínez Perry. I thank my sons Mateo and Joaquín for being the most wonderful distractions ever and for giving me the gift of focus, ensuring that I got down to business during the workday so I could enjoy evenings at home. Finally, I thank my husband, Salvador, who is my home no matter where we find ourselves in the world, and we have found ourselves in many places. For the adventures that have been and for all those to come, thank you.

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

; In 1761, María Inés Gil fell ill and called a local notary to her bedside so that she could make out a will and put her temporal and spiritual affairs in order.1 As María Inés sat with the notary that day, following the legal and religious formulas of will-making, she revealed much about her life. She was a vecina (resident or citizen) of Santiago de Guatemala (today Antigua), the colonial capital of the Kingdom of Guatemala (a province of New Spain roughly corresponding to modern Central America). Like most will-makers, she did not specify her racial status, but it is quite likely she was of mixed African descent, as she lived in a neighborhood closely associated with the free mulatto and free black community.2 There are other indicators of racial mixture as well. By the eighteenth century, approximately 65 percent of Santiago’s population was mixed-race, and the percentage among non-elites was even higher. María Inés suggested her own non-elite status by declining to identify herself with the honorific title of doña. She was also an hija natural, that is an illegitimate child born to parents who faced no legal or ecclesiastical barriers to marriage. This intermediate status of illegitimacy placed María Inés above children born to adulterous or other scandalous unions, but her claim to this ­status was tenuous since she did not know, or chose not to identify her father. In any case, hijos naturales, and especially those not recognized by their fathers, carried the suspicion of racial mixture.3 María Inés opted to leave her marital status blank, but her will clearly indicates that she was a single woman. María Inés may have had one or more long-term consensual unions, because she had borne several illegitimate children during her lifetime, all of whom had died. She did not explain the circumstances of their births and made no mention of her children’s father or fathers. Indeed, in a subsequent will made a few years later, María Inés omitted all reference to her children. 4 Like most will-makers at this time, she did not mention her occupation. But María

2

Introduction

Inés was apparently an enterprising woman. In the sidebar of her will, the notary somewhat unusually referenced her nickname, la grano de oro (the grain of gold). This phrase typically describes a profitable agricultural product, for example coffee in the nineteenth century, and thus suggests that María Inés made a living selling some valuable raw material. Business was apparently quite good. She included a house with a tile roof among her assets, and a subsequent will made out three years later indicated that she owned some furniture and clothing, and also had over 1,000 pesos in hard currency in her possession. Spanish law required will-makers to divide up most of their estates (four fifths to be precise) equally among their children, followed by their parents. Because María Inés had no forced heirs, she was free to leave her soul as primary heir, directing all her assets toward her favored devotions and her own salvation. Her devotion to the Dominican Church, and particularly the sacred and much beloved image of Our Lady of the Rosary housed within, are most apparent. By the time she made out her first will, María Inés was already a pious benefactor of Our Lady of the Rosary, providing funds for a novena, a ritual round of masses, in honor of the sacred image. She donated her nativity scene to Our Lady’s altar, under which she wished to be buried dressed in a Dominican habit. In a more unusual act of devotion, María Inés noted her desire to entrust an indigenous boy she had raised to the care of a Dominican friar, hoping that the boy might apply himself to the service of the chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary. She also wanted to create three religious endowments, one to annually fund expenses related to Our Lady of the Rosary’s feast day, one to fund the daily illumination of six candles in front of the image during Mass or while the lay female community of the Beaterio de Santa Rosa prayed the rosary, and another to fund annual masses in honor of the Christ Child. For each endowment, María Inés named the Dominican friars as chaplains and patrons responsible for celebrating the masses and managing the foundations in perpetuity. Finally, María Inés entrusted the execution of her will to the Dominican provincial head. Toward the end of her will, she highlighted her close relationship with the Dominican friars in unusually explicit terms. She noted that the friars should enjoy wide control over her estate on the condition that they take care of her in her illness “because I am orphaned and alone.”5 María Inés’s situation as a non-elite single woman, and even as a single mother of illegitimate children, was quite common in colonial Spanish American cities. Labor and migration patterns often produced urban ­female majorities, high numbers of unmarried women, and femaleheaded households.6 Indeed, Santiago de Guatemala was very much a “city of women” by the eighteenth century, with women heading many

Introduction

3

households and illegitimacy rates hovering around 45 percent among the non-elite population.7 Recent studies highlight the critical economic roles played by non-elite women in colonial Spanish American cities.8 But we know remarkably little about the religious lives of women like María Inés Gil. What we do know comes mostly from Inquisition and criminal cases, prescriptive literature, and early modern Catholic decrees, all of which highlight official hostility toward laboring women living outside patriarchal authority.9 Nor did intensive piety necessarily save poor single women from scrutiny. Studies point out that the early modern Church was also increasingly concerned about female religious autonomy. 10 Actively religious laywomen had played important roles in medieval Spanish cities as healers, nurses, teachers, alms collectors, shrine keepers, and devotional leaders. But the sixteenth-century Council of Trent moved decisively to enclose active laywomen in cloistered convents as part of a broader project to aggressively enforce Catholic orthodoxy. For the Spanish American context, Nora Jaffary argues that ongoing concerns about native and African idolatry, uncontrollable racial mixture, and threats to the colonial hierarchy heightened anxieties about active lay female religiosity and unorthodox religious practices. Jaffary finds that Mexican Inquisition officials were especially worried about non-elite independent women, women like María Inés Gil, and prosecuted them as “false” mystics more than any other group.11 Wills left by women like María Inés Gil reveal another side to this story. Although official decrees required institutional enclosure of unmarried women and cloistered confines for active female religiosity, María Inés was able to navigate narrowing gender norms, participate in the spiritual economy, and cultivate alliances with powerful priests and religious orders. And she was not alone, according to my analysis of close to 550 wills between 1700 and 1870 and a variety of other sources including spiritual biographies, religious chronicles, school foundation records, and Inquisition files. Far from the margins, laboring women living outside marriage acted as lay evangelizers, teachers, benefactors, and devotional leaders over two centuries in Guatemala’s capital. Priests, friars, and archbishops frequently collaborated with these women and endorsed active religious paths for women outside convent walls. This book explores how and why non-elite single women forged alliances with the Church and how those alliances ultimately shaped local religion and the spiritual economy, late colonial reform efforts, and post-Independence politics in the colonial capital of Central America. In some ways, this is a story about Church leaders in a modest provincial capital, away from close Inquisitorial oversight, adapting official

4

Introduction

doctrine according to local needs and circumstances. Guatemala’s capital was not alone in this. As Elizabeth Lehfeldt points out, even within Europe, the Council of Trent’s strict decrees regarding female enclosure were “unevenly” implemented across provincial towns and cities.12 But most studies that consider this dynamic focus on organized communities of pious laywomen, like the French Daughters of Charity, or on the enduring permeability of convent walls and nuns’ extensive engagement in worldly affairs.13 Far less attention has been paid to local Church support for independent religious laywomen, particularly when those women were poor and unmarried.14 Alone at the Altar explores how the local context of Guatemala’s capital influenced levels of official tolerance and support for lay female religiosity and laboring women outside marriage. My approach builds on William Christian’s concept of “local religion.” Christian found that Catholicism for early modern Spanish peasants centered on community-based devotions connected to particular places, images, and local sacred histories as opposed to the sacramental and liturgical emphasis of the Universal Church. Based on these findings, Christian argued more broadly that Catholic belief and practice invariably reflected distinctly local interpretations of Universal Catholicism. 15 For historians of colonial Spanish America, local religion provides an alternative to binary categorizations of elite versus popular religiosity and rethinks scholarly approaches to religion that separate religious experience and practice from, as William Taylor puts it, “the wider social, economic, and political network of which they are a part.”16 While Christian originally examined local religion in a rural peasant context, the present analysis shifts attention to the urban religious landscape of a provincial capital of Spanish America, which connected with but also diverged from more powerful colonial centers such as Mexico City and Lima. This study further sheds light on the role that gender and marital status played in the formation of local religion.17 While local contexts are clearly at work, this is not a simple story of local religion at odds with the Universal Church, or colonial Church ­officials at odds with Rome. The eighteenth century witnessed a renewal of Catholic missionary movements, which one scholar describes as “the most vigorous spiritual effort of the eighteenth-century church.”18 As Luke Clossey points out, while historians often treat these efforts as “a disjointed collection” of individual missions, early modern mission history was in fact a “macrohistorical phenomenon, that is, a single worldspanning enterprise.”19 In Guatemala’s capital, missionaries revived medieval feminine ideals and forms of devotion and supported a vibrant spiritual renewal among lay populations. Eighteenth-century Franciscan missionary chronicles and the Jesuit-authored spiritual bio­graphy of a

Introduction

5

local holy woman, Anna Guerra de Jesús, illuminate how the encounters of local and global Catholicism, of missionary movements and enthusiastic female religiosity, forged diverse models of female piety and sustained support for active female ministries. Recent analyses of early modern hagiographies, which explore the complex relationships developed between priests and local holy women and the celebration of laywomen from non-elite and mixed-race backgrounds, provide a broader regional and global context for clerical alliances with laywomen in ­eighteenth-century Santiago and suggest the need to modify interpretations of early modern Catholicism as primarily repressive and hostile toward single women and lay female religiosity.20

approaching women and religion, sex and honor in spanish america A rich body of scholarship explores nuns and convent life in Spain and Spanish America. Laywomen, especially non-elite women, left a thinner paper trail and have proved a more elusive subject. Women prosecuted for religious deviance represent an important exception to this rule, and several studies take advantage of the rich and meaty testimonies provided by Inquisition trials. Martha Few’s study of witchcraft in colonial Guatemala, for example, considers how mixed-race women used “informal religious practices” and spiritual power “to overtly challenge gender, racial, and colonial hierarchies and intervene in conflicts and problems in daily life.”21 But other recent studies point out that the scholarly emphasis on power struggles can sometimes obscure how those accused of religious “deviance” saw themselves and their actions. 22 The scholarly and popular soft spot for rebels can also overshadow the prominent role that women played in the expansion of Spanish Catholicism in the New World and the ambitious formation of a global Catholic Church.23 As Kathleen Myers and Amanda Powell aptly note, women’s influence in the public life of colonial Spanish America came primarily through “extensive participation in the orthodox religious world of the Catholic Church and its hierarchies,” rather than rebellion.24 Through an extensive analysis of wills, as well as a variety of other source materials, Alone at the Altar addresses several unresolved questions pertaining to non-elite women’s lived religious experiences and how they shaped local religion in colonial Spanish America. How did nonelite women relate to the female mystical tradition and missionary movements? What role did laboring women play in religious brotherhoods and new nineteenth-century pious associations? Did spiritual capital flow in

6

Introduction

just one direction, from the Church to poor women in the form of ­charity, or did laboring women participate actively in the spiritual economy, and if so, what impact did they have? And how did poor single women respond to religious change and the weakening of the Church in the late colonial period and the post-Independence era? This book also explores how non-elite women living outside patriarchal control navigated questions of sex and honor. Scholars frequently point out that Spanish America was an honor-based culture in which female honor rested primarily on sexual virtue. Although Ann Twinam masterfully examined the ways in which elite women took advantage of loopholes in order to circumvent strict feminine ideals of sexual virtue and honor, the experiences of non-elite women remain unclear.25 Elite women could be single mothers in private and virgins in public because elite society upheld a sharp distinction between carefully crafted public personas and private realities and colluded to keep elite women’s sexual indiscretions secret. But poor women could not access such loopholes. For poor women, private and public were inseparable and indistinguishable. There would be no carefully “defined and manipulated disparities between their private and public worlds.”26 Given remarkably high levels of illegitimacy, especially among nonelite communities in Spanish and Spanish American cities, and the apparent complacency of local officials, some scholars question whether elite ideals of female chastity mattered at all in the daily lives of most people.27 Allyson Poska goes so far as to argue that “culturally or religiously required chastity was not central to gender expectations and sexual interaction in early modern Spain.”28 Evidence certainly suggests a surprising degree of social and legal tolerance in Guatemala and broader Spanish America toward female sexual activity outside marriage. It appears that prior sexual activity did not automatically restrict non-elite women’s marital prospects.29 In Santiago de Guatemala, official concern about sexual morality was also muted, even among local priests and the ecclesiastical court, perhaps because the city lacked the infrastructure required to systematically prosecute and incarcerate women who engaged in informal unions. But tolerance did not necessarily mean acceptance. Even though nonelites were clearly more tolerant toward sex outside the bounds of marriage, recent studies also indicate that non-elites cared, and often cared deeply, about their honor as well as their salvation according to orthodox Catholic belief and practice.30 While basic survival was surely a prime concern for non-elites, economic well-being was always linked to reputation in colonial Spanish America. Within the complex internal hierarchies of non-elite communities, legitimacy, sexual morality, and behavior mat-

Introduction

7

tered and shaped social status as well as vital access to credit and ­mutual aid.31 Furthermore, in the deeply litigious society of colonial Spanish America, marriage and honor allowed non-elites to better protect their rights in court. Slave women, for example, defended their rights in court by emphasizing their status as wives and members of the Catholic community. As Richard Boyer puts it, “Christian marriage attached every station of people to rights meant to be universal.”32 Poor single women, whether they engaged in informal unions or not, were clearly at a dis­ advantage in this cultural context. Alone at the Altar considers how some non-elite single women navigated these tensions by invoking ideals of female conduct other than chastity and enclosure. In its discussion of “alternative” feminine ideals, this study builds on anthropological studies that consider how female honor in Mediterranean societies reflects multiple factors, including, but not limited to, sexual behavior.33 There are obvious interpretive risks to projecting modern ethnographic findings back in time; however, this argument resonates with the evidence provided by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wills from Guatemala’s capital. Single non-elite women like María Inés Gil frequently highlighted their piety and active devotional networks, as well as their hard work and resourcefulness.34 Much as scholars recognize that race in colonial Latin America was a flexible category and individuals might claim multiple racial identities simultaneously, this study considers how gender ideals were malleable and multifaceted and poor single women could sometimes claim more than one moral status. To be clear, I do not assume that women’s religious practices or devotional networks were simply mundane survival strategies. Rather, this analysis of the ways in which gender, marital, and social status intersected with religious practice builds on Robert Orsi’s model of religion as a “network of relationships” that spans this world and the next and connects humans and sacred figures, while always remaining deeply enmeshed in the “arrangements of the social world in which they exist.”35

crossing the independence divide By crossing the boundary between early modern and modern, colonial and postcolonial, this study also explores issues of religious and gendered change and continuity. Secularization did not proceed in a linear fashion in Guatemala’s capital, nor were there clear battle lines between religious tradition and modernization. In the late colonial period, laywomen and their clerical allies pioneered educational initiatives, clearly drawing on medieval and early modern forms of piety, even as they expanded the

8

Introduction

scope and influence of lay female initiatives, challenged entrenched racial ideologies, and creatively engaged with modernizing royal reforms, Enlightenment thinking, and Catholic reform movements. Devotional networks between non-elite laywomen and priests took on new religious and political significance, both locally and globally, during the revolutionary era and for decades after. Nineteenth-century liberals everywhere portrayed female allies of the Church as backward fanatics or as coerced pawns of a reactionary clergy. Only recently have scholars begun to question this overly simplistic portrait of the relationship between women, religion, and politics in nineteenth-century Europe and Latin America.36 Building on this recent scholarship, Alone at the Altar explores how laboring laywomen, priests, and nuns creatively responded to rapid change and the onslaught of crises facing the Church at home and abroad. My case study of ecstatic nun Sor María Teresa Aycinena and her devotees, many of whom were priests and laywomen, illustrates how the Church’s weakened institutional power created an opening for assertive female claims to spiritual authority and a renewal of gendered devotional forms such as affective spirituality, imitation of Christ, and female mysticism. Although this famous, or infamous, nun did not become a unifying symbol for Guatemala, evidence suggests that her devotees forged the early foundations of a new kind of Catholic nationalism and Guatemalan identity. Scholars generally agree that non-elite women suffered significant setbacks in post-Independence Latin America as new states strengthened patriarchal power and privileges. While elite and middle-class women gained some status through the ideal of Republican Motherhood, poor women faced increased stigmatization and repression amid growing concerns about uncontrolled female sexuality.37 This study adds a religious and institutional dimension by considering how the weakening of the Church, especially the decline of religious brotherhoods and pastoral instability, undermined traditional forms of spiritual and social support for laboring women. The Church’s Marian female ideal and renewed emphasis on female sexual purity also likely heightened non-elite women’s vulnerability to stigmatization and repression. But at the same time, evidence from wills also indicates that many women continued to find familiar ways to navigate new challenges, invoking diverse ideals of female conduct, cultivating devotional networks, and positioning themselves as pious benefactors helping to rebuild the Church. Indeed, the weakness of the institutional Church augmented the “laicization of the faith,” a process by which laypeople took greater initiative and control over Church life and charitable activities. 38 Furthermore, the pitched battles between liberals and conservatives pro-

Introduction

9

vided laboring women in Guatemala City with new ways of establishing moral status and authority through their defense of the faith. Their actions shaped the development of popular conservatism in Guatemala and helped lay the foundation for Rafael Carrera’s rise to power and the long conservative era (1838–1871). As the Guatemalan Church rebuilt in the 1850s and 1860s, in the context of a global Catholic revival movement, laboring women in Guatemala City renewed alliances with returning ­Jesuit missionaries and took advantage of new devotional opportunities. These opportunities illuminate profound shifts within the nineteenthcentury Catholic Church, as officials relied heavily on female support to navigate the rapid changes and challenges brought by the modern era and largely rejected early modern restrictions on active lay female religiosity.

methodology and sources Finding ordinary women and their daily devotional lives in the archival record is particularly challenging for colonial Central America. Lengthy Inquisition trial records, the kinds found in Mexico and Peru with rich and detailed testimonies, are all but absent for this region. For most of my research, Guatemala’s Cathedral archive was closed for reorganization, meaning that parish and convent records, as well as ecclesiastical court records, were all out of reach. Wondering if my research was doomed to a dead end, I began searching through a wide variety of sources and found some useful case studies and episodes: the 1717 spiritual biography of a local holy woman, the late colonial foundation of girls’ schools, and the devotion and controversy surrounding an ecstatic nun during Independence. But I struggled to see the connections between these disparate case studies until I opened a large volume of notary records and began reading through wills. I was aware that scholars had used wills to examine religious practice and beliefs as well as construct social histories of women.39 Still, I was surprised by the sheer number of female will-makers in Guatemala’s colonial capital, particularly laboring single and widowed women, and the richness and variety of information about their religious and daily lives. After reading through and analyzing hundreds of wills, I realized that non-elite women living outside marriage were at the center of this story and provided a connective thread for the distinct case studies. Because much of this study builds on an analysis of wills, it is important to clarify my methodological approach, the profile of will-makers, and some of the strengths and limitations of this source material. Wills in colonial and nineteenth-century Spanish America were formulaic documents, but also flexible, varying widely in length and detail. Some

10

Introduction

­ ill-makers were terse. Others were chatty and went off script. But even w the most forthcoming will-makers left gaps and silences. By the eighteenth century, will-makers in Guatemala’s capital generally declined to identify themselves with racial labels. Many non-elite people talked about their “labor and sweat” but did not specify what they did for work. Detailed inventories of belongings were also surprisingly rare, especially among non-elites. Thoughts, feelings, and motivations are rarely accessible. But at the same time, the formulaic nature of wills required will-makers to reveal much about their lives. For more than a generation, historians have productively mined the formulaic fragments provided by wills to analyze subtle changes in religious mentalities and practices. Through a quantitative analysis of pious bequests in thousands of wills over long periods of time, historians like Michel Vovelle charted changing religious beliefs about salvation and death and the rise of secularization in early modern France.40 This study builds on that quantitative methodology, counting how many will-makers were male or female, married, single, or widowed, elite or non-elite, how many left pious bequests, claimed membership in religious brotherhoods, left their soul as primary heir, expressed a devotional connection to a male or female convent church, or named a priest as executor or witness to their will. Each of these quantitative markers measured over time has a story to tell, but I also wanted to explore how all these stories interacted. As anthropologist J. Davis points out, “the language which shapes people’s notions of divinity, the practices of their religion, the questions and answers which are important to them, is typically fairly closely related to the daily experience of family, political, and economic life.”41 To get at these intersections, I employed qualitative forms of analysis, examining a more “moderate number of cases in as much detail as possible.” 42 In order to ensure the most representative sample possible and to consider the relationship between gender, marital status, social status, and religious practice, I examined every will, both male and female, made out in Guatemala’s capital in thirteen selected years between 1700 and 1870, for a total of 539 wills.43 The selected years fell within four twenty-year time periods: 1700–1720, 1750–1770, 1800–1820, and 1850–1870. For the purposes of analysis, I aggregated the data from each twenty-year period (Table 1). When I first began reading through wills, it seemed every other willmaker was a woman, and a non-elite single or widowed woman at that. Not quite, but very close. During the eighteenth century, a striking fortyfive to fifty percent of will-makers in any given year were women. By the midnineteenth century, female will-makers actually outnumbered their male counterparts (Table 2). Spanish American women were often

11

Introduction

table 1.  Number of will-makers per sampled years and per 20-year period 1700–1720

Selected sample years

1800–1820

1850–1870

1700 1705 1717 1750 1755 1761 1770 1800 1810 1816 1850 1858 1862

Number of will-­ makers per year 35 Total number of will-makers per 20-year period

1750–1770

51

42

17

26

128

69

46

158

52

29

23

37

104

50

149

table 2.  Number of male and female will-makers per 20-year period 1700–1720

1750–1770

1800–1820

1850–1870

Female wills

60 (47%)

71 (45%)

51 (49%)

84 (56%)

266 (49%)

Male wills

68 (53%)

87 (55%)

53 (51%)

65 (44%)

273 (51%)

128 (100%)

158 (100%)

104 (100%)

149 (100%)

Total

Total

539 (100%)

well represented among will-makers because Spanish law ensured that daughters and sons inherited equally, husbands and wives jointly shared ownership of all properties acquired during marriage, and widows regained control of their dowries as well as at least half of all community property. Spanish law also guaranteed that women over age twenty-five could engage in the full array of property and business transactions, including inheriting and bequeathing assets; buying, selling, renting, and administering real estate; lending; borrowing; and forming business partnerships.44 Still, the number of female will-makers in eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala appears particularly high, even compared to other parts of colonial Spanish America. In eighteenth-century Mexico City, male will-makers outnumbered female will-makers two to one.45 Although more research is necessary to understand this distinctively local trend, it appears related to the gendered migration patterns and the acute gender imbalance in the Guatemalan capital.46 While census data is lacking for the eighteenth century, the 1805 census found that women represented 60 percent of the urban population.47 Consistently, the vast majority (over 80 percent) of female will-makers in Guatemala’s capital through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were living outside marriage, either as single or widowed women or less commonly as separated or abandoned wives. By contrast, roughly half of male will-makers were married, compared to approximately 15 percent of their female counterparts. The predominance of single women and widows among female will-makers in Guatemala’s capital reflects, at least in part, the significance of this demographic within the city. Several factors contributed to this reality, apparently at odds with the Spanish ideal.

62

12

Introduction

The legal requirement to divide inheritances equally among sons and daughters led some elite families to hold their daughters off the marriage market because they wanted to reintegrate the daughter’s inheritance into the family estate upon her death.48 By protecting women’s rights to inherit and hold property, Spanish law also made it possible for single women and widows to survive economically. Independent female survival was especially possible in urban economies, which unlike rural economies did not necessarily rely on the complementary husband/wife unit for survival.49 Migration and urban demographic imbalances also made for poor marriage markets, for women at least, and particularly for widows. This was an enduring trend in both Spanish and Spanish American society. As one scholar puts it, incessant warfare and emigration created a “kingdom of widows” in medieval and early modern Spanish cities. 50 In colonial Spanish America, gendered migration patterns similarly led to urban female majorities as men sought out work in rural areas and mines while women pursued economic opportunities in cities.51 Still, the rates of single and widowed female will-makers in Guatemala’s capital are especially high even in the context of colonial Spanish America. In her study of wills in nineteenth-century Mexico City, Silvia Arrom found the percentage of single and widowed female will-makers to range between approximately 62 and 74 percent, 10 to 20 percent lower than the figures for Guatemala’s capital.52 Again, the distinctively high proportion of women outside marriage among will-makers in Guatemala’s capital likely reflects a combination of factors including gender and racial demographics and limited ecclesiastical infrastructure to enforce marriage. However, wills also clearly overrepresent the number of women living outside marriage. This is partly because will-makers tended to be older and were thus more likely to be widows. Spanish legal tradition also explicitly provided expanded rights to women who lived outside marriage.53 Karen Graubart additionally points out that the overrepresentation of single women among will-makers in colonial Spanish America may reflect unmarried women’s vulnerability and strategic employment of Spanish law and institutions to protect their interests. 54 For the purposes of this study, the fact that wills highlight the experiences of single women, widows, and abandoned wives is obviously useful; however, it must also be recognized that wills clearly obscure the experiences of married women’s religious lives. Consequently, this analysis does not address married w ­ omen’s devotional lives and networks. In other parts of Spanish America, scholars have used wills to examine indigenous women’s experiences and societal roles, but unfortunately this kind of analysis is not possible for Guatemala’s capital. 55 The oc-

Introduction

13

casional will-makers who identified themselves with a racial marker usually described themselves as free black or mulatto. Nor did I find other suggestive hints of indigenous identity. Although it is clear that Santiago continually attracted indigenous female migrants to the city from neighboring towns and beyond throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, most will-makers who identified as migrants came from largely mixed-race regions to the south and east. Perhaps native women from nearby towns did not consider themselves migrants and simply identified themselves as residents or vecinas of the capital. Because most indigenous female migrants entered the city as dependent domestic servants, it is also possible that they lacked even the most minimal material wealth or financial independence necessary to pay a notary or make out a will. Those who escaped dependent servitude to become independent laborers often blended into Hispanicized mixed-race neighborhoods and may have adopted new ethnic identities. In fact, Catherine Komisaruk argues that indigenous female migrants played a leading role in Santiago’s extensive cultural and ethnic mixture and “the rise of a Hispanicized society.” 56 Compared to other Spanish American cities, indigenous women also represented a much smaller portion of Guatemala’s urban population. As Christopher Lutz points out, Santiago de Guatemala was a predominantly mixed-race city as early as 1700 with free mulattoes representing the largest single group, followed by mestizos, although rampant racial mixture undermined attempts to delineate distinct groups.57 By 1750, a striking 65 percent of the city was casta, or mixed-race, with Spaniards and Indians each representing 17 percent.58 The poorest segments of society also left few traces in the record of wills and are largely beyond the scope of this study. But the non-elite community in Guatemala’s capital was large and diverse, and laboring residents of varying economic backgrounds show up prominently among will-makers.59 The eighteenth century was a time of upward mobility for urban mixed-race groups, especially the mestizo and free mulatto populations, which increasingly left behind dependent positions as servants and slaves and established their own households in the parishes of San Sebastián, Candelaria, and Remedios surrounding the elite center of the city. To get a general quantitative sense of the number of elite and non-elite willmakers, I have relied on honorific titles (don or doña), or lack thereof. By this measure, non-elite women represented a sizable, sometimes predominant, percentage of female will-makers (Table 3). But to be clear, this is an undeniably crude and imprecise measure of social status. Some obviously poor women claimed the title of doña, most likely due to their “pure” Spanish heritage. Likewise, some women with sizable assets declined to identify as doñas, perhaps due to other kinds of “stains” on their honor

14

Introduction

table 3.  Number of elite and non-elite female will-makers per 20-year period 1700–1720

1750–1770

1800–1820

1850–1870

Elite female willmakers (doñas)

Total

17 (28%)

38 (54%)

34 (67%)

24 (29%)

113 (42%)

Non-elite female willmakers (­lacking honorific title)

43 (72%)

33 (46%)

17 (33%)

60 (71%)

153 (58%)

Total female will-makers

60 (100%)

71 (100%)

51 (100%)

84 (100%)

266 (100%)

such as racial mixture, illegitimacy, or type of labor. Over time, usage of honorific titles fluctuated widely and changed meaning, although how and why those meanings changed is not always accessible to historians. To the degree possible, I have complemented the quantitative use of honorific titles with a qualitative reading of individual wills, which takes into account the variety of factors such as legitimacy, race, work, and wealth that influenced social status. While elite women clearly show up in wills and had active devotional lives, I focused on non-elite women. I made this choice because non-elite women emerged so prominently from the sample of wills, and also because non-elite female piety has received considerably less scholarly attention than that of their elite counterparts.

organization Part I examines how laboring women outside marriage forged devotional networks and shaped Santiago de Guatemala’s local religion from 1670 to 1770. Chapter 1 focuses on the case study of local holy woman Anna Guerra de Jesús, an abandoned wife and mother and poor migrant to the city in the late seventeenth century, who navigated gendered constraints and developed close relationships with priests and religious orders. Wills illustrate how Anna Guerra de Jesús’s experiences reflected broader trends, and Chapter 2 looks at how and why priests and friars allied with poor unmarried women in eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala. Chapter 3 explores how gender, social, and marital status shaped participation in religious brotherhoods and the spiritual economy as well as alliances with priests. Through their devotional activities and networks, non-elite single women were able to develop pious personas alongside their position as vulnerable or “at-risk” women. The devastating earthquakes of 1773 and the relocation and renaming of Guatemala’s capital as Guatemala City mark the temporal break between the first and second parts of the book. Part II traces the shifting

Introduction

15

alliances between laboring single women and the Church during the tumultuous era from 1770 to 1870, as Enlightenment thought shaped new feminine ideals and the religious landscape of Guatemala’s capital dramatically altered due to the relocation of the city, late colonial reforms, Independence, and post-Independence politics. Chapter 4 examines how non-elite women, including indigenous women, helped pioneer and sustain three new primary schools for non-elite girls in and around late colonial Guatemala City. These schools illustrate laywomen’s expanding initiatives and influence and also highlight how alliances between laywomen and priests shaped educational reform movements in the late colonial period. Chapter 5 deals with the controversial case of mystic-nun Sor María Teresa Aycinena, which sheds light on the politicization of alliances between laywomen, priests, and nuns during the Independence era. Chapter 6 analyzes how non-elite women outside marriage navigated the shifting religious and political landscape in the decades after Independence. While certain trends undeniably undermined the moral status of laboring women, many women also positioned themselves as pious benefactors and public defenders of the faith, promoted the rise of popular conservatism, and took advantage of new opportunities to collaborate with missionary friars. A final note on translations. Readers can find the original Spanish quotes in the endnotes, and all translations within the text, unless otherwise indicated, are mine.

This page intentionally left blank

Pa rt one

Spiritual Capital: Devotional Networks and a Religious ­Renaissance

This page intentionally left blank

chapter one

City of Women, City of God Poor, Single, and Holy in Santiago de Guatemala

; On May 17, 1713, at age seventy-five, Anna Guerra de Jesús died in Santiago de Guatemala, the colonial capital of Central America. The Dominican and Jesuit orders sponsored sumptuous funerals attended by priests, friars, and government officials. Jesuits carried Anna’s coffin and buried her in the principal altar of their church, the location typically reserved for the Jesuit fathers themselves. Her epitaph read, “she died with the recognition and the fame of holiness.”1 Within three years of Anna’s death, Santiago’s local printing press published a lengthy biography of Anna’s life, penned by her former confessor, Jesuit Padre Antonio Siria and titled Vida admirable y prodigiosas virtudes de la v. sierva de Dios D. Anna Guerra de Jesús (Admirable Life and Extraordinary Virtues of the Servant of God, D. Anna Guerra de Jesús).2 Residents of colonial Spanish American cities delighted in the discovery of holy women close to home. Their lives, full of angst and despair, visions and mystical raptures, inspired devotion and regularly became the subject of evocative biographies and sermons.3 So it is no surprise to find that Santiago de Guatemala celebrated Anna as a local holy woman and published her hagiography (autobiography or biography of a saint or holy person).4 Asunción Lavrín and Josefina Muriel found for colonial Mexico alone approximately 121 books about holy women, most of them cloistered nuns.5 But Anna stands out as an unusual hagiographical subject. While the early modern Catholic ideal of feminine piety prized enclosure, obedience, and virginity, Anna was neither nun nor virgin, but rather a poor abandoned wife and mother. The sixteenth-century Council of Trent and subsequent decrees clearly required cloistered communities for all reli-

20

Chapter One

gious women, including beatas (pious laywomen who took simple vows and lived independently or in communities) and tertiaries (lay women affiliated with religious orders as members of Third Orders). But Anna lived and died in the world as a religious laywoman and Jesuit tertiary. Inquisition records highlight how unmarried and religious laywomen who remained in the world faced marginalization and persecution as the early modern Church more aggressively attempted to enforce Catholic orthodoxy and control female religiosity and sexuality. Indeed, in colonial Mexico, this anxious convergence led the Inquisition to target poor single women, more than any other group, for prosecution as false mystics.6 Anna clearly fits the Mexican Inquisition’s social profile for false mystics. But her spiritual biography illuminates another side to this story, particularly how some women successfully navigated gendered tensions associated with their status as non-elite women living outside both marriage and convent. This chapter explores Anna’s lived religious experience as a poor migrant and abandoned wife and mother, her engagement with female mystical traditions and devotional networks, and her cultivation of alliances with powerful priests and religious orders. It also places Anna’s story within the context of late seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury Santiago de Guatemala, particularly urban demographic shifts and social tensions, as well as movements for spiritual renewal and enthusiastic lay female piety. Like all hagiographies, Anna’s Vida is an imperfect historical source. Anna’s last confessor, Jesuit Padre Antonio Siria, wrote the spiritual biography based on his knowledge of Anna’s life through their confessional relationship and through spiritual diaries that Anna kept after learning how to write. Unfortunately, Anna’s spiritual diaries went missing at some point in the last fifty years and only excerpts published in the appendix of a modern biography remain.7 Surviving excerpts nevertheless illustrate how Padre Siria, like all hagiographers, filtered Anna’s life story in order to support her cause for beatification, reveal religious truths, and portray his subject above time and space.8 And yet, as Jodi Bilinkoff notes, “if pious biographies are not transparent descriptions of reality, then neither are they so opaque that a close reading goes unrewarded.”9 The historian’s task is to reconnect sacred subjects to their specific contexts, in their historical moment and location.10 This is challenging, but not impossible. Particularly by the eighteenth century, when Padre Siria penned Anna’s biography, hagiographies generally tethered sacred stories to specific historical contexts in an attempt to offer verifiable proof of sanctity for the increasingly rationalistic process of canonization investigations.11 Considering Anna’s spiritual biography within the context of rural El Salvador and urban Santiago de Guatemala around the turn of the eighteenth cen-

City of Women, City of God

21

tury sheds light on the relationship between daily life and religious experience and the ways in which laywomen shaped Guatemala’s urban religion.

improbable holiness: marriage and motherhood in rural el salvador Santiago de Guatemala claimed Anna as a local holy woman; however, she was not originally from the capital. Born in 1639 in the small town of San Vicente in modern-day El Salvador to a Spanish father and criolla (Spanish American) mother, Anna grew up in a rural environment of small-scale ranching and subsistence farming.12 At age sixteen, Anna married Diego Hernández Vicente and moved to a remote ranch, hours from the nearest town, where she bore seven children, although only two survived early childhood.13 Anna’s life story to this point generally defied the normative gendered model for holy women in the early modern period. Her biographer pointed to early signs of virtue, but absent from the narrative are the familiar early conversion experience, the explicit emulation of female saints, and the heroic rejection of sex and marriage.14 More surprising still, Padre Siria acknowledged that Anna avoided the annual obligation to confess for years, a flagrant violation of Church law punishable by excommunication. He blamed the “shortage of priests and lack of spiritual sustenance” in rural El Salvador, but even after moving to Santiago, Anna passed three years without confessing.15 Far from holy, Anna spent years living in sin in the eyes of the Church. Her biography thus set up the kind of “dramatic turnaround from sinner to saved” more typical in the lives of male saints.16 To explain this unusual transgression in a holy female life, Padre Siria employed a rhetorical trope common in female spiritual biographies—that the devil was tormenting Anna, and the particular form of torment was to deceive her into believing that her sins were too great to reveal in confession.17 Because Anna’s early life lacked traditional markers of holiness and even the most basic obligatory participation in Church sacraments, Padre Siria’s narrative instead emphasized her heroic virtue in the midst of daily suffering—the violent abuse of her husband, her desperate poverty, and the repeated loss of her children. Indeed, Anna’s early visionary experiences revolved entirely around her experiences as a mother and the illness and deaths of her children. Padre Siria recounted that a few days after the death of her first child, Anna had a vision of her son playful and laughing in the arms of the Virgin. And when a much-beloved daughter died, Anna heard celestial music. Padre Siria further imbued the repeated tragedies

22

Chapter One

of daily life with sacred significance and divine purpose, all part of God’s plan to “torment her body and embattle her spirit.”18 Padre Siria may have exaggerated Anna’s suffering for pious effect, but the trials and tribulations he described were more ordinary than extraordinary. Domestic abuse was both legal and pervasive in colonial Latin America, and infant mortality rates were high, especially among both rural and urban poor.19 Similarly, Padre Siria may have exaggerated the poor spiritual guidance offered by rural priests. He repeatedly betrayed an urban bias, contrasting the “barren soil” of Anna’s rural homeland to the “fecund” spiritual environment of Santiago, where the Jesuit order could be a guiding light for her spiritual formation and a “shield for her defense.”20 But rural El Salvador struggled to recruit priests, especially well-trained priests, and had a relatively low ratio of priests to parishioners. Visiting the Salvadoran province in the late colonial period, Archbishop Pedro Cortés y Larraz noted the lack of educated and vigilant priests and bemoaned that even the best priests of the region failed to govern their parishes properly because of the dispersed rural population.21 He dismally concluded that the poor roads and large distances made it simply impossible for many to reach Mass and feast days.22 Peasant women living far from towns, as Anna did, likely had infrequent contact with the sacraments of communion and confession.

arriving to a city of god: spiritual renewal in santiago de guatemala In 1667, Anna and Diego left behind the rural countryside of the Salvadoran province and migrated with their two small children to Santiago de Guatemala.23 Anna lived in Santiago for the next forty-six years until her death in 1713. Beyond the presence of Anna’s sister in the city, Anna and Diego’s exact reasons for migrating are unclear; however, Santiago had long witnessed a continuous flow of migrants in and out of the city. As the seat of the audiencia, or high court, which exercised executive, legislative, and judicial powers, Santiago was the political, economic, and religious capital for the Reino de Guatemala, also known as the audiencia of Guatemala, a region that stretched from modern-day Costa Rica to the Mexican state of Chiapas (see Figure 1.1). Between 1590 and 1650, the capital’s population apparently doubled and by the 1680s Santiago’s population leveled off at close to forty thousand residents, making it at the time one of the largest cities of the Spanish American mainland after Mexico City and Lima.24 It appears that Anna’s family arrived in the city on the eve of a dramatic shift in the social and cultural rhythm of the colonial capital, which

23

City of Women, City of God

AUDIENCIA DE MÉXICO

N

0 0

Ciudad Real CHIAPA

100 100

200

200 mi 300 km

GUATEMALA

Quetzaltenango Santiago de Guatemala (Antigua)

Guatemala City

Esquipulas

HONDURAS

San Vicente EL SALVADOR

San Salvador

NICARAGUA

COSTA RICA

AUDIENCIA DE PANAMA

Map Area

Figure 1.1. Map of colonial borders of the audiencia or Kingdom of Guatemala. Based on map by Christophe Belaubre.

ultimately culminated in the elevation of Santiago to an archbishopric in 1743. A growing urban population and an economic recovery supported new investments in religious and cultural institutions. Just a few years before Anna’s arrival, Santiago initiated its first printing press and around 1680 the city founded the University of San Carlos and built the grand fountain and Plaza of La Alameda—“‘second only to Lima.’”25 But the most magnificent architectural additions to the city were religious

24

Chapter One

Figure 1.2. Antonio Ramírez, Cathedral of Santiago de los Caballeros (Guatemala, 1678).

foundations. Anna was there to see the opulent reconstructions of the cathedral, as well as the Jesuit and Franciscan churches and the splendid addition of the iconic arched bridge to the Santa Catalina convent (see Figure 1.2 and Figure 1.3). Between 1670 and 1725, the number of female convents in the city also more than doubled, from two to five. 26 For rising provincial cities, female convents served as crowning jewels and symbols of pious identity and cultural prestige.27 The only other city in all of Central America that could claim a female convent during the colonial period was Ciudad Real in Chiapas. The turn of the eighteenth century proved to be the pinnacle of monastic institutions in Santiago, with evidence suggesting that more than 10 percent of Spanish women

JOC OTENANGO

N

S AN ANTÓN

Rio Mag

dalena

Cerro Manchén

N. S. Dolores del Cerro

San Sebastián SAN SEBASTIÁN SA NTIAGO

Candelaria

CA NDELA RIA

L A JOYA Recolección (Colegio de Cristo Crucificado)

Santa Catalina

S AN JERÓNIM O

Beatas Indias

Beaterio de Santa Rosa

Merced

SA N JUA N GA SCÓN

Capuchinos

Santa Teresa

Santo Domingo

Compañía de Jesús San Lázaro E S PÍ R ITU SANTO

LA CONCEPCIÓN Concepción Cathedral

San Agustín

Cruz del Milagro

S ANTA L UC IA

Santa Clara

Santa Lucia

CHIPILA PA

EL TORTUGUERO San José

Cerro de Santa Cruz

San Francisco S AN FRA NCISCO

Escuela de Cristo Belén

Santa Cruz SA NTA CRUZ

SA NTA A NNA L OS REMEDIOS

R io

Pe ns ati vo

Los Remedios

El Calvario

Figure 1.3. Map of Santiago de Guatemala, ca. 1770. Based on map by Christopher Lutz.

26

Chapter One

were professed nuns, and hundreds more women were housed in convents as students, servants, and slaves.28 Most of the servile population was indigenous or of African descent. Coming from a rural environment where she had infrequent contact with priests, Anna must have been struck by Santiago’s dense and growing concentration of priests and friars. Between 1650 and 1750, the number of priests ministering within Santiago doubled, from five hundred to one thousand.29 By the early eighteenth century, Santiago’s religious orders included close to four hundred friars. Parish priests and friars worked together to foster devotions and reinforce Catholic orthodoxy, but like other Spanish colonial cities, Santiago was also rife with competition and rivalries as religious orders openly vied with each other and with secular parishes for devotional followers.30 The late seventeenth century witnessed a vibrant spiritual renewal within Santiago’s lay community as well, fueled by a fervent urban missionary movement and enthusiastic lay piety. The Holy School of Christ religious brotherhood, founded in Santiago in 1664, brought laymen and priests together in a devotional regime of spiritual exercises, physical penance, frequent engagement with the sacraments, and acts of mercy such as visiting hospitals and prisons.31 In the late seventeenth century, the Holy School of Christ transformed into the religious order of the Congregation of San Felipe Neri, known for its cultivation of missionary zeal, dynamic preachers, and gifted and dedicated confessors.32 Joining their efforts were the apostolic Franciscan friars of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith (Propaganda Fide), who arrived in Santiago in 1686. In short order, the legendary missionary Fray Antonio Margil de Jesús and his companion, Fray Melchor López, staged a dramatic mission revival, with displays of penitence; passionate sermons in churches, plazas, and street corners; and expert spiritual direction in the confessional. Urban missions could be as short as one week, but chronicler Fr. Isidro Félix de Espinosa indicated that the first Propaganda Fide mission revival in Santiago and the surrounding villages lasted a full six months.33 Their efforts apparently bore fruit. According to Guatemala’s Franciscan chronicler, Fr. Francisco Vásquez, the effect was such that men and women from all backgrounds streamed into the confessionals, and even the most wayward of Santiago’s residents began to reform their ways and engage in the sacraments more frequently as a result of the mission.34 By 1700, the Franciscan Propaganda Fide community in Santiago was growing and they had received permission to build a missionary college, formally named Recolección and known by locals as the College of the Crucified Christ. It was the second Franciscan missionary college in colonial Spanish America.

City of Women, City of God

27

The nascent printing presses in Santiago also stimulated lay piety, making devotional texts cheaper and more accessible. Unlike the heavy and intimidating tomes written in Latin that were associated with higher learning, devotional texts were small, light, paper booklets written in Spanish. They could easily fit in a pocket and could be carried from home to church and back within the palm of one’s hand. At the same time, confraternity populations were swelling and sponsoring elaborate feast days in Santiago’s parish churches.35 Local sculpted images were gaining fame for their miracles and inspiring devotion and the erection of formal chapels.36 And just two years before Anna’s arrival, Santiago mourned the death of Hermano Pedro de San José Betancurt, a lay Franciscan tertiary and local holy man. Canonized in the twenty-first century as Central America’s first saint and referred to as the “Saint Francis of the Americas,” Hermano Pedro opened a hospital, school, and shelter for the city’s poor and successfully initiated the steps for the founding of a new religious order, the Bethlemite Hospital order. Just three years after Hermano Pedro’s death, women wishing to follow his model of piety founded the Beaterio de Belén, an uncloistered religious community of laywomen.37 Hermano Pedro’s ministries expressed and further stimulated a vibrant lay religious culture that Anna herself soon joined, one closely linked to monastic ­devotional practices, frequent engagement with the sacraments, social ministries to the poor, and evangelizing efforts among wayward Catholics.

single women and social order in santiago de guatemala Jesuit Padre Antonio Siria thus proudly celebrated Santiago de Guatemala as the spiritual center of Central America, a beacon of light promising Anna salvation and a path to sanctity. Indeed, according to Padre Siria, years before her move, Anna received a divine vision of Santiago as a blessed city under a sky that was “clean and pure like a crystal,” and resplendent in the center “the holy name of IHS”—the insignia of the Jesuit order. He went on “that this majestic name would be a light to guide her, a shield for her defense, bringing her from such far away lands to the shelter of its house and the guidance of its Company (of Jesus).”38 It was a vision at the center of Padre Siria’s narrative and provided the inspiration for the frontispiece of the original publication (see Figure 1.4). Like many of his contemporary hagiographers, Padre Siria clearly sought to celebrate not only Anna’s life, but also the central role played by the

Figure 1.4. Frontispiece, Antonio Siria and José Toribio Medina, Vida de doña Ana Guerra de Jesús, escrita por el p. Antonio de Siria, y por encargo del gobierno de El Salvador reimpresa a plana y renglón, precedida de un breve prólogo, por J.T. Medina (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1925 [1716]).

City of Women, City of God

29

Jesuit order on her path to holiness and the fecund spiritual environment of urban Santiago de Guatemala.39 But the reality appears to have been more complex. Padre Siria acknowledged that after arriving in the city, Anna continued to evade the annual obligatory confession for three full years, despite the dense availability of priests in the capital. Apparently, more worldly matters consumed Anna at this time. After only eight months Diego abandoned Anna with their two children in a situation of abject poverty, since “the sister, in whose house she lived, was so poor, that she could not even offer her a piece of bread.”40 Diego did not return for fourteen years, and he never resumed responsibility to financially support Anna or their children. Being separated from her husband provided Anna with a respite from physical abuse and brought certain opportunities for autonomy and independence; however, non-elite women, as well as men, without marital partners faced a precarious situation in colonial Spanish America. The absence or loss of a spouse or conjugal partner could have devastating economic consequences, especially for women, and most acutely for women with children.41 These consequences were probably particularly severe for Anna, a peasant woman and recent migrant to the city. Anna clearly teetered on the edge of desperate poverty, consistently struggling to support her two children without a husband, working odd jobs as a seamstress, moving from house to house, depending on the hospitality or charity of family or friends, and even living alongside poor indigenous women in small thatch huts with dirt floors.42 Anna was not alone. Like other Spanish American colonial cities, Santiago was becoming or had already become a “city of women,” as the urban demand for domestic servants and market women drew female migrants into the city while rural economies and mining drew men out. Although census data is lacking for the seventeenth century, by 1740 Santiago’s census taker pointedly remarked that among the “common poor . . . the feminine sex abounds in total profusion.”43 In colonial Spanish American cities, migration patterns and the unbalanced male-to-female ratio often triggered marital dissolution and sizable numbers of unmarried women and female-headed households, as well as illegitimacy, adultery, bigamy, and informal unions.44 And indeed, when Anna arrived in the city, the illegitimacy rate among Santiago’s non-elite population was a staggering 73 percent, a strikingly high figure even among colonial Spanish American cities.45 The poor, mixed-race, and largely feminine world in which Anna lived and moved became an increasing cause for concern among Church and state officials who attempted to regulate perceived “disorders” in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. By the time Anna arrived in the

30

Chapter One

city, the Spanish colonial model of two republics, one Spanish republic and one Indian republic neatly segregated and ordered hierarchically, had mostly collapsed due to the prominent presence of free blacks and the rampant growth of mixed-race neighborhoods. The ongoing settlement of poor criollos like Anna, those born in Spanish America of “pure” Spanish descent, among free blacks, mestizos, mulattos, and native peoples only further threatened to undermine a new binary model of colonial hierarchy predicated on the firm distinction between those of pure Spanish descent and the large mixed-race population.46 The terrible succession of droughts, locusts, famine, epidemics, and earthquakes, which besieged Santiago from 1680 to 1720 further challenged colonial rule, fueling unrest, protests, and resistance to tribute and tax requirements and further heightening elite anxieties and political factionalism.47 Toward the end of the seventeenth century, officials passed several laws aimed at controlling the large and growing non-elite population made up of poor Spaniards, mixed-race peoples, natives, and free blacks.48 Santiago’s secular and ecclesiastical officials also worried explicitly about non-elite women and their participation in illicit marketing and “deviant” religious practices. Local authorities regularly harassed, arrested, and punished female meat vendors, while Inquisition officials intensified the prosecution of curses, spells, and other magical religious crimes associated with women. By the late seventeenth century, officials in Santiago had transformed the city’s only school and orphanage for girls into a house of detention for women facing trial or convicted of crimes. Additionally, Santiago completed construction of a women’s jail in 1691, and felt the need to expand the jail in 1699 and again in 1701.49 In this context, Anna likely occupied an ambiguous social and moral position. Without knowing if her husband was dead or alive, Anna risked a charge of bigamy if she remarried, or adultery if she formed a new consensual union. But left as a poor single mother, Anna fell outside the ideal gendered female states of celibate maiden, wife, or nun. Some women in her situation pursued an ecclesiastical divorce, which provided official permission to live separately, although never remarry; however, an ecclesiastical divorce did not necessarily resolve the moral ambiguity of Anna’s position. Seventeenth-century officials in other parts of Spanish America explicitly described divorced women as a threat to moral order, much like prostitutes and unchaste women.50 But the documentary record is less clear about how Santiago’s local ecclesiastical and secular officials approached women like Anna who lived outside patriarchal households, whether they were widows, single mothers, divorced women, or abandoned wives. In the colonial centers of Mexico City and Lima, Spanish cultural norms prizing female enclo-

City of Women, City of God

31

sure clearly bred regulatory practices that targeted unmarried women for protection, penalization, and/or redemption, most prominently through the foundation of institutions known as recogimientos. These religious shelters voluntarily and involuntarily housed divorced and abandoned wives, even wives whose husbands were temporarily out of town, as well as other types of vulnerable or wayward women.51 But unlike Mexico City and Lima, or even smaller cities in Mexico and Peru, Santiago lacked even one recogimiento designated explicitly for divorced women and abandoned wives. While there was discussion from the 1680s through the early eighteenth century among ecclesiastical and secular officials about opening a “casa de recogidas,” for women “perdida y de mal vivir” (lost and of the bad life), there is no record of discussions or attempts to found a religious shelter for divorced or abandoned wives. The broader social and cultural significance of this institutional absence and how Santiago’s institutional landscape framed official attitudes toward unmarried women and lay female religiosity will be considered at length in the next chapter.

in the footsteps of saints: female devotional networks and models of piety During Anna’s first three years in Santiago, she likely fit local officials’ stereotype of a “lost” woman—poor, transient, separated from her husband, and largely outside the sacramental community of the Catholic faithful. Then in 1670 came a turning point, a moment that Anna herself must have recorded in great detail. One Thursday afternoon, Anna’s acquaintance, a pious doncella (maiden), invited her to visit the miraculous image of Our Lady of the Rosary, venerated in the humble Chapel of Santa Cruz, in an Indian neighborhood on the other side of the Pensativo River. Padre Siria recounted that Anna had only “just arrived in the presence of that common Mother of sinners, when she felt moved interiorly to confess . . . she left the church without knowing herself.”52 By Saturday, Anna found herself walking to Santa Anna, a town on the outskirts of the city, where she encountered the locally famous preacher and gifted confessor Maestro don Bernardino de Ovando. With him, Anna made her first halting confession in years. According to Padre Siria, in the weeks and months following her conversion and confession, Anna radically transformed her daily life, emulating the lives of female saints and cultivating a rigorous devotional regimen of prayer, ascetic denial of the flesh, penance, charity, and frequent engagement with the sacraments.53 Padre Siria described the conversion experience as abrupt and dramatic and emphasized the divine intervention of Mary through her miraculous

32

Chapter One

image. At this point in the text, Padre Siria’s narrative shifted. The particularities of time and space deliberately faded from view as the hagiography highlighted Anna’s rapid alignment with established models of female holiness. Like many holy women before her, Anna followed the female mystic tradition of affective piety—that is, a piety based on an emotional experience of God’s love rather than an intellectual or learned analysis of scripture and Church teachings.54 On this spiritual path, universally recognized female “weaknesses” such as ignorance, lack of reason, and exuberant imagination and emotion might transform into the spiritual gifts of visions, trances, and mystical union, or spiritual marriage, with God.55 Even a poor peasant woman like Anna might receive these spiritual gifts through intensive prayer, spiritual direction, and bodily penance. According to Padre Siria, immediately following Anna’s conversion experience and first confession with Mro. don Bernardino de Ovando, she radically altered her daily life and devotional practices in imitation of female saints. She quickly initiated the arduous process of self-reflection and soul searching in preparation for a general confession, which involved recounting and reviewing a lifetime of sinful patterns. Thereafter, Anna gained permission to confess and take communion multiple times a week. She dedicated hours a day to prayer and learned to read in order to better access devotional texts and spiritual biographies. She began a perpetual fast, denied herself sleep and all bodily comforts, and harshly disciplined her flesh. She sought the divine presence among the poor and infirm, even licking their blood and sucking pus from their wounds, actions long considered forms of both devotion and penance.56 After Anna placed her children in the care of others, her visionary experiences expanded beyond the mundane concerns of motherhood to encompass more transcendent matters: battles with demons, the suffering of Christ, and divine love. And like a long line of female saints, Anna experienced decades of tortuous physical and spiritual torments, plagued by demons as well as divine trials, including cruel and unsympathetic confessors and anguished uncertainty about the state of her soul. Only after years spent on this painful path of purgation did Anna achieve the calmer state of mystical union.57 Certainly, the way Anna’s life story merged with the sacred stories of female saints was not simply a rhetorical strategy employed by her biographer. The lives of the saints were well known and widely diffused through sermons, paintings, oral culture, and devotional readings. Countless numbers of women in colonial Spanish America used these stories as guidebooks for their own spiritual practices.58 Padre Siria confirmed that Anna quickly learned to read in order to better access the “spiritual sustenance” that God provided through devotional texts.59 As she imitated the lives of saints and became a pious role model herself, Anna nurtured

City of Women, City of God

33

engagement with Spanish Catholicism in Santiago de Guatemala and participated in the protracted spiritual conquest of the New World.60 At the same time, Anna’s Vida illustrates how the deeply imitative nature of sanctity reinforced tenacious attachment to medieval models, which were sometimes at odds with the official doctrine of the early modern Church. Even as the Council of Trent dictated that all beatas and tertiaries should be enclosed within convent walls, the best-selling spiritual biography of medieval saint Catherine of Sienna continued to inspire girls and women to remain in the world and actively tend to the poor and the sick.61 Indeed, two centuries after Saint Catherine’s death and an ocean away, a young girl in Lima, Peru, found inspiration in Saint Catherine’s biography and closely followed in her footsteps on the path to holiness. And like Saint Catherine, this young girl resisted enclosure in a convent, remained in the world as a Dominican tertiary, and became a local holy woman and saint following her death.62 Saint Rose of Lima’s canonization in 1671, right around the time of Anna Guerra’s conversion experience, renewed the tradition of lay female holiness and created a Spanish American role model for the New World. Alongside the diffusion of hagiographical texts and holy female models were other global and local contexts that framed Anna’s conversion experience as well. Historically, rural peasants who migrate to cities have often experienced a jarring dislocation that could be compounded by subsequent familial breakdown and the absence of extended kinship networks. In this moment of profound social and cultural rupture, migrants often creatively adapted their religious beliefs, practices, and networks.63 In the medieval and early modern period, the creative rupture caused by urbanization led to more individual and interior devotions, more intensive attachment to confession and communion, and blurring of lines between monastic and lay religious practices. Gender historically framed these developments as women responded with particular enthusiasm to new spiritual opportunities found in cities.64 Urban economies also allowed more women to survive outside marriage and establish the personal autonomy and economic means necessary to pursue a path of intensive lay religiosity.65 Evidence from wills confirms the broad outlines of this portrait for Santiago de Guatemala at the turn of the eighteenth century. Eighty ­percent of female will-makers indicated a devotional connection to at least one male religious order, double the rate of male will-makers. More striking still, close to one third of female will-makers identified themselves as tertiaries of religious orders—that is, as professed members of Third Orders—compared with just 3 percent of their male counterparts.66 Third Orders represented a “middle state between the cloister and the world.”67 Tertiaries went through yearlong novitiates, made revocable vows, and

34

Chapter One

followed a common “Rule” that involved strict moral standards, private and public devotions, and charitable activities. Some gained authorization to mark their status by publicly adopting modified habits. Although Third Order Rules generally restricted access based on wealth, honor, and legitimacy, the majority of female will-makers who identified as tertiaries resembled Anna, non-elite women who were single, widowed, or separated from their husbands. Evidence from wills thus illustrates how Anna’s conversion took place in an urban religious context marked by enthusiastic lay female piety closely linked to religious orders. But the broader record indicates that gender defined not so much the boundaries of devotional enthusiasm but how that enthusiasm was expressed in early eighteenth-century Santiago. Men who were drawn to the active spirituality of religious orders, even those from poor families, had the option to profess as friars. In so doing, they renounced all material possessions and, like nuns, left almost no trace in the record of wills. Although population figures for the Guatemalan religious orders are spotty, it is clear that orders, particularly the Franciscans, were growing and thriving in early eighteenth-century Santiago, as they were in other cities across New Spain.68 Indeed, the number of Franciscans in Santiago rose dramatically, from 90 friars in 1690 to approximately 155 friars by 1730, in part due to the foundation of a second Franciscan convent, the Propaganda Fide missionary college.69 Women faced a different set of options. Of course, women could also profess, and female convent populations were peaking in early eighteenthcentury Santiago. But profession in a convent was an option only for elite women who could afford the substantial dowry requirement. And even for women who could afford to profess, the cloistered female convent did not resemble the active and apostolic path modeled by friars. Wills illuminate not so much a feminization of piety in Santiago de Guatemala but the ways in which laywomen like Anna navigated the gendered constraints of religious profession and developed alternative forms of affiliation with religious orders by joining confraternities, confessing with friars, and professing as lay tertiaries or beatas.70 Anna’s biography further illuminates how recent female migrants to Santiago encountered and engaged with urban devotional practices and networks. Anna’s relationship with the “pious doncella” who brought her to the chapel and the image of Mary that provoked Anna’s conversion experience clearly antedated that fateful day. Her invitation to Anna and subsequent encouragement of Anna’s conversion experience suggest that she may have been a lay evangelizer of the kind that Anna herself later became. The narrative subsequently reveals that the unnamed acquaintance was literate and followed a rigorous ascetic regime. Perhaps she

City of Women, City of God

35

was a beata or member of a Third Order, or perhaps she was simply one of Santiago’s large body of informally affiliated pious laywomen. In any case, she clearly facilitated Anna’s entry into the long tradition of female mysticism, and she and Anna were frequent devotional companions in the months following Anna’s conversion. Together, they stood on street corners, praying the rosary and exhorting fellow residents to repent and return to the confessional. When time permitted, she and Anna snuck away on the pretext of searching for firewood and trudged up the mountain behind the Chapel of Santa Cruz so they could pray together for an hour and then cruelly discipline each other physically and verbally.71 It seems likely that this pious friend also helped Anna learn to read. At the very least, Padre Siria confirmed that Anna regularly read devotional texts together with her friend and other pious women, a glimpse of how the accessibility of devotional texts nurtured new kinds of spiritual networks.72 These networks likely blended material and spiritual support and apparently extended from the here to the hereafter. Padre Siria recounted just two “marvels” following Anna’s death. In both cases, desperately poor women from Anna’s old neighborhood invoked Anna as a divine intercessor and then “miraculously” received material aid in the form of alms and a much-needed paying customer.73

confession and the jesuit path of spiritual perfection Anna’s biography illustrates how lay female networks existed within a broader web of devotional relationships, which connected laywomen to priests, religious orders, and lay brotherhoods. According to Padre Siria, the awakening Anna experienced in front of the image of Mary left her with an urgent desire to confess. Perhaps Anna’s pious friend referred her to the skilled confessor Mro. don Bernardino de Ovando just as Anna made similar referrals later on. Or perhaps Anna had already come into contact with Mro. Ovando’s evangelizing efforts. Although Padre Siria provided little detail about Mro. Ovando’s background, the broader documentary record confirms that he was in many ways at the center of Santiago’s spiritual renewal, a powerful preacher and apostolic missionary to poor urban communities and wayward ­Catholics.74 He had been a close companion of local saint Hermano Pedro de San José Betancurt and assumed responsibility for the spiritual direction of Bethlemite friars following Hermano Pedro’s death. Priests and laypeople alike sought him out as a known practitioner and proponent of the sometimes-controversial method of mental prayer.75

36

Chapter One

Mro. don Bernardino de Ovando was also founder and director of Santiago’s aforementioned Holy School of Christ, the religious brotherhood that brought together laymen and priests for the collective devotional ­practice of spiritual exercises, physical penance, confession and communion, and visits to hospitals and prisons.76 Matthew O’Hara finds that Holy Schools of Christ in late eighteenth-century Mexico placed a “paternalistic” emphasis on improving the “spiritual and material lives” of working people.77 Mro. don Bernardino de Ovando’s ministries suggest that this emphasis predated the late eighteenth century. Anna’s Vida further indicates that poor laywomen could also be targets for spiritual “improvement,” even though Holy Schools of Christ generally restricted membership to priests and laymen. Anna’s subsequent devotional regime also provides a glimpse of how some poor laywomen responded enthusiastically to the model of spiritual renewal advocated by the Holy School of Christ. Two years after her conversion experience, Anna was drawn into the Jesuit church for the first time. Anna’s Vida suggests it was a painful and humiliating experience, one that required her to leave the humble Remedios parish and enter an elite neighborhood near the center of the city. Inside the opulent Jesuit church, Anna was painfully aware of her “shameful” poverty and lack of proper clothing. She suffered her shame for long hours as she attempted to convince a specific Jesuit priest, Padre Juan Cerón, to become her spiritual advisor.78 Other sources confirm that Anna was in real need of a new confessor, as Mro. don Bernardino de Ovando had journeyed to Peru to bring back the founding nuns of the Carmelite convent.79 Perhaps Mro. Ovando had referred Anna to the Jesuits, and to Padre Juan Cerón in particular. Like Mro. Ovando, the Jesuits were at the heart of Santiago’s spiritual renewal and urban missionary efforts. They had educated Hermano Pedro and written the first biography of his life. They were avid supporters of mental prayer, general confession, acts of mercy among the poor, and frequent engagement in the sacraments.80 Jesuits were also known to be gifted spiritual directors; indeed, spiritual direction was an essential component of the Jesuit mission. In the early modern period, Jesuits were at the forefront of an emerging culture of spiritual direction, in which priests could gain spiritual prestige by “guiding souls toward greater perfection.”81 Many urban women enthusiastically sought dedicated confessors, often among the religious orders, attracted by the opportunity for consistent spiritual communication as well as guidance and clerical authorization.82 Jesuit confessors, the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, and the systematic Jesuit model of examining the conscience on the path toward union with God were particularly popular among women.83 In an early modern society that

City of Women, City of God

37

emphasized female weakness and subordination, the Jesuit ideal of a transformed and empowered sense of spiritual selfhood may have held special attraction for women, especially those like Anna who were single, widowed, or separated from their husbands.84 But if Anna’s decades-long relationship with Jesuit confessors was spiritually fruitful and empowering, it was also complex, tumultuous, and even painful. Jesuits consciously moved penitents toward purgation and union with God through “choreographed sequences of sculpted emotions,” to borrow Inga Clendinnen’s evocative phrase: shame, confusion, and above all sorrow, sorrow for Christ’s suffering and sorrow for personal sin, selfishness, and distance from God.85 Padre Siria noted that as Anna engaged in the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, under the guidance of her Jesuit confessor, she “discovered a clarity about the gravity of her faults and the singular mercy of God in not punishing her as she deserved: from this realization was born a pain so acute that she burst into tears and her heart was shattered.”86 Anna’s position as a poor abandoned wife and mother likely framed her agonizing spiritual experience of confusion and sorrow.87 Unable to take even the simple vows of uncloistered beatas due to her unresolved marital status, Anna spent close to twenty years in a broader, more informal category of pious laywoman. When Anna’s husband, Diego, returned, her confessors instructed her to obey him in all things, and to relinquish her chastity and pious path if Diego so desired. According to her biographer, this spiritual counsel felt like “knives that passed through her afflicted heart.”88 But Diego did not demand the marital “debt” and Anna was able to steer him toward the path of profession as a religious servant in the Dominican monastery. Reconciling her spiritual path and her position as a mother proved more complicated for Anna. The Catholic tradition had long been conflicted about the compatibility of motherhood and female holiness. Although some humanists were beginning to emphasize the valuable role that Catholic mothers played in the spiritual formation of children, the medieval line dividing female sanctity and motherhood seems to have only hardened in early modern hagiographies.89 These tensions were particularly acute for pious female adherents of Jesuit spirituality, for whom the Jesuit ideal of complete independence from familial obligations created distinctly gendered tensions.90 Certainly, Anna’s biography suggests that her worst years of spiritual torments coincided with the time in which her marital status was unresolved and her children were in their formative years. Comparing Padre Siria’s narrative to the few surviving excerpts from Anna’s own spiritual diaries dramatically highlights these tensions. Padre Siria barely

38

Chapter One

mentioned Anna’s relationship to her children following her conversion experience except to affirm the spiritual benefits Anna incurred by placing her children in the care of others, describing her as “rid of all concerns that could impede her knowledge of God.”91 Anna’s own writings paint a very different picture. Although extant selections of her spiritual diaries are incomplete, every available entry, twenty-five in all, highlights the enduring significance of motherhood and family relations to Anna’s prayer life and visions.92 Anna particularly emphasized her relationship with her daughter Catalina and her own painful spiritual reckoning with Catalina’s illnesses and suffering leading up to her premature death in 1689. In one entry, for example, she wrote, “as I was suffering due to my daughter’s head injury, I heard: do not worry about these pains because with them I am redoubling Catalina’s crowns.”93 In another Anna recounted “being on my way to the Santo Domingo Church, to implore Saint Catherine of Sienna and Saint Rose (of Lima) for my daughter’s salvation, as she was about to die, or that they may grant her more patience if she remained ill, I was warned that I should also ask the same of Saint Joseph. I did so and . . . my soul heard this voice, that Saint Joseph said, today I am taking her.”94 And in Anna’s own retelling, her holy detachment from her daughter appears more conflicted than calm. Anna particularly wrestled with the ways in which she neglected Catalina from a very young age. “I forgot about her . . . I do not know how this was, because even though I felt pity seeing her suffer, I put her to work as if she were not my daughter and in that way since she was very young she always went about her life and separated from me to suffer alone.”95 And about placing Catalina in the Beaterio de Belén, Anna wrote, “There is no way to say how much she suffered in the ten years that she was there without having anyone who looked upon her as a child.”96 While motherhood and mundane concerns dramatically receded from view in Padre Siria’s narrative, Anna’s own writings highlight the lived religious experience of a poor single mother for whom prayers, visions, and spiritual struggles continued to reflect the realities and concerns of motherhood. Anna’s spiritual uncertainty was compounded by the attitudes of her Jesuit confessors. Padre Juan Cerón brusquely rejected Anna’s request to come under his spiritual direction. Other Jesuits were more willing, but Padre Siria noted how Anna’s Jesuit confessors regularly underestimated or misunderstood her, only to be converted to her cause later on. One confessor openly laughed at her graphic descriptions of battles with rage and attributed her struggles to the cowardly nature of her spirit. Only after enduring a spiritual attack of his own did he become more compassionate. When Padre Juan Cerón finally agreed to serve as Anna’s

City of Women, City of God

39

c­ onfessor, he was often inattentive and severe, prohibiting her from discussing one word about her interior spiritual life, a painful prohibition, which lasted for seven long years. When another Jesuit offered to serve as her confessor, Anna immediately had a vision of “her soul in the figure of a child with loose hair and her mouth against the floor . . . and Padre Juan Cerón with both feet on her head.”97 According to Padre Siria, Anna understood the vision to mean that she did not have the freedom to change confessors, even if Padre Cerón left her without spiritual guidance. While elite nuns exercised their freedom to reject an unsympathetic or cruel confessor, Anna apparently felt she lacked such privileges.98 Perhaps Anna astutely perceived that switching confessors would be held against her in a way not true for elite nuns, confirming the stereotype of poor women as fickle and weak, or worse yet conveying an arrogance and pride unbefitting her social status. In any case, Anna’s tenacious persistence on the Jesuit path of spiritual perfection and willingness to endure long hard years of an unsympathetic confessor ultimately converted Padre Juan Cerón and his fellow Jesuits to her cause.99 If Anna’s social and marital status distinctively shaped her confessional experience, Padre Siria was also trading in a common hagiographical trope. The cruel confessor often represented one of many divine trials and tribulations on the path to female holiness.100 And like other holy women, Anna reaped spiritual rewards from this divine trial, as God ultimately stepped in and informed her that “from now on he would tend to her spiritual direction himself.”101 But there were historical tensions and conflicts at work in the gendered nature of confessional relationships as well. Early modern views of women as inferior, weak, and sexually tempting as well as Protestant critiques about lewd relations between priests and female penitents inspired concerns about the spiritual direction of women.102 At the time of its inception, in the very constitutions of the order, the Jesuits explicitly rejected the spiritual direction of women. This injunction applied to both nuns and laywomen; however, the g­ reatest concerns regarded poor single laywomen, who were assumed to be overly sexual, superficial, and concerned with material rather than spiritual gains.103 But the injunction did not hold. Jesuits were at the forefront of early modern hagiographical production depicting the lives of holy women under their spiritual direction. 104 Among these women were several unorthodox figures like Anna as well as poor non-European converts to Catholicism. How and why Jesuits allied with laywomen, including poor single women, and promoted them as models of feminine piety will be explored in more depth in the next chapter. Anna’s Vida also serves as a reminder that Jesuit attitudes toward poor single laywomen did not evolve in a smooth linear fashion. Santiago’s

40

Chapter One

Jesuits, for many years, remained skeptical about Anna’s capacity for authentic mystical experience. Confessional relationships were always complex affairs. As Asunción Lavrin points out, personalities mattered in the confessional and in the construction of hagiographical texts.105 Alliances were unpredictable. Priests even within the same order could be alternatively supportive or suspicious of holy women. Individual priests could be converted to see sanctity in unexpected vessels. Of course, social and marital status mattered too. It is probably no accident that Anna’s Jesuit confessors awakened to her spiritual gifts only after her husband had professed as a religious servant, thus resolving at long last Anna’s morally ambiguous status as an abandoned wife and allowing her to profess as a Jesuit tertiary and make vows of obedience to her confessors.

conclusion Anna’s biography challenges narratives about the marginalized or subversive position of women who fell outside the confines of both marriage and convent in colonial Spanish America and in the broader early modern Church. Anna cultivated not only female devotional networks but also alliances with powerful clergy and religious orders to mutual advantage. Like all hagiographical subjects, Anna Guerra de Jesús was an exemplary figure. But her brand of lay female religiosity was no anomaly in colonial Santiago de Guatemala. Evidence from wills highlights the striking number and diversity of women who successfully professed as lay tertiaries in the powerful Franciscan Third Order in early eighteenth-century Santiago. Among them were poor widows, abandoned wives, single mothers, and women of illegitimate birth and potentially mixed-race descent. Like mystic nuns, some pious laywomen successfully navigated shifting ideals of feminine piety and shaped urban religion in colonial Spanish America. The next chapter explores how the local context of colonial Santiago de Guatemala, as well as global Catholic trends, shaped priests’ alliances with single laywomen and fostered more flexible ideals of feminine piety than previously imagined.

chapter two

Unlikely Allies Missionaries and Laywomen

; Within four years of Anna Guerra de Jesús’s death, her last confessor, Jesuit Padre Antonio Siria, published her spiritual biography. Why did Padre Siria choose Anna, a poor abandoned mother and unenclosed laywoman, instead of a more orthodox exemplar of feminine piety? Unfortunately, Padre Siria revealed little about his individual perspective in the hagiographical text. While most confessor/biographers explicitly celebrated their own roles in holy women’s paths to sanctity, Padre Siria was largely silent about himself in the text, perhaps because his relationship with Anna was brief and came at the very end of her life. It is tempting to imagine that their confessional relationship was inverted, that Anna, a mature mystic nearly fifty years Padre Siria’s senior when their confessional relationship began, became a spiritual mother to him. Such inversions certainly occurred between other holy women and their confessors.1 But the personal and spiritual relationship cultivated between Padre Siria and Anna, and how this relationship framed Anna’s biography, remains decidedly elusive. While Padre Siria’s personal motivations are hidden from view, his promotion of Anna as a model of feminine piety clearly fit within a broader local context in early eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala. Since the late seventeenth century, Franciscan missionary friars laboring in Santiago had been promoting lay religious paths for women who could not afford to profess in female convents. Specifically, they encouraged single women to profess as lay tertiaries, members of the Franciscan Third Order, in spite of numerous Church decrees requiring the strict enclosure of female tertiaries behind convent walls. Evidence from wills indicates that women, especially non-elite single women, enthusiastically responded to the opportunity to profess as Franciscan tertiaries outside the cloister.

42

Chapter Two

How and why did priests in Santiago de Guatemala, particularly Jesuits and Franciscans, ally with poor women living outside marriage and support active and unenclosed female religiosity? Local factors certainly played a role. Santiago de Guatemala was a modest provincial capital, removed from intense Inquisitorial oversight and without the institutional resources necessary to enforce female enclosure. These circumstances ­apparently fostered greater official tolerance for single women and lay female religiosity compared to colonial centers like Mexico City and Lima. Indeed, in the context of a protracted spiritual conquest in the native highlands and urban dislocation and familial breakdown, Santiago’s religious leaders apparently recognized and even embraced the valuable social and spiritual services offered by religious laywomen outside cloistered convents. But there were also global trends at work. Jesuits and Franciscans were at the forefront of the Catholic Church’s renewed ­eighteenth-century global missionary movement. The imperative to evangelize wayward Catholics in Santiago de Guatemala led missionaries to ally with non-elite single women, support active female ministries, and promote more diverse models of female piety. These findings provide a fuller picture of the complex relationship between the early modern Catholic Church and poor single women. This chapter begins by examining the broad trend, evidenced by wills, of women, particularly non-elite single women, professing as tertiaries in the prestigious Franciscan Third Order. This section explores how and why the Franciscan missionary order of Propaganda Fide (Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith) promoted the lay tertiary path for single women even though official sixteenth-century decrees demanded cloistered confines for female tertiaries.2 Evidence suggests that the Franciscan missionaries’ gendered vision of the Franciscan Third Order adapted further in Santiago’s distinctive local context. The next section examines how Padre Antonio Siria’s biography of Anna Guerra de Jesús offered a striking endorsement of unenclosed lay female religiosity and active female evangelizing and at the same time crafted an ideal of feminine piety flexible enough to accommodate poor abandoned wives. The final sections situate and explain these unlikely alliances within Santiago’s local context and within the broader context of the global Catholic missionary movement.3

missionaries, women, and the franciscan third order As noted in the previous chapter, close to one third of female will-makers in early eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala identified themselves

Unlikely Allies

43

as Franciscan tertiaries, professed members of the Franciscan Third Order, compared to just 3 percent of their male counterparts. Although individuals, like Anna Guerra de Jesús, might profess as tertiaries of the Jesuits or Dominicans, only the Franciscans had a formally organized Third Order in early eighteenth-century Santiago, and all of the tertiaries found in wills were members of the Franciscan Third Order. Like members of confraternities (lay religious brotherhoods), Franciscan tertiaries paid yearly alms to the organization, visited their sick brothers and sisters, accompanied the bodies of their brethren to funerals, and participated in collective devotions and feast days. But there were also important distinctions. Unlike traditional confraternities, lay people who joined the Third Order underwent a yearlong novitiate and took nonsolemn vows. Some gained authorization to mark their status by publicly adopting the modified Franciscan habit of the Third Order.4 Tertiaries often further distinguished themselves from secular society by distancing themselves from worldly distractions, while engaging in ascetic practices, intensive spiritual reflection, and public devotions. The Rule of the Franciscan Third Order explicitly required novitiates and tertiaries to forgo parties and worldly entertainments such as bullfights, to dress with the utmost modesty, attend Mass daily, confess frequently, fast regularly, and engage in daily, weekly, and annual rounds of prayer.5 The Rule of the Franciscan Third Order in colonial Latin America also attempted to ensure orthodoxy by requiring novitiates to demonstrate wealth, legitimacy, pure Spanish descent, and impeccable virtue. Indeed, the few existing studies of the Franciscan Third Order in colonial Latin America emphasize that its membership was elite, exclusive, and a marker of prestige.6 Studies also suggest that men dominated Third Order memberships and those women who joined were elite and married or enclosed in beaterios (religious houses for laywomen who took informal vows) or convents per Church decrees.7 And yet most female will-makers who identified as Franciscan tertiaries in early eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala were non-elite and living outside marriage. Among them were poor widows, abandoned wives like Anna Guerra de Jesús, single mothers, and women born illegitimate, of potentially mixed-race backgrounds. Much like Anna’s experience with her Jesuit confessors, it seems likely that the profession of poor single and mixed-race women into the Franciscan Third Order in early eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala resulted, at least in part, from the dogged persistence of the women themselves, a point that will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter. But the diverse profile of female tertiaries also reflected the vision and strategic tactics of the Franciscan missionary friars of Propaganda Fide.

44

Chapter Two

The first Propaganda Fide friars to arrive in Santiago de Guatemala were Fr. Antonio Margil de Jesús and Fr. Melchor López in 1686. By the time he arrived in Guatemala, Fr. Margil was already being compared to the legendary band of sixteenth-century Franciscans who initiated the spiritual conquest of the New World.8 Unlike other branches of the Franciscan order, Propaganda Fide was an explicitly missionary organization whose primary purpose was to complete the protracted spiritual conquest of native communities and bring wayward urban Catholics back into the fold of the Church.9 The missionary friars clearly saw the Franciscan Third Order as a vital apostolic ally. Propaganda Fide chronicler Fr. Isidro Félix de Espinosa noted that before leaving Spain, Fr. Antonio Margil had gained the power and privileges necessary to “be promoters and solicitors of the (Franciscan) Third Order of Penitence’s growth,” and to “admit faithful Christians to the reception and profession of its holy habit.”10 The chronicle further celebrated how Franciscan missions inspired a dramatic growth in the number of tertiaries across New Spain. The specific circumstances of Propaganda Fide’s friars in Santiago apparently intensified connections between their missionary endeavors and the local Franciscan Third Order. From 1694 to 1701, while waiting for the foundation of their permanent missionary college, the friars lived and ministered in Santiago’s Third Order chapel, known as the Calvary Church. During the 1690s, the Third Order’s chapel thus became the focal point of Propaganda Fide’s urban missionary work, the site of their exemplary penitential practices, sermons, talks, and exhortations. At the same time, the Franciscan provincial head also named a Franciscan tertiary brother as trustee for the fledgling Propaganda Fide community and charged him with handling and providing all the material needs of the missionary friars.11 And even after Propaganda Fide established its own independent missionary college in Santiago, they avidly shared and promoted key devotional practices alongside the Franciscan Third Order. For example, both the Franciscan missionary friars and Santiago’s Franciscan tertiaries shared an enthusiastic devotion to the Via Crucis, or Way of the Cross, a spiritual exercise in which urban residents reenacted the last steps of Jesus on the way to crucifixion and meditated on the fourteen Stations of the Cross along a route that led from the Franciscan Church to the Third Order’s Calvary chapel.12 In addition to promoting greater participation in the Franciscan Third Order, Propaganda Fide friars also fomented a broader gendered vision of the organization’s spiritual purpose and membership. In spite of Tridentine decrees requiring the enclosure of female tertiaries, Fr. Antonio Margil avidly encouraged young doncellas, or maidens, to profess as lay tertiaries.13 Other Franciscan missionaries clearly joined his efforts.

Unlikely Allies

45

Fr. Espinosa’s chronicle of Propaganda Fide told how another missionary friar in New Spain persuaded many “honest maidens” to leave behind the pomp and vanity of the world and “dress in the exterior habit of the Third Order of Penitence.”14 Many of these women were orphans or members of impoverished but honorable families, all of whom likely lacked the financial means to support the Third Order as envisioned by the Rule. Although Fr. Espinosa’s chronicle is notably silent about the racial background of these women, it seems clear that the Franciscan missionary friars were not particularly concerned about restricting Third Order membership by race. In spite of the Rule’s explicit requirement that members demonstrate “clean blood”—that is, pure Spanish descent— Fr. ­Antonio Margil’s own favored spiritual daughter and Franciscan tertiary in Querétaro, Mexico, was Francisca de los Ángeles, a woman of mixed racial ancestry and a humble economic background. To be sure, Francisca was the favored spiritual daughter of Querétaro’s entire Propaganda Fide community, and they ultimately tapped her to found a beaterio, or religious house, for Franciscan tertiary women.15 Professing young single women of humble backgrounds as lay tertiaries was a controversial proposition, one that challenged the Third Order’s exclusive Rule and furthermore directly undermined official decrees requiring the strict enclosure of beatas and tertiaries. Professing as a tertiary conferred a measure of spiritual authority and influence, all the more so for those authorized to publicly adopt the habit of the Third Order. The Third Order’s Rule explicitly stated that great care should be taken in authorizing tertiaries to wear an exterior habit, “especially with women commonly referred to as beatas, because if it is publicly discovered that they are deceived by a bad spirit, or if they do not live as they should, all of the Order will suffer because of them.”16 Theological notions regarding women’s inherent spiritual weaknesses and carnal nature and perceived connections between female tertiaries and heretical movements further fueled anxieties about allowing women to profess as lay tertiaries. Particularly since the sixteenth century, ecclesiastical officials worried that imbuing women, especially poor single women, with this kind of spiritual authority might lead the flock astray, end in scandal and controversy, or unsettle orderly hierarchies of gender, race, and class.17 Franciscan missionaries quickly encountered critics and crises related to the profession of young single women into the Franciscan Third Order. Just three years after Fr. Antonio Margil arrived in Santiago, his home missionary college back in Querétaro, Mexico, became embroiled in a terrible scandal. For months, several poor single female tertiaries appeared possessed by the devil. Missionary friars further stoked the community’s

46

Chapter Two

fears in the apostolic interests of mass repentance and redemption. Some Church officials saw more scandal than salvation in the episode. Their critical perspective gained ground when the first afflicted female tertiary admitted she had feigned diabolical possession in order to cover up an incestuous pregnancy. The Inquisition ultimately reprimanded the Propaganda Fide community for provoking a broader crisis of demonic possession in the city by fueling the city’s fears and lending credence to the tertiaries’ dramatic displays.18 Franciscan missionaries faced their share of critics in Santiago de Guatemala as well. Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez, best known for his translation of the Mayan Popol Vuh, also penned a chronicle of Dominican history in Guatemala in the early eighteenth century. He discussed at length Santiago’s “intolerable sickness” and the “vulgar” reality in which “putting on a tertiary habit, any old woman starts having revelations and talking with God, deceiving the general population.”19 Fr. Ximénez blamed priests, apparently Franciscans in particular, for allowing themselves to be “deceived” by these women. He furthermore argued that the terrible earthquake of 1717 resulted from this collective sin. Fr. Ximénez was particularly outraged by the case of Juana de Acuña, whom he described as a beata and Franciscan tertiary, and whose visions allegedly convinced the bishop to abandon the city and stoke a public panic following the 1717 earthquake.20 But the Propaganda Fide friars seem unwavering in their support for the profession of “honest maidens” as lay tertiaries in the Franciscan Third Order. When chronicler Fr. Espinosa wrote his account of the missionary order in the mideighteenth century, he subtly referenced the controversy and criticism surrounding the promotion of the lay tertiary path for women. He acknowledged that this was a difficult enterprise, because “prudent eyes” might rightly question the wisdom of professing young single women. He attempted to assuage concerns by emphasizing that the missionary who engaged in such work conducted careful and thorough spiritual examinations before forwarding female candidates to the Third Order for endorsement.21 At the same time, Fr. Espinosa also subtly promoted a return to the medieval role and purpose of the Franciscan Third Order. He noted that Franciscan missionaries encouraged virtuous maidens to imitate Saint Rose of Viterbo, a thirteenth-century Italian holy woman who professed in the Franciscan Third Order because she was unable to profess in a convent due to poverty. He implied that formal cloistered institutions were unnecessary, as female tertiaries could emulate Saint Rose and create cells within their homes where they could leave behind “the pomp and vanity of the world” as well as household distractions.22 The missionary empha-

Unlikely Allies

47

sis on Saint Rose of Viterbo as a model of female piety clearly took effect. When Francisca de los Ángeles, Franciscan tertiary and spiritual daughter of the Propaganda Fide community in Querétaro, Mexico, founded a beaterio with the help of Franciscan missionary friars, she named it Saint Rose of Viterbo. By invoking the medieval model of Saint Rose, Franciscan missionary friars and female tertiaries clearly envisaged a return to the medieval role and purpose of the Franciscan Third Order to provide a pious path for poor honorable single women who could not afford to profess in a cloistered convent. But the choice of Saint Rose of Viterbo as a model of lay female piety also hints at a bolder vision of active female ministries. Although Propaganda Fide chronicler Espinosa diplomatically emphasized Saint Rose’s cloistered existence within her house, the historical reality was more complex. In her own time, Saint Rose was known for her active ministries and evangelizing, regularly walking through the streets, calling on urban residents to repent for their sins. It seems that Saint Rose’s reputation as a lay evangelizer endured into the early modern era in spite of official attempts to align her image with official doctrine regarding female religiosity. In the 1680s, around the same time that missionary Franciscans were invoking Saint Rose as a model in colonial Mexico, a spiritual biography of Saint Rose described her as an “apostolic preacher.” This choice of wording landed the text on the Index of Prohibited Books until it was replaced with more acceptable gendered descriptions like “encouraging the people” and “rebuking errors.”23 Evidence from wills indicates that the Franciscan missionary vision stretched beyond “virtuous maidens” in early eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala. Within the sample of wills from the early eighteenth century, almost one third of female will-makers identified as Franciscan tertiaries (nineteen out of a total of sixty female will-makers). Most of them came from humble circumstances and lived outside marriage. Five were migrants to the city, mostly from other parts of Central America. Three were born illegitimate, five were widows, three were abandoned/ divorced wives, and three were single mothers. Women who claimed the honorific title of doña were more likely to identify as tertiaries, but among them only one woman, Doña Ignes de Fuentes y Guzmán, was clearly an elite widow with substantial wealth, including a house in the city as well as a hacienda.24 Another, Doña Leonor de la Parra, identified herself as a doncella and noted that she owned a decent house in the populous and racially mixed neighborhood of San Sebastián.25 The other female tertiaries who described themselves with the honorific label of doña came from more humble circumstances. Doña Clara de Espino, who migrated to Santiago from Nueva Segovia, in modern-day Nicaragua,

48

Chapter Two

noted that she was a widow and could claim to her name only the few belongings found inside a house that she rented.26 More than half of the female tertiaries found in wills from 1700 to 1720 declined to describe themselves with the honorific title of doña and clearly came from more modest backgrounds. María García, for example, noted that she was born the illegitimate daughter of a single mother and an unidentified father, suggesting the possibility of racial mixture. At the very least she would have been unable to prove pure Spanish descent. She claimed to be a resident of the city, but not a vecina, meaning she had likely migrated to the city at some point. Neither she nor her husband brought any belongings or wealth to their marriage, and after forty years of marriage they had no living children and not much in the way of material wealth, with the exception of partial ownership of a small plot of land.27 The majority of female will-makers who identified as tertiaries in early eighteenth-century Santiago, over 75 percent, also lived outside marriage. Among them were poor abandoned wives like Anna Guerra de Jesús. Vitoria de Paredes, for example, recounted in her 1700 will that she had been living as an abandoned wife for seventeen years and had raised her legitimate daughter on her own.28 She was not destitute, but she also made clear that her life as an abandoned wife had not been easy. She came from a humble background and did not claim the honorific title of doña, nor did she apply the title to her parents. Like Vitoria, Juana de la Fé y Velasco also noted in her 1717 will that she had been living as an abandoned wife for twenty years and had raised her legitimate daughter alone. She survived, at least in part, by taking in boarders.29 Some female tertiaries acknowledged more blatant transgressions. Nicolasa Díaz del Castillo, a poor criolla, admitted in her 1717 will that she had an hijo natural, a child born of an informal union, probably after she became a widow.30 Similarly, Antonia de Aguilar, who identified herself as a woman of Spanish descent and a single woman who had never married, acknowledged that she had borne and raised two hijas naturales, both of them married by the time Antonia made out her will.31 Neither woman discussed the circumstances of her children’s conception and birth or mentioned the father of her children. Their silence suggests that they conceived these children without marriage promises and had perhaps raised them without paternal support. In any case, Nicolasa and Antonia had clearly strayed beyond the morally ambiguous position of abandoned or divorced wife into a more clearly defined transgression of Church law forbidding informal sexual unions. In their devotional enthusiasm, some of these women may have adopted the Franciscan tertiary habit without approval. In eighteenth-­ century Mexico, some priests seemed to assume that many women,

Unlikely Allies

49

especially those of non-elite status, adopted tertiary habits without formal profession.32 Certainly, the fraudulent appropriation of tertiary habits was an issue that the Third Order faced in eighteenth-century Guatemala. But these fraudulent cases appear to have occurred primarily outside the capital, in towns and villages with far less oversight by the Franciscan order.33 A closer reading of the wills and the broader documentary record indicates that, at least in early eighteenth-century Santiago, poor single women were able to formally profess in the Franciscan Third Order and even gain the more elevated status of hábito descubierto (habit worn in public)—that is, the authorization to publicly wear the Franciscan tertiary habit. Only one woman, María Nicolasa de Aparicio, who was a mulatta, freed slave, and single mother, indicated that she had only just professed on her deathbed, the day before making out her will.34 But most of the female tertiaries, regardless of social or moral status, pointed to a longerterm status as Franciscan tertiaries. Two women born illegitimate, two wives separated from their husbands, and one single mother seemed confident enough in their tertiary status to request a privileged burial under the floors of the Third Order’s chapel in the Franciscan convent church chapel. Two female tertiaries who were separated from their husbands also listed Franciscan tertiary brothers among the executors and witnesses to their wills. As noted earlier, Vitoria de Paredes, for example, who had lived as an abandoned wife for seventeen years, clearly had the trust and esteem of the Franciscan friars, because she indicated that one of Propaganda Fide’s friars had entrusted her with the care of an orphaned infant.35 And Juana de la Fé y Velasco, who had been an abandoned wife for twenty years, emphasized in her will that she had been an upstanding member of the Franciscan Third Order for many years, had always paid her dues, and had received authorization to publicly wear the tertiary habit. She also listed fellow tertiary brothers as the executors to her will.36 Nicolasa Díaz del Castillo, the widow of modest resources who acknowledged that she had an illegitimate son, also noted that her two legitimate sons were Franciscans, and she confidently requested burial in the chapel of the Third Order.37 Did Franciscan missionaries encourage these women to profess as tertiaries, or did missionaries simply tolerate, or even resist, their devotional enthusiasm? Espinosa’s chronicle of Propaganda Fide is notably silent on the matter, but Guatemala’s own Franciscan chronicler, Fr. Francisco Vásquez, provides some clues. Writing in early eighteenth-century Santiago, Fr. Vásquez expressed a broader missionary vision to bring the Franciscan Third Order back to its medieval origins as a penitential brotherhood, an association of repentant sinners. The association’s

50

Chapter Two

full name, the Venerable Third Order of Penitence, clearly indicated this penitential identity. Thus, even as Fr. Vásquez emphasized the illustrious origins and distinguished membership of Santiago’s Franciscan Third Order, he also celebrated the stories of multiple repentant sinners who reformed their lives and became Franciscan tertiaries. His recounting of one exchange between a repentant man and a Franciscan friar clearly underscored the relationship between the Franciscan Third Order and reformed sinners. “Oh Father of mine, how can they admit me into the holy (Third) Order, as I am such a great sinner, and have been the source of so much scandal in this city.” To which the friar responded, “for that very reason, because this (Third) Order is of penitents, and although it admits innocents, Saint Francis founded it for repentant sinners.”38 Fr. Vásquez also recounted the story of Doña María de Toledo, an elite and noblewoman who joined Santiago’s Franciscan Third Order a century earlier and asked to henceforth be identified only as “María la Pecadora,” or “María the Sinner.”39 But between the lines, Fr. Vásquez also hinted at the complex gendered tensions that framed the Third Order’s penitential identity and the profession of repentant or “lost” women in early eighteenth-century Santiago. While Fr. Vásquez celebrated the penitential identity of the Franciscan Third Order, his numerous conversion narratives singularly highlighted the experiences of male converts. Every female tertiary described by Fr. Vásquez was a woman of honor, chastity, and impeccable reputation. Even the woman known as “María the Sinner” was an elite and honorable woman who took the name as a virtuous sign of humility and penance. Fr. Vásquez’s pointed silence about repentant female tertiaries reflects early modern Catholicism’s conflicted notions of gendered sin, particularly sexual sin, and redemption. While a long hagiographical tradition celebrated dramatic stories of male conversion from sinner to saint, the most common portrait of female sanctity was lifelong virginity, or at least chastity, and virtue. Hagiographical texts celebrating holy women as reformed sinners existed, but hagiographers almost always managed to portray female converts or redeemed sinners as chaste and sexually virtuous in spite of any other failings. In other times and places, cloistering seems to have resolved some of these gendered tensions regarding sexual sin and redemption. In late seventeenth-century Madrid, repentant women living in a recogimiento, or religious shelter, successfully opted to profess as Franciscan tertiaries and adopt tertiary habits, an affiliation that endured throughout the eighteenth century.40 Around the same time in Mexico City, a Jesuit priest founded the Recogimiento de San Miguel de Belén as a pious house for repentant women and honest maidens to live side by side and without

Unlikely Allies

51

distinction.41 The Franciscan missionary friars may have had a long-term vision to found a beaterio or recogimiento in Santiago to resolve the gendered tensions provoked by the profession of poor single women as unenclosed Franciscan tertiaries. In their home college of Querétaro, Mexico, the friars of Propaganda Fide ultimately led efforts to organize and found a beaterio for Franciscan tertiary women.42 But if that was their plan in Santiago, it failed. The only recorded attempt to found a beaterio for Franciscan tertiary women in Santiago, specifically mulatta tertiaries, came much later in the eighteenth century in 1772, and the attempt was unsuccessful.43 In eighteenth-century Santiago, poor single women who professed in the Franciscan Third Order did so as unenclosed laywomen. The acceptance of poor widows, abandoned wives, and even single mothers into Santiago’s Franciscan Third Order in part reflected secular and ecclesiastical officials’ complex and contradictory attitudes and policies toward single women. Although Spanish law demanded harsh punishments of “illicit” sexuality and officially withdrew legal protection from “indecent” women, such punishments were rarely if ever enforced in colonial Spanish America, and in practice flexibility marked Spanish secular and ecclesiastical justice.44 Spanish courts regularly allowed single mothers the right to openly sue the fathers of their children for child support. As in other parts of Spain and Spanish America, many single mothers in eighteenth-century Guatemala took their former partners to court and won not only financial compensation but also tacit recognition of their position as legitimate guardians.45 Nor does it appear in practice, at least in Santiago, that a widow who formed an informal sexual union after the death of her husband lost control over her legitimate children as prescribed by law.46 And while Church doctrine and moral treatises regularly emphasized the moral dangers of female sexuality, in practice priests and ecclesiastical judges also perceived women as vulnerable and in need of protection. Indeed, recent studies indicate that women who engaged in premarital sex frequently looked to Church officials for support as they exercised their right to sue lovers who reneged on their marriage promises in ecclesiastical courts. Priests and ecclesiastical judges frequently supported women’s cases and encouraged men to fulfill their marriage promises, or required them, at the very least, to pay a monetary compensation for women’s lost virginity and honor.47 Competing colonial interests, particularly elite resistance to marriage across social and racial lines, further limited the Church’s ability to pressure couples to marry.48 As Asunción Lavrin puts it, “the language of the church was stern in prescription, but capable of accommodations and not lacking in understanding of the stark realities

52

Chapter Two

learned in the confessionals . . . In practical terms, it was often forced to forgive and forget.”49 Of course, levels of tolerance varied over time and space. As Allyson Poska points out, the cultural significance placed on female chastity differed across Spain and Spanish America due to multiple factors including demography, economics, and local sexual mores.50 Enforcement of sexual morality was especially muted in Santiago, even among local priests and the ecclesiastical court. A review of surviving records from Santiago’s ecclesiastical court, which was charged with the prosecution of moral crimes, suggests that Santiago’s residents were little concerned about reporting “illicit” female sexuality to ecclesiastical officials. For the entire colonial period, surviving records document only nineteen cases related to illicit sexuality in the ecclesiastical court.51 Only five of these were from the Guatemalan capital, as the bishop’s court oversaw cases from all over Central America. Though scattered and infrequent, the cases referring to sexual infractions suggest that people in eighteenth-century Central America more frequently denounced men for sexual crimes than women. Ten of the cases, or slightly more than half, were denunciations of male sexual infractions, and half of those cases were directed against priests. Three cases denounced couples for informal unions, and six cases involved female sexual infractions. Most of the denunciations lodged specifically against women concerned adultery charges and were brought by their aggrieved spouses. Local priests also appear quite apathetic about illicit sexuality. In his 1730s report to the bishop, the parish priest of Santiago’s poorest parish, Los Remedios, ignored the issue of sexual transgressions completely and instead emphasized drunkenness as the “most dominant vice.”52 His counterpart in the San Sebastián parish mentioned “concubinage,” or informal unions, as a problem but was also far more worried about drunkenness, which he similarly described as the “most abominable and dominant vice” afflicting his parish.53 Perhaps they had simply accepted that their hands were tied, as Santiago lacked the infrastructure required to systematically prosecute and incarcerate women who engaged in informal unions. If the local priests had grown apathetic regarding sexual morality, missionaries were not. Sermons frequently focused on sexual sins and marital relations.54 Franciscan missionary friars in Santiago de Guatemala, facing official apathy toward endemic informal unions and a lack of will or funding to support beaterios or recogimientos, likely saw the uncloistered tertiary path as a practical, effective, and inexpensive solution. Profession in the Franciscan Third Order required women to restructure their lives according to the spiritual discipline and rule of the Franciscan order, pro-

Unlikely Allies

53

viding greater guarantee that the hard-won conversions wrought through fervent preaching and confession would produce enduring spiritual and social transformations. Poor single women who professed as tertiaries were also powerfully situated to serve as role models for the multitude of women engaging in informal unions or struggling with separation from a spouse. As a medieval Franciscan of another apostolic age put it about the missionary potential of repentant women, “her having been a sinner made her a mirror for sinners and an aid for the friars in reaching the lost.”55 Cloaking repentant women in Franciscan tertiary habits also boldly conveyed the Franciscans’ apostolic mission and their direct role in the triumph of salvation over sin. Still, it’s ultimately unclear whether Propaganda Fide missionaries encouraged poor widows, abandoned wives, and single mothers to profess in Santiago’s Third Order or only reluctantly acquiesced to their devotional enthusiasm. Either way, Franciscan missionaries apparently adapted their gendered vision of the Franciscan Third Order in response to realities on the ground. Of course, flexibility and creative adaptation were essential to successful missionary endeavors. But most studies highlight shifting ideas about race, particularly the ways in which the imperative to evangelize and the missionary experience fueled acknowledgment and even celebrations of non-European holiness.56 The surprising acceptance of poor single women, including single mothers and abandoned wives, as Franciscan tertiaries, suggests a different kind of missionary adaptation and the cultivation of more flexible ideals of feminine piety. Much as missionaries had long cultivated alliances with native elites and trained native intermediaries as catechists and lay evangelizers, it appears that eighteenth-century missionaries ministering to a “city of women” actively allied with poor single women and relied on them as vital intermediaries.

born anew and battling for souls: the jesuit portrait of anna guerra de jesús Padre Antonio Siria’s hagiographical portrait of Anna Guerra de Jesús further illuminates how and why missionaries in Santiago de Guatemala promoted the lay female religious path and allied with poor single women as part of broader evangelization efforts. Some scholars argue that priests who allied with and penned the biographies of unorthodox holy women performed a kind of damage control in the face of lay religious ­expression that might threaten Catholic orthodoxy or undermine colonial and ­religious hierarchies. Examining the case of America’s first saint,

54

Chapter Two

lay t­ ertiary Rose of Lima, Kathleen Myers concludes that early modern hagiographers attempted to transform “deviant lives into paradigmatic hagiographic biographies for a new age and a New World.”57 In a similar vein, Joan Bristol argues that the hagiography of an African slave woman in a Mexican convent emphasized her unique and exceptional nature, and thus intentionally aimed to exclude non-Europeans from sanctity and models of feminine piety.58 These scholars point to the ways in which early modern priests obscured, censored, and manipulated unorthodox holy female lives in order to reaffirm orthodoxy and ultimately enforce a narrow ideal of feminine piety. There are certainly ways in which Padre Siria’s narrative molded Anna Guerra de Jesús’s life to fit the exemplary model of early ­modern ­Catholic values and gendered ideals. The fantastic miracles of m ­ edieval hagiographies were appropriately absent and in their stead was a heavy ­emphasis on Anna’s virtuous behaviors.59 While Anna was a poor woman ­abandoned by her husband, she was also a criolla of pure Spanish heritage, born legitimate and honorable, and she was innocent of any sexual transgressions. Padre Siria repeatedly emphasized Anna’s enthusiastic ­relationship to the sacraments of confession and communion, her unwavering obedience to confessors, and her pronounced humility. Anna’s lack of a large charismatic devotional following also made her less threatening as a holy woman. And as noted in the previous chapter, c­ omparing Padre Siria’s narrative with the extant selections of Anna’s spiritual diaries reveals how Padre Siria also reconfigured Anna’s devotional ­practices and visionary experiences, especially the significant role that her personal r­ elationship with her children continued to play in her spiritual life. And like other hagiographers writing about non-elite women, Padre Siria p ­ ortrayed his subject as an exceedingly humble and obedient servant of the Church, developing a spiritual model appropriate for poor laywomen.60 But at the same time, Padre Siria neither obscured the reality of Anna’s lay position nor mitigated its significance by turning her into a singular and exemplary figure. On the contrary, throughout Anna’s spiritual biography, Padre Siria openly endorsed Anna’s position as an unenclosed laywoman. Furthermore, he explicitly articulated an alternative ideal of lay female piety that accommodated an active apostolic calling and was open even to poor women separated from their husbands. Of course, Padre Siria acknowledged the dangers inherent to this path, which attempted to practice “in the dangers of the world, the most heroic perfection of a reformed and religious life.”61 He also indicated that the dangers facing poor single women were particularly acute, repeatedly noting how Anna lived side by side for decades with women “of the bad life.”62 Padre Siria

Unlikely Allies

55

even argued that the devil actively worked through one of these women, tempting Anna into a life of dissolution, with an offer of a room and a chance to escape the dismal hovel in which she lived. Following this encounter, Anna attempted to remove herself from the corruptions of the world by retiring to the small town of Santa Anna, where she could better enjoy the spiritual direction of Mro. don Bernardino de Ovando. This was quite possibly the closest Anna could get to the ideal of female enclosure, barred as she was by poverty and marital bonds from professing in a convent or beaterio, and given the lack of institutional alternatives for abandoned wives in Santiago. It was in all ways a prudent move and one well in alignment with the recommendations of many early modern moral treatises. Padre Siria’s handling of Anna’s attempt to remove herself from the world and her subsequent return to Santiago provided a clear endorsement of her lay and unenclosed status, which he explicitly framed within the apostolic mission of the Jesuit order. He noted that on leaving the city Anna soon realized “that the tender plants, which she had left in the city, were losing their fervor, without her there to water them with her counsel and teaching.”63 She realized she had to “leave behind her solitude and return to attend to them and to guide them once again and this is how God was readying her and introducing in her soul the apostolic spirit of his Company (Jesuit Order), that she attend to her own salvation and at the same time the salvation of those around her, he did not want her retired in the desert, but rather trading with these souls the interests of grace and the business of his greater Glory.”64 This thread weaves throughout the entire narrative as Padre Siria repeatedly privileged Anna’s apostolic calling, or more specifically the apostolic spirit of the Jesuit order, over an ideal of female enclosure or removal from worldly affairs. Padre Siria described Anna as a “legitimate daughter of that burning and ardent spirit of the enlightened Patriarch and founder of the Company of Jesus,” and like Saint Ignatius she “had a desire for the health and conversion of souls always burning brightly in her heart.”65 Reflecting on the whole of Anna’s spiritual life, Padre Siria noted that this apostolic spirit obliged Anna many times to leave the safe recogimiento (enclosure) of her home in search of women “of the bad life” and that in so doing “she was able to bring many women out of their bad state, winning them over to a new exemplary life.”66 Padre Siria’s text hinted at the tension that Anna herself experienced between her own desire for enclosure and an apostolic calling. This may well have been a rhetorical trope that Anna employed in her spiritual diaries, or that Padre Siria added to the biographical text as a way of legitimating Anna’s apostolic activities. Repeatedly Padre Siria portrayed

56

Chapter Two

Anna’s calling as divinely inspired and Anna as a willing, or sometimes reluctant, servant to God’s will. “God took this servant as his instrument in order to rescue her, as indeed, she rescued innumerable people.”67 Early modern religious women, both nuns and laywomen, regularly used a rhetoric of extreme humility or obedience to confessors or divine will as a way of legitimizing spiritual authority or actions typically defined as male. And confessors/biographers often followed suit or further embellished the rhetoric of female obedience.68 But these tensions could also be quite real, and Anna’s own spiritual diaries illuminate her complex relationship to female enclosure and lay religiosity. When an opportunity arose for Anna’s daughter Catalina to leave the uncloistered Beaterio de Santa Rosa and enter the cloistered Carmelite convent of Santa Teresa, Anna enthusiastically favored the cloistered option, so much so that she sought out Catalina’s spiritual director, none other than famed Franciscan missionary friar Antonio Margil, and beseeched him to use his influence to sway Catalina toward profession in Santa Teresa. But Fr. Margil replied “that I should not interfere with Catalina, that she was not my daughter, but instead belonged to Saint Dominic and Saint Rose (of Lima), and that he knew that God had not raised her to be a nun, but to be a beata.”69 In Anna’s telling, Fr. Margil, like Padre Siria, framed this support for uncloistered female religiosity in terms of God’s divine plan; however, the missionary zeal of Propaganda Fide likely influenced his position as well. Like Padre Siria, Fr. Margil emerges from the text as a supporter of lay religious paths for women. Anna’s account upends traditional narratives, which assume that beatas pushed for an active lay religious path while Church officials desperately attempted to confine and cloister them. Just as recent studies suggest that women themselves had complex relationships to ideals of female enclosure, so too did priests, and Anna’s Vida provides a glimpse of priests actively encouraging lay female religiosity.70 If Anna struggled with her apostolic calling, Padre Siria also emphasized the variety of ways in which she enthusiastically responded to the call. Certainly, Padre Siria took care to note that she channeled the “desire that always burned brightly in her heart for the conversion of souls” into “effective means that were permitted to her status and sex.”71 Among those means permissible for women, Padre Siria emphasized the simple yet profound significance of Anna’s visible presence as a role model of lay piety. By her example of frequent engagement in the sacraments of confession and communion, Padre Siria claimed that “there were innumerable souls, who following her footsteps and her example, left behind the disorders of their ravaged lives and returned to God.”72 Padre Siria also affirmed that Anna’s pioneering decision to become a tertiary of the Je-

Unlikely Allies

57

suit order and wear the Jesuit habit opened a new path for “many noble, pious, and devout maidens” to follow suit.73 Padre Siria also described how Anna saved numerous souls through more active ministries, through “the fervor of her exhortations, alongside her gifts and services, and other industrious means that she learned in the school of charity.”74 Unfortunately, Padre Siria’s narrative never explains what he meant by methods learned through the “school of charity.” But the reference, albeit vague, suggestively links Anna’s charitable ministries with the works of her onetime spiritual director Mro. don Bernardino de Ovando and the Holy School of Christ brotherhood, which emphasized tending both bodies and souls in hospitals and prisons. Padre Siria provided a clearer portrait of Anna’s “exhortations” of neighbors and fellow residents. These exhortations to reject sin were sometimes public, if indirect, as when Anna began publicly praying the rosary on the sidewalk alongside her pious friend as a response to the “vanity and decadence of the dress and customs that were much in use in this city.”75 Padre Siria further emphasized how Anna ably turned her apostolic experience and skillful missionary tactics on her own husband. On his return, Anna “gently prepared him for a general confession of all of his life, which he quickly did with Mro. don Bernardino de Ovando.”76 Padre Siria indicated that it was Anna who felt internally moved during confession toward the conclusion that her husband should profess as a donado (religious servant) with the Dominican order. Surely Diego must have had some personal inclination toward this profession, perhaps because their son was already a professed Dominican priest. But the text also suggests that Diego struggled on this path and was often angry and resentful. Padre Siria credited the “holy counsel and fervent reasoning of Doña Anna, taking charge of his labors . . . and never leaving his side until she had brought him to a calm tranquility.”77 Here, Anna’s Vida seems to invoke the medieval hagiographical model of women as uniquely persuasive and able to convert their wayward husbands.78 But Padre Siria also highlighted the great impact of Anna’s evangelizing efforts beyond her household, specifically with regard to the endemic issue of “illicit” sexuality. He recounted, for example, how Anna, pained to see her neighbor’s “abominable soul,” reached out to her many times and ultimately guided her to repent on her deathbed. In another instance, Anna approached a woman “of the bad life” and advised her “with affable firmness and familiarity” to engage in penance for her sins, to not waste time, for her days were counted. “This woman received (Anna’s) words like an oracle and following her holy counsel died a month later.”79 He reported another instance in which residents advised a man who had

58

Chapter Two

spent many years in a “bad friendship” with a woman to seek out Anna’s counsel for the good of his soul. With great energy and “effective reasoning” Anna helped the man see the gravity of his sin and convinced him to confess and leave behind the relationship, all of which he did as part of a new exemplary and Christian life. The anecdote suggests that Anna’s reputation as an able evangelizer was such that she even received referrals, perhaps especially for sins of a sexual nature. Indeed, Padre Siria argued that the case of this man was just one of many, and he credited Anna’s ministries with pulling women in particular out of illicit sexual relationships.80 Obviously, assessing the veracity of this claim is impossible. But modern scholarship confirms Padre Siria’s interpretation on at least one count. Illegitimacy rates among non-elites plunged dramatically in late seventeenth-century Santiago, from approximately 75 percent in the 1660s to 45 percent in the 1690s. Christopher Lutz attributes the marked decline to social and economic transformations, specifically the emergence of a sizable population of independent workers from slave and dependent servant status. Greater independence allowed more opportunities for non-elite peoples to set up their own households and formalize their unions through marriage.81 But economic and social transformations may not fully explain the decline in illegitimacy. Nonelite men and women could and did establish independent households through consensual unions outside marriage. The decline in illegitimacy and increase in non-elite marriages suggests that religious and cultural values played a role alongside economic and social factors. Given the timing, Franciscan urban missions, which focused heavily on sexual relations and formalizing consensual unions, likely played at least some role. Padre Siria’s narrative further suggests the possibility that lay female evangelizers like Anna Guerra de Jesús, and most likely Franciscan female tertiaries, also actively participated in the transmission of religious values. Of course, not all residents responded favorably to Anna’s evangelizing efforts. Padre Siria pointed out that some residents in Santiago sarcastically labeled her “the converter,” “the saint,” and “the preacher.” But in Padre Siria’s recounting, such taunts only further illuminated the parallels between Anna’s apostolic ministry and that of Saint Ignatius himself, who similarly faced insults and defamations in his quest to “win souls and reduce the number of sinners.”82 And like Saint Ignatius, Anna’s personal experience of sin and redemption enhanced her capacity to reach lost souls. And rather than ignore Anna’s morally ambiguous status as a poor abandoned wife who had strayed from the church for years, Padre

Unlikely Allies

59

Siria clearly affirmed the relationship between Anna’s capacity as a lay ­evangelizer and her identity as a repentant sinner, even as he carefully maneuvered around standard models of female holiness, which typically emphasized sanctity since birth. He claimed that “God permitted her to believe that she had sinned so that through her own experiences she would feel more deeply the unhappy state of sinners and at the same time her continuous memories would bring her humiliation and abundant material for repentance.”83 With this disclaimer, Padre Siria proceeded to repeatedly emphasize Anna’s path from sin to sanctity. He recounted, for example, that after completing the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and spending days overwhelmed by the gravity of her sins, Anna experienced a vision of God as an eagle in his nest, “sheltering his little chicks under his wings . . . and he told her: these are the sinners that have returned to me and you are one of them, see how I take them into my shelter, do not fear, because whoever is protected by my wings, will never be lost.”84 Padre Siria also pointed to Anna’s “reconciliation with her offended God,” and repeatedly described Anna’s conversion experience as one in which she was “born anew.”85 By portraying Anna as a repentant sinner, Padre Siria articulated an ideal of feminine piety flexible enough to accommodate women with imperfect pasts, women who had strayed from the Church, or women who were separated from their husbands. Anna’s spiritual biography amounts to a striking endorsement of unenclosed lay female religiosity in the service of a female apostolic ministry. And rather than ignore Anna’s status as a poor abandoned wife and mother, or treat her case as exceptional and unique, Padre Siria crafted a feminine ideal that was open even to “lost” women. This certainly makes for an “atypical text about an atypical figure.”86 The official position of the Church had long been that women could never be apostles of the faith, prohibited as they were from preaching and delivering the sacraments. The Counter-Reformation emphasis on the enclosure of female religiosity apparently only further distanced women from missionary enterprises. Even the Jesuits, most ardent of apostolic orders, balked at the idea of a female monastic counterpart.87 Furthermore, the standard model for holy women, be they nuns or laywomen, was lifelong virginity. Occasionally, hagiographers celebrated pious widows, usually after they had professed as nuns or at least entered cloistered convents as laywomen or religious servants. Abandoned wives, like Anna, who remained outside convent walls were more unusual hagiographical subjects, especially by the early modern period.88 If this text is not quite paradigmatic, what bigger story can it tell, particularly alongside evidence of Franciscan missionary support for lay female religious paths? The following sections consider the local and global contexts that framed alliances between

60

Chapter Two

priests and single women and more flexible ideals of feminine piety in eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala.

the council of trent meets santiago de guatemala: priests, laywomen, and local religion Franciscan and Jesuit alliances with non-elite women living outside marriage and their support for lay female religious paths reflected, in part, Santiago’s distinctive local context. Evidence suggests that single women and religious laywomen in Santiago enjoyed greater tolerance compared to colonial centers such as Mexico City and Lima, as local ecclesiastical officials selectively implemented Tridentine decrees regarding enclosure of women falling outside the category of wife or nun. 89 Those decrees had attempted to decisively rectify the moral threat posed by female sexual and spiritual autonomy and the “disorderly” blurring of sacred and profane produced by religious women moving through the streets and worldly women moving through convent corridors. The Tridentine solution required all religious women, including nuns, beatas, and tertiaries, to live in strictly cloistered convents and simultaneously encouraged the foundation of separate institutions (known as recogimientos in Spain and Spanish America) to protect, enclose, and perhaps redeem or punish women who did not fit in the category of wife or nun. Mexico City and Lima, the wealthy and powerful colonial capitals of Spanish America, at least attempted to realize key aspects of the Tridentine vision, founding numerous elite convents as well as recogimientos to address the different kinds of “worldly” women in need of safe enclosure such as wives abandoned by their husbands and reformed prostitutes.90 But this was a highly expensive endeavor, especially for a smaller humbler provincial capital like Santiago de Guatemala. In contrast to both Mexico City and Lima, Santiago had only one official recogimiento, the Casa de Recogidas, throughout the entire colonial period. The Casa de Recogidas began as a house and school under the name Colegio de Doncellas (also known as the Colegio de la Presentación de Nuestra Señora), with the express purpose of protecting and educating “honorable” but poor Spanish and criolla orphans and young women.91 But Santiago’s bishops consistently used the house as a detention center for women accused or convicted of crimes. By the late seventeenth century, the bishop of Santiago began a campaign to officially transform the house into the Casa de Recogidas, a detention center for “lost women” and women “of the bad life.”92 The bishop may have lumped other kinds of women, such

Unlikely Allies

61

as separated or abandoned wives, into these ambiguous categories. But records indicate that over the course of the eighteenth century, most of the women enclosed in the Casa de Recogidas were accused or convicted of sexual crimes such as adultery, prostitution, or informal sexual unions.93 And a review of ecclesiastical divorce proceedings suggests that by the early eighteenth century, the Casa de Recogidas was so thoroughly associated with criminality that both residents and Church officials viewed it as an inappropriate destination for single women who were simply vulnerable or “at risk.”94 Indeed, Padre Siria may have used Anna Guerra de Jesús’s Vida as a way of engaging with local debates about how to handle the social and spiritual challenges posed by large numbers of independent and poor women. In other parts of Europe, Jesuits were at the forefront of debates about whether “lost” women should be spiritually redeemed by the Church or criminalized and incarcerated in secular prisons. Jesuits actively founded and supported houses aimed at the moral redemption of repentant women throughout Europe, and the Jesuit vision influenced recogimientos in colonial centers like Lima and Mexico City.95 In light of this Jesuit tradition, the timing of Padre Siria’s publication of Anna’s Vida appears significant, just two years after the Guatemalan audiencia approved the bishop’s request to formally found the Casa de Recogidas and one year after the bishop purchased the properties to realize the foundation. It seems possible that Anna’s Vida was a subtle response to the bishop’s decades-long campaign to formalize and fund the Casa de Recogidas as an institution for women “of the bad life.” Perhaps the bishop’s vision was as vague as surviving documents imply and Padre Siria’s portrait of Anna as a redeemed sinner sought to subtly influence the direction of the Casa de Recogidas toward the Jesuit model of moral redemption. Or perhaps the bishop always intended the Casa de Recogidas to be an institution for a more narrowly defined category of female criminals, and Padre Siria’s text suggested ways priests and friars might guide the broader population of vulnerable women in the absence of institutions designed to protect and enclose them. Lacking institutional alternatives, Santiago’s local church officials certainly seem resigned to accept pious independent female living as an acceptable alternative to actual enclosure. Ecclesiastical divorce records indicate that officials rarely placed women seeking divorce into private homes, as was customary in some other provincial towns that lacked recogimientos.96 Anna’s Vida provides another glimpse of these realities as well. Anna spent many long years separated from her husband, and at no point did her confessors or local officials attempt to enclose her in a beaterio or the Casa de Recogidas. Anna’s status as an independent

62

Chapter Two

woman separated from her husband became an issue only when Diego wished to profess as a donado, or religious servant, in the Dominican monastery. Padre Siria recounted how ecclesiastical officials debated whether they could justifiably allow Diego to “abandon” his wife to the dangers of the world. Anna’s first confessor, Mro. don Bernardino de Ovando, stepped forward and argued that Anna’s pious reputation demonstrated her capacity to live in the world as an independent woman.97 Church officials agreed and consented to Diego’s profession. The lack of social welfare institutions also likely accentuated greater reliance on religious laywomen in colonial Santiago. Some studies for early modern Europe find that local ecclesiastical officials continued to support active unenclosed religious women, because these women provided useful social services and some form of protective community for single and widowed women who were unable to profess in a convent or uninterested in doing so.98 Padre Siria hinted at this dynamic in Anna’s hagiography. He recounted that his Jesuit brother Padre Juan Cerón provided Anna Guerra de Jesús with a house next to the Jesuit school, so that she might head a recogimiento of honest and virtuous maidens and “indoctrinate them with her counsel and inspire fervor with her example.”99 The project ultimately failed as a formal recogimiento; however, Padre Siria noted that Anna continued throughout her final years to provide shelter and spiritual guidance to poor orphans and migrants to the city.100 Similarly, Franciscan tertiary Vitoria de Paredes recounted in her will that a Franciscan missionary friar entrusted her with the care of an orphaned infant.101 Indeed, the Rule of the Franciscan Third Order explicitly required tertiaries to engage in regular acts of charity, including visiting the sick, accompanying the dead to their burials, and feeding, clothing, and sheltering those in need.102 Fears about native “backsliding” may have also heightened interest in the promotion of non-elite and mixed-race holy women. Celia Cussen finds that in seventeenth-century Peru, the same priests who actively led campaigns to extirpate “idolatry” in native towns were simultaneously documenting the holy lives of two Franciscan tertiary women in Lima: Madre Estephania de San Joseph, a mulatta freed slave, and Isabel Cano, a mestiza. She argues that these missionary priests were particularly concerned about developing appropriate models of piety for the large urban populations of non-elites from indigenous, African, and mixedrace backgrounds.103 A similar dynamic seems to have been at work in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Guatemala. In the 1680s, Propaganda Fide friars based in Santiago began leading extirpation campaigns throughout the Mayan highlands and coastal lowlands in a renewed effort to root out Mayan and other heterodox religious beliefs and

Unlikely Allies

63

practices.104 Results were mixed. Between 1708 and 1713, new native religious movements emerged in the Mayan highlands of Chiapas. When ecclesiastical authorities suppressed a saint’s cult deemed heterodox, a violent spiritual and political uprising convulsed the region.105 Perhaps “backsliding” in rural hinterlands gave added urgency to urban apostolic missions and more flexible models of piety, particularly as colonial Spanish American cities were themselves rife with familial breakdown, illicit sexuality, and heterodox religious practices. Of course, living, praying, and ministering in remarkably diverse urban contexts, surrounded by poor criollos, indigenous and mixed-race residents, and abandoned wives and mothers, also likely influenced clerical perceptions of holiness and spiritual alliances. Recent studies highlight how some priests responded to holy figures that embodied, and perhaps helped to resolve, the tensions and contradictions inherent to highly diverse and stratified colonial societies.106 At the same time, the competitive religious environment of cities like Santiago led some religious orders to align with popular local lay holy women, including unorthodox figures, as a means of gaining local recognition, prestige, and devotional following. When Propaganda Fide friars first arrived to their home mission in Querétaro, Mexico, for example, they had to carve out a space for their evangelizing mission in a city that already had multiple religious orders and a sizable secular clergy. One scholar argues that they accomplished this, in part, by allying with poor and mixed-race local holy woman Francisca de los Ángeles.107 Evidence from wills suggests that the newly arrived Franciscan missionary friars pursued similar tactics in Santiago as they competed with multiple well-established religious orders and parish churches for devotees. The Inquisition often frowned on such missionary tactics; however, their influence in Santiago was relatively weak compared to Mexico City and Lima, as well as Spanish cities such as Seville and Madrid, all of which hosted Inquisition tribunals. In those cities, successive waves of Inquisitorial prosecutions of beatas and tertiaries for heretical beliefs and false mysticism fueled growing intolerance for lay female religiosity. In early seventeenth-century Lima, for example, a cluster of Inquisition trials of pious laywomen and their clerical supporters helped enforce a narrower ideal of feminine piety based on enclosure and orthodox observances rather than lay status and female mysticism.108 But unlike Mexico City and Lima, Santiago witnessed no cluster of Inquisition trials targeting pious laywomen, nor the priests with whom they were allied. Indeed, a search of Inquisition records for broader New Spain, which included both Mexico and Central America, uncovers no prosecutions of Guatemalan beatas or tertiaries for heretical beliefs or false mysticism.

64

Chapter Two

The lack of Inquisitorial attention to lay female religiosity in Santiago was surely a result, at least in part, of the city’s position at the far edges of the Inquisition’s reach. Inquisitorial oversight of Guatemala was notoriously lax, and many denunciations were left unresolved. But the broader documentary record confirms that Santiago’s local residents and priests did actively denounce other kinds of heresies such as bigamy, blasphemy, witchcraft, and solicitation in the confessional. The only systematic study of Guatemalan Inquisition cases confirms that false mysticism, and the related heresy of alumbradismo (illuminism), the most frequent charges against lay religious women in other parts of Spanish America, received far less attention than other kinds of religious crimes. The relatively few Guatemalan cases of false mysticism appear to have mostly targeted friars and laymen.109 The absence of Inquisitorial attention to Santiago’s religious laywomen is brought into sharp relief by Dominican friar Francisco Ximénez’s aforementioned chronicle of Dominican history in Guatemala, written around the same time as Anna’s Vida. Fr. Ximénez lamented the absence of an Inquisitorial investigation of Juana de Acuña, the beata and Franciscan tertiary whose visions allegedly convinced the bishop to abandon the city following the 1717 earthquake. He insinuated that the bishop must have blocked an investigation, since multiple priests who examined Juana concluded that her visions were inspired by the devil and reported the offense to Inquisition officials.110 Fr. Ximénez’s chronicle clearly illustrates that lay female religiosity was a live topic of debate in this time and place, but his account also suggests the disgruntled frustration of impotence. Although Fr. Ximénez’s concerns echoed Inquisition rulings and ecclesiastical rulings in Mexico City and Lima, in the local context of Santiago, his concerns and perspective appear relegated to the margins. Further documentation of this episode has yet to be uncovered, but a Franciscan tertiary and beata named Juana Manuela de Jesús y Acuña made out a will in 1717, the same year as the devastating earthquake referenced by Fr. Ximénez. It seems quite likely that this is the same Juana de Acuña pilloried by Fr. Ximénez. If so, her will further confirms the Dominican’s marginalized position. A poor maiden, Juana declared that she was a professed member of the powerful Franciscan Third Order and was also a beata of the Mercedarian order. She talked at great length about her love for the Mercedarian order, and the feeling was apparently mutual. Juana was authorized to publicly wear the habit of Our Lady of Merced, and she also enjoyed a close relationship with her Mercedarian confessor, whom she named as executor of her will. In addition, Juana affirmed strong devotional networks with several churches and religious orders across the city. She was a member of confraternities in the Cathedral and San Sebastián

Unlikely Allies

65

parish churches, in the Holy School of Christ, and in the Jesuit, Mercedarian, Dominican, and Conceptionist convent churches. Despite her status as a poor single woman, Juana and her active brand of lay female religiosity obviously had powerful supporters well beyond the bishop.

the global catholic mission and diverse models of feminine piety Clearly, the distinctive local context of Santiago de Guatemala framed clerical attitudes toward single women and lay female religiosity. But a broader global Catholic context also shaped alliances between early modern priests and laywomen and promoted diverse models of female piety. The renewal of medieval forms of piety, for example, clearly produced complex clerical attitudes toward active and unenclosed laywomen. The best-selling biography of Saint Catherine of Sienna, widely popular ­medieval saint and model of lay female religiosity, inspired not only early modern female devotees but also priests, who continued to find a powerful role model in Saint Catherine’s legendary confessor and biographer, Raymond of Capua.111 Eighteenth-century missionaries laboring in New Spain clearly continued to find inspiration in medieval models. For example, Padre Siria seems to build on medieval hagiographical examples of holy women experiencing social and economic dislocation—rural migrants, orphans, and abandoned wives.112 And although early modern Catholic doctrine and moral treatises emphasized the importance of marriage to contain the potentially dangerous specter of female sexual independence, the Tridentine Church also reaffirmed the medieval vision of celibacy as the more perfect state. This was in sharp contrast to Protestant societies of Europe and North America, which regarded celibacy as “unnatural” and were openly hostile toward “­spinsters.”113 The promotion of celibacy clearly reflected broader efforts within the early modern Catholic Church to repress and control sexuality. But the sustained value for celibacy also led to complex and contradictory attitudes toward single women. On the one hand, Church officials saw women outside both marriage and the convent as vulnerable or even morally dangerous to the broader society. Yet at the same time, priests clearly linked single women’s capacity for celibacy with distinctive spiritual opportunities and gifts, providing room for single women, even abandoned wives and single mothers, to develop a positive spiritual status. Marriage, on the other hand, remained an impediment to the pious path, particularly for women who were bound by Catholic law and custom to obey their husbands.

66

Chapter Two

Padre Antonio Siria’s biography of Anna Guerra de Jesús clearly displays the tensions in early modern Catholic attitudes toward female celibacy and marriage. He described, for example, how when Anna’s husband returned, her confessors instructed her to obey him in all things and to relinquish her chastity and pious path if he so desired. But Diego did not demand the marital “debt” and Anna was able to steer him toward the path of profession as a religious servant in the Dominican monastery. Padre Siria explicitly celebrated the marital separation as a providential opportunity that allowed Anna to pursue her spiritual vocation more intensely. Padre Siria recounted that on Diego’s profession, Anna heard God speaking in her soul: “My beloved, now you no longer have a husband on this Earth because the one you have will profess . . . from now on I am your spouse and as such I take possession of your body in order to torment it with suffering, all of you belongs to me, even unto your children I lay claim as their father.”114 Thus, even as the early modern Church expressed growing concerns about independent unmarried women, the exaltation of celibacy endured and hagiographies continued to celebrate models of feminine piety outside of marriage. Franciscan missionaries were particularly zealous proponents of celibacy over marriage. One itinerant Franciscan preacher in Spain stressed the terrors of marriage to every young woman he encountered and urged them to reject marriage and join a religious order. Another popular ­seventeenth-century religious text warned women that their charming suitors would become “atrocious, cruel, and inhuman” during marriage.115 But the early modern Catholic value of celibacy over marriage clearly extended beyond fiery Franciscan missionaries. In his famous sixteenth-century moral treatise laying out the ideal of feminine piety, Juan Luis Vives noted that the unmarried woman was “more lofty and closer to the Lord,” citing Corinthians, “the unmarried woman thinks of what pertains to the Lord, how she may please God, the married woman thinks of what pertains to her husband and how she may please her husband.” He also noted that if your husband “wants you to stay and you go to church,” then “your prayers will not be pleasing to God and you will not find him in church.”116 By contrast moral theologians long recognized that widows and celibate single women enjoyed a greater freedom to focus on God and their spiritual life rather than pleasing their husband.117 If the Church’s complex relationship to pious single women was partly a reflection of enduring medieval traditions, it was also a product of early modern impulses and reforms. The heightened emphasis on confession, for example, clearly embodied Counter-Reformation attempts to reinforce the orthodox spiritual formation of the laity, the mediating role of priests, and the centrality of the sacraments. But, as Jodi Bilinkoff has shown, the

Unlikely Allies

67

promotion of confession, unintentionally perhaps, also produced complex relationships between priests and pious women, both nuns and laywomen. Thus, even as confessors surely steered female penitents toward orthodoxy, many also continued to support and authorize the path of lay female religiosity into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.118 And while the Council of Trent sought to reinforce clerical control over lay religiosity in myriad ways, the council also encouraged the spiritual formation of a militant laity who could combat the Protestant threat.119 So even as the Spanish Inquisition began to censor theological and humanistic works, the early modern Church simultaneously embraced the profusion of hagiographical and devotional texts, which purposefully energized the laity, promoted intensive devotional practices, and popularized practices formerly restricted to elite monastic settings.120 As Ellen Gunnarsdóttir puts it, the “view from below” of the early modern Church highlights first and foremost a “spiritual renewal” of “lay religious experience.”121 In this context, while the ideal of female religious enclosure existed, there was also wider acceptance of lay female religiosity than previously imagined.122 Recent discoveries and analyses of hagiographical texts also highlight flexibility and diversity within early modern Catholic female models. As part of their global mission, Jesuits were quick to perceive the compelling power of hagiographies, of life stories like Anna Guerra de Jesús’s, to convert and inspire; to provide common symbols, values, and role models for Catholics around the world; to stitch together incredibly diverse communities into one mystical body.123 Jesuits were not only among the most active producers of hagiographies in the early modern period; they were also especially able and willing to craft diverse models of piety, which might better speak to both global and local communities. A few decades before Padre Antonio Siria published Anna Guerra de Jesús’s Vida, Jesuits in Puebla, Mexico, celebrated the beata Catarina de San Juan, known popularly as la China Poblana, a South Asian woman, former slave, and convert to Christianity. And just two years before the publication of Anna’s Vida, Padre Siria’s fellow Jesuit in New France published the life story of another beata, Catherine Tekakwitha, an Iroquois woman and adult convert to Catholicism. These texts reflected the global apostolic mission of the Jesuit order and their commitment to the conversion of non-Europeans. As some scholars point out, the Jesuit mission to teach and evangelize inspired new kinds of hagiographical narratives, which emphasized not only traditional martyrs and saints, but also repentant sinners, women like Anna Guerra de Jesús, who had been reformed by the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises.124 Emphasis on repentance and redemption, rebirth and ­reformed

68

Chapter Two

selves expanded the possibilities for hagiographical subjects beyond perfectly enclosed nuns marked by holiness from childhood. Nor were Jesuits alone in their construction of alternative hagiographical models of female holiness as part of a broader missionary project. Alongside Jesuits, some secular priests as well as other religious orders embraced the didactic potential of diverse hagiographical female role models to guide the faithful and evangelize to wayward Catholics. Secular priest José Esteban Noriega’s 1737 hagiography of beata María Quintana, from the Spanish city of Segovia, explicitly noted that he wanted to publicize her story of sin and redemption “so that no one loses confidence in (God’s) mercy, no matter how numerous, grave and heinous his own afflictions may be.”125 And in 1744, Augustinian Tomás Pérez published the spiritual biography of another Spanish beata, Beatriz Ana Ruiz, whose life story bears a striking resemblance to that of Anna Guerra de Jesús. Poor, illiterate, and a victim of severe domestic abuse before being left as a destitute widowed mother of three at age thirty-three, Beatriz transformed from an ostracized woman into a respected visionary and lay holy woman under the spiritual guidance of a Jesuit missionary and local clergy and friars. Her hagiographer used her example of orthodox mysticism, humility, and perfect obedience to both confessors and God as a forceful weapon against heresy and model of piety that could be emulated by even poor illiterate women.126 These case studies illustrate how the global context of early modern Catholic mission history, which was as much a European story as a colonial story, inspired the development of diverse models of lay feminine piety. Padre Siria’s celebration of Anna’s active ministries further reflects how the apostolic current emanating from the early modern Church inspired some holy women as well as their hagiographers to stray from the normative model of female sanctity as enclosed, passive, and interiorized. In describing the Spanish Capuchin nuns who founded the first convent in Mexico City, one hagiographer described them as “truly apostolic.”127 And Marie de l’Incarnation’s hagiographer described the French Ursuline nun who traveled to New France as an “apostolic woman.”128 Of course, these hagiographical descriptions safely emphasized female apostolic desires and interior spiritual experiences over actions. 129 But others made bolder claims. Franciscans were among the most avid supporters of apostolic nuns and beatas who bilocated, or miraculously traveled through divine aid, to evangelize the missionary frontiers of the New World. Sometimes the voyages were purely spiritual, but other times both holy women and their supporters maintained that the women had traveled in both body and spirit, usually through the aid of angels. Whether the bilocations were physical or spiritual, holy women report-

Unlikely Allies

69

edly preached, evangelized, and even administered sacraments and experienced martyrdom. The most famous case was Spanish nun Sor María de Agreda, who reportedly bilocated to New Mexico in the 1620s in advance of the Franciscan spiritual conquest. Sor María allegedly converted natives, encouraged them to seek out Christian baptism, and experienced martyrdom. Although the Inquisition was skeptical and opened an investigation of the case, Franciscans actively promoted the story of Sor María Agreda’s bilocations to spiritually and politically legitimate their own missionary enterprises in New Mexico.130 Missionary friar Antonio Margil was especially devoted to Sor María de Agreda, and the Propaganda Fide friars in New Spain made it a daily habit to read her writings and spread her devotion among lay devotees. Their spiritual daughter in Querétaro, Francisca de los Ángeles, followed in Sor María de Agreda’s footsteps and repeatedly bilocated to Texas, where she baptized dozens of native peoples and miraculously assumed the form of a friar. Her sexual identity was sufficiently ambiguous among the native converts that they alternately referred to her with terms such as lady, mother, and father. An Inquisition investigation concluded that her Franciscan supporters shouldered the primary responsibility for encouraging and lending credence to her mystical flights and evangelical activities. Despite the Inquisition’s rebuke, Fr. Antonio Margil brought relics of Francisca de los Ángeles to Guatemala and distributed them to devotees, although he attributed them to the more famous Sor María de Agreda.131 It is difficult to determine whether this deception was a cunning maneuver to build on Agreda’s existing fame and devoted following or an illustration of how Fr. Margil’s own devotion fused these apostolic women. In any case, Fr. Margil and other Propaganda Fide friars clearly promoted a model of apostolic female piety in their urban missions. And yet as Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela aptly points out, these accounts were acceptable because women’s cloistered positions remained at a safe distance from the wild frontiers of the New World, where the “worldturned-upside-down” context allowed sexual and gender differences to temporarily blur without actually expanding narrow gendered ideals.132 But Padre Siria’s biography of Anna Guerra de Jesús suggests that the apostolic mission of religious orders like the Jesuits and Franciscans could bend and stretch gendered ideals in more tangible ways. To be sure, Padre Siria’s description of Anna’s apostolic ministries was simultaneously safer and more daring than accounts of holy women’s bilocations. If Anna preached on the sidewalk before or after publicly praying the rosary, Padre Siria never said so. Nor did she ever come close to delivering the sacraments. She never usurped male clerical privileges, and her efforts al-

70

Chapter Two

ways appear as an auxiliary to the sacramental ministries of male priests. But at the same time, there is no ambiguity regarding Anna’s physical presence and actions as an evangelizer in the world. She was no “encloistered missionary” but was rather an active lay female evangelizer. And she acted not in the savage lands beyond civilization where the world, gender norms included, might be turned upside down, but rather in an urban political and religious capital of colonial Spanish America. It seems that Padre Siria’s hagiographical model of a lay female evangelizer formed part of a broader trend in colonial Spanish America. Seventeenth-century Franciscan chronicler Fray Diego de Córdova y Salinas, for example, celebrated the active ministries of Franciscan tertiaries Madre Estaphania and Isabel Cano, who evangelized to Lima’s diverse population. Like Padre Siria, Fr. Córdova y Salinas explicitly portrayed these women as lay evangelizers and models of feminine piety even as he confirmed their astute navigation of gendered norms. Madre Estaphania “preached” to elites by feigning illiteracy and asking noble men and women to read to her devotional passages, which she had preselected for their spiritual benefit.133 And Isabel Cano supported the work of Franciscan priests, “going through the streets to look for Indians,” whom she convinced to attend Franciscan sermons “with the gentleness and grace of her words, which God poured down on her lips.”134 She also taught the catechism to over a hundred Indians accused of sorcery and successfully converted many, even bringing an elderly “sorcerer” who had resisted all prior missionary efforts to accept baptism. As Celia Cussen puts it, Fr. Córdova y Salinas’s hagiographical narratives intentionally formulated a new model of female piety, the “casta (mixed-race) preacher.”135 If the Inquisition viewed missionary zeal with suspicion, Propaganda Fide, in particular, also had powerful supporters alongside their critics. Although the Spanish Bourbon crown and eighteenth-century Catholic reformers were often critical of religious orders in general, crown and Church officials enthusiastically supported Propaganda Fide and their urban missions. This support reflected the conviction that Franciscan urban missions were one of the most effective ways of reforming wayward Catholics and addressing what both secular and ecclesiastical officials perceived as the vexing problems associated with social disorder and family breakdown in colonial cities.136 In this context, the transformation of “lost” women into exemplars of Catholic piety as Franciscan or Jesuit tertiaries appears less unorthodox and more in line with the reformist perspectives of secular and ecclesiastical officials in eighteenth-century Spanish America.

Unlikely Allies

71

conclusion Around the turn of the eighteenth century, Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries in Santiago de Guatemala developed devotional networks with nonelite women living outside marriage and supported lay religious paths for women, including active roles as lay evangelizers. Santiago’s status as a provincial capital, removed from close Inquisitorial oversight and without the institutional resources necessary to enforce female enclosure, led to greater tolerance of lay female religiosity and single women compared to larger cities like Mexico City and Lima. The perceived threats of native “backsliding” in the highlands and urban dislocation and familial breakdown in the capital apparently led at least some priests and missionaries to recognize and even embrace the valuable social and spiritual services offered by laywomen. At the same time, global missionary movements, led largely by Franciscans and Jesuits, forged diverse models of female piety and sustained support for active female ministries. The eighteenthcentury spirit of evangelism led to renewals of lay religiosity as well as diverse models of piety, which might better speak to both global and local communities. As the next chapter explores in more detail, in this context, non-elite women living outside marriage were able to cultivate moral status and pious personas.

chapter three

Sex, Honor, and Devotion

; In 1705, María Nicolasa de Aparicio called a local notary so that she could make out her will.1 Per Spanish law and in order to rule out fraud, notaries typically directed will-makers to begin by identifying themselves in terms of geographical origins, family, and quality of birth—that is, their hometown and current residence, and whether they were the legitimate or illegitimate offspring of their parents, whom they also identified by name. Women sometimes identified themselves further according to civil status, as wife, widow, doncella (maiden), or soltera (single woman without a claim to virginity). María Nicolasa must have delicately refused the notary’s request and identified herself only as a “mulata libre,” a free woman of mixed African descent. Circumventing the standard testamentary formula, María Nicolasa waited to the very last lines of her will to discuss matters of family and inheritance. At that point, María Nicolasa acknowledged that she had three hijos naturales, children born outside marriage. Her son was still a slave, and María Nicolasa wanted the inheritance she was leaving him directed toward the purchase of his freedom. Here María Nicolasa implicitly pointed to her own former slave status. She appears to have been one of the many mulattoes in eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala who were able to gain their freedom and establish their own independent households in the neighborhoods surrounding the elite urban core.2 Based on the pattern of most female slave manumissions in colonial Latin America, it is likely that María Nicolasa saved up to purchase her own freedom and the freedom of her children.3 She gave no information regarding the father of her children. Perhaps he was a slave master. Or perhaps he was another slave. In an urban context like Santiago, slave women could also form unions with free men and thereby develop networks with the free black or mixed-race community, which greatly facilitated the transition to freedom. In any case, her silence suggests that the union was informal and that the father may have declined to recognize their children.

Sex, Honor, and Devotion

73

María Nicolasa was far more vocal about her economic achievements and her active cultivation of devotional networks. It’s unclear how María Nicolasa made a living, but she owned her own house in the poor and muddy neighborhood of Tortuguero, so named for its resemblance to the marshy environs inhabited by turtles.4 She had invested 350 pesos in the house and owned some furnishings, including a bed. María Nicolasa also affirmed her piety and active devotional networks. She was a longtime member and capitana (captain) of the confraternity known as the Black Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary in the Dominican convent church on the opposite side of town from where she lived. Very little is known about how female leadership functioned in Spanish American religious brotherhoods, but at least in the case of Santiago, confraternity records indicate that capitanas were generally elected on an annual basis by confraternity members and were usually responsible for tending images and altars, collecting alms, and/or serving as patrons for celebrations. 5 As capitana of the Black Brotherhood of Our Lady of the Rosary, María Nicolasa supported one of the Dominican order’s most visited chapels. 6 She was also a member of the Brotherhood of Charity in the Cathedral Church and counted on them to ensure a proper funeral and burial. It seems her devotional activity and reputation had made it possible for María Nicolasa to profess in the prestigious Franciscan Third Order on her deathbed the day before she made out her will, and gain authorization to wear the tertiary habit in her final days and when she was laid to rest. The tertiary habit was a powerful form of protection for the dangerous passage from this world to the next and surely provided María Nicolasa with some spiritual solace. She also asked to be buried under the floors of the Dominican chapel, which she had tended for so many years. Lying close to the sacred and beloved image of Our Lady, María Nicolasa could rest assured that her soul would receive the spiritual benefits of the Virgin’s protection and the prayers and masses eternally sponsored by the religious brotherhood. She also left a humble donation to support the confraternity’s feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, and another donation for the construction of the Church of Our Lady of Carmen. Finally, in the last lines of her will, María Nicolasa invoked the support of a local notary and a priest to serve as executors to her will. Another priest was there by her bedside and served as witness to her will. María Nicolasa’s leadership position in the Black Brotherhood, her ability to profess in the devout and prestigious Franciscan Third Order on her deathbed, and the support she received from two priests to make out and execute her will all clearly indicate that her local community, as well as priests, Franciscan friars, and elite leaders of the Franciscan Third Order, recognized her piety and honorable reputation alongside her ­status as a

74

Chapter Three

freed slave and single mother. Scholars often emphasize the vital importance of honor in Spanish culture and underscore that female honor was based solely on sexual virtue, while male honor reflected multiple attributes like courage, assertiveness, and control of female family members. Although scholars have examined the ways in which elite women in colonial Spanish America took advantage of loopholes and the distance between public honor and private sexual matters, many questions remain about the experiences of non-elite women like María Nicolasa de Aparicio.7 Wills highlight how non-elite unmarried women navigated the here and hereafter and invoked feminine ideals other than chastity and enclosure through their enthusiastic participation in confraternities and Third Orders, increasing involvement in the spiritual economy as pious benefactors, and complex alliances with local priests. Through their devotional activities and networks, laboring women living outside marriage developed pious personas alongside their public status as morally vulnerable or at-risk women. Much as scholars recognize that race in colonial Latin America was a flexible category and individuals might claim multiple racial identities simultaneously or change their racial identity over time, these findings illustrate how poor single women took advantage of alternative feminine ideals and claimed moral status within their communities.8

the here and hereafter: religious change and continuity in eighteenth-century santiago de guatemala In 1717 a terrible earthquake devastated much of Santiago de Guatemala. A new kind of city emerged in the decades following this natural disaster.9 The discovery of silver in modern-day Honduras and the rising European demand for the rich blue dye of indigo, produced primarily in modernday El Salvador, created a booming export economy in mideighteenthcentury Central America.10 As the political and economic capital of the region, Santiago reaped most of the rewards. Honduran silver necessarily traveled through Santiago’s mint, established in 1733. Santiago’s merchants also controlled access to mercury, credit, and coinage and therefore monopolized the export economies and the importation of European goods. By 1750, Santiago de Guatemala was the commercial hub of an increasingly integrated Central American economy.11 Although Santiago remained very much a city of women, male merchants, or would-be merchants, flocked to the city from surrounding provinces and beyond. By

Sex, Honor, and Devotion

75

the mideighteenth century, nearly half of male will-makers were migrants to the city, and more than half of those migrants came from Spain. New wealth fueled religious patronage in artwork, publications, and church construction. Local religious art, particularly sculpture, became more dynamic and rich in form and material, garnering fame throughout New Spain, where there arose a high demand for Guatemalan artwork.12 The city sponsored a new female Capuchin convent and inaugurated its splendid church and convent in the 1730s. Convent churches ­damaged by the 1717 earthquake were reconstructed on grander scales. The ­Franciscan missionary college of Propaganda Fide, formally named La Recolección but more commonly known as Colegio del Cristo Crucificado (College of the Crucified Christ), became one of the largest churches in Santiago and boasted an impressive sixty-foot arch over the sanctuary. New formal chapels, some of them architectural gems in their own right, emerged to house the city’s much beloved and miraculous images.13 In total, by the mideighteenth century, Santiago had forty-one ecclesiastical buildings, including eight male convents, nine female ­convents, fourteen churches, six chapels, and one church hospital. Wealthy merchants were clearly among the largest religious patrons; however, wills also point to the active participation of a broader nonelite population in Santiago’s spiritual renaissance. Reflecting the city’s enhanced position of power and prestige, Santiago was elevated from a bishopric to an archbishopric in 1743. The eighteenth century brought other significant political and cultural shifts. After 1750, the Bourbon crown initiated a series of reforms, which directly affected the position of the Catholic Church in colonial ­Spanish America. Among these reforms were several aimed at subordinating the Church to the state, limiting the power and autonomy of religious orders and lay brotherhoods, and sharply reducing “frivolous” religious expenditures such as the attention lavished on saints and funerals.14 The most striking and controversial royal reform was the expulsion of the Jesuit order in 1767. Other religious orders like the Franciscans and ­Dominicans were spared such a harsh fate but suffered the dramatic loss of ecclesiastical control over native parishes and dwindling numbers due to strict new limits on the profession of novitiates. From 1754 to 1768, just forty-two men professed as Franciscans in Guatemala, while 103 friars died.15 One scholar describes the mideighteenth century as a “time of dark despair” for Guatemala’s Franciscans and Dominicans, contending that the orders responded to their loss of native doctrinas (parishes) with “fatalistic resignation.”16 But evidence from wills suggests that religious orders responded to these challenges not with fatalism but with a strategic shift

76

Chapter Three

to urban ministries.17 Their efforts clearly bore fruit as the ranks of Santiago’s urban devotees expanded over the eighteenth century. Both male and female will-makers increasingly favored burial within male convent churches, and the percentage of will-makers who donated money or assets to male religious orders roughly doubled from 1700 to 1770. The rate at which male will-makers identified as Franciscan tertiaries also increased fivefold and the wealth and prestige of the Franciscan Third Order rose dramatically over the eighteenth century. The effects of royal reforms and Enlightenment ideas are also clearly visible in Santiago’s new “free trade” practices, educational initiatives, scientific instruction, and university reforms.18 But local religious belief and practice also continued to emphasize that this world was but a brief preparation for eternal life. Sermons, images, and devotional texts regularly described the horrors of Hell and Purgatory in graphic detail but also provided hope for salvation.19 Because Purgatory remained under the reign of God, devotional acts could both ease the suffering of souls and pave the way for one’s own salvation. For Santiago’s residents, the cult of the saints, religious images and objects, confraternities, prayers, masses, and indulgences continued to bind together the living and the dead in the common cause of salvation.20 So while European will-makers by the eighteenth century gave dramatically less attention to salvation, Santiago’s will-makers, like those in many parts of Spanish America, continued to direct generous attention to pious bequests in the hopes of cleansing their souls through good works.21 Indeed, both male and female will-makers in Santiago gave more attention to pious works, rather than less, through the 1770s. And although Enlightenment thinking inspired debates in Europe and some parts of Spanish America about the creation of suburban cemeteries, Santiago’s residents were content to keep the dead intimately close under Church floors, where they might receive the spiritual benefits of prayers, masses, and the protection offered by the images of Jesus, the Virgin, saints, and the Holy Eucharist.22 Santiago’s local religion also continued to support confraternities, or religious brotherhoods, through the eighteenth century, a time when confraternities in other parts of Spanish America were suffering sharp declines. Close to 40 percent of will-makers claimed membership in confraternities through 1770, almost four times the rate of will-makers in Mexico City at that same time.23 Confraternities provided mutual aid for members and supported collective devotions to a particular saint, caring for the image and funding annual feast day celebrations. Entry fees were modest and often reflected a sliding scale based on ethnic or social status. In return, members were generally assured of care in sickness, a good death with a decent funeral and burial, and perpetual prayers and

Sex, Honor, and Devotion

77

suffrages for the salvation of their soul. As Brian Larkin puts it, confraternities “promoted sacred sociability between members both living and dead.”24 Confraternities also supported spiritual bonds between devotees and holy figures, Jesus, Mary, and the saints, both those in heaven and those on earth in the form of sacred religious images. Confraternities in Santiago were both numerous and widely accessible. There were approximately seventy-six confraternities in the city by the eighteenth century, each one founded in a particular chapel, parish, or convent church.25 Royal and ecclesiastical efforts to reform and constrain the exuberant collective religiosity of Santiago’s confraternities largely failed in the late colonial period. Like his reformist colleagues in Mexico, Archbishop Pedro Cortés y Larraz (1767–1779) was clearly influenced by enlightened Catholicism and voiced similar concerns about confraternities’ autonomy, management of funds, and mixing of sacred and profane activities in religious festivals. But unlike his Mexican counterparts, Cortés y Larraz did not implement substantive reforms, or indeed any reforms, due to Guatemalan churches’ heavy reliance on confraternities to remain financially solvent. He openly acknowledged that Guatemalan confraternities were the primary providers of economic support to parishes and their priests, “contributing ornaments, wax, wine, hosts, and other necessities,” as well as funding the “building and repair of temples,” which was a constant need due to frequent earthquakes.26 Confraternities in Guatemala’s capital city continued to sponsor raucous feasts and solemn processions and gather for Lenten and Holy Week devotions at all hours of day and night through the early nineteenth century. In spite of royal prohibitions and numerous local decrees, male members continued to conceal their faces with penitential capirotes (pointed hoods) as they collected alms and flagellated themselves during processions.27 Such traditions died hard only later in the nineteenth century. Some never died at all, or at least not permanently, as any modern visitor to Guatemala during Holy Week could confirm. As the following sections explore in more detail, this context of religious change and continuity created new constraints, as well as opportunities for non-elite women outside marriage. As the Franciscan Third Order became more prestigious and masculine, female participation apparently declined, particularly among non-elite single women. But at the same time, women continued to enthusiastically participate in confraternities and ally with priests and friars. Furthermore, Santiago’s shifting spiritual economy and the heightened social mobility of the eighteenth century created new opportunities for laboring single women to assume the role of pious donors, shaping local religion and claiming a form of religious authority traditionally associated with elite patriarchs.

78

Chapter Three

virtuous communities: confraternities, mutual aid, and moral status According to her 1705 will, Isabel de Pinzón was born the hija natural of a single mother and unnamed father and became a single mother herself of six hijos naturales.28 Two sons had already died by the time she made out her will. Like other poor single mothers, Isabel may have placed one or more of her children in the care of others. Or at the very least, she had an estranged relationship with her surviving son, who refused to recognize her as his mother. She had few material belongings but did own a humble house in the San Sebastían neighborhood, thanks to the “donation” of a man by the name of Juan Antonio Dávalos. 29 It seems likely that Juan Antonio was the father of Isabel’s daughters, but not her sons, because the terms of the donation explicitly excluded her sons from inheritance of the property.30 In any case, Isabel was still liable during her lifetime for interest payments on the remaining loan of 100 pesos, which would have amounted to roughly 5 pesos a year. She was two years behind in payments at the time of her will. Although Isabel claimed few colonial markers of honor, she clearly affirmed active devotional networks, particularly her membership in confraternities. She belonged to two confraternities in two different churches close to her home, the brotherhoods of Our Lady of Sorrows in her parish church of San Sebastián, and the Holy Guardian Angel in the Mercedarian convent church. She counted on these brotherhoods to provide her with a “good death” and ease her passage through Purgatory. Isabel indicated that the Holy Guardian Angel brotherhood would pay for her burial in her San Sebastián parish church, and the Our Lady of Sorrows brotherhood would pay for her funeral Mass.31 Participation in one or more confraternities provided non-elite single women like Isabel de Pinzón with key opportunities to engage in collective devotions, gain social and spiritual support, and establish moral status within their communities. Indeed, evidence from wills suggests that laboring single and widowed women were the most enthusiastic participants of Santiago’s religious brotherhoods. Consistently, from 1700 to 1770, approximately 60 percent of non-elite female will-makers affirmed membership in a confraternity. Among non-elite women living outside marriage, including single mothers and abandoned wives, the rate of participation was slightly higher, 65 percent. By contrast, 35 percent or less of elite women and laymen of all social statuses did the same. Indeed, it was not uncommon for non-elite single women to belong to multiple confraternities affiliated with different churches and religious orders across the city. Much like Isabel de Pinzón, Antonia Pérez, a poor widow born the hija natural of a single

Sex, Honor, and Devotion

79

mother, also belonged to the brotherhoods of the Holy Guardian Angel in the Mercedarian convent church and Our Lady of Sorrows in the San Sebastián parish, as well as her parish’s San Sebastián brotherhood.32 Antonia de Leiva, a mulatta woman, freed slave, and single mother of two sons still enslaved, belonged to four different confraternities in as many churches across the city, including the Confraternity of the Holy Sacrament in the Cathedral, Our Lady of Sorrows in the San Sebastián parish, Our Lady of Slavery in the Mercedarian convent church, and Saint Benedict the Moor in the Franciscan convent church, which was particularly popular among residents of African descent in Santiago and other Spanish American cities.33 Membership rolls from surviving confraternity records in eighteenthcentury Santiago de Guatemala similarly indicate that women accounted for approximately 60 percent of confraternity memberships.34 Although few studies consider gendered trends of confraternity participation, recent scholarship points to similar patterns in eighteenth-century Mexico. Nicole von Germeten finds that women, particularly poor and laboring women of mixed-race descent, “dominated the membership lists, of almost every one of the hundreds of confraternity record books available in parish and diocesan archives.”35 She further notes that baptism records confirm that some of these women were single mothers laboring in urban environments.36 And in her extensive study of eighteenth-century Mexican confraternities, Margaret Chowning finds that women constituted, on average, 61 percent of confraternity members, and many joined as single women alongside sisters and other female relatives. She concludes that religious ideals, which advocated for the protection of vulnerable women, promoted confraternity membership for poor women living outside the protective confines of a patriarchal household.37 For poor single women navigating the tensions between ideals of feminine chastity and the realities of their daily lives, participation in confraternities offered opportunities to build and buttress a sense of moral status through membership in spiritual communities. Entry into most religious brotherhoods required a “spiritual contract,” in the words of Asunción Lavrin, one that demanded virtuous habits as well as attendance at religious functions and sermons.38 In formal recognition of this agreement, confraternities provided new members with a certificate of membership. This formal document functioned as a kind of sacred identity card that confirmed the owner’s privileged status and the spiritual benefits of indulgences and protection under the brotherhood’s patron saint.39 Religious brotherhoods, which encompassed men and women, elites and non-elites, married and single, also likely nurtured new kinds of relationships and identities based on communal religious practices rather than distinctions of social, racial, marital, or moral status.40 This could be especially

80

Chapter Three

i­mportant for poor or mixed-race women, who were more vulnerable to accusations of criminal behavior and religious deviance. For example, one study points to a Mexican Inquisition case in which a free mulatta woman and confraternity member successfully refuted allegations that she had made a pact with the devil. Although her accuser was a Spanish man and social superior, the local Inquisition official rejected the allegations based on his own personal knowledge of the woman’s leadership position in a confraternity and her regular engagement in confession and communion.41 Some of Santiago’s confraternities provided enhanced opportunities for poor single women to establish their spiritual status and authority through leadership positions. For plebeian communities, confraternity leadership posts represented the most powerful public roles available within colonial society, and these positions played an important role in establishing internal non-elite hierarchies. In Spain, confraternity leadership was restricted to male members, but in Spanish America that restriction apparently loosened, at least in certain times and places. In Santiago, confraternity records consistently highlight the existence of female leadership positions. For example, the Confraternity of San Gerónimo in the San Sebastián parish elected women as senior and junior capitanas and madres mayores (senior mothers), and as diputadas (representatives).42 These positions likely included taking charge of devotional activities, cleaning and tending the image and altar, caretaking and nursing roles, and financing the confraternity as alms collectors and patrons. One study of colonial Mexico suggests that confraternities preferred to elect widows and single women to leadership positions because they enjoyed greater freedom to engage in devotional activities and public alms collecting.43 Opportunities for female leadership in Spanish America reflected the influence of indigenous and African customs and traditions.44 Indeed, for colonial Mexico, it appears that only native and Afro-Latino confraternities elected women as leaders.45 But evidence suggests that in Santiago, female leadership extended beyond ethnically segregated native and black brotherhoods. The aforementioned Confraternity of San Gerónimo, which elected women as captains and senior mothers, explicitly indicated that its membership would comprise “Spaniards, ladinos (mixed-race), and indigenous,” although the principal leadership position was reserved for a Spaniard or criollo.46 Similarly, the two principal confraternities of Santiago’s Remedios parish, the Confraternities of the Holy Sacrament and Our Lady of Remedies, which surely included people of Spanish descent alongside those of mixed-race, both elected women to serve as captains and representatives.47 And unlike Mexico, where female leadership dwindled and even disappeared over the eighteenth century, in Santiago surviving records indi-

Sex, Honor, and Devotion

81

cate that opportunities continued and in some cases expanded into the nineteenth century. For example, early nineteenth-century records for the Confraternity of Our Lady of Carmen of the Hillside, which was widely revered as a miraculous image in the Guatemalan capital, noted elections for multiple female leadership positions, including captains, senior mothers, representatives, and sacristans. In total twenty-seven women were elected in 1816 to various leadership positions.48 Most lacked honorific titles, suggesting they were non-elite women. Nineteenth-century records of other confraternities similarly refer to women operating as capitanas and mayordomas (stewards or administrators), and indicate that women continued to perform vital and public functions such as alms collecting and providing lodging for pilgrims.49 How and why women seemed to enjoy broader and more enduring opportunities for leadership positions in Santiago’s confraternities compared to Mexico, and perhaps other parts of Spanish America, are complex questions awaiting greater study. But sources point to some tentative explanations. It appears that in Mexico, the tradition of racially or ethnically segregated parishes and confraternities ultimately undermined opportunities for female leadership. By the eighteenth century, upwardly mobile Afro-Mexican men increasingly rejected female leadership roles, which they apparently saw as negatively distinguishing their confraternities from more elite and Spanish organizations.50 But in Santiago, the rapid emergence of racially mixed parishes and confraternities by the early seventeenth century seems to have allowed for African and native traditions of female spiritual leadership to become more fully integrated into the local religious landscape.51 The demographic makeup of the city also likely played a role. Santiago’s predominantly mixed-race population contrasts with the demographics of Mexican cities, which had higher percentages of Spaniards and natives, and clearer racial boundaries between groups. Gendered trends may have also had an impact. In Mexico, sizable populations of African descent congregated in mining and port towns, which drew male laborers and created more even populations of men and women. By contrast, women heavily predominated in Guatemala’s capital, which may have led to continued reliance on female leadership.

moral habits: clothing and virtue in the franciscan third order Like confraternities, the Franciscan Third Order provided opportunities for non-elite single and widowed women to invoke pious ideals and establish virtuous identities. As noted in previous chapters, nearly one third

82

Chapter Three

of female will-makers in the early eighteenth century identified as Franciscan tertiaries. As these figures indicate, Third Orders were less accessible than other confraternities, requiring a yearlong novitiate, rejection of most worldly entertainments, and a more profound transformation of daily religious practice.52 But for those who entered, including single mothers and abandoned wives, profession as a tertiary provided an effective means of affirming a virtuous persona. Evidence from wills suggests that women who gained authorization to adopt the Franciscan tertiary habit were especially well positioned to highlight their virtue and piety. Single mother Antonia de Aguilar, who had raised two illegitimate daughters, for example, somewhat unusually pointed to her status as a Franciscan tertiary of the habito descubierto (habit worn in public) in the opening lines of her will. She identified herself as “Antonia de Aguilar, a soltera dressed in the habit of the Third Order of Penitence of Saint Francis.”53 Antonia’s juxtaposition of terms is striking. The term soltera referred to a single woman who could not claim virginity, as opposed to the morally elevated status of doncella or maiden.54 Many female will-makers simply left their status blank rather than identify themselves with this term. And yet Antonia openly acknowledged her position as a soltera and in the same breath identified herself as a Franciscan tertiary who had gained the honorable authorization to wear a habit in public. The emphasis Antonia placed on her tertiary status was replicated by the notary, who identified her in the sidebar as “Antonia de Aguilar, Spanish, Tertiary.”55 Although notaries sometimes included women’s civil status in the sidebar notes, Antonia’s notary opted to emphasize her ethnic status of Spanish descent and her tertiary identity rather than her position as a soltera. Abandoned wife Juana de la Fé y Velasco also pointed to her identity as a Franciscan tertiary in the opening lines of her will, immediately before acknowledging her status as an abandoned wife.56 She presented herself as “Juana de la Fé y Velasco, vecina of this city of Santiago de Guatemala, sister of the Third Order of Penitence of Saint Francis, legitimate wife of Don Juan de Salazar, who has been absent from this city for more than twenty years.”57 She was also sure to emphasize later in her will that she was authorized to publicly wear the tertiary habit and had been an upstanding member paying her dues for many years. As numerous scholars point out, clothing played a powerful role in the construction of identities in colonial Spanish America. Most studies examine the ways in which non-elite and mixed-race individuals regularly adopted elegant attire as an effective means of altering their social or ethnic status.58 Sumptuary laws attempted to control this threat to colonial hierarchies, but these laws were largely ineffective. Chroniclers

Sex, Honor, and Devotion

83

of colonial Spanish America repeatedly remarked on the rich and lavish clothing and jewels sported by artisans, market women, servants, and even slaves. As eighteenth-century commentator Juan de Viera noted for Mexico City, “even poor women of very few means have silver buckles and many reliquaries decorated with that metal and generally the Indian women who trade in the plaza regard it as fashionable to wear a necklace with six or eight strings of pearls and coral, many reliquaries, and rings of gold, silver, and red gold.”59 Like Viera, many chroniclers particularly emphasized poor women’s forays into fashionable elegance. Much as scholars find that women and men might change their ethnic and social status through dress, the adoption of the Franciscan tertiary habit provided a distinctive opportunity for poor single women to craft a moral public persona. Perhaps the tertiary habit effaced the moral ambiguities of poor unmarried women’s status and allowed them to pass as moral exemplars, much as poor or mixed-race people passed as wealthier or whiter individuals through lavish displays of silk, lace, and jewels. Or perhaps tertiary habits did not conceal women’s poverty or morally ambiguous status so much as transform the meaning of these markers. As Antonia de Aguilar put it so succinctly, she was a “soltera dressed in the habit of the Third Order of Penitence of Saint Francis.” The penitential nature of the tertiary habit may have allowed poor single women to transform their poverty, vulnerability, or previous moral transgressions into sacred categories of humility, self-denial, devotion, and repentance.60 How successful was this transformation in status? How did fellow urban residents view these women? Surely, opinions regarding female adoption of tertiary habits varied considerably among individuals, as well as over time and space. There is no denying that the adoption of a coarse and plain tertiary habit was in many ways a countercultural move in a colonial society obsessed with ostentatious display. Franciscan tertiaries may have faced scorn and derision among their neighbors, much as some locals mocked Anna Guerra de Jesús with sarcastic labels like “saint,” “preacher,” and “converter.”61 A Mexican chronicler of the Franciscan Third Order noted that tertiaries who wore the habit faced taunts and jeers; however, he also notes that such derision affected men more than women.62 On the other hand, in the baroque religious culture of colonial Santiago, many likely recognized what Inga Clendinnen describes as “the special poignancy and authority of a deliberate denial and inversion of the values dominant in secular society.”63 Santiago’s own sacred history likely shaped the meaning and value of Franciscan tertiary habits as well. Santiago’s most beloved local saint, Hermano Pedro de San José Betancurt, spent his entire ministry in the late seventeenth century as a Franciscan tertiary.64 Hermano Pedro’s fol-

84

Chapter Three

Figure 3.1. Hermano Pedro de San José Betancurt, unknown artist (Guatemala, ca. 1720–1730).

lowers, both male and female, also professed as tertiaries of the Franciscan Third Order until the distinct Bethlemite Hospital order, inspired by Hermano Pedro’s ministries, was founded after the holy man’s death in 1667.65 Although the Bethlemites developed their own distinctive rule and habit, local memory continually emphasized Hermano Pedro’s identity as a Franciscan tertiary. Throughout the eighteenth century and even into the nineteenth century, images of Guatemala’s most celebrated holy man repeatedly depicted him in the well-known habit of the Franciscan Third Order (see Figure 3.1 and Figure 3.2).66 Opportunities for women to profess in the Franciscan Third Order apparently contracted over the eighteenth century. While close to one third of female will-makers in the early eighteenth century identified themselves as Franciscan tertiaries, the rate declined to 10 percent by the mideigh-

Sex, Honor, and Devotion

85

Figure 3.2. Hermano Pedro de San José Betancurt, Estampa Suelta (looseleaf print, Guatemala, 1808).

teenth century. Not only did the rate of female participation decline, but also the profile of female tertiaries shifted. More female tertiaries in the mideighteenth-century sample of wills claimed the honorific title of doña and the morally elevated status of doncella. Not one identified as a single mother or abandoned wife. At the same time, the rate at which male will-makers identified as tertiaries rose fivefold by 1770. Explaining these shifts is challenging. The masculinization of Third Orders occurred in other times and places as well.67 Perhaps as Bourbon reforms restricted professions within the Franciscans, men who were drawn to Franciscan piety increasingly turned to Third Orders, much as women had long done in the absence of female mendicant orders. Rising numbers of male tertiaries and the increasing wealth and prestige of the Franciscan Third Order may have created a more exclusive organization. There may have

86

Chapter Three

also been a concerted effort to restrict non-elite women’s participation to the Franciscan Confraternity of the Cord, which was affiliated with the Third Order but was explicitly open to non-elite and mixed-race populations.68 This less prestigious affiliate of the Franciscan Third Order seems to have been a fairly new option in mideighteenth-century Santiago. Not one will-maker reviewed in the early eighteenth century mentioned membership in the Confraternity of the Cord, but almost 9 percent of lay female will-makers, most of them non-elite, identified as members in the mideighteenth century. The next section considers how single laywomen navigated the shifting religious landscape of the eighteenth century and assumed positions as pious benefactors even as the path of tertiary profession became less accessible.

single women and spiritual capital Manuela de Jesús y Molina was a widow by the time she made out her will in 1755.69 It’s unclear how long her marriage lasted, but she noted that her husband had nothing when they married and he apparently did not contribute much economically to the union, as Manuela left out the typical reference to the fruits of their joint labors. It seems Manuela had managed on her own, at least in part, through a small farm she owned in the valley on the outskirts of town. Perhaps she also rented out urban properties, as she owned three houses, two humble dwellings covered with thatch and one with a proper tile roof. Manuela had also clearly developed a close devotional relationship with the Mercedarian convent church and its community of friars. She named the Mercedarian ­provincial head as executor of her will and asked to be buried in the convent church. Manuela wanted to leave whatever was left from the sale of her small farm to the Mercedarian cause to redeem Christian captives. She also left her own personal image of Our Lady of Sorrows to a chapel within the Mercedarian church dedicated to Our Lord of Agony. Finally, Manuela wanted to sell her small house and apply the proceeds to a “memoria de misas,” a perpetual endowment of masses in the Mercedarian convent church to fund a ritual round of nine masses for Our Lady of Mercy as well as masses on other specified feast days. Manuela named the Mercedarian provincial head as patron of the endowment and the Mercedarian friars as chaplains responsible for celebrating the masses. Manuela’s will illustrates her engagement in a “spiritual economy” of salvation as she invested material wealth in this world with the expectation of a spiritual return in the hereafter.70 Such investments reflected

Sex, Honor, and Devotion

87

broad confidence in what Carlos Eire describes as the “giant redemptive apparatus” of the Catholic Church, which rewarded pious acts with indulgences, promising to subtract years and even centuries off the Purgatory sentence.71 But Manuela does not fit the typical portrait of a pious benefactor in colonial Spanish America. Scholars often reasonably assume that only the very wealthy were in a position to invest in pious works, and thus most studies focus on an elite spiritual economy headed primarily by noblemen, and to a lesser extent by elite widows.72 As one scholar puts it, the “figure of the benefactor and pious man committed to spiritual works was clearly identified and linked to the aristocratic class and the noble aspirations of the social sector which included owners of haciendas, mines, mills, and commercial establishments.”73 Some further suggest that in urban spiritual economies, non-elite peoples functioned primarily as recipients of charity. Money flowed from the Church, especially the religious orders, to plebeian individuals, not the other way around.74 But evidence from wills indicates that single and widowed women, many of them non-elite like Manuela, increasingly participated in Santiago’s spiritual economy, accessed the most coveted kinds of spiritual security, and achieved the prestigious positon of pious benefactors.75 While rates of male and female pious giving were roughly equal in the early eighteenth century and increased over time, female participation in the spiritual economy grew at a faster rate. By the 1750s and 1760s, 69 percent of lay female will-makers indicated they wanted to invest material wealth toward pious ends, donating houses, jewelry, clothing, religious images, hard currency, or other assets. By contrast, approximately 54 percent of lay male will-makers directed money or assets toward spiritual ends. And by the mideighteenth century, female will-makers were more than twice as likely as their male counterparts to name their soul as primary heir. Close to 40 percent of female will-makers left all or most of their material belongings to the Church, compared to 17 percent of lay male will-makers. Although scholars typically associate female pious giving in colonial Latin America with elite widows, the most striking expansion in pious giving occurred among non-elite women. While only 21 percent of nonelite female will-makers had invested material wealth toward pious ends in the early eighteenth century, by the 1750s and 1760s, that figure had risen sharply to 76 percent. All but one of these non-elite female donors were also living outside marriage. Spanish inheritance laws and the pious opportunities available to those without forced heirs provide a partial context for this remarkable surge in pious giving among non-elite unmarried women. Spanish law required will-makers to divide marital assets in half and then bequeath equal shares to children and living parents;

88

Chapter Three

however, one fifth of the estate (el quinto) was reserved for pious works or individual bequests.76 Married individuals and those with living children thus had far less discretion over the division of their assets and less opportunity to invest in pious works. But this explanation alone is insufficient, and gender clearly intersected with marital and social status to shape pious giving. Non-elite single and widowed women were approximately 20 percent more likely than unmarried men to make pious donations. Providing an explanation for the incredible growth in pious giving among non-elite unmarried women is challenging. As noted earlier, non-elite single and widowed women appear to be the most active participants in Santiago’s confraternities through the eighteenth century. Confraternity participation reinforced devotional relationships with sacred images, altars, churches, priests, and religious orders and surely fueled pious donations. Economic growth and social mobility during Guatemala’s indigo boom clearly afforded non-elite women new opportunities to gain material assets and ultimately direct those assets toward favored devotions and their own salvation. Assuming the role of pious donors also provided laboring women outside marriage with a kind of spiritual and social status typically reserved for elite and honorable men and women.77 As might be expected, poor unmarried women often gave quite humble pious donations compared to their elite female and male counterparts. María Antonia de Castillo, a migrant to the city and poor widow who had an hija natural after her husband died, owned precious few assets at the time she made out her will.78 She did not own a house, and her only possessions were a box, a table, a desk, and some religious images. Among these was an image of the Sacred Heart, painted onto a lamina (thin metal plate or sheet of tin). This María Antonia wished to donate to the Bethlemite beatas. She provided no other information about her relationship with the beaterio. But it was clearly close to her house in the Remedios parish and it is quite possible that the beatas, who ran a hospital for poor women, tended to María Antonia during a time of illness. Although she made no requests in exchange for her gift, she likely hoped that the donation would inspire the beatas to remember her soul in their prayers. Similarly, single woman Melchora de los Reyes asked that whatever money was left over after taking care of her affairs be directed to the abbess of the Conceptionist convent, so that she might “do well for my soul.”79 Like María Antonia, Melchora surely counted on the potent power of nuns’ prayers for those in Purgatory, but she also had more personal devotional connections to the convent, having supported its affiliated Brotherhood of the Nativity.

Sex, Honor, and Devotion

89

More frequently, women of few means used their humble donations to secure the potent salvific power of the Mass. María Nicolasa de Acebedo was a poor widow, but she at least owned a humble house.80 This she had received from the father of her two hijos naturales before she married her husband. Out of her modest belongings, María Nicolasa wished to invest in twenty masses for the souls of Purgatory and five masses for the Holy Sacrament. Juana Hernández, who described herself as the “poor and needy widow” of a tailor, similarly wanted to fund forty masses for the good of her soul in the Dominican and Franciscan churches.81 With five living children as her forced heirs, it’s unclear exactly how Juana planned to come up with at least 40 pesos to pay for the masses. It seems she had survived widowhood, at least in part, by moneylending and she may have counted on collected debts to finance her desired suffrages. As a member of the Franciscan Confraternity of the Cord, Juana also surely enjoyed greater freedom to fund masses because she did not need to pay for her funeral and burial in the Franciscan Third Order chapel. A surprising number of laboring women living outside marriage directed more sizable assets towards pious works. Single woman María Esperanza de la Selva left all her material assets for the good of her soul and her favored devotional connections to the Mercedarian convent church.82 She left the value of her house to the Mercedarian convent, leaving the specific direction of these funds entirely at the discretion of the friars. She also wished to donate a large painting of Our Lady of Mercy to the provincial head of the Mercedarian order, “for the adornment and decency of the church, for which I have a great love.”83 Similarly Petrona Carrillo, a widow without any living children, left her house to the Franciscans and asked that the proceeds be used to pay for her funeral and burial in their church and as many suffrages as possible.84 More striking still, by the mideighteenth century, one-third of non-elite unmarried female will-makers successfully leveraged their material assets to create religious foundations or endowments, which perpetually funded annual masses, feast days, or liturgical costs. Indeed, non-elite single and widowed women invested in religious foundations at rates equal to men. Only priests and elite women more frequently created perpetual religious endowments in this time and place. This evidence challenges scholarly assumptions that non-elite groups were unable to access the salvific benefits of foundations of perpetual masses, which offered the best spiritual benefits that money could buy, eternally harnessing the salvific power of the Mass.85 How were non-elite single and widowed women able to position themselves as pious benefactors and reap the coveted salvific rewards promised by religious endowments? Wills indicate that most of these female

90

Chapter Three

benefactors pursued distinctively gendered investment strategies in order to endow masses in perpetuity. Elite benefactors usually created religious endowments that functioned like trust funds for sons, nephews, and other male descendants, who joined the priesthood. The priestly beneficiary, or chaplain, received an annual stipend for celebrating the masses and in return benefactors were guaranteed annual masses in perpetuity.86 Endowments were substantial, usually with initial investments of at least 2,000 to 4,000 pesos, so that the annual interest payments set at 5 percent yielded a decent stipend. But this type of endowment was generally out of non-elite women’s reach. Not only did they lack the resources to fund a decent annual stipend, they were also far less likely to have sons or nephews on the ecclesiastical career path, since becoming a priest generally required legitimate birth, education, certification of “clean blood,” and evidence of independent means.87 Instead, evidence from wills indicates that non-elite single and widowed women tended to create foundations with corporate beneficiaries, churches, chapels, and convents—rather than family members.88 In this type of endowment, the resident priests or community of friars acted as chaplains who jointly performed the masses.89 As beneficiaries of these endowments, churches also typically assumed the responsibilities of ecclesiastical oversight—investing the capital, overseeing payments to chaplains, and ensuring that the chaplains actually celebrated the masses according to the founders’ wishes.90 Non-elite women also frequently directed their endowments toward male convent churches. This was an astute move, helping to ensure the viability of religious foundations funding annual masses. Male convent churches had larger numbers of priests in residence than parish churches. More priests meant more capacity for masses because individual priests could celebrate only one mass per day according to Church law.91 If directing perpetual mass foundations toward male convent churches was a pragmatic attempt to ensure endowments’ long-term viability, these choices also reflected gendered devotional patterns. One quarter of female will-makers affirmed membership in a confraternity affiliated with male convent churches, and 61 percent opted for burial under their church floors. Whether founded in a male convent, parish church, or small chapel, religious foundations with corporate beneficiaries could also be exceptionally modest. With just 100 pesos, a benefactor could secure five annual masses in perpetuity. But 100 pesos, or even half of that, was still a sizable sum for non-elite women. Wills illuminate how women’s strategies for salvation mirrored survival techniques employed during their daily lives. For many laboring women living outside marriage, home ownership

Sex, Honor, and Devotion

91

offered not only shelter and security but also key economic opportunities to take in boarders, collect rent, run corner stores, and produce prepared foods and beverages for sale.92 In Santiago, close to 70 percent of female will-makers claimed home ownership by the mideighteenth century, compared to 41 percent of male will-makers, who tended to hold more mobile forms of wealth. As women prepared for a good death, they often continued to rely on their houses as a flexible resource and key material asset. Much as urban real estate represented a critical survival strategy for laboring women, houses also functioned as a vital form of spiritual capital. María de la Encarnación Marroquín, for example, relied on her halfbuilt thatch-covered house in the poor Tortuguero neighborhood to fund an endowment of perpetual masses in the San José chapel, under construction not far from her house.93 She certainly did not fit the stereotypical image of an elite and noble pious benefactor. She had been placed on the doorstep of Nicolasa Marroquín as an infant, making it impossible for her to claim legitimacy or pure Spanish descent. She had clearly never married, but she also declined to describe herself as a doncella. Her few assets she had acquired through her personal labor and the help that she had given to an elite man, Don Pedro de Olmedo. Perhaps she had worked for some time as his servant, or perhaps she had cared for him during an illness. These labors had provided María de la Encarnación with her house, as well as some clothes and jewelry, all of which she wanted to leave for the good of her soul. She asked her executors to finish construction on the house before donating it to the clerical steward of the San José chapel. She wanted the rents provided by the house to fund an endowment of perpetual masses in honor of San José on the nineteenth of each month. Anything left over she directed toward the costs associated with a ritual round of nine masses celebrated each year in the San José chapel. San José’s construction and maintenance depended entirely on humble benefactors like María de la Encarnación. Inspired by devotion to a magnificent sculpted image of San José, a local shoemaker in the Tortuguero neighborhood had initiated alms collections to build a chapel in its honor around 1740. Tortuguero’s humble residents eagerly responded, perhaps in part because the neighborhood lacked a church of its own. With modest donations and endowments like María de la Encarnación’s, the Tortuguero neighborhood raised the necessary funds and constructed the chapel without even waiting to secure royal permission.94 Evidence from wills also reveals how women relied on their homes to creatively balance familial concerns, devotional interests, and the pursuit of salvation. Adopted orphan and doncella María Antonia Matamoros

92

Chapter Three

indicated that she had bought a house together with a girl she was raising, through their joint “industry and personal labors.”95 María Antonia described the girl as her “criada,” an ambiguous category that could mean either an adopted child or a servant, or something in between. In any case, María Antonia adeptly balanced recompense for her criada’s “loyalty, love, and labors” with concerns about her own salvation. She indicated that the girl could stay in the house on the condition that every month she fund one mass for the good of María Antonia’s soul. In effect, María Antonia planned to charge her criada rent and direct the proceeds toward the good of her soul. Similarly, widow Manuela Flores noted that she had inherited a house from her aunt and she wanted the two girls whom she had raised to continue living in the house, on the condition that they pay for one annual mass in honor of San Rafael in the Church of San Lázaro, “as I have done up until now.”96 Clearly Manuela had acted the part of a pious benefactor for some time and intended to continue her devotional investments in perpetuity. When those girls died, the house was to pass to the Church of Our Lady of Carmen, under the direction of its clerical steward, in order to eternally fund annual masses in honor of San Rafael. In other times and places, churches and convents rejected such modest foundations as more trouble than they were worth. Administrative costs easily offset the humble rewards.97 Renters or buyers could fall behind in payments. Inexpensive urban real estate and rental properties could be especially problematic as properties could be damaged or destroyed.98 The willingness of churches and convents to accept such humble endowments likely reflected distinctive trends in late colonial Guatemala and broader Spanish America. As noted earlier, Guatemala’s Franciscans and Dominicans lost most of their former control of native communities between 1754 and 1760. The sizable incomes provided by these native parishes had traditionally supported the capital’s large urban monasteries.99 In this context, willingness, or perhaps even eagerness, to accept modest endowments may have reflected adaptations on the part of male religious orders. The realities of the broader spiritual economy also may have encouraged male and female convents, as well as parish churches and chapels, to accept more humble foundations. Although scholarship is lacking for Guatemala, studies for other parts of Spanish America highlight the challenges facing the traditional elite spiritual economy by the eighteenth century. In Cuzco, Peru, the traditional spiritual economy began to buckle under the weight of debt-laden properties by the late colonial period. Elite families had long financed opulent lifestyles as well as salvation by mortgaging properties and taking on debt, and by the eighteenth century heavily mortgaged elite properties no longer supported new religious

Sex, Honor, and Devotion

93

foundations. Cuzco’s female convents adapted to the new landscape by accepting inexpensive properties, like stores and market stalls, on which they could collect humble rent payments, sometimes as low as 2 or 3 pesos per month.100 The case of Cuzco highlights how the exigencies of a shifting spiritual economy might have fostered greater opportunities for non-elite individuals to create humble endowments and step into the position of pious benefactors. Assessing the economic impact of non-elite women’s modest religious foundations is challenging. By the mideighteenth century, women apparently invested more frequently in pious works than men; however, men generally left more sizable donations. Male will-makers were also far more likely to have liquid capital and precise knowledge of their net worth. Female will-makers, on the other hand, often relied heavily on their homes, rental agreements with family members, and vague conceptions of their disposable income. Many of their foundations may have failed. Debts may have surpassed assets. Or family members may have failed to endow the masses as promised in return for housing. Although only fragments of church finance records survive for Santiago, these records suggest that women’s investments expanded over the eighteenth century and became increasingly vital streams of income for churches, chapels, and convents. Records from the Congregation of San Felipe Neri indicate that in the seventeenth century, women represented just one quarter of the church’s pious benefactors.101 By the mideighteenth century, that rate had nearly doubled and women were responsible for eight out of seventeen foundations. Female investments totaled half the worth of San Felipe’s foundations.102 All of these women were single or widowed, and only two were identified with the honorific title of doña. The foundations left by non-elite unmarried women were notably humble compared to their elite male and female counterparts. The cumulative impact was modest but far from insignificant. Non-elite women’s foundations were worth 3,200 pesos, or 12 percent of San Felipe Neri’s total investments for the mideighteenth century.

spiritual networks and substitute patriarchs It appears that over the course of the eighteenth century, Santiago’s spiritual economy increasingly depended on urban female devotees, including the sizable population of laboring women living outside marriage. Through their religious endowments, female will-makers actively assumed the role of benefactors while the priests they named as patrons and chaplains became beneficiaries of their pious patronage. In so doing, these

94

Chapter Three

women stepped into a role traditionally associated with elite male household heads and helped shape the religious landscape and spiritual economy of eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala. But evidence from wills also indicates that the relationships between non-elite unmarried women and priests were complex and mutually interdependent. Even as independent laywomen stepped into the role of pious benefactors, many also relied on their priestly beneficiaries to navigate both the here and the hereafter. María Inés Gil, for example, was quite explicit about her reliance on the Dominican beneficiaries of her pious donations. As noted in the introduction, María Inés was a single mother whose four children had died in childhood. She had an active devotional relationship with the Dominican Church and especially the image of Our Lady of the Rosary. She counted on one Dominican to raise the orphaned boy in her care, and she entrusted the execution of her will to the Dominican provincial. Toward the end of her will, she bluntly highlighted her dependence on the Dominicans, noting that the friars should enjoy wide control over her estate on the condition that they take care of her in her illness “because I am orphaned and alone.”103 Few female will-makers were quite so frank about their level of dependence on priests, but many clearly relied on priests to put their worldly and spiritual affairs in order, formally naming them as both beneficiaries of their endowments and as executors of their wills. Much like María Inés Gil, Gertrudis Paniagua noted in her 1761 will that she was born the hija natural of a single mother and was herself a single mother of multiple hijos naturales.104 But she laid claim to pure Spanish descent and had substantial wealth of unclear origins, including a house valued at 2,000 pesos. She directed much of this wealth to the Dominican Church and the image of Our Lady of the Rosary. In addition to donations of gold and jewels to the image of Our Lady, Gertrudis wanted to donate her house to the Dominican Church, after her children passed on, in order to perpetually fund four masses a year. At the same time, she named one Dominican priest, presumably her confessor, as executor of her will and noted that she was counting on the Dominican priests to handle some secret business for the salvation of her soul. Similarly, Juana Ventura Muños del Oro, who described herself as a doncella and hija natural of a single mother, trusted the Franciscan missionary friars of Propaganda Fide to resolve her temporal affairs as well as ensure the good of her soul.105 Juana named the provincial head of Propaganda Fide as executor of her will. She also named him as patron of an endowment of perpetual masses in his missionary College of the Crucified Christ and counted on the community of missionary friars to serve as chaplains, praying for the good of her soul in perpetuity.

Sex, Honor, and Devotion

95

These women were surely not alone in their reliance on priests to help put their temporal affairs in order or serve as executors of their wills. Both male and female testators in eighteenth-century Santiago asked priests to serve as witnesses and executors of their wills, as priests were particularly well situated to navigate the colonial legal system. But the circumstances of these arrangements differed for men and women. Consistently, from 1700 to 1770, most men who named priests as executors were married, and they usually named priests jointly alongside family members, spouses, and friends. By contrast, most women who named priests as executors were single, widowed, or living separated from their husbands, and they were more likely to name one or more priests as their sole executors.106 Over time, social status increasingly framed gendered relationships with priests. By the mideighteenth century, men of all social statuses and elite women named priests as executors far less frequently. Only non-elite women continued to rely on priests to execute their wills at a constant rate. In the sample of wills from 1750 to 1770, nearly 40 percent of non-elite female will-makers named one or more priests as executors, compared to roughly one quarter of elite women and men of all social statuses.107 All but one of these non-elite women lived outside marriage. This evidence suggests that alliances with priests, like confraternity membership, continued to offer unmarried plebeian women a vital form of spiritual, material, and social support through much of the eighteenth century. The long-standing alliances forged between some single and widowed women and priests seem to reflect a version of Steve Stern’s concept of the “pluralization of patriarchs.” Stern found that women in rural eighteenth-century Mexico set up “male to male rivalries and hierarchies as a check on the power of the patriarch with the most immediate claim of authority.”108 In the absence of husbands, fathers, or other male kin, it appears some single and widowed women in urban eighteenth-­ century Santiago cultivated substitute patriarchs through their devotional networks with local priests. In daily life, close relationships with priests surely enhanced poor unmarried women’s spiritual and moral status. In extraordinary situations, if a woman ever faced accusations of religious, sexual, or criminal deviance, for example, a clerical substitute patriarch might provide critical support.109 Wills illustrate how laboring women living outside marriage might gain moral status, protection, and support through their relationships with priests. More hidden from view is the extent to which women experienced coercion and conflict in these relationships. Kathryn Burns’s recent analysis of notary records in Peru, one case in particular, illuminates how substitute patriarchs might abuse their power and how wills might

96

Chapter Three

conceal such dynamics. In 1701 a lay beata, Doña Clara de Montoya, made out her will and requested one dozen annual masses on behalf of her soul in exchange for a donation of land. Doña Clara’s confessor was a witness to her will and she also named him as chaplain for this perpetual mass foundation. Three years later, Doña Clara declared in a subsequent will that the perpetual mass foundation had been her confessor’s idea and his presence at the making of the previous will restricted her ability to resist. She declared in her new 1704 will that she felt “completely defrauded” because the pious work went against her own economic interests. Burns notes that in this case we are left wondering as to Doña Clara’s true intent. Was the pious foundation she endowed in her 1701 will the result of confessional coercion or did she change her mind for some reason?110 One might note an alternative explanation as well—that the line between spiritual counsel and coercion was inherently hazy as all confessors were charged with steering their penitents, willing and unwilling alike, toward redemption as defined by the Church. Did the line between spiritual counsel and coercion further dissolve as the fortunes of religious orders fell over the eighteenth century? That is, did friars increasingly pressure or persuade their penitents toward pious works that would benefit their own financially struggling convents? It’s certainly possible. Once religious orders lost control over native parishes, provision of masses represented an even more vital income stream for urban convents, supporting daily liturgical costs and even building projects and repair.111 Furthermore, friars likely felt fully justified in such pursuits, ministering as they did in a religious context that frequently blurred the line between spiritual and material realms, and viewed pious works as essential to individual salvation as well as the maintenance of vital urban ministries. Non-elite unmarried women would have been among the most vulnerable to new pressures within the confessional. This may help explain the striking increase in pious donations among non-elite women over the eighteenth century. But if coercion played a role in relationships between priests and non-elite single and widowed women, so did choice. According to Catholic doctrine, the primary confessional relationship was supposed to be between parish priests and their parishioners. The obligatory annual confession, or Easter Duty, for example, could only occur with one’s parish priest. Furthermore, parish churches often formed the religious nucleus of urban neighborhoods.112 One would thus expect that female will-makers would usually affirm relationships with their parish priests and their parish church. And yet female benefactors reviewed here more often highlighted close relationships with priests beyond their parish churches, usually friars but also priests from secular orders like

Sex, Honor, and Devotion

97

the Congregation of San Felipe Neri—frequently naming them as executors and witnesses as well as chaplains and patrons for their perpetual mass foundations. These female will-makers appear to have willingly and actively forged spiritual bonds with local priests and friars beyond an obligatory confessional relationship with their parish priest. Through their devotional mobility, laywomen participated in a competitive religious landscape in which priests, friars, and religious orders contended for devotees through preaching and confessing as well as the promotion of popular devotions.113 Alliances were not necessarily permanent, and evidence from wills illustrates how women could switch confessors and devotional networks. Returning once again to the case study of single mother María Inés Gil provides a case in point. As noted earlier, María Inés left everything to the Dominicans in her 1761 will and in exchange counted on them to care for her in her illness “because I am orphaned and alone.”114 Perhaps they did not fulfill their end of the bargain, because three years later she made out another will, which highlighted a new set of devotional networks. In her 1764 will, María Inés left nothing to the Dominicans and instead funded perpetual masses in the Church of Our Lady of Belén, in the Remedios parish, and in the chapel of the Congregation of San Felipe Neri, also known as the Holy School of Christ.115 The San Felipe Neri chapel, where María Inés also requested burial, was by far the largest recipient, with one endowment for December masses in honor of the Christ Child worth 1,000 pesos and a second endowment based on the value of her house to fund masses for Our Lady of Sorrows. María Inés clearly connected these pious works to her close relationship with San Felipe Neri’s current head priest, Don Pedro Martínez. María Inés counted on Don Pedro to serve as first executor to her will while simultaneously naming him and his successors as patrons of her endowment and the broader community of priests as chaplains in perpetuity.

conclusion In eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala, laboring women living outside marriage enthusiastically participated in confraternities and Third Orders, invested in the spiritual economy, and cultivated alliances with priests and friars. Through their religious practices and relationships, non-elite single women were able to establish their moral status. Several factors influenced laboring women’s engagement in Santiago’s local religion and their ability to develop pious personas. Economic growth fueled social mobility through much of the eighteenth century and allowed non-elite women to gain assets and homes and assume the role of pious,

98

Chapter Three

if humble, benefactors. Royal reforms and the changing spiritual economy led to greater dependence on urban devotees, including the sizable population of laboring single and widowed women. This dependence ultimately limited efforts to curtail the autonomy and strength of religious brotherhoods in which non-elite single women dominated. Local factors such as these may have also allowed women to continue exercising positions of religious leadership in Santiago’s confraternities through the eighteenth century, when female leadership had been largely eliminated in most of Mexico.

Pa rt t wo

Shifting Foundations: Reform, Revolution, and Spiritual ­Renewal

; A terrible earthquake in 1773 irrevocably altered the physical and spiritual landscape of Guatemala’s capital. Santiago was no stranger to natural disasters and was built and rebuilt repeatedly in the wake of devastating earthquakes like the one of 1717. But Central America’s newly arrived captain general responded to the 1773 disaster with a controversial and unprecedented plan to relocate the capital forty-five kilometers east to the Valley of Ermita. King Charles III and the Council of Indies actively supported the proposal. Perhaps the king and Bourbon reformers saw an unprecedented opportunity to build a new enlightened city and liberate the economy from the “dead hand” of debts and mortgages owed to the Church, thereby undermining the entrenched economic and political power of the Church, and especially the religious orders.1 In 1775, a royal decree endorsed the plan and required Santiago’s residents and surrounding native villages to relocate to the new capital, appropriately named Nueva Guatemala de Asunción (New Guatemala of the Assumption), although most called it simply Guatemala City. Santiago ceased to be the political, economic, and religious capital of the Kingdom of Guatemala, and even ceased to be “Santiago,” as locals increasingly referred to the city as Antigua, the “Old” City as opposed to the “New.” Guatemala’s captain general and Bourbon councilors in Spain won the battle, but the relocation was chaotic and politically fraught. Building a new capital from the ground up was not cheap, and provinces throughout Central America resented demands that they subsidize ­construction costs. 2 Within the capital itself, Archbishop Pedro Cortés y Larraz and most religious orders and secular priests, as well as the city’s large non-elite population, fiercely opposed and resisted the move. In 1778,

100

Part Two

­ uatemala City still had slightly less than 11,000 residents. Under the G force of crown militias, the pace of relocation accelerated in the 1780s, and by 1794 the new capital finally had around 23,000 residents. But it took fifty years before Guatemala City’s population equaled that of Santiago on the eve of the 1773 earthquake.3 Advocates for the move thought construction would be complete in ten years, but shortages of materials, architects, and laborers delayed projects for decades.4 In the early nineteenth century, the new capital still resembled a frontier settlement, diminishing its sense of power and prestige within the broader Kingdom of Guatemala. Poor neighborhoods in particular suffered for lack of proper roads, access to water, and drainage systems. During the rainy season, rivers of sewage and filth replaced roads and made travel within poorer parts of the city difficult if not impossible.5 But even within the elite city center, construction was sluggish. The earthquake severely drained Church capital, and the crown was ill disposed to subsidize new church construction. The cathedral was not completed until 1815, and even then, the temple still lacked towers and the front façade.6 The unfinished Cathedral symbolizes the challenges facing the Guatemalan church in the aftermath of the earthquake and relocation. Estimates of the Church’s economic losses range from 600,000 to 1,500,000 pesos. By royal decree, endowments based on urban real estate were compensated at a rate under 10 percent, meaning that an endowment with a principal investment of 10,000 pesos before the earthquake was left with a principal valued under 1,000 pesos. The Franciscans, the Mercedarians, and the Congregation of San Felipe Neri appear to have been the hardest hit.7 Royal reforms further exacerbated challenges facing the Guatemalan church and contributed to a steady decline in the number of priests and friars ministering to the city. Post-Independence policies only further intensified the shortage of clergy and pastoral instability. The Church remained an active force behind reforms and initiatives in late colonial and nineteenth-century Guatemala City, but it was also increasingly dependent on lay female allies. The earthquake and relocation also took a heavy toll on laboring women, who remained a sizable presence in the new capital. Indeed, it appears that the gendered demographic imbalance may have intensified in Guatemala City. The citywide census of 1805 indicated that women represented 60 percent of Guatemala City’s population and as much as 64 percent in certain neighborhoods.8 These figures are consistent with neighborhood censuses conducted between 1796 and 1825.9 Non-elite women who relied on homes and urban properties for their economic livelihoods and participation in the spiritual economy often had to start

Part Two

101

over from scratch. The relocation also significantly disrupted the urban economy, especially petty commerce in which women predominated. At the same time, laboring residents faced inflation and higher levels of unemployment and crime.10 Worse still, just as the new capital finally began to stabilize around the turn of the nineteenth century, the indigo economy crashed, never to recover, and economic depression ensued. These trends may help explain why non-elite women somewhat retreat from view in the record of wills. While women without an honorific title of doña made up close to half of all female will-makers in the mideighteenth century, they account for only one-third of female will-makers in the early nineteenth century. Although the earthquake and forced relocation of Guatemala’s capital undeniably disfavored laboring women, the late colonial and post-Independence period also witnessed new opportunities for nonelite laywomen to work in active ministries, assert their spiritual authority, and shape local religion and politics.

This page intentionally left blank

chapter four

To Educate and Evangelize Laywomen, Clergy, and Late Colonial Girls’ Schools

; Between 1780 and 1795, four schools for poor girls of all racial backgrounds opened in and around the recently relocated and renamed capital, Guatemala City. For the Spanish Bourbon crown, intent on revitalizing the empire and making the colonies more productive and orderly, education offered a path to social and economic progress. In 1767, King Charles III confirmed that the “crown would use all means in its power to develop better public instruction.”1 Order and progress could be achieved only through free education that was broadly accessible to both boys and girls. Within these broader educational goals, Bourbon reformers in Guatemala specifically articulated the importance of educating women because of the social and moral role that women played as wives and mothers. As early as 1780, a Guatemalan official wrote to the crown: The education of girls and the rational cultivation of both sexes is an important start for all of society, because as women will become mothers, nobody can ignore the great power they have to inspire the pleasure of learning in their children, as mothers are in charge of children’s education more often than are fathers.2

Almost forty years later, another official echoed those sentiments, discussing “girls’ great need for the appropriate education: a need that is even greater because of the influence and predominance that women exercise over men of all ages.”3 At first glance, Guatemala City’s new girls’ schools, thus, seem to reflect Bourbon reform efforts and Enlightenment thinking, particularly a new optimism about women’s capacity for learning and a new feminine

104

Chapter Four

ideal that emphasized the social utility of marriage and motherhood, as opposed to the early modern monastic ideal of celibacy and intensive devotional practices. These trends were certainly important, but they are only part of the story. As much as the Bourbon crown supported the expansion of primary education, it was ultimately unable or unwilling to fund the ambitious enterprise. In late colonial Guatemala, pious laywomen, tertiaries, and beatas, alongside laymen, religious orders, and ecclesiastical officials, initiated, staffed, and maintained the new free grammar schools for girls. The prominent role played by laywomen in Guatemala’s educational reform comes as a something of a surprise given that scholars often view women and their frequent devotional allies—Third Orders, confraternities, and religious orders—as resistant to currents of “enlightened Catholicism” and mostly peripheral to late colonial reform movements. Pamela Voekel’s influential study, for example, finds that the Church in late colonial Mexico was a “house divided,” with women, religious orders, and religious brotherhoods supporting traditional forms of worship pitted against enlightened reformist bishops and upwardly mobile men who sought to replace lavish communal devotions and affective piety with an internalized, sedate, and rational religiosity that could produce social progress.4 But an analysis of three of Guatemala’s new schools for girls—the Colegio de Pinula, the Beaterio de Indias, and Cruz del Milagro—illustrates how laywomen acted as pioneers and innovators, shaping educational reform through creative engagement with Bourbon reforms, Enlightenment ideas, and progressive Catholicism.5 The schools reflect laywomen’s growing initiative and influence around the turn of the nineteenth century, as active lay female congregations dedicated to teaching and other social services multiplied in Spanish America and across Europe. The formation of Guatemala City’s Teacher’s College for native women, possibly the first of its kind in Spanish America, also challenged entrenched racial ideologies and illustrates a critical shift toward acknowledging and cultivating native laywomen’s capacity to serve as teachers, role models, and spiritual leaders. At the same time, these schools highlight “eventful continuities,” to borrow William Taylor’s suggestive phrase, particularly ongoing alliances between clergy and laywomen, missionary movements, and an enduring attachment to monastic models of feminine piety.6 Guatemala’s new girls’ schools ultimately blur perceived battle lines between baroque and enlightened pieties. Religious actors and reformers in eighteenth-century Spanish America found in religious traditions a “toolkit,” as Matthew O’Hara puts it, for improving society and achieving progress.7

To Educate and Evangelize

105

the colegio de pinula and lay female congregations Guatemala’s first free primary school for girls, the Colegio de Pinula, was founded in the small town of Pinula on the outskirts of Guatemala City. Formally titled the Escuela de Santa Catarina Pinula, the colegio probably opened sometime in the 1770s and achieved official status by royal decree in 1780. As a “free” school, dedicated to the education of indigenous and mixed-race girls, the Colegio de Pinula was an educational pioneer in late colonial Spanish America. By 1792, the school had fifty-four girls “of all castes” and over one hundred graduates.8 King Charles III was pleased with the project, placing it under royal protection and donating a land grant to the school, the cultivation of which was intended to subsidize costs.9 The colegio also made an impression with local leaders. Pinula’s mayor, Lorenzo Montúfar, affirmed the school’s success, pointing to the “good order, honesty, and dedication to work” of its graduates, some of whom had married and become “excellent mothers,” while others had dedicated themselves as teachers in new public girls’ schools or as private teachers for girls who were unable to attend school.10 Local audiencia officials also lauded the school and explicitly connected its achievements to a new feminine ideal based on the social utility of motherhood, noting that “good parents who know how to direct their houses will make it easier to lead the people and govern the Kingdom.”11 In 1790, Guatemala’s Archbishop Cayetano Francos y Monroy recruited some of the colegio’s teachers to start up a new school in the capital’s Beaterio de Indias. Pinula’s constitutions served as the basis for the beaterio’s school and subsequently were used in the foundation of a third school, known as Cruz del Milagro, as well. The Colegio de Pinula was thus the prototype for female education in late colonial Guatemala. While the Bourbon crown clearly endorsed the Colegio de Pinula, it played an auxiliary role in the school’s foundation and maintenance. Indeed, the land granted to the school by the crown ultimately proved infertile and of minimal use.12 The initiative, funding, and staffing behind the Colegio de Pinula came entirely from pious laywomen and men. The founder was Don Vicente Muñoz, a Spanish immigrant, who prominently self-identified as a professed member of the Franciscan Third Order, a tertiary who openly wore his habit in public. Don Vicente maintained the school largely with his personal wealth and work. Clearly the colegio was a labor of love, and it appears that Don Vicente began buying properties for the school over a period of years.13 Alongside Don Vicente was a cadre of pious laywomen who operated as teachers and administrators. Among these women were Don Vicente’s

106

Chapter Four

own sister and niece, both identified as doncellas. Approximately twenty more unnamed pious single laywomen joined them as teachers in the colegio. Considering Don Vicente’s prominent self-identification as a Franciscan tertiary, these women may also have been members of the Franciscan Third Order. This organizational affiliation would certainly help explain the school’s ability to recruit such a sizable group of women. Female tertiaries in Spanish America also had a long history of involvement in charitable foundations such as pious houses, shelters, schools, and hospitals for girls and women. Whether they were Franciscan tertiaries or not, Pinula’s female teachers clearly embraced a model of piety similar to tertiaries or beatas. Correspondence confirmed that Pinula’s female teachers lived together in a “casa de recogimiento” (pious house or shelter) and were endowed and supported by the wealth and industry of Don Vicente Muñoz.14 Pinula’s parish priest, Padre José de Orellana, extolled the example set by these women, not only through their teaching, “but also through the spiritual exercises that they customarily do in public and private” which inspired their neighbors to frequent the sacraments.15 Unfortunately, the records are silent regarding the backgrounds of these pious laywomen. It is possible that they were all criollas, or at least passed as women of pure Spanish descent. But the Colegio de Pinula more likely brought together a diverse community of women. Elite women of Spanish descent tended to enter formal convents, while women who entered beaterios and other informal communities of pious laywomen in colonial Spanish America tended to have humbler and mixed-race origins.16 The historical record further hints at the possibility of mixed-race members among Pinula’s community of pious female teachers. By the late eighteenth century, mulatta women were working among Guatemala City’s ranks of privately paid female teachers and tutors.17 Furthermore, in 1772, just a few years before Pinula was formally founded, a wealthy donor left a sizable grant, 30,000 pesos, to fund a beaterio for mulatta Franciscan tertiaries in Santiago de Guatemala. 18 The foundation was ultimately unsuccessful, most likely due to the fallout associated with the earthquake and relocation of the capital. But the attempt suggests the existence of a group of mulatta Francisan tertiaries who were interested in forming a pious community. Perhaps given the failure to found a beaterio, some of these women found in the Colegio de Pinula an attractive alternative in the 1770s. Whether they were criolla or mixed-race, Franciscan tertiaries, members of other Third Orders, or previously unaffiliated laywomen, Pinula’s community of lay female teachers were at the forefront of broader movements within global Catholicism. Lay female “congregations” dedicated to teaching, nursing, and other social services proliferated across Europe

To Educate and Evangelize

107

in the late eighteenth century. Like the Colegio de Pinula and many beaterios in Spanish America, these communities took simple (revocable) vows and engaged in active ministries such as teaching or nursing. These lay female congregations became the seedbed for the dramatic rise in new active female religious orders throughout nineteenth-century Europe.19 Of course, this phenomenon was not completely new to the modern era. As discussed in earlier chapters, active lay female religiosity flourished in the medieval period and survived to varying extents through the early modern era, despite Tridentine decrees demanding strict enclosure of female religious. The survival of active female religiosity was due to women’s ability to navigate new norms and ideals, as well as the ongoing support of local bishops, priests, and secular officials who relied on these women to provide vital social services. The seventeenth century had also seen the birth of three female orders (Ursulines, Visitandines, and the Daughters of Charity), which rejected the purely contemplative monastic model and embraced an active life of teaching and charity. What made the late eighteenth and nineteenth century distinctive was the number, size, and scope of active female congregations and religious orders. In France alone between 1800 and 1880, for example, almost four hundred new female orders were born and 200,000 women took a religious profession. Some scholars describe this nineteenth-century phenomenon as a feminization of the Church, particularly since the number of female religious rapidly overtook the number of their male counterparts.20 The remarkable growth in European religious women was made possible in part by the decisions of male authorities, namely the Church hierarchy’s reversal of early modern decrees and growing acceptance of socially active brands of female religiosity. But it was also a reflection of Catholic women’s initiative and enthusiastic engagement in active ministries, as well as growing demand for services like female education. Religious laywomen and nuns clearly acted as “vital agents of religious reform.”21 A rise in the number of lay female religious communities and new active female orders dedicated to education is also evident in eighteenth-­century Spanish America. In the 1750s, the Company of Mary, also known as La Enseñanza (The Education), a teaching order founded in early seventeenth-century France, arrived in Mexico City and offered a model of socially active female monasticism for Spanish America. By 1754 they had opened a school for girls within the convent, as well as a free grammar day school for girls from all backgrounds, both of which promoted a new vision of female education and shaped initiatives throughout New Spain.22 Over the next few decades, several existing beaterios in different Mexican cities adopted new educational missions and emulated the C ­ ompany

108

Chapter Four

of Mary, opening free grammar schools for girls. The Beaterio de Santa Clara, for example, in Guadalajara, Mexico, opened a free school for girls of all backgrounds in 1777 and was soon teaching close to three hundred girls. Like other beaterios, the Beaterio de Santa Clara explicitly linked their project to the Company of Mary’s school, known as La Enseñanza, by naming their school Congregación de Maestras de la Caridad y Enseñanza (Congregation of Teachers of Charity and Education).23 By the late eighteenth century, the number of new beaterios was also on the rise. In the Mexican bishopric of Michoacán alone, seven beaterios were founded between 1750 and 1795, bringing the diocese’s total to nine beaterios, with space for 250 women.24 At least four of these beaterios were explicitly dedicated to the education of poor girls from their inception. The Beaterio de Carmelitas (also known as the Beaterio de Santa Teresa), for example, began in 1765 with the efforts of one pious woman to teach “not only girls of distinguished birth, but the poorest, most humble and rustic, especially devoting herself to Indian girls.”25 She soon had a dozen pious laywomen working with her, and by 1775 they gained the attention of an elite male donor who funded a small church and school building for them. At least one scholar describes the foundations of new beaterios, dedicated to both contemplative prayer and female education, as a key feature of late colonial female religious life in Mexico.26 In Guatemala City, there was also greater interest in founding beaterios in the late colonial period. In addition to the attempted foundation of a beaterio for mulatta Franciscan tertiaries discussed earlier, there was another attempt, just a few years later, led by a Mercedarian beata. Both of these attempts failed for lack of official support and the collapse of funding sources due to the earthquake and relocation of the capital. But considered alongside the emergence of the successful lay female community in Pinula, these efforts reflect growing interest in the establishment of communities of pious laywomen. But unlike Europe, congregations of actively religious laywomen in late eighteenth-century Spanish America, like the Colegio de Pinula, did not give birth to new female religious orders in the nineteenth century. Indeed, for economic and political reasons that will be explored in greater detail later, female convents in Spanish America suffered sharp declines after Independence. Instead, the pious laywomen and layman behind the Colegio de Pinula reflect the early stages of laicization as laypeople increasingly led creative initiatives and assumed greater control over Church life amid declining ranks of priests and both male and female religious orders.27 Many unanswered questions remain about religious life in nineteenth-century Spanish America; however, preliminary studies suggest that women were at the forefront of the laicization of Church life

To Educate and Evangelize

109

and used their new positions of religious leadership to gain greater access to the public sphere.28 Several factors converged in late colonial Spanish America to support greater lay female leadership and involvement in educational initiatives like the Colegio de Pinula. In 1759, the Spanish crown definitively ruled in favor of a proposed school for girls in Mexico City, which would operate under the independent lay leadership of a confraternity. The confraternity had attempted to found this school, the Colegio de Vizcaínas, as early as the 1730s, but the Mexican archbishop consistently opposed the proposal, objecting to the school’s lay character and independence from the archdiocese and ecclesiastical oversight. With royal support, Vizcaínas finally opened in 1767 with lay female teachers, setting a new precedent for lay management of schools.29 There were other trends at work as well. In the Mexican city of Querétaro, Third Orders and confraternities affiliated with male religious orders flourished in the late colonial period, amid greater attention and value for charitable activities like running free schools for boys and girls. In the years following the Colegio de Pinula’s founding, Querétaro’s Franciscan Third Order also opened a free primary school for poor children of all caste backgrounds. At the same time, Querétaro’s predominantly female Confraternity of the Cord, closely tied to the Franciscan Third Order, proposed the foundation of another free primary school for poor girls.30 Lay leadership was particularly prominent within female education in late colonial Spanish America. While male religious orders and priests continued to play a vital role in the expansion of public education for boys, girls’ schools relied far more heavily on laywomen. This was due in large part to female convent reforms initiated during the 1760s. At that time, Mexican bishops, intent on purifying female convents of worldly corruptions, recommended expelling all laywomen, including the sizable population of girls boarding and receiving education within convent walls. King Charles III concurred and issued a royal edict in 1774, fully cloistering convents and expelling virtually all nonreligious women and girls, including students, servants, and guests throughout Spanish America.31 Female convents vigorously opposed the measure and the edict was never fully successful. Nevertheless, the reforms largely sidelined female convents, with the exception of the teaching order, the Company of Mary, from educational initiatives in the late eighteenth century, and left beatas, tertiaries, and pious laywomen to run new schools for girls.32 Religious laywomen’s active involvement in late colonial educational initiatives fits with historical patterns but is also somewhat unexpected given Church officials’ explicit reservations about lay female piety. Late eighteenth-century Inquisition records reveal rising concerns about beatas

110

Chapter Four

and female tertiaries. Not only did the Inquisition intensify prosecutions of beatas for false mysticism, but Mexican Church officials in the Fourth Provincial Council of 1771 also sharply questioned beatas’ and tertiaries’ “dubious claims to spiritual legitimacy.”33 Furthermore, the council prohibited female tertiaries and confraternity members from publicly wearing religious habits. The Mexican archbishop reinforced these rulings in a 1790 edict, which linked beatas and tertiaries with crime and fraud.34 And yet late colonial Church officials often endorsed beaterios’ expanded educational ministries. This suggests that while Church officials might have perceived autonomous and independent religious laywomen as threatening and dangerous, they also identified these women as useful allies in the expansion of female education. In the case of the Colegio de Pinula, the congregation of laywomen who ran the school operated for decades as an informal and independent community, which was not under the explicit direction of the archbishop or any male religious order. Surviving records make no reference to a particular Rule followed by the laywomen. It is also unclear whether they took simple (revocable) vows such as chastity or obedience. They were clearly not cloistered, as the parish priest made note of the local influence of their public and private devotions. And yet, in spite of the extensive autonomy and influence enjoyed by the Colegio de Pinula’s congregation of laywomen, there is no evidence of controversy or conflict with local Church officials. The official support enjoyed by the Colegio de Pinula’s informal congregation of laywomen reflects ongoing continuities in Guatemala’s local religion, which historically exhibited greater tolerance toward independent laywomen than colonial centers like Mexico City and Lima. But it also appears that Bourbon reforms and Enlightenment thinking may have expanded clerical alliances with active laywomen in late colonial Mexico as well. The Colegio de Santa Teresa de Jesús in Michoacán, Mexico, for example, was simply an informal community of tertiary women who wore the habit of the Third Order of Carmelites and taught poor girls until 1775. While the Provincial Council of 1771 officially condemned such independent lay female communities, the Colegio de Santa Teresa de Jesús successfully secured the support of a pious donor as well as the bishop and transitioned into a formal beaterio in 1775. Similarly, an informal beaterio developed in the Mexican city of Celaya when a group of poor pious women who identified as members of the Third Order of Jesus of the Nazarene gathered to educate girls of all racial and class backgrounds.35 These laywomen not only operated within an informal beaterio, but were also clearly from non-elite, and potentially mixed-race, backgrounds. Church officials’ endorsement of these women as teachers and moral guides of young girls suggests that the late colonial emphasis

To Educate and Evangelize

111

on female education may have expanded opportunities for active laywomen in colonial centers as well as provincial regions like Guatemala.

pioneers of educational reform What kind of school did Don Vicente Muñoz and Pinula’s congregation of laywomen create? A closer look at the Colegio de Pinula’s constitutions highlights how the school’s administrators and teachers were among the early pioneers of educational reform in late colonial Spanish America. As a free grammar school for poor girls of any racial background, the Colegio de Pinula anticipated a host of similar projects in Mexican cities initiated by municipal governments later in the decade. After the Mexican famine of 1786 provoked mass social unrest, municipal officials in Mexico City and elsewhere charged parishes and religious orders with opening free schools for poor urban youth.36 Perhaps the terrible aftermath of the 1773 earthquake and forced relocation of the capital inspired Guatemala’s early attention to the expansion of education among non-elite communities. But even within Guatemala, the Colegio de Pinula preceded other initiatives. The first free “public” schools for poor boys and girls, founded by the archbishop with the support of the city council, opened more than a decade after the Colegio de Pinula.37 The Colegio de Pinula not only was at the forefront of the movement to expand education among non-elite communities but also offered a broader pedagogical vision than many other free public schools. In the Colegio de Pinula girls learned reading, writing, Christian doctrine, and a host of useful skills like sewing and making cigarettes, candle wax, and artificial flowers. By contrast, Mexico City’s “free schools” strictly limited themselves to teaching Christian doctrine and reading, due in part at least to private teachers’ protests about unfair competition.38 Pinula’s broad curriculum is especially noteworthy considering it was a free girls’ school and similar schools opened in Spain in the 1780s taught only textiles and Christian doctrine. Indeed, the Royal Decree of 1783, which called for the development of free schools for girls, specifically emphasized Catholic doctrine, virtue, and labors appropriate to women, but omitted any mention of reading, writing, or math.39 The omission was not accidental. At least some eighteenth-century reformers argued that non-elite education should be primarily vocational because literacy for the poor was unnecessary and perhaps even dangerous.40 In its format and methods, the Colegio de Pinula also helped spearhead a new approach to female education. Until the eighteenth century, elite donors, as well as church and secular officials, worried primarily

112

Chapter Four

about the formation of Spanish and criolla girls, protecting their honor, ensuring “clean” bloodlines, and reproducing Spanish Christian values, norms, and ideals in a land where most people were of indigenous or African descent. Thus, for most of the colonial period, female education was generally reserved to elite girls, or at least girls of Spanish descent who could afford to pay fees and tuition, and it occurred primarily with private tutors, or in female convents, or other religious institutions, such as beaterios, colegios, and recogimientos.41 But the kind of education girls received was not necessarily academic instruction. Female religious institutions rarely included classrooms or formal plans of study. Girls learned Christian doctrine; labors suitable to women, like needlework; and perhaps music. They might or might not learn to read and write. More than schools in the modern sense, female religious houses functioned as surrogate homes for young girls and emphasized proper enclosure and protection of virtue and honor until the young woman married or professed in a convent. Indeed, parents in colonial Mexico who placed their daughters in convents and colegios were less interested in knowledge than they were in acquiring a monastic “finish” for their daughters, which was synonymous with refinement and superiority.42 This “finish” and the assurance of virginity after years spent in a cloistered environment were important commodities on the marriage market, and like any good education could provide the means to upward mobility. After centuries of neglect, the Colegio de Pinula focused on the education of indigenous and mixed-race girls. And rather than emphasize enclosure and protection over academic instruction, the Colegio de Pinula functioned as a day school. Girls studied for three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, with a three-hour break in the middle of the day so they could return home for lunch. Instead of grouping girls together for common lessons, as had been customary in female convents and other religious institutions, the Colegio de Pinula developed a system of graduated study. The first article of Pinula’s constitutions indicated that one teacher would work with a group of students learning basic literacy (defined as the alphabet and early reading) and to separate, beat, and spin cotton. Having mastered that, students passed to the second station where they learned to read fluently in books and to do a plain weave and knit. The third level of study involved learning how to write and read handwritten letters, make bed linens, and, if they demonstrated aptitude, make handmade flowers, embroider, and make cigars.43 The Colegio de Pinula’s innovative design, organization, and curriculum clearly reflected an engagement with Bourbon reforms. By the mideighteenth century, Bourbon reformers were focusing renewed attention on indigenous education as native populations swelled and concerns

To Educate and Evangelize

113

mounted about poverty and social disorder. The Bourbon crown also intended to Hispanicize native communities, rejecting the Hapsburg model of rule, which had allowed and even encouraged semiautonomous native kingdoms to retain their indigenous languages and certain customs.44 By contrast, Charles III’s Royal Decree of 1778 obligated native communities to learn Spanish and use community funds to open schools in their towns.45 This policy largely failed, as native communities, uninterested in learning Spanish and already suffering under the financial impositions of Bourbon reforms, were ill disposed to fund the initiatives with community resources. But these policy aims clearly influenced the Colegio de Pinula’s constitutions. The school instructed native girls in Spanish and explicitly discouraged the use of native languages. Rule number six of its constitutions indicated that the indigenous girls were to speak Spanish and were not allowed to speak “even one word” of their language under threat of punishment.46 This commitment to Spanish-language instruction among its indigenous pupils notably put the Colegio de Pinula at odds with the Franciscan Order, which vigorously criticized Bourbon policies aimed at extinguishing native languages.47 The curriculum’s emphasis on “productive” and “useful” knowledge like sewing and making cigars and handmade flowers also aligned with Bourbon reformers’ vision of expanding education in order to foment more effective economic production.48 Also, notably absent from the Colegio’s constitutions is any reference to the teaching of music, which had been a standard component of female education in colonial convents and colegios. This absence apparently reflected a broader perspective among Bourbon reformers that promoted moral and religious education, but considered music and its centrality to baroque ritual to be of little social utility. In 1799, the audiencia of Guatemala declared that while music had “some educational value,” it was not as important as “teaching Christian doctrine and knowing the Supreme Being.”49 Many indigenous communities, including Pinula, disagreed, and the colegio’s apparent intention to strike musical education from the curriculum ultimately failed. In 1792, the indigenous town council and governor of Santa Catarina Pinula asked for a license to take 8 pesos monthly out of their community holdings to hire a music teacher. The local priest, Padre Manuel José de Pineda, concurred that the “choir of this parish church is in a state of serious decline in terms of the leader and singers necessary to celebrate the Divine Offices and other sacred liturgical functions.”50 It appears that Pinula’s indigenous residents achieved their ends because a 1792 report indicated that the Colegio de Pinula was teaching the girls to play various instruments and sing for Church liturgy. 51 This addition to the curriculum clearly reflected a negotiation between the

114

Chapter Four

Colegio’s administrators and local parents and priests about what constituted a proper and “useful” education for their daughters. The documentary record suggests that progressive Catholic influences shaped the Colegio de Pinula’s curriculum as well. By the 1780s, Catholic reform movements were focusing more attention on issues of poverty, social inequality, and the abuses and prejudicial restrictions faced by indigenous peoples.52 So while the colegio’s education of indigenous girls reflected Bourbon priorities, its emphasis on the social value of indigenous mothers also connected to debates and conflicts over the continued use of forced native labor. Like other indigenous towns in the vicinity of the capital, Pinula’s native population was subject to the repartimiento (forced draft-labor) system, which could include drafts for wet nurses. Indigenous women drafted as wet nurses were forced to leave their own nursing infants behind. In the decade following the Colegio de Pinula’s foundation, a controversy erupted regarding the forced drafts of native wet nurses in the neighboring town of Jocotenango. Padre Manuel Pineda, who had supported the request for musical instruction, sent local officials to retrieve an indigenous wet nurse from an elite Guatemalan household, because he saw “the painful results that were produced in mothers who are torn from their own children.”53 In the extensive audiencia investigation that followed, Padre Pineda protested the customary forced labor drafts of indigenous wives and mothers into service as wet nurses as a practice that was detrimental and sometimes fatal to the indigenous infants left motherless behind.54 The emphasis on native female education and the value of native motherhood may have been in line with Bourbon reforms, but it also potentially undermined exploitative forced labor systems like the repartimiento. The Colegio de Pinula’s organization also subtly challenged the caste system, educating indigenous, parda (mulatta or Afro-mestizo), and criolla girls, and employing relatively minimal segregation according to caste. Indigenous and ladina (mixed-race and criolla) girls were to be instructed in the same materials and in the same room, although in separate corners. The colegio embraced a measure of racial integration in spite of real or perceived conflicts between groups. The fourth rule of the constitutions stated that the teachers should first allow the indigenous students to exit at the end of the day, followed shortly by the ladinas, to prevent them from fighting with one another.55 Again, the Colegio de Pinula’s model seems to reflect an engagement with local strains of progressive Catholic thought. In 1802, Guatemala’s Franciscan provincial head, Fr. José Antonio Goicoechea, directly lobbied King Charles IV to eliminate most caste restrictions, particularly the harsh limitations imposed on those of African descent. In particular, he recommended that the king grant Afri-

To Educate and Evangelize

115

can descendants “access to education and service in the principal institutions of the colonies without restrictions based on distinctions of race or ethnicity.”56 Fr. Goicoechea’s impassioned argument ultimately triggered a formal policy review by the Council of Indies and substantive reconsiderations of caste restrictions on people of African descent.57 The Colegio de Pinula also encouraged petty industry and economic autonomy in Pinula by instructing girls how to spin cotton and run a hacienda of bees. From the latter, the girls acquired wax that they bleached and turned into candle wax “with as much perfection and consistency as that made in the north.”58 The cultivation of bees was not included in the original constitutions, and it is unclear whether this idea emanated from Don Vicente or the school’s cadre of lay female teachers. In any case, these projects came at a time when some progressive Catholic reformers, like Padre Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, famed Mexican Independence leader, were mindfully encouraging petty industries like beekeeping and textile production, in an effort to resist dependency on expensive Spanish imports and gain local economic autonomy. Clerical promotion of local production was not new to the eighteenth century, but these efforts did acquire new political significance as the Bourbon crown attempted to enforce a stricter mercantilist economy. Perhaps the most striking illustration of the Colegio de Pinula’s engagement with both Bourbon priorities and progressive ideas like petty industry was their collaborative relationship with Guatemala City’s nascent Economic Society of Friends of the Country. Economic Societies, founded in various cities throughout Spain and Spanish America in the 1780s and 1790s, strongly aligned with the Bourbon mission to revitalize the Spanish empire by stimulating economic productivity. But at the same time, some Economic Societies founded in colonial cities also challenged the mercantilist system and Bourbon attempts to stifle local industry and economic autonomy.59 In 1795, Guatemala City’s Economic Society, although still waiting for royal approval of their charter, eagerly moved forward with an initiative to found a “patriotic school” that would offer free education in cotton spinning to girls and women. The Economic Society chose the Colegio de Pinula to house the new spinning school, a testament to the colegio’s fame and reputation among leading elites in Guatemala City.60 The society brought to the Colegio de Pinula a master of spinning and weaving from Spain along with the necessary tools and instruments. The spinning school rapidly gained twenty-three students, and according to the society’s own publication, “so quickly did the project progress, that within a few days word had spread through all of the city. The President of the audiencia (captain general) and many people of both sexes, and of both high distinction and popular classes, went to see

116

Chapter Four

for themselves, and they admired with satisfaction the advances, and the humility, and the good order of the education.”61 The Colegio de Pinula’s early history clearly defies standard portraits of Third Order members and pious laywomen as marginalized, defensive, and recalcitrant in the face of late colonial reforms. On the contrary, the school illuminates the enthusiasm, creativity, and adaptability of religious actors typically located in the “traditionalist” or “conservative” camp. Nor was the Colegio de Pinula an isolated anomaly. Indeed, the school’s innovative design, organization, and curriculum largely built on educational initiatives spearheaded by religious orders in mideighteenthcentury New Spain. Like several other free public girls’ schools founded in the 1780s and 1790s by beaterios and lay female congregations, the Colegio de Pinula appears to have followed the model of the Company of Mary’s school in Mexico City, La Enseñanza, founded in 1754.62 As one scholar puts it, the Company of Mary introduced a “new system of human and intellectual formation for women” that influenced “all the other parallel educational establishments.”63 Like La Enseñanza, the Colegio de Pinula emphasized academic instruction in reading and writing, as opposed to simply Christian formation and traditional feminine labors. The Colegio de Pinula also followed La Enseñanza’s schedule and organization, establishing itself as a day school and using a system of graduated study in which girls were separated and taught according to their level. The Colegio de Pinula’s commitment to the education of poor indigenous and mixed-race girls also built on Jesuit, Bethlemite, and lay initiatives. In 1753, the Jesuits in Mexico City opened the Real Colegio de Indias de Guadalupe (Royal School of Indian Girls of Guadalupe), the first formal foundation of a school for native girls in two centuries. Within this school, indigenous women served as teachers under Jesuit guidance, running a boarding school for native girls, as well as a free day school for girls of all racial backgrounds.64 Although more examples likely exist, records indicate at least two lay initiatives in native female education in the years between the Jesuit school for indigenous girls and the opening of the Colegio de Pinula. As noted earlier, a female Carmelite tertiary began to teach poor girls, with a special devotion to indigenous girls, in the Mexican city of Valladolid in 1765. Joined by a dozen other laywomen and funded by an elite donor, the Carmelite tertiary successfully developed a more formal school with a building, church, and endowment by 1775. A similar project emerged in the Mexican city of Celaya, when “some poor women of particular virtue, laborious and of honest life, known as the Third Order of Jesus of Nazarene” began to educate all classes of girls “rich or poor, Spaniards or Indians.” With elite donors and sponsors, they were able to acquire a building and chapel.65

To Educate and Evangelize

117

Closer to home, the Bethlemite order in Guatemala’s capital offered a long-standing model of educating poor children of all social and racial backgrounds. Although Bethlemite founder and Guatemalan local saint Hermano Pedro de San José Betancurt is most associated with his hospital ministries, he was equally concerned with the instruction of poor children. In the midseventeenth century, Hermano Pedro opened a free school for poor boys and girls, which operated alongside his charitable hospital. When the Bethlemite order was formally founded in 1667, Hermano Pedro’s commitment to education was clearly reflected in its mission to provide “relief for the sick and education for the children, instructing them in basic literacy.”66 In the 1760s, Guatemalan Bethlemite friar Adrián de San José modernized the school’s curriculum and organization, placing greater emphasis on academic instruction including both reading and writing, while maintaining a commitment to free education for poor children. After the earthquake and relocation of the capital, the Bethlemites operated Guatemala City’s only primary school for many years and it became a model for subsequent free grammar schools and a training ground for many of the city’s future teachers. By 1788, it had 400 boys as students.67 The Guatemalan Bethlemites’ renewed attention to educational ministries connected to broader regional trends within the order. Although research is limited, it appears that in Mexico City, the Bethlemites, alongside the Mercedarian order, ran the city’s first free schools for poor children by the 1770s or early 1780s, if not before.68 These schools apparently provided role models for later municipal-led efforts to expand free education to poor urban youth in the city’s parishes and monasteries.69 It is unclear at what point the Bethlemite school in Guatemala’s capital restricted itself to male education. In any case, in 1781, just one year after the foundation of the Colegio de Pinula, Guatemala City’s Bethlemite beatas opened a girls’ school, which taught between thirty and fifty girls. Like the Colegio de Pinula, the Beaterio de Belén school was free and open to girls of all racial backgrounds but offered a more limited curriculum of reading, Christian doctrine, sewing, and other “feminine activities.”70 In part, the educational initiatives of religious orders and lay female communities reflect Enlightenment ideas, and perhaps an adaptive strategy to remain relevant and useful in the new Bourbon political order.71 Those efforts only intensified in the decades following the Colegio de Pinula’s foundation as religious orders, confraternities, and Third Orders actively participated in efforts to open free grammar schools for poor urban youth. As Karen Melvin points out, the history of educational reform in late colonial Spanish America highlights the extent to which local communities and officials, as well as the Bourbon crown, relied on

118

Chapter Four

religious orders, pious laywomen, beatas, tertiaries, and Third Orders for “enlightenment projects often seen as antithetical to the church.”72 Viewed within this broader context, the Colegio de Pinula illustrates the enthusiasm, creativity, and adaptability of laywomen and their frequent devotional allies—religious orders, confraternities, and Third Orders—and the ways in which they shaped educational reform. But even as the Colegio de Pinula reflects change and adaptation, it also illuminates continuities of early modern and even medieval forms of Catholic piety, charity, and evangelization. In fact, much of what appears “new” in schools like the Colegio de Pinula was in fact a “renewal” of early modern traditions. Like the seventeenth-century religious orders dedicated to nursing or charity, schools like the Colegio de Pinula reflected medieval and early modern Catholic emphasis on tending to the needy.73 The vibrant lay religious culture that emerged in seventeenth-century Santiago de Guatemala also emphasized acts of mercy, social ministries to the poor, and evangelizing efforts among wayward Catholics. Much like visiting hospitals and prisons, education of poor children merged multiple charitable aims, providing merciful care for those in need, vital access to the sacraments, and moral Catholic formation for “at risk” populations. Indeed, although the Colegio de Pinula was founded as a day school, they ultimately took charge of approximately twenty orphans, representing close to half of their total student body.74 Eighteenth-century schools like the Colegio de Pinula also reflected the close historical relationship between education and evangelization, and the renewed energy of missionary movements in the late colonial period. The Jesuit foundations of schools for indigenous girls and boys in the 1750s were directly linked to their expanding evangelization efforts. The Company of Mary’s influential teaching order, much like the Jesuit order with which they were closely affiliated, explicitly embraced an evangelizing mission to battle against heresy through female education.75 And much like the urban missions led by Franciscan friars of Propaganda Fide, the free schools for poor children of all racial backgrounds founded by the Franciscan Third Order and Confraternity of the Cord in Querétaro, Mexico, in the late 1780s and 1790s were concerned with saving souls and the formation of more virtuous and moral urban Catholics.”76 Like Anna Guerra de Jesús and Franciscan tertiaries from an earlier era, the pious laywomen behind the Colegio de Pinula and other girls’ schools likely identified as lay evangelizers or, as one French nun described her corps of female teachers, as “truly the preachers of faith.”77 Nor was the missionary purpose behind Catholic educational initiatives necessarily at odds with Bourbon interests. The Bourbon crown actively supported missionary movements, both in urban centers and among native communi-

To Educate and Evangelize

119

ties, as key to establishing order and progress by reforming the morals and customs of colonial society.78 The Colegio de Pinula’s congregation of lay female teachers also reflected an enduring attachment to early modern feminine ideals. Although the Colegio de Pinula operated as a day school and emphasized its role in preparing girls to become good mothers, the female teachers and administrators running the school clearly embraced a celibate ideal, lived together in a religious community, frequented the sacraments, practiced private and public devotions, and assumed charitable care for twenty-one orphans. The Colegio de Pinula also reflected the persistent devotional networks forged by pious laywomen, particularly non-elite single women, with Third Orders and priests, and how these networks continued to sustain evangelization efforts and key social services in the late colonial period.

the beaterio de indias school: race, gender, and female education By the early 1790s, Guatemala’s enlightened and reformist Archbishop Cayetano Francos y Monroy was eager to open free day schools for poor boys and girls in Guatemala City. The earthquake and forced relocation continued to exact a heavy toll on non-elite communities, and the new capital struggled with vagrancy, unemployment, and crime. Bourbon and local ecclesiastical officials hoped public education might improve public morality and serve as a foundation for order and progress. As Archbishop Francos y Monroy saw it, education provided a “check” on “man’s violent passions.”79 At this time, Guatemala City had only two free day schools, one for boys and one for girls, run by the Bethlemite friars and beatas respectively, apparently independent of support or direction from either the Church hierarchy or city government.80 In 1792, Archbishop Francos y Monroy opened two public schools for poor boys, both managed by lay male teachers. For girls, the archbishop sought to import the Colegio de Pinula’s model to the city, to create a free primary school for indigenous, mixed-race, and criolla girls. To realize this vision, he turned to the city’s Beaterio de Indias, a long-standing community of pious lay indigenous women. The school was to be governed by the Colegio de Pinula’s constitutions, and to ensure that the school developed according to plan, two teachers from Pinula were recruited to help orient the school and its teachers and students.81 In addition to the free grammar school, the archbishop founded within the Beaterio de Indias the Colegio de Matronas Seculares y Maestras de Niñas Indias, a professional school to train indigenous female teachers.

120

Chapter Four

In many ways, Archbishop Francos y Monroy’s proposal reprised s­ ixteenth-century efforts to instruct native girls as part of the early evangelization efforts. In the 1520s, Franciscan friars recruited Spanish beatas and tertiaries to educate and evangelize indigenous girls in lay religious houses. Dominicans in Guatemala launched a similar initiative, founding the Beaterio de Indias in the capital and similar institutions in neighboring villages. Although nearly four thousand indigenous girls were receiving a Spanish Christian formation in such institutions by 1536, it proved to be a short-lived experiment. By the midsixteenth century, all of these schools, with the exception of Guatemala’s Beaterio de Indias, had closed their doors due to a variety of factors, including native resistance and demographic collapse, controversies surrounding the autonomy of lay female teachers, and Spanish elites’ preference for channeling resources into institutions for Spanish women.82 While Guatemala’s Beaterio de Indias was the only one of these original institutions to survive intact through the eighteenth century, it did so in a slightly modified state. Rather than a school for native girls under Spanish women, the Beaterio de Indias functioned since the midsixteenth century as simply a pious house for indigenous women. Although it was closely affiliated with the Dominican order, one friar noted that the women were not really beatas at all. They did not make even simple or revocable vows and instead of a habit, they simply wore a modest version of their own native dress. But they did engage in intensive devotions, live obediently under a “mother” or abbess, and left the beaterio only to attend Mass.83 Like other beaterios, Guatemala’s Beaterio de Indias also instructed some girls on a fee basis as a way of maintaining themselves. The Beaterio de Indias school further underscores how enlightened and reformist bishops and Bourbon officials in the late colonial period continued to ally with and rely on pious laywomen, beatas, and tertiaries to provide vital social services in Guatemala’s capital. Contrary to the assumption that “traditional institutions like beaterios were getting left behind in the political ideals of Enlightenment thinkers,”84 the new value placed on female education provided greater support and increased funding streams, from both Church and secular officials, for laywomen’s active ministries. But the Beaterio de Indias school project reflected some striking innovations, particularly new alliances with indigenous beatas, whom officials had largely ignored for over two centuries. The foundation of the Beaterio de Indias school, particularly the teacher-training program, reflected substantive eighteenth-century shifts in the Church’s perspectives regarding indigenous women, their spiritual abilities, and their capacity to serve as religious leaders and role models. When the first Franciscan missionaries arrived in Mexico in the sixteenth

To Educate and Evangelize

121

century, some initially considered indigenous men and women capable of professing as priests, friars, and nuns.85 But by the 1550s, evidence of “backsliding” into native religious practices, as well as the diminished status of native communities reeling from the combined toll of disease, war, and exploitation, raised doubts among missionaries and Church officials about the spiritual capacities of native peoples. Gender consistently framed these doubts. The Third Mexican Council of 1585 confirmed that native men, as well as mixed-race men, could be ordained as priests, although it recommended proceeding with caution.86 Furthermore, friars continued to train noble indigenous boys to be catechists, aides to priests, and local leaders in their communities, vital intermediaries and reinforcements for the sparse population of European missionaries. By contrast, Church policy throughout most of the colonial period categorically rejected indigenous women’s ability to profess as nuns in convents. Church officials expressed particular concern about indigenous women’s capacity for chastity and spiritual discipline. As one skeptic put it, “all the shortcomings found in indigenous people are worse in women because they are the more imperfect sex.”87 Church policy on native women remained static for almost two centuries. But during that time, native laywomen carved out spiritual spaces for themselves, as confraternity leaders, caretakers of sacred images and objects, and pious benefactors.88 Some native women worked as servants in female convents and gained reputations for their spiritual gifts. In Peru, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, indigenous elites founded multiple beaterios exclusively for native women, where they could exercise spiritual leadership, engage in charity, and instruct native girls in Christian doctrine. Still, doubts about native women’s spiritual capacities died hard. At least some Peruvian priests viewed native beaterios with open hostility, seeing them as little more than dens of immorality and sexual licentiousness.89 But at the same time, religious chroniclers during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries wrote hagiographies of a handful of exemplary native women, highlighting the possibility of a native Christian feminine ideal. Nevertheless, these accounts always depicted native holy women in subordinate positions, as poor, illiterate, and humble servants, and sidestepped completely the issue of altering Church policy.90 The tepid consideration of native women’s spiritual capacities took an abrupt turn when New Spain’s viceroy, Baltasar de Zúñiga (1716–1722), moved to found a convent for native women, specifically cacicas (noble native women), in Mexico City. The initiative unleashed a bitter debate within the Church. While skeptics dwelled on familiar assumptions about native women’s inherent moral, spiritual, and intellectual weaknesses,

122

Chapter Four

supporters gave voice to changing perspectives of native women. Interestingly, Guatemala’s longstanding Beaterio de Indias was used to support arguments on both sides. Convent opponents argued that a more informal and less prestigious religious institution, like Guatemala’s beaterio, would better suit native women. Convent supporters, on the other hand, pointed to Guatemala’s Beaterio de Indias as evidence of native women’s spiritual capacities. Relying on hagiography’s power to persuade, convent supporters published the spiritual biography of Iroquois holy woman Catherine Tekakwitha in 1724. The extended preface written by New Spain’s vicar general argued explicitly for native women’s capacity to profess as nuns, and to further reinforce that point, the last section recounted the stories of multiple holy native women from New Spain.91 When the crown approved the initiative and Mexico City’s Corpus Christi convent of native women was founded in 1724, it represented a pivotal turning point for indigenous women and the Spanish American Church.92 Less than a decade later, a second native female convent was founded in the Mexican city of Valladolid. By the 1740s, indigenous leaders in the southern Mexican region of Oaxaca proposed a convent for their daughters, and this third convent opened in 1774. Church officials continued to express doubts about the depth of native Christianity and the endurance of superstitious or idolatrous beliefs and practices, but by the late eighteenth century, a growing number also expressed confidence that native nuns could be essential allies of the Church and role models for their communities. Even opponents of native female convents exhibited greater confidence in native women’s spiritual capacities by the mideighteenth century. Although some Jesuits actively supported the foundation of the native female Corpus Christi convent in the 1720s, other Jesuits vigorously opposed the plan and testified in opposition. And yet, without controversy or conflict, the Jesuit order founded the first formal school for native girls, the aforementioned Real Colegio de Indias de Guadalupe, in 1753. Not only was this the first formal school for native girls in over two centuries, but it was also the first native girls’ school founded by Church officials that relied on indigenous women, rather than Spanish women, as teachers and role models. Although it is unclear whether these women took habits or identified as beatas or tertiaries, they clearly “entered the colegio with an apostolic purpose.”93 Their ministries extended beyond their own native community, as they taught girls from all racial backgrounds in a free day school, which they operated in addition to the boarding school that was exclusively for native girls.94 Guatemala City’s Beaterio de Indias represented another critical moment in the shifting relationship between native women and the Church

To Educate and Evangelize

123

in colonial Spanish America. The professional school to train indigenous teachers appears to be the first formal foundation of its kind in Spanish America. It signaled an important transition, from viewing native female piety in terms of ignorance and rustic servitude to embracing native women’s capacity to serve as leaders, teachers, and guides. In its formation of a corps of native female teachers, Guatemala’s Beaterio de Indias anticipated the emergence of the first indigenous convent of the Company of Mary’s teaching order in Mexico City in 1806. The Beaterio de Indias professional school for teachers was also notably open to native girls of all class backgrounds. By contrast, the first two native female convents in Mexico limited admission to elite or noble native women. Those restrictions were relaxed somewhat for the third native female convent, founded in Oaxaca in the 1780s. But even those relaxed standards required the family to be above dishonorable forms of labor and have a respected social status. The emphasis on class apparently helped assuage concerns about race in the foundation of native female convents.95 But the Beaterio de Indias professional school for teachers expanded the parameters of native female spiritual leadership beyond a small elite group. The school only required proof of “pure” Indian descent, without any reference to class background.96 Of course, these shifts did not preclude ongoing racial tensions and biases against native women. The Beaterio de Indias professional school for teachers emphasized assimilation to key Spanish cultural norms and practices. The teachers in training had to learn to properly eat with utensils. They also were taught Spanish social etiquette, such as how to properly introduce themselves and greet people. The constitutions also referred in a vague yet sweeping way to their education “in all the rest that is involved in societal interaction, accommodated to their circumstances.” 97 The Beaterio de Indias school also explicitly restricted the power and authority of the native beatas over the students and the school. While the prioress remained an indigenous beata, ecclesiastical and secular authorities responsible for the school found that the “bad state” in which the beaterio was operating “necessitated” putting a Spanish woman as rector at the head of the school. If the indigenous prioress had problems, the Spanish head was to correct her or replace her.98 The subordination of Guatemala’s native beatas to Spanish oversight paralleled similar racial dynamics in Mexico’s first native female convents, where the constitutions placed Spanish nuns in charge for twenty years based on the assumption that native nuns were not ready for self-rule. This internalized racial hierarchy bred bitter resentments and divisions and finally the expulsion of all Spanish nuns.99 It is unclear whether similar conflicts emerged in Guatemala’s Beaterio de Indias. But it seems likely, especially considering

124

Chapter Four

that within just a few years of the Beaterio de Indias school founding, the Spanish teacher and students transferred to the Cruz del Milagro school. For all the ways in which the Beaterio de Indias professional school for teachers was innovative, it also reflected the persistence of monastic models of feminine piety. Although the constitutions included attention to useful skills and reminded the school’s chaplain to “not omit an explanation of a mother’s obligations,” the school largely formed teachers in the monastic tradition.100 The indigenous beatas served as teachers and guides, and the teachers in training learned religion not only as formal doctrine but also as an intensive daily routine of devotions and prayers. They awoke at 5:30 a.m. to attend chorus and meditate on a pious reading. At six o’clock they began to pray the Litany of the Virgin Mary with the beatas, who would have finished their own spiritual exercises by that time. At 7:30 a.m., they took a short break in the refectory, drinking hot chocolate alongside the beatas. At eight o’clock, the school day officially began with praise for the Holy Sacrament. Kneeling in neat and ordered rows, they prayed the Creed, the Our Father, and the Hail Mary, finishing with a supplication that their daily labors serve for the greater glory of God. Rising from their knees, they would take their seats and study letters and pronunciation until nine o’clock, after which they would begin their productive labors.101 At this point, girls training to be teachers joined those attending the escuela pública (public day school), being separated according to age and skill. The youngest girls worked on spinning, knitting, and weaving, making girdles, socks, small bags, and garters. More advanced students worked on sewing and needlework, hemming, and fixing shirts, petticoats, undergarments, and huipiles (traditional indigenous blouses). The most skillful students embroidered delicate huipiles, towels, and other items used by indigenous communities, and those who showed an inclination for fine labors graduated to working on silks and artificial flowers. At 10:30 a.m., they were to be asked about Christian doctrine, followed by the prayers of “Faith, Hope, and Charity,” in the same order as in the morning. After lunch and a rest break, the students returned to classes at two o’clock, following the same routine of prayers, study, and work until five o’clock. At this time, the day school students went home and the teachers in training joined the beatas to pray the Rosary of Five Mysteries, the Litany of the Virgin Mary, and the Benediction. The day ended with dinner and prayers.102 The constitutions of the Teacher’s College also emphasized ample religious instruction, spiritual guidance, and participation in the sacraments. A chaplain, preferably a Dominican, Franciscan, or other regular friar, was to celebrate Mass every day, as well as preach on the feast days, and

To Educate and Evangelize

125

offer a lesson from Christian doctrine after the Mass. This lesson included moral instruction based on the Gospel, as well as occasional reflections on the social virtues of the feminine sex, principles of good education, love of work, and hatred for idleness and vice. The chaplain would also examine the girls and young women for knowledge of Christian doctrine, hear their confessions during Lent, or help find other confessors to make sure that they fulfilled their Easter Duty. Every Saturday and on the eve of feast days in honor of the Virgin Mary, they would sing the Hail Mary before the Rosary. The teachers in training were to confess and take communion the first Sunday of every month and for Christmas and Easter, although they were not to be forced or punished if they refused. Notably, they also engaged in ten days of spiritual exercises annually leading up to the fifth Sunday of Lent. On all the Fridays of Lent, the girls and young women participated as a community in one of Guatemala City’s most popular public devotions, the Via Crucis, or Way of the Cross.103 While not formally cloistered, the Beaterio de Indias professional school for teachers also adhered to a strict model of enclosure. Unlike the day students in the grammar school, the teachers in training lived in the Beaterio de Indias, entering between ages seven and twelve and leaving around age twenty. To leave the house, even to visit their family members, both the teachers in training and the beatas instructing them needed written permission from the archbishop and the audiencia official charged with overseeing the school. There was also to be no entry of letters or cards without prior notification of the female director. Only the chaplain and doctors were allowed to enter the beaterio, while family and other “honest” visitors were only allowed in the locutorio, or visiting room, under supervision.104 It is unclear whether the founders of the Beaterio de Indias professional school for teachers sought to create an active teaching congregation of indigenous women that merged contemplative practices with active ministries in education. In any case, the school clearly illustrates how an enduring attachment to monastic female ideals shaped the preparation of female teachers and the broader Catholic educational reform movement. The beatas themselves likely promoted, or at least favored, this model. In 1771, Guatemala’s indigenous beatas attempted to transform their house into a more formal convent, one in which they would take the habit of the Third Order of Saint Dominic, make formal vows and live strictly cloistered.105 The available sources do not offer a clear lens onto the beatas’ motivations; however, Elizabeth Rapley reminds us that the “attraction to monasticism remained a powerful temptation for devout women.”106 Throughout colonial Spanish America, beaterios, and even recogimientos and colegios, repeatedly sought to elevate their status

126

Chapter Four

by transforming into more formalized and prestigious female convents. It appears that the indigo boom and economic growth of the eighteenth century allowed Guatemala’s beaterios to entertain such aspirations. Alongside the Beaterio de Indias, the Beaterio de Santa Rosa also formally cloistered itself during these years. Formalizing their vows and enforcing strict enclosure probably held a distinctive appeal for Guatemala’s indigenous beatas, who had long been denied opportunities to formally profess in female convents due to caste restrictions. But the beatas’ vision of themselves did not please the king. In 1785, the crown mandated that the Beaterio de Indias return to its primitive state and that no beata should make formal vows.107 While the native beatas’ attempts to formalize their status as a cloistered beaterio failed, their model of monastic feminine piety clearly shaped the direction of the school for teachers founded within its walls. Local ecclesiastical and secular officials also clearly endorsed the monastic formation of indigenous female teachers. This was a broader trend within the global Church during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Even as reformers, both inside and outside the church, railed against the decadence of female convents, they also adapted the monastic model to form a modern corps of female teachers. Religious orders and lay congregations, both male and female, largely spearheaded the dramatic expansion of Catholic grammar schools during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As one scholar points out, monastic formation and organization provided a number of practical benefits for the development of a modern Catholic educational system: discipline, order, hierarchy, corporate identity, missionary purpose, charitable commitment, and a sense of community and belonging for teachers facing a challenging endeavor.108 Local dynamics of gender and race also likely framed the enduring attachment to monastic models. Concerns about unmarried and native laywomen’s capacity to embody feminine ideals of chastity, modesty, and religious orthodoxy endured alongside greater optimism. Even supporters of native women’s capacity to profess as nuns simultaneously harbored doubts about pervasive backsliding within native communities.109 A monastic formation of contemplative prayer, rigorous discipline, frequent engagement in the sacraments, modest dress, chastity, obedience, and semienclosure helped ensure that female teachers and role models would strictly adhere to ideals of feminine piety. Much as Church officials envisioned the role and purpose of native nuns, the Beaterio de Indias school prepared indigenous teachers to act as role models for their home communities.110

To Educate and Evangelize

127

the cruz del milagro school: female tertiaries and feminine ideals In 1795 a group of Guatemala City parents, mostly mothers, from the far side of the San Sebastián parish and the neighborhood of La Ermita, appeared before local officials, concerned for the education of their daughters.111 They represented a poor area on the outskirts of the recently relocated capital, an area that had many workers and artisans but still lacked churches, schools, and basic infrastructure. 112 The parents respectfully complained that the city’s two free grammar schools for girls were located far from their neighborhood, the distance serving as an insurmountable obstacle to the education of their daughters and other girls in their care. During the rainy season from May to September, the neighborhood was virtually cut off from the city center. The parents came to propose a solution. In their neighborhood was a conventlike structure, built to temporarily house the Clarist nuns in the new capital while they awaited construction of their permanent convent and church. The building now stood empty, as the Clarist nuns had transitioned to their new convent. Furthermore, the residents were aware that the Spanish and criolla students in the recently opened Beaterio de Indias school lacked adequate space. The residents suggested that these students and their teacher relocate to this empty building. They made the compelling argument that opening the school would provide multiple social benefits, including expanded educational opportunities, greater neighborhood access to the sacraments, and maintenance of the building.113 Their petition was well received by Archbishop Juan Félix de Villegas and audiencia official Francisco Robledo, who saw in education an antidote to many of the social ills still plaguing the capital since the earthquake and relocation of the city. By December 1795, approximately thirty students, along with their teacher, Augustinian tertiary Antonia Perfecta, transferred from the Beaterio de Indias to the provisional Santa Clara convent. The new school was officially named the Colegio de Nuestra Señora de la Visitación (School of Our Lady of the Visitation), in honor of its foundation on July 2, 1796, the feast day of the Virgin’s Visitation. But it quickly acquired the nickname Cruz del Milagro (Cross of the Miracle), because a famous miraculous cross also made a new home in the building. Although it lacked a secure endowment, the Cruz del Milagro school had great success, at least for a short time. Under Antonia Perfecta’s watchful eye, and with support from the archbishop, the audiencia, and local priests, Cruz del Milagro expanded, reaching up to two hundred students by 1803.114

128

Chapter Four

Unlike its predecessors in and around Guatemala City, Cruz del Milagro was founded separate from a congregation of laywomen or a beaterio. When Cruz del Milagro’s constitutions were rearticulated in 1804, they noted only that two lay female teachers should run the school, and they should be of Spanish descent, “maidens or widows, of honest life and good customs.”115 While Guatemala City’s two free grammar schools for boys founded by the archbishop made no reference to the marital status of lay male teachers, Cruz del Milagro clearly required its female teachers to be single laywomen. But as discussed at length in previous chapters, gendered anxieties about female independence and autonomy and assumptions about women’s moral weakness made it challenging for single and widowed women, especially non-elite women, to establish a moral status, let alone position themselves as exemplars of Christian piety prepared to serve as role models and guides for young girls. Although there was no explicit requirement that the lay female teacher be a beata or tertiary, officials ultimately entrusted the school to Augustinian tertiary Antonia Perfecta, who had spent most of her adult life in the Beaterio de Belén and the Beaterio de Indias. She remained the school’s director for over twenty years. It was yet another striking confirmation of Guatemala City officials’ willingness to ally with single and non-elite lay religious women in an effort to provide key social services to the city. As an independent female tertiary, Antonia was exactly the kind of woman targeted for censure by the Fourth Provincial Council of Mexico in 1771 and subsequent decrees by the Mexican archbishop. But Guatemala never enforced the orders to prohibit uncloistered female tertiaries and beatas from taking habits. And Antonia enjoyed the enthusiastic support of Guatemala’s archbishop, leading clerics, and secular officials. Rather than serving as a marker of trickery or deceit, Antonia’s tertiary habit seems to have communicated her moral status, spiritual discipline, and affiliation with a religious order. This moral status, as well as her teaching experience and long-standing relationships with local priests and the archbishop, facilitated support for her position of authority and leadership over the Cruz del Milagro school. Like the Beaterio de Indias free grammar school, Cruz del Milagro was supposed to follow the constitutions of the Colegio de Pinula, to function as a free day school, under lay leadership, and emphasize reading, writing, Christian doctrine, and productive skills. But under Antonia Perfecta’s leadership, Cruz del Milagro ultimately diverged from the Colegio de Pinula’s model. In 1816, the crown requested information about the foundation, state, and circumstances of the school “known popularly as Cruz del Milagro.” In the correspondence, the crown noted rumors that “today, not only have the school’s doors closed to the male sex, but

To Educate and Evangelize

129

each day the school restricts more and more the entry and exit of its own students.”116 The crown’s request initiated a series of declarations in support of the school, including the testimonies of the female head, Antonia Perfecta, and various priests. Their statements reveal how Antonia had moved the school toward a more monastic model of feminine piety. Many girls now lived in the school. They woke up at 5:00 a.m. for devotions and Mass, during which time those who had orders from their spiritual directors to take communion would do so. They read from devotional texts as they took their morning chocolate. During prayer times, they would go to the chapel’s choir, pray the rosary and some devotions, and read a devotional meditation, followed by a half hour of mental prayer. In her own written statement, Antonia noted that she did not obligate the girls to fast; nevertheless, most of them did so voluntarily Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays all year long. She also explained that she did not obligate them to engage in physical penances but left this up to the devotional inclinations of each student. Like Antonia, who considered herself a tertiary sister of the Augustinian order, some of the students voluntarily took tertiary habits of the Franciscan, Dominican, Carmelite, and Augustinian orders, although they did not profess vows. Antonia defended the semicloistered nature of the school, arguing that interaction and communication between the sexes was incompatible “with the secluded and spiritual life.” Furthermore, she argued that this rule had not impeded girls from marrying.117 Was this the project of one woman? There is every indication that Antonia was at least partly if not primarily responsible for these developments. The priests who testified in favor of the school unanimously affirmed her primary role in running the school, offering support for her vision but never once indicating their own involvement in reorganizing the school. Antonia’s commitment to a semicloistered school environment and rigorous devotional practices reflected her life experiences and religious outlook. At a very young age, she entered the Colegio de Nuestra Señora de la Presentación, also known as El Niñado. There is no indication of family relations, so Antonia was quite possibly left in the colegio as an orphan. She probably entered this school after its late eighteenth-century revitalization, in which it was transformed from a recogimiento, or women’s shelter, to a school for honorable Spanish and criolla girls, as it was originally intended and founded in the sixteenth century. During her time there, Antonia began to demonstrate her interest in educational responsibilities, filling in for the school director when she was sick or away. As Antonia neared adulthood, she decided that she wanted to take the habit of the Beaterio de Belén, the female auxiliary to the Bethlemite Hospital order. Lacking a dowry, Antonia requested help

130

Chapter Four

from Archbishop Cayetano Francos y Monroy. The archbishop complied and helped her enter the Beaterio de Belén as a laywoman, demonstrating an early support for Antonia from the highest ecclesiastical levels that continued as she assumed the position of teacher and director of Cruz del Milagro. She remained in the Beaterio de Belén for nine years as a pious laywoman, and she likely worked in the Beaterio de Belén’s new primary school for girls. During this time, Archbishop Cayetano Francos y Monroy and audiencia official Francisco Robledo moved forward to found the school for Spanish and mixed-race girls in the Beaterio de Indias. In a sign that Antonia had made a name for herself in ecclesiastical circles, they recruited her to teach the Spanish girls.118 Like the pious lay female teachers in the Colegio de Pinula, Antonia Perfecta’s personal life experience and choices reflect the continued relevance of the monastic model for many laywomen, especially for those who served as teachers and directors of late colonial girls’ schools. While she was inclined toward a religious vocation of active ministry—first in nursing and education in the Beaterio de Belén and later as a teacher in the Beaterio de Indias and Cruz del Milagro—she was also explicitly supportive of a semicloistered educational environment. Her interest in active ministries did not deter her commitment to a rigorous devotional schedule, and she blended practices such as fasting, penitence, prayer, devotional reading, and spiritual direction in her own life and in the daily life of students. It seems clear that Antonia was attempting to cultivate a new generation of active lay female teachers who blended contemplative devotions and active ministries. She may have even seen Cruz del Milagro as the starting point for a new congregation of active laywomen. Lay female congregations in Europe often consciously cultivated new generations of lay religious teachers through their schools.119 A series of written statements from local priests to the crown clearly indicate that Antonia found ample support for her educational vision among powerful clerical allies. One archbishop had donated construction costs for a classroom, and another had given 50 pesos to provide clothing for the poor students.120 Fray Luis Escoto, theologian and professor at the University of San Carlos and spiritual director to Antonia and some of her students, echoed this support. He pointed to “the great and tireless devotion of the said Señora Perfecta” and noted that “she and her students demonstrate exemplary and religious conduct, they are perfectly instructed in all fields appropriate to their institution and they are full of zeal, charity, and gentleness.”121 He also praised the school’s dedication to maintaining the chapel for daily Mass and the principal feast days “with sufficient decency and even beyond what is permitted by their poverty.”122 Mercedarian friar Mari-

To Educate and Evangelize

131

ano José López Rayón similarly stressed the value of Cruz del Milagro, in the way it provided religious and moral instruction for girls, taught them mental prayer, and prepared them to frequent the sacraments. He also pointed out, as did other clerical supporters, that the school lacked an endowment and sources of fixed income and “had been able to survive all these years deprived of any support because of the attentiveness and dedication of the said Señora and the work of her students.”123 Others echoed these statements and subtly rebuked the charges, brought up by the crown, that the school was inappropriately cloistered. Fray Mariano Pérez de Jesús y Guadalupe, the ex-guardian of the Franciscan missionary college of Propaganda Fide, noted “that I have known Doña Antonia Perfecta, Mother Rectora . . . since she was little,” and “I have seen since its inception around twenty-three years ago, this pious establishment founded and sustained by the said Señora for the Christian and domestic education of many poor girls who want to voluntarily live in edifying enclosure and for the public education of young women.” He went on to praise the “union, harmony, and orderliness with which they live inside the school.”124 He also emphasized the critical role played by Antonia and her students in maintaining the chapel “with great cleanliness and all in accordance with the Church’s ritual requirements,” thus providing vital access to the sacraments for many neighborhood residents. He concluded that the school had prepared some girls for religious professions and others for marriage.125 Padre Antonio Croquer, who had been parish priest of Candelaria for eleven years, more directly connected the school’s “order” to its “seclusion,” when he noted approvingly that the school operated “without any trace of disorder, rather on the contrary it demonstrates great seclusion.”126 And Padre Enrique Loma, current parish priest of Candelaria in 1818, described Antonia as “a teacher of mature age, hardworking, with integrity . . . inflexible in her zealous religiosity, constant in the direction of her students, and diligent in acquiring, through her good judgment and labors, the maintenance of the students, and the subsistence of the ruined rooms and of worship.”127 He also explicitly defended the school’s level of enclosure, noting that it “protected” the girls and Antonia had always proceeded in collaboration with the parish priests and local officials who oversaw the school.128 After the innovations initiated by the Colegio de Pinula and the Beaterio de Indias free grammar schools, it would seem that Cruz del Milagro reverted to a more traditional colonial model of monastic female education in which the lines between colegio, beaterio, recogimiento, and convent blurred. The statements of support for Antonia Perfecta and Cruz del Milagro certainly highlight continuities of thought and practice regarding female honor, virtue, and piety. Institutions like Cruz del Milagro

132

Chapter Four

had long played an important role in colonial Spanish American cities, protecting vulnerable girls and women from moral and sexual risk so that they could properly establish themselves in either marriage or a religious profession. The new emphasis on the social utility of motherhood apparently did not diminish the monastic ideal of feminine piety based on intensive devotions, penitence, enclosure, chastity, and affiliations with religious orders. In fact, the religious actors who supported Cruz del Milagro seemed to see no conflict between the two, but rather assumed that the moral and spiritual formation provided by Antonia Perfecta produced good wives and mothers as much as good nuns or beatas. Attention to the broader early nineteenth-century context suggests that Cruz del Milagro reflected an active and intentional renewal of traditional models of female piety and religious institutions. There were practical matters at stake. By 1796, the Bourbon crown abruptly reversed its position on the presence of girls in female convents, having recognized that the expansion of female education would necessarily depend on the vast infrastructure provided by female monastic institutions.129 In Europe, even Napoleon quickly discarded his hostility toward female religious orders and offered instead financial support and political favors on recognizing the valuable role they might play in expanding education and social services.130 Other local and regional trends were at work in the renewal of the female monastic ideal. By 1800, tensions between the colonial Church and the Bourbon state were mounting, and the interests and goals of Church and state reformers increasingly diverged. By 1810, Church officials and reformers were growing disillusioned with social reforms and progressive political theory. In the midst of dire political challenges both in Spanish America and Europe, Church leaders sought spiritual renewal by reviving “devotion to spirituality and otherworldliness.”131

conclusion Girls’ schools run by active religious laywomen and nuns flourished in nineteenth-century Europe, but they withered on the vine in Guatemala and other parts of Spanish America. By the Independence era (1810– 1820), the three schools examined here were barely subsisting and their enrollments had significantly declined. Lack of funding appears as a paramount obstacle. The 1804 royal decree, the consolidación de vales reales, further wiped out funds for pious works. With this decree, the Bourbon crown appropriated pious foundations and endowments and issued government bonds instead. The Spanish government gained between 10,500,000 and 12,750,000 pesos but was often desultory in its annual

To Educate and Evangelize

133

interest payments.132 The royal appropriation of Church funds significantly undermined the financial security of schools throughout Spanish America.133 In Guatemala, the declining indigo economy, economic depression, and the ongoing fallout from the earthquake and the relocation of the capital compounded economic challenges for schools. There were other structural impediments to the expansion of female education in nineteenth-century Guatemala. In Europe, industrialization and the rise of the middle class fed the ranks of active religious women and fueled demand for their educational ministries. By contrast, nineteenth-century Guatemala, like the rest of Spanish America, developed neither an industrial economy nor a growing middle class but instead suffered through decades of destructive civil warfare and economic decline. Although they failed to flourish like their European counterparts, Guatemala’s girls’ schools highlight key developments in late colonial Spanish America. These schools illustrate how religious laywomen, most of them single and non-elite, engaged with Bourbon reforms, Enlightenment thinking, and Catholic reformism to shape educational reform; expand education to poor, mixed-race, and indigenous girls; and promote pedagogical innovations. These educational initiatives also reflect the growing recognition of non-elite and non-European women’s capacity to serve as spiritual leaders and role models. The weakening of the institutional Church heightened dependence on laywomen to educate and evangelize, provide social services, and maintain ritual spaces. This dynamic continued, and indeed intensified, in the wake of Independence as the institutional Church continued to lose funding, clerical personnel, and political power. Guatemala’s girls’ schools also illuminate the complex relationship between continuity and change and local and global Catholicism, as laywomen and Church officials drew on early modern and local traditions to confront the challenges of the modern era. Guatemala’s capital had a long history of tolerating and supporting active religious laywomen, modifying official Church policy in accordance with local needs. By the late eighteenth century, the Universal Church increasingly embraced these sorts of local initiatives and ultimately reversed Church policy regarding the strict enclosure of religious laywomen. And yet, even as Enlightenment thinking emphasized the modern feminine model of motherhood and opportunities for active female religiosity expanded, laywomen and priests also renewed the monastic feminine ideal. The next chapter considers how the monastic feminine ideal, female religious practice, and the devotional networks between laywomen, priests, and nuns became politicized during and after Independence.

chapter five

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

; One hundred years after the publication of Anna Guerra de Jesús’s spiritual biography, Guatemala’s capital focused its attention on another local holy woman. During Lent of 1816, as struggles for Independence raged to the north and south of Guatemala City, Sor María Teresa Aycinena, a thirty-two-year-old Carmelite nun, reportedly began to manifest signs of the stigmata and experience mystical crucifixions (see Figure 5.1). The fact that she was the daughter of Central America’s most powerful merchant, the Marquis Juan Fermín de Aycinena, and had the unwavering support of her confessors and Archbishop Ramón Casaus y Torres heightened awareness of her mystical displays. Within a few months, Sor María Teresa’s stigmatic blood began producing images, such as hearts and crosses, on handkerchiefs. Priests and lay devotees, many of them women, claimed the bloodstained cloths had the power to heal, and residents flocked to the Carmelite convent in the hopes of coming away with a miraculous object touched by the holy woman. Then letters began to appear in her cell, allegedly written by angels and addressed to the archbishop. The following year, the Inquisition launched an extended investigation and Sor María Teresa’s divine revelations regarding convent reform and local political battles fueled new controversies. And yet she continued to have the support of her confessors, Guatemala’s powerful archbishop, and many local residents. After Independence, Sor María Teresa’s case took on new political significance as liberals interpreted her and the devotion she inspired as a tool used by priests to undermine Independence and the formation of a liberal federal republic. The liberal view of Sor María Teresa Aycinena as a pawn of orthodox and reactionary conservatism has shaped the limited scholarly treatment of this historical episode. One of Central America’s preeminent

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

135

Figure 5.1. Sor María Teresa Aycinena, unknown artist (Guatemala, ca. 1810–1820).

­ ineteenth-century historians, Lorenzo Montúfar, dedicated an entire n chapter of his first volume to Sor María Teresa Aycinena.1 The impression he leaves of her and her devotees is one of religious superstition and fanaticism, cynically manipulated for political gain in the contentious environment preceding and following Independence. Modern historians have generally relied on Montúfar for their passing references to the Carmelite nun.2 These interpretations of Sor María Teresa Aycinena reflect broader narratives about nineteenth-century miraculous episodes and alliances between priests and women, namely that Church officials took advantage of alleged “miracles” and the credulous masses, particularly women, to regain power or resist modernity. In this reading, figures like Sor María Teresa, and legions of pious laywomen, were antimodern fanatics or puppets of conservative clerics.3

136

Chapter Five

An examination of the Inquisition’s lengthy investigation and hundreds of pages of primary source material only recently made available to the scholarly community paints a more complex portrait of Sor María Teresa and her clerical allies and lay supporters.4 Far from a puppet or pawn, Sor María Teresa Aycinena emerges from the documentary record as a bold reformer within the Church. In fact, Sor María Teresa’s story highlights how the Church’s weakened institutional power created an opening for assertive female claims to spiritual authority and a renewal of gendered devotional forms: affective spirituality, imitation of Christ, and female mysticism. Sor María Teresa also defied her own powerful family, breaking ideologically and politically with them and the broader elite criollo community, illustrating the ways in which gender and religious experience shaped attitudes toward Independence, republicanism, and liberalism. The image of Archbishop Casaus y Torres and other clerics as puppeteers is also problematic. This image ignores the complex and shifting political alignments within Guatemala during the Independence era, as well as the ways in which religious motivations and experiences shaped clerical support for Sor María Teresa. This miraculous episode occurred at a pivotal moment in local and global Catholicism, as many clerics lost faith in the enlightened Catholicism of the eighteenth century amid a series of crises befalling the global Church. Like Archbishop Casaus y Torres, many nineteenth-century priests and bishops at times embraced miracles, apparitions, visions, and prophecies, hungry themselves for signs of divine intervention and guidance, and also aware of apostolic benefits as laypeople responded enthusiastically to these devotions.5 Sor María Teresa’s case study sheds light on the internal tensions and shifting balances of power within the Church as clerics and laypeople alike variably responded to rapid change and unprecedented challenges. Evidence suggests that non-elite women living outside marriage played an active, and perhaps leading, role in Sor María Teresa’s devotional following. Their participation reflected global trends, as laboring single women across nineteenth-century Europe were also at the forefront of miraculous cults and Catholic revivalism. Mystical phenomena and devotional networks among priests, holy women, and pious laywomen were clearly not new to the modern period and were not born out of resistance to modernity. But they took on new political significance during the early nineteenth century. While holy women had long been symbols of shared local identity in colonial Spanish America, Sor María Teresa came to symbolize the politicization of gendered religious practices and devotional networks and the wrenching partisan and regional conflicts that ultimately gave way to decades of civil war after Independence. And

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

137

yet, although she did not become a unifying sacred symbol, her devotees helped forge the early foundations of a new kind of Catholic nationalism for post-Independence Guatemala.

mystical crucifixions and miracles in the carmelite convent On May 17, 1816, Archbishop Rarmón Casaus y Torres and a group of priests and laymen clustered into the cell of Carmelite nun Sor María Teresa Aycinena. The archbishop’s assistant secretary was also there, poised with pen and paper, and charged with recording a formal deposition of what they witnessed that afternoon.6 A little more than two months earlier, on the first Friday of Lent, Sor María Teresa had allegedly exhibited signs of the stigmata, visible impressions of Jesus’s five wounds. On every Friday since then, Sor María Teresa had reportedly experienced mystical crucifixions between noon and three o’clock, the hours traditionally associated with Jesus’s own crucifixion.7 Apparently, the reports were credible enough to warrant an ecclesiastical investigation. During five formal depositions made out on each Friday between May 17 and June 14, a total of forty-one witnesses, among them Guatemala’s most powerful priests, friars, and theologians, were called to observe and verify Sor María Teresa’s ecstatic episodes.8 Each of these signed depositions recorded virtually the same scene. The witnesses found Sor María Teresa on her bed, rigidly motionless, with her arms outstretched and one foot laid flat atop another as though she were bound to a crucifix. Witnesses who touched her arm found it so stiff that force was required to move the limb. The secretary also recorded that “from the wounds on her hands, blood was coming out in some abundance,” staining her hands and some pieces of cloth.9 There were also wounds on the tops and soles of her feet, and marks around her wrists as though she had been tightly bound. Furthermore, the depositions recorded physical evidence of Sor María Teresa’s mystical marriage to Christ. “On the ring finger of the right hand was a ring under the skin with some kind of stone.”10 As the clock struck noon, the secretary recorded that Sor María Teresa’s entire body began to move and convulse, pressing on the wounds of her hands with her fingers before falling silent and still. The stillness was so complete that the convent’s chaplain was unable to locate her pulse. Between one and three o’clock, convulsions racked Sor María Teresa’s body with ever greater frequency and she appeared to be in agony. As the hour approached three, she choked out some words in Latin from the

138

Chapter Five

Psalms and a few of Jesus’s own last words on the cross. At exactly three o’clock, the deposition noted that she made the last movements, which were so extraordinary that she was hovering over the bed, and she made an arc with her body, but without moving her feet and hands from the place they had been since the start of her trance; coming to an end these extremes, she became like a cadaver without breath nor any sign of life, so that even flies entered her mouth and eyes, which remained open.11

After a few moments, the archbishop spoke to her and she responded, greeting him “pleasantly with a rosy color and with a natural and perceptible voice.”12 There were no depositions during the last two weeks of June. Then on June 30, Sor María Teresa’s confessor, Dominican friar Anselmo Ortiz, informed the archbishop that the nun’s stigmatic blood was producing images on the pieces of cloth used to clean her wounds.13 News of this potential miracle initiated another series of examinations. Thirteen formal depositions were recorded between July and August 1816.14 Again, approximately forty witnesses participated in this round of depositions, including all of the city’s parish priests; several professors of theology; the provincial heads of the Franciscans, the Dominicans, and Propaganda Fide; the head of the Congregation of San Felipe Neri; chaplains to the city’s convents and beaterios; and clerical chronicler Domingo Juarros. Some had attended previous depositions, but there were close to twentyfive new witnesses, bringing the total number of witnesses to approximately sixty over the course of three months. Some names on the witness list stand out. On July 5, Dr. Narciso Esparragosa, Guatemala’s renowned physician and professor of medicine, and Pedro Molina, surgeon and future Independence leader, were both present.15 And on August 8, Salvadoran priest José Matías Delgado, who was already a prominent Independence leader, attended the deposition.16 According to the signed statements, most of the images produced by Sor María Teresa’s stigmatic blood appeared after she took communion and resembled symbols of Jesus’s Passion and the Sacred Heart.17 On Tuesday, July 2, the witnesses observed that on one handkerchief, there appeared three very perfect hearts, which seemed to be throwing off flames, made out of fresh red blood, a well-formed cross, and above the largest and most elevated of these, a figure of a ring with three rocks, like the one that is currently seen on her ring finger, and also a figure of the wound that she has on her side, another figure that looks like a nun in a habit, and a small flame, that seems to be between two hearts, all of them made from fresh blood and red in color.18

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

139

Over the next two days, witnesses observed another handkerchief with “four hearts made out of fresh red blood, well-formed with flames, and on the lower one there was a perfect cross, and on the side, a crown with a nail in the center, three nails on the side of the cross, the figure of the side wound together with the heart on the upper side.”19 More bloodstamped handkerchiefs appeared in the following weeks (see Figure 5.2). When asked who was making these images, Sor María Teresa repeatedly affirmed that it was the work of angels.20 Some priests used these pieces of cloth to cure people, and local residents began to bring their own handkerchiefs to the convent doors in hope of receiving a miraculous marking.21 Guatemala City’s residents also sought out the Carmelite nun’s washing water, and eventually any water from the convent’s well, which they considered to have miraculous healing properties.22

Figure 5.2. Pañuelo de 19 de agosto, 1816 (handkerchief from August 19, 1816).

140

Chapter Five

News quickly traveled beyond the bounds of the city. One Guatemalan priest testified that he heard about Sor María Teresa’s ecstasies in Jacaltenango in June on his way back from Chiapas, and that “one finds the same news in all the towns on the road back to this capital.”23 For the literate elite, an anonymous observer wrote a brief account that documented the miraculous events that he witnessed, including the stigmata, the formation of a crown on her head, elevations from the bed, and spiritual agony cured only by ingesting the Eucharist.24 This text was most likely written by Carmelite friar Manuel de la Madre de Dios, who had been visiting Guatemala from Mexico City, and apparently circulated the account, or excerpts of it, on his return to Mexico City.25 Objects infused with Sor María Teresa’s miraculous powers also circulated far and wide. In 1820, a Carmelite nun in Mexico, over a month’s journey away from Guatemala City, requested a bloodstained image or “any item touched by Mother Teresita.”26 And Mercedarian friar Mariano José López Rayón testified in 1818 that it was rumored the images had spread as far as Europe.27 But some were doubtful from the beginning. While Guatemala’s preeminent physician, Narciso Esparragosa, signed off on the sworn statement of July 5, surgeon and intellectual Pedro Molina did not. In a separate deposition, Molina agreed with the other witnesses on several points: Sor María Teresa’s rigid posture resembling a crucified body, her dramatic convulsions, and the visible marks on her hands and feet. But while the scene provoked “surprise and admiration,” Molina insisted that closer examination was required to understand the nature and cause of the wounds.28 Apparently, Pedro Molina was not alone in his hesitation, because by late July, Archbishop Casaus y Torres began explicitly responding to doubts and questions about the miraculous nature of Sor María Teresa’s experiences. During the deposition on July 22, the archbishop explicitly rejected the accusations of “malicious tongues” and affirmed that all of Sor María Teresa’s mystical displays were a “work of God” and not the product of cleverness, artifice, or malice of any kind.29 In an effort to establish proof and limit the possibility of fraud, the archbishop ordered that distinctive handkerchiefs, with corners cut off, should be used to collect the bloodstained images. All the Carmelite nuns were interviewed, and all rejected the possibility of deception and confirmed their belief that the “paintings in blood were extraordinary and marvelous things that God was doing.”30 In late August, Sor María Teresa’s cell was searched to rule out the possibility that she was using some instruments to create the images.31 Although doubts were clearly circulating, Sor María Teresa continued to enjoy the firm support of her confessors, leading clerics, and the archbishop, as well as a broad devotional following in Guatemala City. In August 1816,

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

141

Guatemala City’s city council approved a proposition to acquire three imprinted handkerchiefs, which were to be stored in a silver box, donated for this express purpose.32 A council representative stated, “This being such an admirable miracle, it seemed strange that the city council would not have an authentic token for posterity.”33 The city council also commissioned a painter to reproduce exact copies of the bloodstained handkerchiefs, so that the originals could be safeguarded in the “most secret safe locked with six keys,” along with the original will of Hermano Pedro de San José Betancurt.34 The city’s administrators were treating Sor María Teresa as a verified holy woman worthy of association with the much-beloved Hermano Pedro, local holy man and founder of the Bethlemite order. Of course, Sor María Teresa’s mystical crucifixions and miraculous imprints and the devotional following that emerged around her occurred within particular social and political contexts, and those will be considered later. But this was also a deeply religious story from the beginning, a moment in which historical actors experienced a dramatic encounter with a divine presence.35 Understanding this encounter requires situating Sor María Teresa’s ecstatic experiences and her devotees in the enduring devotion to Jesus’s Passion and Imitatio Cristi, the Imitation of Christ. Since the medieval era, the Passion played a central role in Catholic devotional culture as Jesus’s wounds came to represent divine love and redemption.36 As Caroline Walker Bynum puts it, meditating on Jesus’s suffering offered an opportunity to “plumb the depths of Christ’s humanity,” and imitating that suffering allowed privileged access to the divine by forming a “union with the body of Jesus.”37 In this religious context, suffering gave birth to salvation, redemption, and ecstatic union and the body became a central vehicle for religious experience, an entry point to the divine and a “locus of the sacred.”38 From this devotional tide also emerged an enduring cult of relics, centered on the belief that the physical remains of saints’ bodies held sacred and miraculous powers. As the case of Sor María Teresa illustrates, the cult of relics often extended in practice to include the bodily fluids of living holy people, such as blood and saliva, as well as objects thought to contain holiness simply by virtue of contact or association with relics, miraculous images, or holy people such as washing water or pieces of clothing. This more liberal definition of “relics” was particularly important in colonial Spanish America, because unlike Europe, the New World had very few verified relics and canonized saints.39 Gender significantly shaped the Imitatio Cristi tradition. Medieval Christian theologians and laypeople alike understood Christ’s divinity in masculine terms, while Christ’s humanity, and hence his physical suffering, was considered feminine. Like Christ’s body on the cross, female bodies had the capacity to give new life and nourish and sustain that life

142

Chapter Five

through bodily fluids.40 As a result, female mystics and holy women were among the most enthusiastic devotees of Imitatio Cristi and were also far more likely than men to experience miraculous bodily transformations such as seizures, rigidity, levitations, trances, and the inability to swallow food except the Eucharist. Medieval Christians also assumed that sexual and gender boundaries were fluid and might be blurred or crossed.41 In this context, Walker Bynum notes that “women’s efforts to imitate this Christ involved becoming the crucified, not just patterning themselves after or expanding their compassion toward, but fusing with the body on the cross.”42 The stigmata, first displayed by a male saint, Francis of Assisi, quickly turned into a miracle primarily associated with holy women, and only female stigmatic wounds have actively bled.43 This is not to suggest that the Imitatio Cristi tradition was limited to female devotees. In Guatemala’s capital, as in other Spanish American cities, ritual imitations of Christ were at the vibrant center of local religion. Bourbon officials, followed by the liberal post-Independence government, repeatedly attempted to regulate the “very large numbers of people dressed as the Nazarene Christ,” including children, who processed through the streets at all hours of day and night during Lent and Holy Week each year and engaged in public displays of penitence, carrying crosses, wearing hair shirts and spiked belts, whipping themselves, and covering their faces.44 And every Lenten Friday, on the same day that Sor María Teresa was experiencing mystical crucifixions, Guatemala City residents processed along the stations of the Via Crucis (Way of the Cross). At each of the fourteen altars, or stations, between the Franciscan convent church and the Calvary church, participants prayed and meditated on Jesus’s Passion, on how it felt to carry the cross, to fall, to be whipped, stripped, and humiliated, and finally to be crucified.45 The devotion originated with Franciscan tertiaries in Guatemala’s capital in the early seventeenth century, but it quickly became one of the city’s most popular Lenten devotions. By the eighteenth century, laypeople were practicing the Via Crucis every Friday of the year within the Franciscan convent church.46 Sor María Teresa obviously went beyond merely meditating on or empathizing with Jesus’s Passion. At first glance, her ecstatic crucifixions, stigmata, and miraculous bloody imprints might appear to be a medieval relic, an odd anachronism in the nineteenth century. Sor María Teresa’s story certainly highlights enduring continuities of religious experience and expression inside and outside convent walls. But the Carmelite nun and her devotional followers also reflect the early stages of a broad ­nineteenth-century Catholic revival of affective piety and physical displays of devotion.47 Across Europe, Catholics enthusiastically responded

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

143

to Marian apparitions, flocked to miraculous shrines, listened to prophecies, and read pamphlets about living visionaries and stigmatics.48 Catholic revivalism in nineteenth-century Latin America is less well understood. Many of the rich source materials for the study of religion in the colonial period dry up in the nineteenth century due to the end of the Inquisition, challenges faced by the Church, and the general chaos and disruption of the war-torn decades that followed in the wake of Independence. But William Taylor’s recent study points to the growing popularity of established miraculous shrines and the emergence of new shrines, as well as abundant reporting of miracles in nineteenth-century Mexico.49 Although clearly aware of famous European apparitions of Mary, ­nineteenth-century Mexico followed its own variant of Catholic revivalism. Unlike Europe, where Marian apparitions predominated, in early nineteenth-century Mexico, the six shrines that gained regional followings were devoted to images of Christ. And while European apparitions of the Virgin Mary often communicated prophetic warnings, Mexican marvels and apparitions were usually silent, their miracles focused on more intimate and daily concerns, especially healing for illnesses and protection from danger and misfortune.50 At least in its initial phase, Sor María Teresa’s mystical crucifixions and stigmata similarly reveal a Cristo-centric devotional culture. In a way, the Carmelite nun became Guatemala’s own “wonder working image of Christ,” as Taylor describes those that inspired Mexican shrines and pilgrimage sites.51 And for months, Sor María Teresa offered no prophetic visions, even when prompted and prodded by her clerical supporters. When asked by the archbishop in July 1816 if she had been praying for the insurrection in Mexico and if God had heard her prayers, she responded laconically, “I do not know if he has heard me.”52 And when asked about the bloodstained images, she responded that angels were painting them for the good of souls and to show God’s mercy.53 Unlike the fiery warnings proffered by Marian apparitions in Europe, Sor María Teresa’s cult initially focused on miraculous healing, salvation, and divine mercy.

gender, marital status, and miraculous devotions Did women predominate among the local residents clamoring for Sor María Teresa’s handkerchiefs and washing water? Were single and widowed women principal participants in the devotion, as they were in Guatemala City’s local religion more generally? In Europe, evidence clearly

144

Chapter Five

indicates that women played a predominant role in miraculous devotional culture as both visionaries and as miracle-seekers.54 For example, at three shrines in nineteenth-century France, women, specifically single and widowed women, were the most likely to seek miraculous help. One explanation for this gendered pattern is that single and widowed women were among the most marginalized members of society, and the “social drama of the miracle provided an effective mechanism for overcoming this tension between single women and their communities.”55 Other explanations for the apparent “feminization” of Catholic devotional culture in ­nineteenth-century Europe suggest that Catholic practice, from pilgrimages to charity, provided women with opportunities for public engagement and local authority, at a time when secular forms of participation were reserved for men. In this same vein, some note that women appeared more prominent in nineteenth-century Church life because men largely deserted the Church and flocked to new secular associations.56 Unfortunately, sources do not reveal the exact demographics of Sor María Teresa’s devotional following. Unlike some European shrines, which maintained registers of pilgrims, Guatemala’s Carmelite convent kept no record of Sor María Teresa’s devotees. Although a quantitative analysis of the gender and marital status of Sor María Teresa’s devotional followers is not possible, the broader documentary record does suggest laywomen’s enthusiastic participation. Guatemala’s Carmelite abbess, Madre María Manuela de Santa Ana, noted in her 1817 account that it was a woman who experienced the first miraculous healing associated with Sor María Teresa. According to Madre María Manuela, the woman recovered from the brink of death after Sor María Teresa’s confessor, Fr. Anselmo Ortiz, prayed over her and applied a piece of paper that had come into contact with the holy woman. Madre María Manuela indicated that another woman who suffered from a growth under her tongue, which doctors had been unable to treat, came to the convent seeking water that had come into contact with Sor María Teresa. After drinking the water, she was healed.57 When doctor and future Independence leader Pedro Molina testified before Inquisition officials in 1817, he noted that “these stained images have multiplied so much that almost every mujercita (little woman) who has wanted one on her handkerchief has been able to obtain one.” 58 Similarly, Fr. Maríano José López Rayón’s testimony before Inquisition officials in 1818 highlighted the devotional participation of specific female residents of Guatemala City. He noted that Doña María de la Luz Gutiérrez asked her sister, Carmelite nun Sor Regina Gutiérrez, to provide her with some of Sor María Teresa’s washing water. He also testified that he had seen in the possession of the Arrivillaga sisters a painted

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

145

image of Saint Teresa of Avila with a bloodstained imprint. The only other residents, mentioned by Fr. López Rayón, in possession of objects touched by the holy woman were priests and friars.59 These anecdotal assessments must be approached with caution. By the early nineteenth century, a well-developed Enlightenment discourse connected baroque and “superstitious” forms of religiosity to women and non-elite groups. And Pedro Molina and Fr. López Rayón were both prominent participants in Guatemala City’s enlightened circles. At the same time, evidence from wills also suggests that laywomen, particularly single and widowed women, likely played a leading role in Sor María Teresa’s devotional following. In a continuation of earlier trends, most female will-makers in early nineteenth-century Guatemala City (86 percent) were single, widowed, or separated from their husbands. Close to 20 percent of these women identified as tertiaries, and half claimed membership in either a Third Order or a confraternity, or both. Almost three quarters of unmarried female will-makers indicated a relationship with a male religious order or convent church, and half listed a priest as executor or witness to their will. Eighty percent left a pious donation or invested in a pious work. At least two female will-makers indicated a close relationship with Sor María Teresa’s confessor and staunch supporter, Dominican friar Anselmo Ortiz. One woman noted that she had privately communicated with Fr. Ortiz about certain pious bequests she wished to make for the good of her soul.60 Another woman went further still. In case her husband died, laboring woman Felipa Jacobo Melgar indicated that Fr. Anselmo Ortiz should assume care for her daughter in terms they had already discussed, entrusting him with “the conscience of my said daughter, so that she subjects herself in all ways to his directions, in accordance with my arrangements.”61 The devotional networks evident in laywomen’s wills likely promoted their awareness of Sor María Teresa’s mystical displays and miraculous “relics.” As was often the case with holy women, Sor María Teresa’s clerical supporters actively disseminated information about the Carmelite nun in sermons and confessionals, at dinner tables and deathbeds. According to Madre María Manuela de Santa Ana, just the “news of these marvels” brought about conversions, changes in customs, confessions, and greater love of God.62 Doctor Narciso Esparragosa testified in 1817 that priests began talking openly about Sor María Teresa’s apparent stigmata and that Fr. Anselmo Ortiz, confessor to the Carmelite nun, was the most enthusiastic proponent.63 Several accounts also confirmed that Fr. Ortiz actively distributed pieces of a sleeping mat stained with Sor María Teresa’s blood, as well as papers and pieces of cloth that had come into contact with the holy woman. He also used these objects in order

146

Chapter Five

to heal the sick.64 While some argue for Europe that single and widowed women’s marginalized status prompted their participation in miraculous cults, the evidence for Guatemala City suggests quite the opposite. To the extent that unmarried women participated in the devotion surrounding Sor María Teresa, many surely did so as central figures in Guatemala City’s local religion.

a holy woman for troubled times: devotion and independence politics Evidence also makes clear that devotion to Sor María Teresa was not relegated to Guatemala City’s female residents. The support of leading elite criollo men is evident in the city council’s decision to commission a painter to reproduce exact copies of the images imprinted on handkerchiefs with Sor María Teresa’s blood and guard the originals in a protected safe alongside the original will of Hermano Pedro San José Betancurt. One historian suggests that a political agenda fueled elite criollo support, specifically that the Aycinena clan, the wealthiest and most powerful merchant family in Central America, allied with the archbishop and the Dominican order during the Independence era. In this interpretation, the promotion of Sor María Teresa as a holy woman offered a way for these allies to gain support for their conservative political aims.65 Elite criollo men’s participation in this devotion did occur within the contentious political environment of the Independence years, but it certainly did not reflect a conservative alliance with the archbishop. Although the Aycinenas and other elite criollo clans became synonymous with the Conservative party after Independence, they were among the most vocal proponents of late colonial liberal policies, such as the 1812 Spanish Constitution, freedom of the press, and greater local autonomy. Sor María Teresa’s mystical displays came in the midst of a political battle between criollo elites, including the Aycinenas, and Guatemala’s increasingly authoritarian captain general, peninsular Spaniard José de Bustamante. Tensions were evident as early as 1811, when Sor María Teresa’s nephew Juan José de Aycinena wrote and widely distributed a report favoring greater political autonomy and the establishment of a constitutional government. The conflict escalated when Captain General Bustamante initiated a series of repressive measures in 1812, in response to rebellions in the provinces and conspiracies in support of Independence within the capital. By 1813, disgruntled criollo elites and their leaders on the city council were locked in a bitter feud with the captain general, a feud that intensified when Don Juan José de Aycinena took a seat on the

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

147

Council of State in Spain and forcefully promoted criollo interests and opposed José de Bustamante’s policies. Far from allying with the Aycinena clan, Archbishop Casaus y Torres was a key ally of Captain General Bustamante until at least 1815.66 Criollos briefly held the upper hand following the liberal constitution produced by the Spanish Cortes (parliament) in 1812. But when King Ferdinand VII returned to power in 1815, Captain General Bustamante reestablished his authoritarian rule with a vengeance, specifically targeting the Aycinenas and other powerful criollo families. Just months before Sor María Teresa began to experience mystical crucifixions and the stigmata, the captain general stripped the head of the Aycinena family, as well as other prominent criollos, of privileges and titles, including public offices. He also forced criollo supporters of the liberal constitution to pay 500,000 pesos to fund Spanish parliament salaries; cracked down on contraband trade, which was a key source of income for merchant families; and attempted to break up the Aycinena commercial monopoly. Guatemala’s criollo elites vigorously protested these measures, and by 1816 the political tides appeared to be turning. In August 1816, the same month that Guatemala City’s city council recognized Sor María Teresa’s mystical crucifixions and stigmatic imprints as an “admirable miracle,” they received their first conciliatory overture from the crown.67 Belief in miracles was commonplace in religious societies like late colonial Guatemala, and residents experienced them as part of daily life with or without political crises.68 But the imminent threats facing Guatemala’s elite criollo community likely shaped their relationship to Sor María Teresa as a holy woman, just as the dramatic onset of this miraculous episode provided a religious frame for criollos’ woeful political position. Sor María Teresa’s mystically crucified body offered the beleaguered criollo community a coveted sign of God’s favor and direct access to divine support. Her suffering and sacrifice may have also provided a mystical reflection of criollos’ own political martyrdom, as well as a promise of redemption. In Mexico, insurgents compared Independence leader Padre Miguel Hidalgo and other fallen rebels to Christ, noting that the “precious fluid of their blood” would generate the “fruits of liberty.”69 And like Mexico’s Virgin of Guadalupe, Sor María Teresa had the potential to be both a symbol of the criollo resistance to Spanish repression and also a vital protector and mediator with the divine during a time of trials.70 If elite criollo support for Sor María Teresa makes sense within this political context, Archbishop Casaus y Torres’s alliance with the holy woman is far more surprising. Ramón Casaus y Torres had always been a regalist bishop, heavily influenced by Enlightenment ideologies and Catholic reformist movements, which advocated an internalized and rational

148

Chapter Five

piety and opposed affective spirituality, extreme penitence, and mystical displays.71 There are other reasons to wonder at the archbishop’s devoted support of Sor María Teresa. By all accounts, Archbishop Casaus y Torres aligned himself with Captain General Bustamante and explicitly supported and legitimized his rule. As a peninsular Spaniard who witnessed the fallout from the Hidalgo rebellion in Mexico firsthand, the archbishop was openly wary of criollo leaders, particularly those who challenged Spanish authorities. This position clearly pitted the archbishop against the Aycinena clan and the broader elite criollo community. In fact, between 1812 and 1813, the archbishop tangled directly with the criollo city council when they demanded to visit Church jails in accordance with the law. Archbishop Casaus y Torres’s harsh refusal prompted an official complaint to the Spanish government.72 But by 1815, it seems the archbishop was reconsidering his unwavering support for José de Bustamante. When the captain general asked the archbishop to compose a history of the region’s recent revolts for the crown, thereby legitimizing his own repressive policies, Archbishop Casaus y Torres refused. His refusal signaled a subtle but significant shift. Deprived of the archbishop’s support, Captain General Bustamante found himself buried by the relentless complaints and appeals filed by criollos with the crown.73 Perhaps Bustamante’s unrelenting political vengeance against local criollo leading families with deep ties to the Church finally went too far for the archbishop. Or perhaps he believed the time had come to rebuild a sense of unity, now that the king was safely back on his throne. Still, through 1815, the archbishop seems mostly ambivalent about how to deal with the wrenching divisions tearing apart the city and the Guatemalan Church. The dramatic onset of Sor María Teresa’s mystical crucifixions during the first week of Lent in 1816 appears to have been a decisive turning point for the archbishop. By May 1816, he was inviting Guatemala City’s entire clerical community to witness the mystical displays of a nun named Aycinena. Among these priests were many from leading criollo families deadlocked in political battle with Captain General Bustamante. Scholars who treat the episode in passing suggest that Archbishop Casaus y Torres’s support for Sor María Teresa reflected a cynical political move. But this explanation clearly falls apart on closer examination. Although the archbishop’s support for Captain General Bustamante appears to have softened by 1815, he was no natural ally of the liberal-leaning Aycinena clan. Supporting Sor María Teresa had the real political potential of undermining Captain General Bustamante and stoking support for the elite criollo community and the liberal constitutional rule they endorsed. Second, as will be discussed in greater detail

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

149

later, evidence clearly indicates that Archbishop Casaus y Torres continued to support Sor María Teresa, even when doing so weakened and compromised his religious and political authority. The hours Archbishop Casaus y Torres spent in Sor María Teresa’s cell day after day, month after month, his invitation to over sixty clerics and laymen to witness her mystical crucifixions, and even his anguished uncertainty in the face of her increasingly bold prophetic visions all suggest that the archbishop’s relationship with Sor María Teresa reflected a religious experience of transcendence, an encounter with the divine with unexpected and unsettling consequences. Archbishop Casaus y Torres’s receptiveness to this encounter reflected shifting clerical perspectives at a time of profound unease as the Church faced the ongoing fallout from the French Revolution, Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and Rome, the removal of Spain’s rightful Bourbon king, and the forced exile of two popes (Pius VI and VII).74 By the early nineteenth century, many priests and bishops who had formerly championed enlightened ideas and royal reforms had grown disillusioned and uneasy with the direction of change. Like their counterparts in Europe, many clerics in New Spain responded to these trials by actively reviving a spirituality of miracles, penitence, prophesies, apparitions, and other signs of divine intervention and guidance.75 Other local and regional contexts likely shaped Archbishop Casaus y Torres’s enthusiastic response to Sor María Teresa’s mystical crucifixions, stigmata, and miraculous imprints. While priests became politically polarizing figures after Independence, during the colonial period, the Church and its clergy were the primary intermediaries between the crown and its subjects and between the diverse segments of the rigidly hierarchical society. Through the Independence years, the Church continued to see itself as the glue holding together a conflicted society.76 During Lent of 1816 Archbishop Casaus y Torres came to see Sor María Teresa Aycinena as a holy figure capable of reuniting the disparate factions of peninsular Spaniards and criollos. The nature of her mystical displays likely enhanced this capacity. Like the Eucharist, which had long offered a poignant symbol of social unity through the mystical body of Christ, Sor María Teresa’s crucified stigmatic body could also offer a sacred common ground on which a renewed sense of unity might be forged.77

angels, convent reform, and controversy In early September, Sor María Teresa’s ecstatic displays took another dramatic turn. On September 3, seemingly out of nowhere, a handwritten letter appeared with the piece of cloth used to soak up the Carmelite

150

Chapter Five

nun’s stigmatic blood. Addressed to the archbishop, the letter was allegedly written by angels in Sor María Teresa’s blood. Nearly every day for over a month, and then sporadically, more letters appeared, always addressed to the archbishop. Not one of these letters survives in the archive, or at least they have yet to be found, so it is impossible to assess their full content. In his extensive, sometimes daily, account of the “marvelous” events surrounding Sor María Teresa, an account certified by Archbishop Casaus y Torres, Franciscan friar José Buenaventura Villageliu claimed that the letters focused primarily on how the archbishop should spiritually direct the Carmelite nun.78 Letters found in November and December 1816 included extreme directives to place Sor María Teresa in the convent’s “prison,” first for a period of eleven days, then for an indefinite number of months while Archbishop Casaus y Torres conducted his pastoral visit of surrounding provinces, a visit he had not planned himself.79 The letters specified that Sor María Teresa should be chained to the wall by her left foot, deprived of a mattress or blanket of any kind, and provided the most meager ration of two ounces of bread and a little water every twenty-four hours. Those delivering food were not allowed to communicate even one word, although they could take her out for Mass once a month and on feast days and for confession every two weeks.80 Through her imprisonment, Sor María Teresa would suffer for the sins of the world and dedicate herself to constant prayer for the needs of the Church and souls in Purgatory. One letter prophesied that Sor María Teresa would emerge from imprisonment crippled, but that she would be able to walk by virtue of obedience when the archbishop so commanded.81 Letters written by angels were an unusual miracle, far more unusual than even the stigmata or mystical crucifixions. Indeed, a review of relevant scholarship suggests this episode may be unique among the lives of saints and holy people. The angelic production of letters may have been rare, but angels, alongside saints and demons, abounded in Guatemala City’s baroque religious culture. As one recent study puts it, angels were an “integral part of the Spanish American cosmology,” a point highlighted by the broad local belief that angels painted the miraculous images in Sor María Teresa’s blood, as well as Archbishop Casaus y Torres’s willingness to follow the angelic letters’ controversial directives.82 But according to Fr. Villageliu’s account, the profusion of letters and their highly specific and troubling content made the archbishop uneasy. He consented to the short-term imprisonment of Sor María Teresa but anxiously refused to place her back in the dungeon indefinitely. He worried openly to Sor María Teresa’s confessor, Fr. Anselmo Ortiz, that the letters might be the product of demons rather than angels and that following

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

151

these directives might have fatal consequences.83 The broader record also hints at the archbishop’s uncertainty during this time. At the archbishop’s behest, Franciscan missionary friar Félix Castro and Mercedarian friar Mariano José López Rayón conducted extensive ten-day spiritual examinations of Sor María Teresa between November and December 1816.84 Both examiners unequivocally authenticated the divine origins of Sor María Teresa’s mystical experiences. It appears that their reports swayed the archbishop, because in January 1817, he abruptly changed his mind about her imprisonment. At the end of January, he authorized Sor María Teresa’s indefinite confinement according to the instructions detailed in the letters.85 She remained in the convent’s prison, with her left foot chained to the wall, for the next sixty-four days. On April 5, Holy Saturday, the archbishop released her from the prison before a notary and witnesses including the guardian of the Franciscan Missionary College of Propaganda Fide, two Franciscan friars, and two Dominican friars. The Carmelite abbess confirmed for the signed deposition that Sor María Teresa had been imprisoned according to the archbishop’s instructions.86 The sworn statement indicated that they found her chained to the wall in the convent prison, looking emaciated and weak, but with a “serenity and modesty” that revealed a soul that “rests with unshakeable peace and in accordance with the will of God.”87 Her left foot and ankle were inflamed and swollen and she struggled to walk, even with crutches. According to the deposition, the archbishop spoke the Latin verse of Mark 5:41 when Jesus said, “Little girl, I am speaking to you— rise!” Then he commanded Sor María Teresa in Spanish, “In the name of Jesus Christ, I order you, by obedience, to leave the crutches, and walk without them good and healthy.”88 All witnesses agreed that Sor María Teresa stood up at these words and walked without any aid. While the archbishop’s faith in Sor María Teresa was apparently renewed, controversies continued to mount. During the months of mystical crucifixions, Sor María Teresa had received visions urging her to reform her Carmelite convent and other female convents in Guatemala City. She told Fr. Villageliu that she had a vision on June 21, 1816, in which the Virgin Mary told her that it was Jesus’s desire that she found a new convent of Carmelites, “in which the Rule and Constitutions will be observed to the letter of the law.”89 The Carmelites were known to be one of the more austere female religious orders, but Sor María Teresa’s visions called for a return to the absolute poverty and more rigorous seclusion of Saint Teresa of Avila’s original reform efforts. More visions ensued in the following months, and Sor María Teresa understood that her convent should live without fixed rents, be stripped of all material decadence, and limit visitations with family and friends. Another vision left Sor María

152

Chapter Five

Teresa certain that the convent should only have three designated confessors, rather than allow the nuns freedom to choose their confessors.90 By September 1816, Sor María Teresa began promoting reforms not only in her own convent but in all of Guatemala City’s male and female convents, based on divine revelations she received in a series of visions. On September 17, the day of Saint Francis’s stigmata, Sor María Teresa had a vision of the saint in which he bemoaned the state of his religion, the bastard sons of friars, and the disorderly monasteries. The missionary colleges apparently offered some consolation, but in general, Saint Francis communicated to her that his order had lost its way as it compromised its commitment to poverty.91 Through her visions, Sor María Teresa understood that all of Guatemala City’s female convents should embrace the “vida común,” a humble model of convent life based on communal labor and living. Over time, Sor María Teresa’s visions became more specific. One vision revealed whom the Dominican order should elect as their provincial head. Others indicated who should serve as confessors in Guatemala City’s female convents, and who should not. And repeatedly, Sor María Teresa received revelations about the religious professions of local elite single women, if they should profess as nuns, and in which convent.92 Reforming the Church, particularly convents and religious orders, was a recurring theme among visionaries, prophets, and saints dating back to the medieval era.93 Like many other female mystics, Sor María Teresa emulated Saint Teresa of Avila, who had initially reformed the Carmelite order in the sixteenth century. Following Saint Teresa’s original model, Sor María Teresa wanted her Carmelite convent to do away with dowries and fixed rents, so that the nuns might live in absolute poverty and sustain themselves by their own labors. Not only did this plan enforce the spiritual values of humility and poverty, but it also freed convents from the economic and spiritual strings that came with religious foundations endowed by elite families.94 Also like Saint Teresa of Avila, Sor María Teresa sought to limit visitations with family and friends, which entangled nuns in worldly interests and limited their spiritual independence.95 Sor María Teresa’s visionary efforts to reinforce a stricter separation between the Carmelite cloister and the world might seem at odds with the concurrent expansion of active female religious orders. But contemplative religious women often saw their vocation as a form of active service that reaped spiritual benefits and provided a model of virtue for a sin-sick world.96 Indeed, Saint Teresa of Avila promoted her sixteenth-century convent reforms as a missionary response, an “apostolate of prayer” and penitence for an embattled Church, besought by the Protestant Reformation and other heretical movements.97 Sor María Teresa’s visionary calls

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

153

for convent reform similarly responded to a time of unprecedented crises and engaged with broader efforts to purify the Church of worldly corruption, so that it might better provide society with moral guidance.98 Convent reform may have been a common visionary theme, but it was also a notoriously controversial issue. Many nuns preferred relaxed rules and rejected extreme poverty, communal living, and overly rigorous devotional schedules. Guatemala had largely bypassed the era of “vida común” reforms initiated by Mexican bishops in the 1760s and 1770s, which had attempted to strip female convents of material decadence and worldly influences, expelling servants, slaves, and schoolgirls; restricting visitations; and enforcing communal living. The vida común reforms resulted in a firestorm of conflict and controversy. Most Mexican nuns vociferously opposed the reforms and successfully restricted their implementation.99 Guatemala City lacked this experience of trial and error, and its convents thus remained, at least in Sor María Teresa’s view, ripe for reform. But much as in Mexico, Sor María Teresa’s proposed reforms provoked resentment, opposition, and factionalism. Her call to reduce the number of confessors and designate the remaining confessors based on her visions was particularly controversial, in part because it had little precedent. Although Sor María Teresa invoked Saint Teresa of Avila’s original constitutions, her rules regarding confessors clearly deviated from Saint Teresa’s model, which explicitly upheld nuns’ freedom to both choose and change their confessors.100 Nor had the Mexican vida común reforms ever attempted to limit or control nuns’ abilities to choose their own confessors. Sor María Teresa’s experience with spiritual direction may have framed her visionary efforts. Unlike Saint Teresa of Avila, who had suffered the consequences of unsympathetic and antagonistic confessors, Sor María Teresa described only positive experiences of spiritual direction in her 1814 spiritual diary or autobiography.101 By designating her closest clerical allies as the confessors, Sor María Teresa also ensured that the spiritual guidance received by nuns was in alignment with her visionary reform efforts. According to Fr. Villageliu, the archbishop reduced the number of confessors to the Carmelite convent around October 1816 based on the supernatural letters and revelations of Sor María Teresa. Resentment and factionalism within the convent grew quickly. Within weeks, some nuns were complaining about Sor María Teresa’s communication with the archbishop and how it seemed to circumvent internal hierarchies. Some began to question the veracity of her extreme penitence and mystical experiences. Despite these controversies, the archbishop followed Sor María Teresa’s visionary lead the following year, stripping the Carmelite convent of “unnecessary” furniture, images, and saints and expanding

154

Chapter Five

the reform efforts to other convents. According to Fr. Villageliu, the Convent of Santa Catalina had asked for the vida común “since word spread about the mercies that God was bestowing on Mother María Teresa, and therefore were already observing this rule.”102 But the Convent of Concepción appears to have been more reluctant because the archbishop worried about the potential fallout of moving forward with the reforms there. Fr. Villageliu noted that when these reforms were enacted in September 1817, and “many were left without licenses to confess nuns . . . there was no small amount of talk in the city against the archbishop, and the Mother María Teresa, who was presumed to be behind the reform, and almost all of the confessors showed greater aversion toward her extraordinary displays.”103 He further noted that among the confessors who lost their posts was the Inquisition commissary Bernardo Martínez. Mercedarian friar Mariano López Rayón later testified that the restriction of freedom to choose confessors had created tensions and conflicts within the Carmelite convent and among the removed confessors. “The changes that have been made in the convent have increased the number of nuns against the new Rule, which would deprive them of the freedom to choose their confessors, a freedom so favored by Saint Teresa.”104

the inquisition’s investigation As these comments indicate, conflicts were not confined to the cloister. On the same day that the first supernatural letter appeared, Inquisition commissary Padre Bernardo Martínez sent a report about Sor María Teresa to the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in Mexico City.105 News of these strange and marvelous occurrences had already reached the Mexico City tribunal through other channels. When the Holy Office received the Guatemalan commissary’s report in December, it composed a list of questions to guide an investigation into the matter. Padre Martínez received the questionnaire in March 1817 and began interviewing witnesses in what became a drawn-out investigation that lasted until the Spanish Inquisition was closed by royal decree in 1820.106 Padre Martínez’s energetic and sustained investigation of Sor María Teresa reflects the Inquisition’s longstanding suspicion of female mystics, especially those who exhibited extraordinary miraculous displays, gained large devotional followings, and exercised significant power and authority over clerical and lay devotees. Church officials understood all of the supernatural powers exhibited by female mystics—stigmata, ecstasies, trances, visions, revelations, prophecies—as potential signs of holiness, but also as potential signs of demonic possession or fraudulent attempts

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

155

to gain power and prestige. Given theological assumptions about women’s moral and physical weaknesses, as well as their exclusion from official avenues of authority, Church officials believed women were far more vulnerable than men to diabolical influences, as well as more prone to deceitful attempts to claim power and authority. Even the exemplar of female mysticism, Saint Teresa of Avila, faced at least five Inquisitorial investigations in her lifetime, and skeptics continued to argue that she had been manipulated by the devil even as her allies promoted her canonization as a saint.107 Sor María Teresa Aycinena’s mystical displays inspired particular anxieties because they strayed well outside the norm. There were numerous cases of female stigmatics and mystics who experienced ecstasies, but the angelic production of images and words out of blood was far less common. The famous sixteenth-century female mystic and stigmatic Sor María de la Visitación, often referred to as the Nun of Lisbon, produced an image of the cross on pieces of cloth with five drops of blood from the wound in her side, but she was later discredited as a fraud.108 During the early modern period, the Spanish crown sometimes tipped the balance in female mystics’ favor, as it did in the case of Saint Teresa of Avila. But by the eighteenth century, the Bourbon monarchy largely discouraged mystic spirituality in favor of more “rational” forms of religious expression. As a result of Bourbon reforms and the influence of Enlightenment thinking, many Church leaders and Inquisition officials in New Spain increasingly questioned whether mystical displays could ever be a legitimate sign of divine favor. By the late eighteenth century, the Mexican Inquisition, which held jurisdiction over Guatemala, intensified prosecutions of “false” mysticism, which was largely defined at that time as fraudulent displays of mysticism, either actively through personal will or passively through demonic delusion or mental illness.109 While the Inquisition’s investigation of Sor María Teresa clearly reflects these broader trends, it also stands out as unusual in some key respects. The Mexican Inquisition only rarely investigated nuns and never convicted them for false mysticism. Most of the female mystics investigated and prosecuted by the Mexican Inquisition were laywomen, especially independent and non-elite beatas.110 And while Sor María Teresa’s mystical displays were certainly extraordinary, she also perfectly fit the profile of successful female mystics. She was an elite, well-educated, and cloistered nun who was known for her virtue and obedience. Perhaps most importantly, she had the support of not only her confessors but also Guatemala’s powerful prelate and leading clerics and theologians.111 Sor María Teresa’s formidable circle of support made for an unusual Inquisitorial investigation. The Holy Office in Mexico City clearly in-

156

Chapter Five

structed Padre Martínez to proceed with caution and avoid direct confrontation with Archbishop Casaus y Torres.112 Padre Martínez ultimately disregarded the proscribed caution. And yet he also never questioned Sor María Teresa herself, nor did he question any of her confessors, including the archbishop, about the orthodoxy of her mysticism. The archbishop may have used his position to shield Sor María Teresa and her confessors from questioning. Or, Padre Martínez may have sought the testimonies of skeptics in order to establish grounds for a full prosecution. The investigation into Sor María Teresa, and ultimately her clerical allies as well, also seems strange given the political context of the Independence era. The Inquisition enforced religious orthodoxy, but it also explicitly functioned as an instrument of political control. And yet, in a strange political twist, Padre Martinez’s extended investigation directly challenged and potentially undermined the religious and political authority of Guatemala’s most staunch and powerful loyalist, Archbishop Casaus y Torres. Beyond enduring concerns about female mysticism, the Inquisition’s investigation into Sor María Teresa seems to reflect shifting alignments in the complex political landscape of Guatemala during the Independence era. Both Archbishop Casaus y Torres and Padre Martínez had served as important clerical allies to Captain General Bustamante. While Padre Martínez remained closely aligned with José de Bustamante, the archbishop’s support softened by 1815 and he clearly assumed a more conciliatory position toward criollo elites as he promoted devotion toward Sor María Teresa Aycinena. By 1816, a rift had opened between the archbishop and Padre Martínez, who was the only member of the ecclesiastical council, indeed one of the only priests in town, not invited by Archbishop Casaus y Torres to witness Sor María Teresa’s mystical displays.113 It is a striking omission, especially considering that the archbishop invited several representatives of elite criollo families locked in battle with the captain general, as well as known Independence leader and Salvadoran priest José Matías Delgado. If the rift between the archbishop and the Inquisition commissary was partly about shifting political alignments, it also reflected religious tensions and divisions within the Church during the Independence era. Archbishop Casaus y Torres’s encounter with the divine, through Sor María Teresa, led him to embrace an affective, miraculous, and visionary spirituality that deviated from the enlightened and regalist Catholicism that he and other Church leaders had promoted for over half a century. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Archbishop Casaus y Torres’s stance was replicated many times over around the world as some Church leaders embraced and promoted miraculous cults.114 The Inquisition’s investigation into Sor María Teresa, and the conflict that emerged between Arch-

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

157

bishop Casaus y Torres and Padre Martínez, highlights frictions among Church leaders as the enlightened Catholicism of the eighteenth century confronted the nineteenth-century revival of miracles and mystics.

politics, prophecy, and the

pliego

affair

For all the conflicts and controversies surrounding Sor María Teresa, she apparently remained a valuable spiritual ally for the beleaguered criollo community. In early November 1817, elite criollo Don Luis Barrutia asked Sor María Teresa, by way of a message through her brother, to pray about a certain pliego (sealed document) sent by the crown to the Guatemalan audiencia, or high court.115 Captain General Bustamante’s rule was nearly over and his replacement was on the way, but elite criollos, who had lost positions and privileges under Bustamante’s authoritarian reign, had yet to regain their former status. Criollos believed the pliego contained a royal order rebuking the captain general and returning them to their former positions of power and prestige. But because the document was addressed to Guatemala’s audiencia, the criollo city council was not at liberty to open it.116 If elite criollos believed Sor María Teresa might serve as a divine intermediary in their cause, they were gravely disappointed. After praying on the matter, Sor María Teresa relayed the “knowledge that God our Lord communicated to my soul.” “Harm to the republic would follow from presenting it . . . God wants the interested parties to sacrifice their honor, returning it to the King without opening it, that acting in this Christian way, forgiving the insults, God would ensure that the honor of all was fully reestablished.”117 A few days later she amplified her prophetic warning, cautioning that opening the sealed document would result in a destructive civil war in the capital. Indeed, Guatemala City was teetering on the edge of violent conflict by late 1817 as the simmering feud between criollo leaders and the captain general threatened to boil over. By December, José de Bustamante had brought extra militias into the city and placed troops and cannons around his palace, while criollos prepared to riot if the document was left unopened.118 According to Fr. Villageliu’s account, Sor María Teresa implored him and the archbishop to convey her prophetic message to the aggrieved criollo parties and the audiencia officials tasked with opening the document. The archbishop initially appeared reluctant to heed Sor María Teresa’s warnings. But Fr. Villageliu vigorously lobbied elite criollos to stand down, to set aside their pride and honor in the interests of peace, either by leaving the document unopened or by allowing the royal orders to go

158

Chapter Five

unenforced. Criollos rejected Sor María Teresa’s prophetic counsel in no uncertain terms, and they suspected Fr. Villageliu’s lobbying efforts were behind the audiencia’s obstructionism.119 Audiencia officials absented themselves multiple times through the month of November, and without a quorum present, the document remained unopened.120 At some point, Archbishop Casaus y Torres heeded Sor María Teresa’s prophetic vision because at the end of the month he instructed two priests to preach on the matter following the revelations of another “supernatural letter.”121 And on November 27, when all the audiencia officials were finally present and ready to open the document, the archbishop sent them a message pleading to delay the opening in the interests of keeping the peace and allowing the captain general to maintain order. The archbishop then met with the audiencia officials and convinced them to invite Captain General Bustamante to be present when they opened the document to assure the public of the government’s due diligence and stability.122 One modern historian explains the strange absences and delays in opening the document as a “comedy of errors, a drama of the byzantine nature of Spanish colonial administration and the high-stakes conflict between the captain general and the criollo elite.”123 But obviously Sor María Teresa’s prophetic visions and her persistent pressure on Archbishop Casaus y Torres and Fr. Villageliu significantly shaped this incident. Spanish Catholicism had a long tradition of politicized prophets, particularly during times of crisis and unsettling change. While some prophets explicitly challenged officials, others served as valuable allies and advisors for the Spanish crown and Church.124 In this case, Sor María Teresa’s prophetic revelations aligned with the position of Spanish American clerics like Archbishop Casaus y Torres attempting to play the role of moral arbiters who could reconcile differences and possibly thwart outbreaks of political violence or even civil war. Sor María Teresa’s religious experience and identity buttressed her prophetic stance. From her spiritual perspective, it was no betrayal to ask her family and community to willingly sacrifice their privileges, out of obedience to God, and in service of the greater good. She herself clearly rejected the trappings of the world—honor, wealth, titles, privileges—and fervently embraced obedience, hierarchy, and authority. While Church officials generally accepted that prophecy was a common gift among female mystics, most holy women’s revelations involved spiritual matters such as the fate of souls in Purgatory or convent reform. Political prophecies like Sor María Teresa’s were less common and always carried greater risk of controversy.125 And indeed, the pliego incident was ultimately a political disaster for Sor María Teresa, the archbishop, and their allies. When the audiencia finally opened the document on De-

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

159

cember 15, 1817, the criollo elite savored their political victory and the captain general’s humiliating defeat. The enclosed royal decree not only returned their titles and positions but also condemned José de Bustamante’s conduct and falsifications. It furthermore instructed officials to publicize the royal repudiation of the captain general in Guatemala City and all the provincial capitals.126 Sor María Teresa’s prophetic warnings about the crisis that would befall the city if they opened the document never came to pass. Elite criollos apparently saw her efforts, and those of the archbishop and Fr. Villageliu, to keep the document sealed in the interest of stability and peace as a betrayal and explicit alignment with the muchdespised captain general. Even Sor María Teresa’s own mother offered her a sharp rebuke in the aftermath of the pliego affair. When Sor María Teresa communicated new visions to her mother about who should be elected provincial head of the Dominican order and personal matters such as her brothers’ travels and marriages, her mother responded, “Thank God I am not obligated to govern myself based on revelations.”127 The pliego incident also worsened relations with the Inquisition commissary, Padre Bernardo Martínez. During the controversy, Sor María Teresa claimed to receive, through divine revelation, word that Captain General Bustamante should cease to communicate with the Inquisition commissary because his counsel led to error. Fr. Villageliu lobbied the captain general accordingly, apparently to little avail.128 But a few weeks later, in January 1818, Padre Martínez resumed the Inquisitorial investigation with renewed vigor, interviewing multiple priests and friars, after months of inactivity. This time around, Padre Martínez largely ignored the Mexico City tribunal’s instructions to avoid publicity and scandal. Although he continued to avoid a direct confrontation with the archbishop, Padre Martínez targeted a Dominican friar who had published some conclusions and a hymn regarding Sor María Teresa’s marvels. Padre Martínez confiscated approximately 130 of the published copies and forbade any future publications celebrating Sor María Teresa’s apparent miracles or revelations.129 He then attempted to depose Fr. Villageliu, who as official censor had reviewed the hymn and approved it for publication. According to Padre Martínez, Fr. Villageliu refused to cooperate by feigning illness. Fr. Villageliu related a different version of the encounter. He told multiple witnesses that Padre Martínez had pulled him out of the confessional and threatened him with excommunication and suspension if he did not cooperate. Fr. Villageliu countered that this was “a matter, which does not correspond to the Holy Office, but to His Grace the archbishop” and refused to be silent about their interview, which was conducted without an official notary present.130 According to Fr. Villageliu’s account, by the end of March 1818, Padre Martínez placed him and the Dominican

160

Chapter Five

author of the hymn, Fr. Antonio Toledano, under house arrest for several months in the Mercedarian convent and Franciscan missionary college, respectively.131 The fallout from the pliego affair heightened skepticism about Sor María Teresa among other priests as well. While Mercedarian friar Mariano López Rayón had conducted an extensive spiritual examination of Sor María Teresa in 1816 and authenticated her mystical experiences, he expressed doubts when called to testify before Padre Martínez in February 1818. Specifically referencing the pliego incident, he noted: said nun, by way of Villageliu, made great efforts so that they would not open it (the pliego) because doing so would result in terrible damage, all of which turned out to be false, and to have said that Jesus Christ had assured her that the wicked would not believe her for their greater damnation is very repugnant, it is repugnant to claim that disbelieving a private revelation could be motive for greater damnation: all of this inclines this witness to believe the said nun is passively ilusa (false mystic).132

He concluded “that I am inclined to believe that there is much illusion in the miracles and deeds of Sor Maria Teresa,” although he had no doubt about her virtuous conduct.133 Fr. López Rayón also noted in his 1818 testimony that “the people are divided in their opinions about the veracity of Sor María Teresa Aycinena’s miracles and deeds.” He went on to imply that class, and perhaps gender, framed skepticism and devotion, commenting, “It appears to me that the majority of educated people do not believe.”134 Again, Fr. López Rayón’s assessment seems to reflect Enlightenment discourses, which disparaged certain religious beliefs and practices through association with non-elites and women. But his observations about class and gendered divisions are also plausible. Elite criollos, men in particular, were especially aggrieved by Sor María Teresa’s role in the pliego incident. The profession of fifteen elite criolla women into Sor María Teresa’s reformed Carmelite rule in 1818 suggests that perhaps elite women remained more devoted than their male peers. Fr. Villageliu explicitly noted that Doña María Concepción Urruela, the first woman to profess under Sor María Teresa’s reformed rule, did so against her father’s wishes and without his help.135 Devotion may also have endured among Guatemala City’s nonelite residents. Indeed, urban artisans may have supported Captain General Bustamante, or at least some of his policies that protected them from a flood of cheap foreign imports.136 Furthermore, unlike elite criollos, non-elites were not directly affected by the pliego incident, and they may have appreciated Sor María Teresa’s spiritual efforts and extraordinary penitential acts in the interests of peace and stability.

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

161

the archbishop and the nun: faith, suspicion, and spiritual authority The nature of Sor María Teresa’s mystical displays raised doubts even for Archbishop Casaus y Torres. Although Inquisition records and modern historical analyses portray the archbishop’s support for the Carmelite nun as unwavering, Fr. Villageliu’s daily account of events paints a more anguished portrait of vacillations between faith and suspicion. In February 1818, in the aftermath of the pliego affair, Archbishop Casaus y Torres ordered the Carmelite nuns to strip Sor María Teresa’s convent cell of everything, including her bed and curtains, and to observe her ecstasies in order to rule out fraud.137 That same month, he ordered Fr. José Mariano Méndez to conduct another spiritual examination. Like earlier spiritual examiners, Fr. Méndez authenticated the veracity of Sor María Teresa’s mystical displays and concluded that she “is one of those privileged and favored souls of God, that she does not know self-love,” and that her ecstasies and visions were “inspired by God and not suggested by the devil, nor driven by a corrupt nature.”138 Still, the archbishop’s doubts persisted. According to Fr. Villageliu’s account, in August 1818, Archbishop Casaus y Torres shared his concerns with Franciscan missionary friar Félix Castro. He specifically referenced the frequency and multitude of revelations and extraordinary things, spelling mistakes in the letters, and her claims that five million souls had been taken out of Purgatory when he celebrated a Mass at her convent church. It seems he still believed he had encountered the divine through Sor María Teresa, but he also noted in his conversation with Fr. Castro that even legitimate prophets and saints could be confused by the devil at times.139 The archbishop’s uncertainty continued for years, apparently aggravated by the ongoing Inquisition investigation and the heightened skepticism of some Guatemalan clerics. Even as he allowed fifteen novices to enter the Carmelite convent under Sor María Teresa’s new Rule, Archbishop Casaus y Torres also ordered new rounds of spiritual examinations and depositions, changed her confessors, and prohibited lay devotees from sending handkerchiefs and estampas (cheap prints with images of saints) to the convent to collect miraculous imprints.140 For a time he visited Sor María Teresa’s cell every day during her ecstasies, but at one point he commanded her to hide herself during these episodes because the devil might be at work in her displays. In early 1820, the Inquisition demanded that Archbishop Casaus y Torres have tests conducted to verify Sor María Teresa’s stigmata, including medical attempts to cure them. The doctors ultimately reported that the stigmatic wounds were self-inflicted. During this time, the archbishop cut off all communication

162

Chapter Five

with the Carmelite nun and placed the convent under the stern watch of Padre Antonio Croquer, who tested Sor María Teresa’s humility and obedience, requiring her to follow dictates, such as wearing shoes, that contradicted her own spiritual revelations.141 The Inquisition tribunal in Mexico City ultimately determined the case to be one of false mysticism, caused by illness or diabolical illusion.142 Sor María Teresa’s bold assertions of spiritual authority further added to the archbishop’s unease and doubts. Most early modern female mystics followed Saint Teresa of Avila’s gendered rhetoric emphasizing their humility, female ignorance, and obedience to confessors as a way of navigating clerical fears about female mystics’ claims to spiritual power. 143 But Sor María Teresa deviated from that model and instead increasingly claimed her own spiritual authority established through divine revelation. For example, the archbishop specifically expressed doubts about Sor María Teresa’s revelation that the pope’s abolition of the Jesuit order had been a mistake.144 When the king approved her new Carmelite Rule in November 1819 but rejected her plans to subsist without fixed rents, Sor María Teresa urged Archbishop Casaus y Torres to appeal the ruling. The archbishop sharply rebuked her for lack of obedience, arguing that “the will of the king is the will of God.”145 Sor María Teresa later told Fr. Villageliu “that the Holy Mother had told her, that she should no longer say anything to His Grace, because he did not do what she had ordered.”146 A few months later, she attempted to circumvent both archbishop and crown by pushing her case for convent reforms directly with the pope. She asked Fr. Villageliu to write a letter to Rome about her convent rule and the importance of remaining barefoot, without rents, and without internal hierarchies.147 Around the same time, she wrote a letter to the archbishop, openly protesting what she perceived as the pernicious effects of Padre Croquer’s oversight of the Carmelite convent. “The Vicar is not suited to any convent, nor as a confessor to these nuns. His heart is good and he is not malicious, but his understanding is blinded by the influences within the convent and through the will or permission of God. The damage to these souls is significant.”148 She went on, laying the responsibility at the feet of the archbishop, who had placed Padre Croquer in this position, and pointedly advising him on how to proceed. “For Your Grace to surrender the faithful of Jesus Christ to a stranger has left them devastated, left the souls in an excess of iniquity and passions. . . . Your Grace should take Padre Villageliu as your advisor and come to an accord with him.”149 In May 1820, she wrote the archbishop another letter, in which she declared, “There are only five apostolic men among all those who call themselves friends of God,” and “I am an instrument of Divine providence,

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

163

and I speak although I do not wish to.”150 And in the aftermath of Independence, Sor María Teresa boldly rebuked Archbishop Casaus y Torres for what she perceived as an insufficiently assertive response to liberal and anticlerical policies. “Your Grace’s conduct . . . is alien to that of a true shepherd, as you have moved too far from your flock, you banish yourself and run away from protecting them, and you hide when there is notice of pillaging wolves or cruel mercenaries. . . . Your Grace is dominated by fear, which brings with it the other three passions, and in this way your soul is captivated and you do not have the freedom to govern your flock in the way God intended.”151 These post-Independence conflicts provoked new doubts for both Archbishop Casaus y Torres and Fr. Anselmo Ortiz, Sor María Teresa’s longtime confessor and supporter. According to Fr. Villageliu’s account, the archbishop perceived Sor Maria Teresa’s 1824 letter as a threat and a sign that she had given into her passions. And Fr. Ortiz negatively contrasted Sor María Teresa to the gendered model of female sanctity, Saint Teresa of Avila, who never “troubled herself, nor asked questions, nor argued, nor insisted on her revelations, on the contrary when she found . . . that no one believed her and everyone scorned her revelations, she felt a supreme pleasure and she gave thanks to God.”152 And yet, remarkably the archbishop, as well as Fr. Ortiz, continued to vacillate through the 1820s, consulting with Sor María Teresa about her divine revelations, while still worrying whether their origins were divine or diabolical. Archbishop Casaus y Torres also continued to gather documentation in support of her cause as a holy woman and potential saint. In 1825, the archbishop asked Fr. Ortiz to compile a “Short report about Mother María Teresa’s spirit.”153 And as late as 1835, Archbishop Casaus y Torres, while in political exile in Cuba, wrote a brief preface verifying Fr. Villageliu’s extensive and laudatory “Diary of the extraordinary things of Madre María Teresa.” He intimated hopes of an eventual canonization process, noting that he had safeguarded all the documentation regarding Sor María Teresa and wanted to authenticate Fr. Villageliu’s account in case “at some point it makes sense to make use of these and other guarded papers.”154 The tensions between Sor María Teresa and Archbishop Casaus y Torres illuminate the complexity of their alliance and the broader ­nineteenth-century Catholic revival. As Edward Wright-Rios puts it, the nineteenth-century clerical embrace of miracles, apparitions, prophecies, and holy people was “fraught with tension” and marked by messy internal negotiations as nuns and laywomen, as well as indigenous, mixed-race, and non-elite populations “advanced their own interpretations of Catholicism.”155 Given these tensions and Sor María Teresa’s

164

Chapter Five

clear ­deviations from early modern gendered norms of sanctity, why did Archbishop Casaus y Torres continue to support her? Unfortunately, the archbishop left no hagiographical account of his own, no firsthand explanation of his complicated relationship with Sor María Teresa. Clearly, their enduring alliance cannot simply be explained as a political machination given that Sor María Teresa’s prophetic counsel was often far from politically expedient. Like many priests who formed spiritual relationships with holy women, Archbishop Casaus y Torres seems to have been powerfully drawn to Sor María Teresa’s apparently direct access to God. This spiritual attraction was often rooted in the priest’s perception of contrast and opposition between himself and the holy woman, his belief that she had spiritual gifts that he fundamentally lacked.156 For the archbishop, Sor María Teresa’s prophetic certainty surely contrasted with his own acute crisis of confidence. Like so many of his contemporaries during the Independence era, Archbishop Casaus y Torres appears to have suffered a profound uncertainty as the Church faced unprecedented challenges. Thus, even as he was troubled by Sor María Teresa’s profuse revelations and assertive claims to authority, he also seems drawn to her unwavering certainty and righteousness. Similarly, the dramatic weakening of the Church’s institutional power likely made her access to informal spiritual powers all the more attractive. And for a man deeply immersed in politics, and all the negotiating and compromising inherent to such business, Sor María Teresa’s zealous and uncompromising prophetic stances were troubling but probably attractive as well. The appeal was surely heightened in the late 1820s when all of Archbishop Casaus y Torres’s attempts at political negotiation and compromise failed miserably, resulting in his 1829 exile alongside all of Guatemala’s male religious orders, hundreds of friars in total. Ultimately, the institutional weakness of the Guatemalan Church during the Independence era seems to have created a window for more assertive female claims to spiritual power and authority. And like many other nineteenth-century priests, Archbishop Casaus y Torres was also likely drawn to the apostolic effects of Sor María Teresa’s mystical displays and miraculous healings.157 Evidence certainly suggests that popular devotion toward Sor María Teresa endured alongside heightened skepticism. When he testified before Inquisition commissary Padre Bernardo Martínez in 1818, Mercedarian friar Mariano José López Rayón noted how the Carmelite convent continued to provide devotees with water that had touched or come into close proximity to Sor María Teresa.158 Residents also continued to bring handkerchiefs and cheap images of saints to the Carmelite convent in the hope that these humble items might become miraculous relics through simple contact with the

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

165

holy woman or by acquisition of a bloodstained image. In 1819, Archbishop Casaus y Torres attempted to prohibit this devotional practice, and a year later Padre Croquer, as director of the Carmelite convent, attempted to prohibit requests for water. Apparently, these prohibitions failed. By 1820, Archbishop Casaus y Torres relented, because people continued to show up at the convent asking for water to heal sick loved ones, and the nuns continued to oblige them.159 Indeed, devotion to Sor María Teresa continued well beyond the confines of Guatemala City. In 1820, the aforementioned Carmelite nun from the distant northern city of Guadalajara requested a painting from the angels, or any item touched by the holy woman. In 1821, Sor María Teresa’s fellow Carmelite told Fr. Villageliu that “the people, both within the city and outside it, brought handkerchiefs and similar things so that the Mother María Teresa would use the items and then return them, and these items could then be used to treat illnesses and grant relief.”160 It appears these devotional practices endured for decades, because when Sor María Teresa died in 1842, Padre José María Navarro’s eulogizing publication noted that she “was generally loved and esteemed for her enormous virtues, especially for the great charity that she exercised daily with all those who arrived to the grille to beg for help with their needs.” And when word got out that she was on her deathbed, “the grille and doorway were filled with all kinds of people who arrived to find out about their Mother.”161 Other sources explicitly highlighted the apostolic effects of Sor María Teresa’s mystical displays, penitence, and convent reforms. When Franciscan missionary friar Mariano Pérez de Jesús spiritually examined Sor María Teresa in 1819, he pointed to her healing capacities, describing her as “Universal Mother and Solace for the poor, sick, and needy.” But he also underscored her apostolic effects, “inspiring the piety of her family members and many other people . . . how many young people of both sexes have found placement in colegios, conservatories, or houses of virtue.”162 It is impossible to confirm whether Sor María Teresa had any effect on the number of children entering pious schools and houses. But sources hint at a devotional relationship between Sor María Teresa and the pious laywoman running the Colegio de Pinula in the early 1820s. According to Fr. Villageliu’s account, Sor María Teresa relayed communications to Pinula’s lay director, Doña Ignacia Muñoz. And when Doña Ignacia died in 1822, Sor María Teresa told Fr. Villageliu that she had a vision confirming that the laywoman would spend only eight days in Purgatory.163 The abolition of the Spanish Inquisition in 1820 also eliminated a key source of skeptical scrutiny, which had aggravated Archbishop Casaus y

166

Chapter Five

Torres’s doubts about Sor María Teresa. According to Fr. Villageliu’s account, the archbishop immediately lifted restrictions on Sor María Teresa and allowed her to direct novices again on receiving word that the Spanish crown had abolished the Inquisition in 1820. “This news moved His Grace to provide relief to Madre Maria Teresa, since the (Holy) Tribunal no longer existed.”164 The end of the Inquisition reflected a shift in the balance of power between the sometimes-conflicting interests of evangelization and enforcement of orthodoxy within the Church. Apostolic movements regularly pushed at orthodoxy’s boundaries, for example when missionaries allied with poor single women and supported exuberant and affective forms of spirituality, while the Inquisition and other Church leaders often pushed back on this missionary zeal. Nineteenthcentury trends swayed the balance heavily in the direction of evangelism and clerical engagement in popular devotional forms, at least for a time. In the case of Archbishop Casaus y Torres, the end of the Spanish Inquisition in the Americas clearly facilitated his open endorsement of Sor María Teresa and her miraculous displays.

gender, religion, and independence politics In their passing references to Sor María Teresa, historians suggest that she offered spiritual support to the conservative political schemes of the Aycinena clan and Archbishop Casaus y Torres.165 But in the years leading up to Independence, a clear political divide opened between Sor María Teresa and elite criollos, including members of her own family. While the Aycinenas and other elite criollo leaders urged the new captain general in 1818 to enforce constitutional rights such as freedom of the press, and supported the liberal newspaper El Editorial Constitucional, which became the explicitly pro-Independence journal El Gremio de la Libertad, Sor María Teresa wrote a letter to the king in 1820 arguing that freedom of the press was “not suitable for the faith, nor for your Majesty, because among them are insurgents and Calvinists.”166 As elite criollos decided for Independence in the summer of 1821, Sor María Teresa resolutely advised Archbishop Casaus y Torres that Guatemala’s priests should preach against the insurgency and “publish an excommunication against those who continue in the political parties that have formed in this city because of the popular elections ordered by the constitution.”167 A city council meeting in June 1821 underscored the extent of the schism. The criollo city council members rejected the earlier ruling about the marvelous nature of images created with Sor María Teresa’s stigmatic blood. “That far from there being anything miraculous in the impressions . . . one rather

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

167

perceives in the events that motivated it superstition that captivating the public offend true religion, adding to these points the total lack of tests done to verify the miraculous nature of the events.”168 Three months later, the Aycinena clan and their allies in both Spain and Guatemala celebrated Independence, while Sor María Teresa noted despondently, “Independence is a punishment from God and so there is nothing else to do but suffer.”169 Sor María Teresa’s steadfast loyalism may have placed her at odds with her family and the elite criollo community, but her perspectives coincided with those of many non-elite groups. Unlike parts of Mexico and other Central American provinces like San Salvador and Nicaragua, Guatemala largely lacked a popular movement for Independence as its laboring communities, both indigenous and mixed-race, mostly remained loyal to Spain. Guatemala City’s artisans and store owners benefited from royal trade policies, and native communities valued the level of autonomy and protection ensured by Spanish colonialism.170 Much as one recent study finds for certain Mexican regions, Guatemala’s popular loyalism, which evolved into a popular conservatism in the nineteenth century, also seems to have reflected well-developed networks connecting non-elites and priests and the sustained imprint of missionary movements.171 As a staunch loyalist, Sor María Teresa also joined other prominent elite Spanish American women, like María Antonia Bolívar, sister to famed Independence leader Simón Bolívar, who broke with their families and opposed Independence. In so doing, they resisted not only Independence from Spain but also republicanism, a form of government that some feminist scholars argue “was constructed against women, not just without them,” because it involved “a purging of the female from the body politic” and “stark divisions between public and private, political and domestic.”172 In Sor María Teresa’s case, she also vehemently resisted republicanism’s separation of sacred and secular, spiritual and political. If Sor María Teresa Aycinena and her family diverged ideologically before Independence, shifting political alignments reunited them in the early years of nation building. During the debates over Independence, the Aycinena clan, as well as other elite criollos, broke with some of their liberal allies and opted for a constitutional monarchy, supporting annexation to Mexico rather than a Central American Republic. The schism widened when Central America broke off from Mexico in 1824, and some elite criollos, including the Aycinenas, favored centralized government over a federalist system. At the same time, an acrimonious battle erupted over San Salvador’s efforts to establish its own independent bishopric, a move that Archbishop Casaus y Torres vehemently opposed. The Aycinena clan and other elites supported the archbishop’s position, but the liberal fed-

168

Chapter Five

eral government of Central America sided with San Salvador in 1825. Partisan lines between conservatives and liberals hardened as rancorous antiliberal and anticlerical sentiments intensified on respective sides of the divide. Conservative supporters of Archbishop Casaus y Torres labeled liberals as heretics and enemies of the Church, while liberals portrayed their opponents as “vicious men who were inciting Central Americans to war,” acting like “agents of the King of Spain.”173 A situation involving a nun under Sor María Teresa’s reformed Carmelite rule further inflamed partisan passions in 1824. In March of that year, Sor María Ignacia Mercedes Payes requested permission from the National Assembly to rescind her vows, leave the Carmelite convent, and move to the Santa Clara convent.174 According to Church law, nuns’ vows were permanent and immutable, but the liberal assembly supported Sor María Ignacia’s petition. Their support reflected broader liberal attitudes regarding Church law, and female convents in particular. Latin American liberals in the decades after Independence saw female convents as virtual prisons and assumed that force and coercion were behind young women’s religious professions.175 According to Fr. Villageliu’s account, the Assembly won the battle and transferred Sor María Ignacia to the Santa Clara convent, after threatening to send troops into the Carmelite convent.176 By 1824, the Aycinena family, as well as Archbishop Casaus y Torres and members of Guatemala’s religious orders, became the principal enemies of Central America’s ruling liberals. So was born an enduring, if inaccurate, narrative about how the conservative Aycinena clan and Archbishop Casaus y Torres had colluded since 1816, using Sor María Teresa as a pawn for their political schemes. A pamphlet published in El Salvador in 1824, in the midst of the Salvadoran bishopric battle, directly charged members of the religious hierarchy with cynically using the Carmelite nun to manipulate the population in order to thwart the Independence movement. “The scandalously puppeteered miracles attributed to the innocent and naïve Mother Teresa from 1815 to 1820 made the humble people make an idol of her and believe the episode was the work of angels . . . all with the pernicious goals of making the people believe that to resist the crown was to distance themselves from their altars.”177 The pamphlet highlights how Sor María Teresa became embroiled in regional as well as partisan politics in the aftermath of Independence. The Salvadoran province’s battle for its own bishopric and its attitude toward Sor María Teresa reflected deep-seated tensions between Central America’s capital city and the provinces. Central American provinces had long resented Guatemala City’s monopoly over political, religious, and economic power. To these regional grievances were added resentments about Guatemala City’s construction costs, which forcibly depleted pro-

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

169

vincial coffers for decades after the 1773 earthquake.178 The Salvadoran provinces had further cause to resent the capital city. El Salvador was the ­center of indigo production, but merchants in Guatemala City, particularly the Aycinena clan, had reaped most of the benefits of the indigo trade as they controlled access to markets, credit, and materials. As the indigo trade declined in the early nineteenth century, Aycinena merchants and other elite criollo merchant families in Guatemala City continued to reap rewards, while Salvadoran producers bore the brunt of the decline.179

covenant theology and popular conservatism By 1826, Guatemala and El Salvador were engulfed in a full-blown civil war, which lasted three years and ended when Honduran liberal Francisco Morazán and his band of provincial troops from Nicaragua and El Salvador laid siege to Guatemala City and defeated its coalition government of liberals and conservatives. So began the first liberal era in Central America, which lasted from 1829 to 1838. The plan was “everything new, everything Republican,” and “nothing of the colonial monarchical system.”180 The liberal government immediately and forcibly exiled Archbishop Casaus y Torres and hundreds of friars, shutting down Guatemala’s male religious orders. Through most of the 1830s, liberal leaders pushed forward broad reforms aimed at modernizing Central America economically and culturally, reforming the legal code, and removing the Catholic Church from its traditional position of economic, political, and cultural power. Not all embraced the liberal vision and military repression was used to enforce unwelcome laws. As Lowell Gudmundson puts it, early Central American liberals suffered from an endemic “inability to develop a series of images, an identity, a discourse capable of galvanizing mass support.”181 In 1837, a devastating and poorly handled cholera epidemic and news that liberal leaders had granted large tracts of arable land to a British company triggered Indian revolts throughout the country. That same year, an organized rebellion began in eastern Guatemala that challenged the legitimacy of the liberal state. Rafael Carrera, a former pig herder of mixed-race heritage, led the troops. According to one observer, Carrera’s followers took the capital and entered the plaza shouting, “Long live religion, and death to foreigners.”182 The beginning of Carrera’s conservative rule coincided with the permanent fracturing of the Central American federation and Guatemala’s emergence as a distinct nation state. Carrera’s conservative reign lasted thirty years, until 1868, and during that time most of the liberal laws of the 1830s were overturned and the Catholic Church recuperated many of

170

Chapter Five

its colonial privileges. Guatemala’s clergy, particularly Sor María Teresa’s nephew, Don Juan José de Aycinena, played a leading role in developing Guatemala’s national identity through religious images, symbols, and narratives. But they notably declined to invoke Sor María Teresa as a unifying sacred symbol for the country. Like certain Marian images in Mexico, Sor María Teresa’s close association with loyalism and divisive partisan politics ultimately undermined her position as a shared symbol of national identity.183 Beyond politics, she also carried substantial religious baggage as well, including a long history of ambivalence toward female mystics, the unusual nature of her mystical displays, the Church’s divided stance, and the legacies of the Inquisition’s investigation. And yet Sor María Teresa’s devotees also helped lay the foundation for what Douglass Sullivan-González describes as the “covenant theology” at the heart of Guatemala’s emerging national identity. During the Carrera reign, Guatemalan sermons developed the idea of God’s divine pact or covenant with the Guatemalan nation. In particular, clergy emphasized Guatemala’s “blessed and chosen” status among nations because it achieved Independence peacefully. They also stressed the moral and religious responsibilities incumbent on Guatemala’s chosen people in order to sustain their blessings. Sullivan-Gonzalez notes that the “first hint of this theology” can be traced back to José María Castilla’s sermon during the Independence debates.184 But in fact, the first pioneers of a Guatemalan covenant theology appear to be Sor María Teresa’s clerical devotees. As early as 1819, Propaganda Fide friar Mariano Pérez de Jesús emphasized Sor María Teresa’s spiritual efforts to ensure the city’s tranquility: “Ah how many words of advice! How many letters! How much work by way of confessors and other persons in order to achieve this end! How much crying, praying, suffering, and battling with God for public tranquility, for the health, freedom, and reestablishment of Our Holy Father Pius VII and our Catholic King Don Fernando VII and the pacification of his kingdoms.”185 He went on to credit her with Guatemala’s privileged immunity from the violent insurgencies raging to the north and south. “I believe that this part of the world is in debt to Madre María Teresa for the unexpected resolution of many of its problems, and that greater problems have not arrived, because I am certain, that she has incessantly solicited God with the tears of her eyes and the blood of her innocent body.”186 Sor María Teresa’s longtime confessor, Fr. Anselmo Ortiz, similarly portrayed the Carmelite nun as responsible for the divine protection enjoyed by Guatemala during the wars for Independence. In his 1825 hagiographical account of her life, Fr. Ortiz wrote: “This is not an exaggeration, God himself revealed that if this soul had not been in the

The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

171

middle, Guatemala would have felt the sword of divine justice as have experienced all of Europe and America, since our faults, our vices and scandals, if they are not greater than those of other lands, are at least equal.”187 Although Fr. Ortiz was writing during the time of the Central American Republic, he clearly expressed a Guatemalan nationalism and portrayed Sor María Teresa as special divine intermediary for Guatemala. Underscoring Guatemala’s nationalistic claim to Sor María Teresa amid regional hostilities, Fr. Ortiz noted, “it is well known all that the Salvadorans have invented to destroy her, finish her, and annihilate her.”188 Fr. Ortiz went on to affirm, “If God did not punish Guatemala as he did the other peoples of America, it has been because Madre María Teresa, as in other times, liberated her country from ruin, the same as she has done for the Guatemalan people, although she suffered so many evils and persecutions from them. . . . God heard her prayers as he always does.”189

conclusion Politics clearly framed Sor María Teresa’s story from the beginning, although not in the way nineteenth-century liberals and modern historians have generally assumed. In the years leading up to Independence, Archbishop Casaus y Torres and elite criollos, including the Aycinena clan, were on opposite sides of Guatemala’s political battle lines. While elite criollos apparently saw in Sor María Teresa a sign of divine favor in their bitter feud with the captain general, it appears Archbishop Casaus y Torres saw an opportunity for divinely inspired political reconciliation. Sor María Teresa’s own position evolved significantly over time and repeatedly demonstrated a marked independence from both her elite criollo family and her clerical supporters. Early on, she resisted efforts by confessors and the archbishop to draw out political revelations. But by 1817, Sor María Teresa’s visions and prophecies led her to intervene directly, or at least through clerical intermediaries, in a political standoff between criollos and the captain general. Sor María Teresa’s efforts were a political disaster and left a deep rift between her and the elite criollo community, a rift that only widened when they opted for Independence, while Sor María Teresa remained a staunch loyalist. In the immediate aftermath of Independence, political alignments shifted again and a more natural alliance formed between elite criollos, Archbishop Casaus y Torres, and Sor María Teresa. But still, under the surface of that alliance, tensions simmered, as Sor María Teresa challenged the archbishop and other clerics over their conciliatory efforts with liberals.

172

Chapter Five

This was also a profoundly religious story from the beginning. Sor María Teresa Aycinena’s imitation of Christ and mystical displays tapped into a deep well of local devotion to Jesus’s Passion, angels, and miraculous relics. Even as this story highlights enduring continuities of religious experience and expression, it also reflects shifts in local and global Catholicism. Like many of his generation, Archbishop Casaus y Torres had been an enlightened reformer within the Catholic Church, advocating for a less emotional and physical faith. But in the face of nineteenth-century crises, many clerics like Archbishop Casaus y Torres embraced a renewal of affective piety and miraculous cults. These devotional forms had long been popular among women and created spaces for female claims to spiritual authority. Much as in Europe where laboring single women were among the most enthusiastic participants in nineteenth-century miraculous devotions, they also appear to have been at the forefront of Sor María Teresa’s devotional following. This was not a response to their marginalized status, as some have suggested for Europe, but rather reflected non-elite single women’s central role in Guatemala City’s local religion and active devotional networks with priests and religious orders. The next chapter further explores how laboring single women responded to the weakening of the Catholic Church, narrower feminine ideals, and the profound politicization of religion and gendered devotional networks in post-Independence Guatemala.

chapter six

“With Knives Drawn” Gender, Devotion, and Politics After Independence

; In 1850, María Cesaría Bolaños fell sick and called the local notary José María Gavarrete to make out her will.1 It’s unclear how long María Cesaría had lived in Guatemala City, but she was originally from San Salvador. While the term doncella or “maiden” had fallen out of use, some single women in midnineteenth-century Guatemala City described themselves as de estado honesto (of an honest state) or as “celibate.” But María Cesaría declined to classify her unmarried status in these moral terms and simply left her civil status blank. Like many of her contemporaries, she was also silent about burial preferences. Since the 1830s, federal law had prohibited church burials, so María Cesaría would necessarily be laid to rest in a cemetery. She was more forthcoming about work, indicating that she owned a small market stall on the plaza. One nineteenth-century writer described these stalls as “primitive” structures selling an odd mix of wares from baskets and bullets to rope and gunpowder.2 Besides some clothes and dishes, the only other belongings María Cesaría listed were religious images, including several beloved images of the Virgin Mary. She wished to leave a favored image of Our Lady of the Incarnation to her sister along with her clothes and dishes. She further indicated that her image of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, which included a crown of silver weighing fifty ounces, should go to the Carmelite Convent of Santa Teresa so that it could be “kept and venerated” by the nuns. Perhaps her devotional relationship with the Carmelite convent began during the mystical displays of Sor María Teresa Aycinena, who had died in the convent less than ten years prior. At the end of her will, María Cesaría named a priest as her executor and noted that she did not know how to sign her name.

174

Chapter Six

The world in which María Cesaría lived and died remains something of a mystery for historians. If most of the Central American history has received scant scholarly attention compared to other parts of Latin America, the decades following Independence are the most poorly documented. 3 Scholarship on women in nineteenth-century Guatemala is virtually nonexistent, and the studies that do exist mainly focus on the late nineteenth century.4 In some ways, little changed for laboring single women like María Cesaría after Independence. Civil codes governing marriage and property laws remained largely the same until the Liberal Reform era of the 1870s, with some temporary exceptions during the first era of liberal rule in the 1830s. Census data is lacking for the midnineteenth century, but Guatemala’s capital apparently remained a city of women, and women like María Cesaría continued to dominate much of the city’s petty commerce in the streets, plazas, and markets. The urban demographic imbalance continued to make for a dismal marriage market for women, and many women never married or spent years living as independent widows. Studies of other regions in nineteenth-century Latin America suggest that where change occurred for Guatemalan women, it was probably for the worse, particularly for non-elite women. Amid the chaos and conflict that followed in the wake of Independence, new states attempted to reestablish order by shoring up the power of patriarchal household heads. Nineteenth-century courts were thus less inclined than their colonial counterparts to intervene in marital or conjugal disputes.5 Others point out that liberal reforms such as the secularization of laws governing marriage and sex also frequently disadvantaged women by eliminating pressure on men to marry or financially compensate lovers and pay child support for illegitimate children, by creating a new gendered double standard for adultery cases, and by enhancing husbands’ power and authority over wives.6 Heightened concern about female sexuality led to greater efforts to police and enforce stricter morality, particularly among nonelite women. Post-Independence Latin American states did emphasize the valuable social role played by mothers in the cultivation of an educated and virtuous citizenry, but the feminine ideal of Republican Motherhood mostly benefited middle-class and elite women. As Sarah Chambers puts it, while elite women could claim to be “arbiters of morality in the public sphere as well as the home,” laboring women could never live up to the ideal of Republican Motherhood.7 The realities facing non-elite women in Guatemala City in the decades after Independence were complex and often contradictory. On the one hand, the weakening of the Church, particularly the decline of confraternities and pastoral instability, undermined traditional forms of spiritual and social support for laboring women. But at the same time, the pitched

“With Knives Drawn”

175

battles between liberals and conservatives provided laboring women with new ways of establishing moral status and spiritual authority through their defense of the faith. Their actions shaped the development of popular conservatism in Guatemala and helped lay the foundation for Rafael Carrera’s rise to power and the long conservative era (1838–1871). As the Guatemalan Church rebuilt in the 1850s and 1860s, Marian piety, lay female initiatives, and renewed collaboration between non-elite single women and Jesuit missionaries created new devotional opportunities for laboring women in Guatemala City. These local opportunities illuminate profound shifts within the global Catholic Church, as officials relied heavily on female support to navigate the rapid changes and challenges brought by the modern era and largely abandoned early modern restrictions on active lay female religiosity. But at the same time, the Church also renewed its emphasis on female sexual purity, and some new devotional opportunities excluded single mothers, abandoned wives, widows, and indeed any woman who could not claim virginity. While several nineteenth-century trends clearly undermined poor single women, evidence from wills indicates that many women continued to find familiar ways to navigate new challenges, invoking multiple ideals of female conduct, cultivating devotional networks, and positioning themselves as pious benefactors helping to rebuild the Church.

post-independence crises and constricting spiritual opportunities for women The decades following Independence were challenging ones for Guatemala. Through the midnineteenth century, economic depression, war, disease, drought, and famine took a toll on the capital. There were brief periods of economic recovery and growth of the export/import economy, but many struggled as English imports damaged local industries and global demand for Guatemala’s primary exports dried up with the introduction of synthetic dyes.8 In the 1820s, approximately one third of adult males in Guatemala City were unemployed. Access to credit contracted as the Church, the traditional primary lending agency, faced its own financial crises. There were no banks and no consistent hard currency for the half century after Independence. Poor and laboring neighborhoods also still lacked basic infrastructure such as access to water, drainage systems, and decent roads as construction in the relocated capital largely stalled in the aftermath of Independence.9 Everyday crime, hunger, and disease also wreaked havoc on the city. Foreign traveler Henry Dunn noted during his 1827 trip to Guatemala

176

Chapter Six

City that most men and women carried knives and machetes and violent crime was common, as there was a total absence of organized police and courts of justice were inactive.10 Residents only narrowly escaped famine in both 1831 and 1832 as the colonial-era food distribution system collapsed and inflation led the prices of beans and rice to double and triple, respectively.11 Devastating cholera epidemics followed, tearing through Guatemala City and other Central American towns in 1837, 1851, 1857, and 1858, falling hardest on the indigenous and the poor. By the 1860s, Guatemala City still had only approximately forty thousand residents, roughly equal to the population of the former capital, Santiago de Guatemala, on the eve of the 1773 earthquake.12 War compounded these challenges. Central America had gained Independence with minimal bloodshed, but regional and partisan divides quickly engulfed the isthmus in protracted civil wars. After a brief annexation to Mexico, the Central American region from modern-day Guatemala to Costa Rica formed the United Provinces of Central America, a federal republic of five states. The unified Central American Republic lasted from 1823 until 1838, but it was besought by violent civil conflicts from beginning to end. Between 1821 and 1842, the armies of individual Central American states and the united federation conducted 143 military engagements.13 Little is known about how the incessant warfare of nineteenth-century Spanish America affected urban households. But the unprecedented militarization of society likely reinforced gendered demographic imbalances within Guatemala’s capital, as men were drafted into militia units and the violence and disruptions in the countryside may have driven women to migrate to cities.14 Studies indicate, for example, that in Mexican cities and towns, militarization and casualties resulted in larger numbers of single women and widows, as well as many who delayed marriage while eligible males were off at war.15 Although census data is largely lacking for Guatemala City until the late nineteenth century, evidence from wills suggests that the gendered imbalance in the capital indeed intensified in the decades after Independence. From 1700 to 1820, men slightly outnumbered women among all will-makers. But by the midnineteenth century, female wills outnumbered male wills 57 percent to 43 percent.16 In a continuation of earlier trends, most female will-makers (84 percent) lived outside marriage in the midnineteenth century. Forty-four percent of female will-makers had never been married, and another 40 percent were widowed. Fifteen percent acknowledged bearing one or more children outside marriage. Demographic imbalances may have also reinforced female dominance of petty commerce. The 1829 census of store owners found that out of

“With Knives Drawn”

177

twenty-five stores listed, women were the proprietors of nineteen, compared to just six men. In the list of stores “outside the Market,” forty out of fifty-nine proprietors were women.17 In both cases, women made up approximately 70 percent of storeowners. Women also heavily dominated among owners of corner stores, clothing stores, and chicherias selling homemade alcohol, representing between 80 and 100 percent of owners.18 Even among businesses often assumed to be the sole domain of men, women strongly participated. The 1829 list of comerciantes (tradesmen) included twenty-six women out of a total of fifty-five, and the list of bakeries included eighteen women out of a total of forty-two—almost half in both instances.19 The reality of large numbers of laboring women, many of them single or widowed, contrasted sharply with nineteenth-century feminine ideals, which heavily emphasized domesticity, marriage, and motherhood. An 1857 article in the Gaceta de Guatemala proclaimed, “Marriage is a sacred bond that unites husbands and wives so that together they may suffer life’s adversities and share its joys.”20 The author went on to stress women’s gendered connection to “virtue,” which was meant to complement men’s physical strength. The virtuous wife’s primary goal was to “please her husband” and to reign over the household with “great care, cleanliness, grace, and elegance.”21 A week later, the author further elaborated on the affective and domestic role of wives and mothers. The Heart of a mother is a treasure trove of tenderness for her children and a good mother is the providence of the whole family. . . . The father, always engaged in worldly occupations, distracted by endless business and personal matters, cannot by himself maintain the family’s order and happiness. This falls especially to the mother, whose only pleasure is in thinking about the well-being of others.22

This author explicitly indicated a class-based vision of marriage built on clearly separated public and private spheres that was far removed from most women’s daily experience in Guatemala City. The gaping disparity between ideals and realities likely heightened the long-standing moral ambiguity surrounding non-elite women living outside marriage. During the colonial period, non-elite single women, widows, and abandoned wives in Guatemala’s capital navigated the gendered tensions inherent to their status by invoking feminine ideals other than chastity and enclosure and cultivating moral status through religious practices and devotional networks. Confraternities and Third Orders, for example, had provided poor women during the colonial period with vital social and spiritual support as well as opportunities to engage in public devotions and charity. But by the midnineteenth century, female participation in Guatemala City’s confraternities and Third Orders seems to

178

Chapter Six

have plummeted. While approximately 50 percent of female will-makers had claimed membership in a religious brotherhood in the early nineteenth century, only 6 percent did so fifty years later. This sharp decline in confraternity membership does not seem to reflect a broader secularization of religious beliefs and practices, as well over 50 percent of female will-makers continued to invest material assets in pious donations and assert devotional connections to particular images, altars, and churches. Wills may overstate the decline in confraternity membership. Norms and formulas for making out wills changed over time. The formulaic reference to confraternity memberships in the early clauses of the will certainly disappeared. Nineteenth-century will-makers may have simply opted to leave out this information. But the declines correspond to broader patterns in Guatemala City and other parts of Spanish America. Independence and the wars and economic instability that followed took a heavy toll on lay religious brotherhoods. The incomes of many confraternities declined drastically or disappeared altogether.23 Guatemala’s first era of liberal reforms in the 1820s and 1830s, particularly seizures of Church properties and endowments, the secularization of burial, and reduction of religious holidays, further undermined confraternities’ viability. State confiscation of Church capital and the elimination of the tithe also increased clerical dependence on confraternities’ much-depleted coffers through the 1830s.24 Guatemala City’s non-elite female population, along with the rest of the city, also faced declining access to priests and friars. From 1700 to 1820, close to half of all female will-makers consistently indicated close connections to priests, either charging them with specific instructions or listing them as executors or witnesses to their wills. Laywomen’s consistent reliance on priests contrasted with their male counterparts, who steadily declined to name priests in these capacities over the course of the eighteenth century. But from 1820 to 1850, female will-makers’ reliance on priests abruptly declined fifteen percentage points. An even sharper decline is evident in female will-makers’ relationships with male religious orders. At the turn of the nineteenth century, 68 percent of female willmakers indicated a devotional relationship with a male religious order, their convent church, or a particular friar. Fifty years later, that figure dropped to 20 percent, a dramatic decline of almost 50 percentage points. Again, these trends may reflect new norms for making out wills. Federal law had prohibited church burials since the 1830s, and thus will-makers no longer revealed devotional connections to particular convent churches through their burial requests. But the abrupt shifts also correspond to the Guatemalan Church’s pastoral crisis in the nineteenth century. The declining ranks of priests and friars actually began during the late colonial pe-

“With Knives Drawn”

179

riod when Bourbon policies undermined the power, prestige, and funding for clergy and explicitly limited new professions into religious orders. But the liberal and anticlerical policies of the 1820s and 1830s dramatically expanded and accelerated these trends, particularly the 1829 exile of the archbishop along with close to three hundred clerics, closure of all male convents with the exception of the Bethlemite Hospital order, suspension of the tithe, and expropriation of clerical property, including the vast properties of the Dominican order. These policies drained the Church of both personnel and most liquid wealth. In pursuit of a secular and mass public education system, the state also uprooted clerical influence on education.25 By the late 1830s, the Guatemalan Catholic Church was in a state of disarray, beset by a combination of liberal policies, war, disease, economic attrition, and internal church politics.26 Only seven men were ordained in Guatemala between 1829 and 1841, while thirty-five priests died. Rafael Carrera’s rise to power in the 1840s allowed the church to revive itself, but it was an uneven recovery. Even under Carrera’s conservative tenure, church leaders struggled with an aging clergy and an inability to find enough new recruits for a risky career with an uncertain future.27 Church leaders inadvertently made things worse. Douglass Sullivan-González points out that Archbishop Francisco García Peláez, who served from 1846 to 1867 and largely overlapped with Carrera’s conservative rule, made the strategic decision to restrict the number of beneficed or permanent clerical appointments, opting instead for temporary interim appointments.28 Sullivan-González argues that this was a calculated move to limit state control over the Church, since beneficed appointments fell under the jurisdiction of the state, while interim appointments remained solely under ecclesiastical power. The liberal period clearly left behind a weary Church skeptical of state interference. Internal church politics also influenced the archbishop’s decision. Regular and secular clergy had long distrusted and competed with one another. In the early 1850s, Archbishop García Peláez resisted placing former friars in permanent beneficed appointments. The archbishop’s nationalism also made him reluctant to rely on non-Guatemalan priests to fill permanent posts, even those from neighboring Mexico or other Central American countries. The declining number of priests and the growing reliance on interim priests left parishes throughout the country with limited access to permanent priests on whom they could rely. Archbishop García Peláez, faced with an uncertain political future, opted to guarantee ecclesiastical control over clerical appointments, but in so doing had unwittingly limited the long-term effectiveness of his religious institution.29 The Guatemalan Church’s pastoral crisis had complex implications for non-elite women. Declining numbers of priests and pastoral

180

Chapter Six

i­nstability likely expanded lay devotional autonomy and influence over the ritual life of the Church. The situation also probably decreased clerical oversight of sexual lives and pressure to formalize unions. When Capuchin and Jesuit missionaries returned in the 1850s and 1860s, they certainly lamented rampant rates of illicit unions and illegitimacy.30 But this was not necessarily a clear win for poor single women. As studies of other parts of nineteenth-century Spanish America point out, postIndependent states were often more repressive of female sexuality than their colonial counterparts. Furthermore, during the colonial era, women often counted on the Church to pressure men to follow through on marriage promises, or failing that, to at least require financial compensation for lost virginity or child support for an illegitimate child. Close relationships with priests and friars had also allowed laboring women living outside marriage to cultivate substitute patriarchs, enhance their spiritual and moral status, and gain critical support in personal disputes and formal trials.

long live religion! laboring women, defense of the church, and popular conservatism Guatemala City’s religious landscape clearly shifted in the decades following Independence, creating new spiritual and social challenges for nonelite single women. And yet, even as women had less access to clerical support and spiritual direction, alliances between laboring women and priests also endured and non-elite women found new opportunities to establish moral personas through their defense of the Catholic faith. In her will made out in 1850, Manuela Agatona Beteta, for example, recounted with pride how thirty years earlier “she alone and without support defended the archbishop during the tumults of Independence in the main plaza.”31 It appears she was referring to the threatening taunts and hostility directed at loyalists, particularly Archbishop Ramón Casaus y Torres, during the Independence celebrations.32 Manuela was a laboring woman, born the illegitimate daughter of a single mother. She was married at the time she made out her will, but she noted that her husband had brought nothing to the marriage. Manuela bitterly added that her husband had never contributed to the household, but rather had squandered everything she had made through her own “work and industry.” Although she clearly did not fit the ideal of Republican Motherhood, Manuela emphasized in her will how the archbishop had publicly recognized her support with a gift of two ounces of gold. Other local residents had also recognized her actions and thanked her with gifts.

“With Knives Drawn”

181

While non-elite women like Manuela were largely denied the mantle of Republican Motherhood, they still claimed a moral right to enter Guatemala’s public space and political debates as defenders of priests and the Catholic faith. As Susan Desan argues for Revolutionary France, defending the Church through protests, riots, and physical resistance provided nineteenth-century women with new ways to gain “spiritual and even political power within the community.”33 In the 1820s and 1830s, laboring women in Guatemala found many opportunities to defend the Church. Given women’s long-standing devotional networks with religious orders, particularly the Franciscan missionary order, it’s highly likely they were active participants, or perhaps leaders, of a protest that occurred on February 19, 1824. In his 1837 published account, Guatemalan historian Alejandro Marure described how on that evening the Franciscan friars of Propaganda Fide were beginning an urban mission when liberal officials interrupted and demanded that the missionary superior take an oath of allegiance to the constitution and declare his obedience to the National Assembly. In Marure’s words, “once the order was made public, the masses of San Sebastián neighborhood thronged together around the (Propaganda Fide) College of Christ, subversively protesting that they would defend, at the cost of their own blood, the missionary friars.”34 When the assembly demanded an appearance by the Franciscan missionary provincial head, crowds shouted from the balconies of Congress, “we want a mission, long live religion, death to heresy, death to those who do not want missions.”35 The vigorous protests forced liberal officials to back down and allow the mission to proceed as planned. Historical accounts place women more explicitly at the forefront of a violent riot two years later in the provincial highland town of Quetzaltenango. By 1826, the fight over the creation of an independent Salvadoran bishopric had fueled partisan rancor and anticlerical sentiments. Although a moderate Salvadoran liberal headed the federal government of the Central American Republic, Guatemala’s state governor and assembly represented a more radical wing of liberalism. Due to conflicts with federal officials, Guatemala’s state government, under the leadership of Lieutenant Governor Cirilo Flores, moved to the provincial highland town of Quetzaltenago. From there, they passed several controversial measures such as allowing priests’ children to inherit Church property, reducing the tithe by half, restricting religious professions, regulating clerical appointments, and imposing new taxes on the Church, including Quetzaltenango’s Franciscan convent church.36 Tensions simmered in the provincial town. Then, in preparation for an armed conflict with federal troops, state government forces, led notably by a foreign army officer, broke into private residences, tore down the doors of the Franciscan con-

182

Chapter Six

vent, and took locals’ horses under threat of arms. According to Marure’s 1837 account, the next morning several women and some other local residents came to the Franciscan church for their “customary devotions.” The friars informed them of their plans to abandon the city, “because they could no longer tolerate the despotism of the radical liberals; and they made their good-byes with such emotion, that some women cried and became filled with indignation.”37 These same women were probably responsible for the rapid dissemination of news about the friars’ impending departure. As locals began to congregate around the convent church, they were also likely among the “fanatics” mentioned by Marure who showed people the fractured convent doors and images (estampas) of the crucifixion and the Virgin that liberals had supposedly thrown around the streets in a sign of their disrespect for religion. Marure specifically highlighted women’s leadership of the bloody protest that followed as the crowd moved to Lieutenant Governor Flores’s house, crying “Death to the heretic!” When the lieutenant governor fled to the Church to find sanctuary, “some women hurled themselves at him and suddenly snatched away his cane and hat, pulling out some of his hair; then they hit him repeatedly with his cane, while other women tore at his clothes.”38 A priest intervened and momentarily stopped the attack, but the violent conflict escalated when troops stormed the church, struck members of the crowd, and fired shots into the air. According to Marure, Franciscan friars further incited the people, and Lieutenant Governor Flores was fatally wounded as “the furious and fanatical horde, made up mainly of women; like unleashed furies threw themselves at the unfortunate lieutenant governor, and with rocks, sticks, and fists, they hit him over and over again.”39 Cirilo Flores died from the violent attack, and the liberal state government rapidly succumbed to a federal takeover and imposition of more conservative leaders. A year later, liberal Salvadoran forces attempted to invade Guatemala City in an effort to depose the federal government. According to U.S. ambassador John Lloyd Stephens’s nineteenth-century travel account, when the troops reached the outer limits of the city, “priests ran through the streets exhorting the people to take up arms, the friars headed mobs of women, who, with knives drawn, swore destruction to all who attempted to overturn their religion, and the San Salvadorans were defeated and driven back.”40 Marure’s account also stressed female participation and alliances with clergy but described a more coordinated resistance. He noted that as Guatemala City prepared for the Salvadoran invasion of 1827, in the streets, in the plazas, in the countryside, everywhere one saw the weaker sex, taking drinks to the troops and encouraging them on to battle, insulting and violently directing toward jail those men not with a militia unit, and beating on

“With Knives Drawn”

183

the doors and windows of liberals’ houses with the threatening cry of death to heretics, long live Religion.41

Marure also described organized squadrons of non-elite women prepared for armed resistance. “These bands of women, armed with a kind of spear made up of a stick with two or three knives attached to one end, and led by those who were most known for their dishonorable profession, moved the entire city, terrorizing the Salvadorans’ few followers.”42 At least one woman even disguised herself as a male soldier so that she could join troops on the front lines.43 Most nineteenth-century accounts, as seen in the case of both Alejandro Marure and John Lloyd Stephens, depicted female rioters as fanatics or pawns of a manipulative clergy. Modern historiography long reproduced that view, although in the case of Guatemala, indigenous peoples have generally played the role of clerical pawns, while women’s political involvement has been mostly invisible. But more recent studies highlight the rational and political interests underlying popular protests and riots in nineteenth-century Latin American cities.44 Although priests surely encouraged resistance to liberal policies, laboring women also clearly had their own reasons to oppose anticlerical measures that undermined the spiritual economy in which they were stakeholders, limited opportunities for devotional expression and engagement with the sacraments, reduced access to spiritual direction and substitute patriarchs, and threatened the mutual support and aid provided by confraternities. Popular contempt for Guatemala’s civil marriage and divorce law, the so-called dog law implemented in 1832, similarly reflected a fairly accurate perception that elite males would be the primary beneficiaries of the reform, gaining, as one scholar puts it, “even greater leeway to behave in ways that created the problems being addressed.” 45 Because women, indigenous peoples, and mixed-race lower classes could not formally participate in Guatemala’s emerging republican political system, they voiced their objections to policies through physical and sometimes violent resistance. As in other parts of nineteenth-century Latin America, these popular tactics were often surprisingly effective, shaping political debates and policies, and sometimes forcing elite officials to back down or reverse course.46 Laboring women’s participation in protests and riots in defense of the Church also illustrates how gender and religion intersected with partisan political identities and struggles in nineteenth-century Spanish America. In the aftermath of Independence, Colombian liberal leaders, for ­example, moved quickly to demobilize women and confine them to the home after their active involvement in the wars for Independence, casting elite women in the role of passive martyrs who need to be protected, and

184

Chapter Six

non-elite women in the role of dangerous sexual temptresses who needed to be controlled.47 Studies show that Spanish American liberals generally opposed female involvement in politics in the decades after Independence, seeing women as inherently weak, superstitious, and conservative, and as incapable of rational political participation. They furthermore argued that political participation would corrupt women. Post-Independence conservative leaders, for whom defense of the Church was a central aim, were far more amenable to female political involvement than were their liberal counterparts.48 As James Sanders explains, conservative tolerance and even support for women’s political involvement in part reflected smart politics, given broad female alignment with conservative causes. But it also resulted from the intersection of partisan politics and gendered ideologies. For conservatives, women’s defense of religion and morality fit with traditional gendered roles, which was not the case for liberal causes. Furthermore, conservatives were comfortable with inequality and hierarchy and believed diverse groups could engage in politics without gaining equal status.49 In the case of Guatemala, laboring women who actively allied with priests and defended the Church supported the development of a thriving popular conservatism, which laid the foundation for Rafael Carrera’s rise to power and the long conservative reign from 1839 to 1865.

daughters of mary: new devotional opportunities for non-elite women in the conservative era (1838–1871) By the late 1830s, the liberal state’s repeated use of military repression to enforce unwelcome laws had fueled deep resentments, particularly among indigenous and mixed-race rural communities. When a poorly handled cholera epidemic swept through Guatemala in 1837 amid news that the liberal government had granted large tracts of arable land to a British company, indigenous revolts erupted across the country.50 In eastern Guatemala, an organized rebellion emerged under the leadership of Rafael Carrera, a native of Guatemala City and former pig herder of mixed-race heritage. By 1838, Carrera and a group of roughly 10,000 rebels entered Guatemala City. U.S. ambassador John Lloyd Stephens described them as “a tumultuous mass of half-naked savages, men, women, and children,” who arrived to the main plaza shouting, “Long live Religion and Death to the Foreigners!”51 Carrera’s revolt led to more conservative leadership and rescinding of several liberal and anticlerical laws. The next year the federal republic of Central America permanently fractured into five in-

“With Knives Drawn”

185

dependent nation-states and in 1844 Rafael Carrera became president of an independent Guatemala. He ruled the country until his death in 1865 by building a successful conservative coalition of indigenous and mixedrace peasants, urban artisans and laborers, clergy, and elite families like the Aycinenas. Carrera allowed the Church to regain many of its colonial privileges, brought back exiled priests and religious orders, and welcomed Jesuit and Capuchin missionaries. Although the Guatemalan Church continued to struggle with insufficient numbers of priests and pastoral instability, signs of spiritual renewal were clearly evident by the 1840s and 1850s. In 1839, John Lloyd Stephens noted that the miraculous shrine of the Black Christ of Esquipulas was annually receiving approximately eighty thousand pilgrims, most of them indigenous. If his estimates were correct, the number of pilgrims had roughly doubled over that in previous decades.52 After their arrival in 1851, Jesuit missionaries repeatedly staged urban missions and promoted new religious practices like the monthlong “flowers of May” devotions dedicated to the Virgin Mary.53 During the 1850s, the abbess of the Beaterio de Belén, Madre Encarnación Rosal, actively reformed the beaterio, implementing formal constitutions for the first time. In 1857, the year of the terrible cholera epidemic, a series of personal revelations led Madre Encarnación to enthusiastically foment an entirely new devotion, which she named the Sorrows of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and depicted as the Sacred Heart pierced by ten darts. With the support of Guatemala’s archbishop, the first feast day was celebrated on August 25, 1857. Some believed the new devotion helped bring an end to the cholera epidemic.54 And in 1862, Guatemala welcomed eight members of the active female religious order the Sisters of Charity and two affiliated priests of Saint Vincent de Paul, to take over the administration of the San Juan de Dios Hospital. The Sisters of Charity began in seventeenth-century France under the guidance of Saint Vincent de Paul and two laywomen as a congregation of women who took simple vows, much like beatas, and dedicated themselves to corporal and spiritual works of mercy. In the nineteenth century, the order spread across Europe and the A ­ mericas, enthusiastically welcomed in many places for their social and spiritual contributions. Guatemala City greeted the sisters with great fanfare, a procession of carriages through the city, and a special Mass in the ­Cathedral. The sisters took charge of all the offices and wards of the hospital and supervised the work of the servants and also worked as nurses and pharmacists. The Sisters of Charity quickly expanded across Central America and established strong domestic roots. Between 1862 and 1882, fifteen provincial houses emerged in Central America, recruiting novices from America as well as France.55

186

Chapter Six

New kinds of lay pious associations also emerged in the 1840s and 1850s. Some of these opportunities were clearly limited to elite and middle class women. In 1845, the Brotherhood of Charity, the governing body responsible for Guatemala’s only official hospital, San Juan de Dios, established a “women of the guard” (señoras de guardia) system to complement the existing male guard (hermanos de guardia). Many of the women who joined were wives or kin of the male participants, and like their male brethren, the women patrolled the hospital to ensure that the servants were giving the highest quality of care to the patients. The brotherhood approvingly remarked that the women helped to improve the “customs, cleanliness, and attention to duty of the female servants.”56 Five years later, the Gaceta de Guatemala reported that a group of wealthy women had begun working with female convicts in the Women’s Detention Center, providing them clothing and teaching them Christian doctrine.57 Other congregations of pious elite and middle-class laywomen dedicated to charitable activities also emerged in Guatemala City in the midnineteenth century. For “the most noble and wealthy married women of the city,” Jesuit missionaries founded the Congregation of Women of the Immaculate Conception in 1852. They gathered weekly for meetings with the aim of improving the religious formation of their families and working together on charitable pursuits.58 By 1854, Luz Batres Aycinena, sister of the powerful cleric Juan José de Aycinena, had assumed leadership of the congregation and moved forward plans to found an orphanage and school for girls to learn Christian doctrine, reading, and sewing. Within a year, the orphanage housed forty-five girls and moved to a bigger facility. Four years later, sixty-seven girls lived there and received instruction from a staff that included a director, subdirector, three teachers, a porter, and an errand girl.59 In 1864, the Ladies of Charity also opened a branch in Guatemala City. Although long overlooked by scholars, the Ladies of Charity was a powerful global association of middle and upper-class laywomen linked to the piety of Saint Vincent de Paul and the Vincentian religious orders. The Guatemalan Ladies of Charity await further investigation, but Silvia Arrom’s recent study indicates that the Mexican branch rapidly drew tens of thousands of members who dedicated themselves to visiting and caring for poor sick individuals in their homes, educating children, and defending the faith. Arrom argues that the Mexican Ladies of Charity critically supported the development of civic society, modern forms of welfare and public assistance, and Social Catholicism.60 Although far less visible than their elite counterparts in both archival and scholarly records, new devotional associations for non-elite women

“With Knives Drawn”

187

also emerged in midnineteenth-century Guatemala and other parts of Latin America. In 1855, Jesuit missionaries in Guatemala founded the Association of the Daughters of Mary Immaculate, a sodality reserved for girls and single women of all ages who had remained celibate. It was also clearly geared toward non-elite women, as Jesuit chronicler Rafael Pérez noted that a separate congregation later formed for “young women of decent families, so as to also cultivate this delicate age among those who will later set the tone for society.”61 The Daughters of Mary manual, published in Guatemala City in 1855, further underscored its non-elite character, noting that members should content themselves “with the state and condition in which God has placed you and your family, and if you have to work to sustain yourself, give thanks to God that he has placed you in the same position as the Holy Virgin, who with the Patriarch Saint Joseph had to take care of the Son of God with the work of their hands.”62 Non-elite girls and single women apparently flocked to join the Daughters of Mary in Guatemala City and in provincial towns across the country. Jesuit Rafael Pérez noted, “We can confirm that of all the congregations this one was the most prosperous and produced the most blessed fruits, always growing, extending into neighboring towns, and demonstrating singular fervor and precision in the performance of duties.”63 He specified that Guatemala’s smaller provincial town of Quetzaltenango had seven hundred female Daughters of Mary by the early 1860s. Although Padre Pérez never indicated the number of members in Guatemala City, the Quetzaltenango figure suggests that the capital included at least several hundred members and perhaps more given that the capital’s population was around three times that of Quetzaltenango.64 In addition to taking responsibility for visiting an image of the Virgin of Immaculate Conception once a month, Padre Pérez explained that members engaged in monthly devotions in their respective towns and embraced a “strictness of habits that protected them from any intentions that were less than honest and insulated them from the dangers usually faced by youth.”65 Once a year, Daughters of Mary from across Guatemala journeyed to the capital for a celebration in the Mercedarian church, where the Jesuit missionaries presided. Padre Pérez recalled, “It was a thing to behold on that day, numerous phalanxes of young women, entering from different parts of the city, singing hymns to the Virgin Mary. This was the most popular festival and the largest communion, and every year it grew larger with the small girls who approached the holy table for the first time.”66 Non-elite women’s and girls’ enthusiastic participation in Guatemala’s Daughters of Mary reflected flourishing Marian piety within the ­nineteenth-century global Catholic Church. Indeed, some church officials

188

Chapter Six

describe the century between 1850 and 1950 as the “Marian Age.” 67 The Virgin of the Immaculate Conception held a privileged place in this Marian revival. In 1854, Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, officially confirming a popular but also long-­ controversial belief that the Virgin Mary, alone alongside Jesus, was born free of the stain of original sin. In the decades leading up to and following the papal declaration, numerous Marian apparitions, including the famed one at Lourdes, came in the form of the Immaculate Conception. While several studies consider nineteenth-century Marian apparitions, miracles, and pilgrimages, far less is known about the proliferation of Marian associations. The Jesuit order, reconstituted by the pope in 1814 after thirty years of abolition, clearly played a key role in promoting ­nineteenth-century lay Marian sodalities. Certainly, the Guatemalan Daughters of Mary reflected renewed collaboration between Jesuit missionaries and single non-elite laywomen. The Jesuit order had a long history with Marian associations, having founded the first lay Marian Congregations in the sixteenth century. Usually linked to Jesuit schools, and directed toward boys and young men, Marian Congregations were to the Jesuit order what Third Orders were to mendicant orders like the Franciscans and Dominicans.68 After Rome restored the Jesuit order in the early nineteenth century, Marian Congregations for both young men and young women played a key role in Jesuit missionary activities. Although scholarship on nineteenth-century Jesuit Marian congregations is remarkably slim, one study notes for early twentieth-century Spain that the Daughters of Mary Immaculate for girls and single women was the most popular and numerous of all Jesuit sodalities.69 But by the nineteenth century, Jesuits no longer monopolized Marian associations, as a dizzying array of lay female initiatives emerged over the century, many of them specifically devoted to the Immaculate Conception. For example, several active lay female congregations dedicated to teaching and nursing in Europe called themselves Congregations of Mary Immaculate or Daughters of Mary Immaculate. Particularly popular among non-elite women was another Association of the Daughters of Mary Immaculate, identically titled to the Guatemalan association but with distinct origins in the female religious order of the Daughters of Charity in Paris. Inspiring this Marian association was the 1830 apparition of the Virgin Mary to Catherine Labouré, a Daughters of Charity novice in Paris. As part of her visions, Catherine heard a prayer that confirmed the Virgin’s Immaculate Conception and saw a miraculous medal with an image of Mary standing on the globe with light flowing from her outstretched arms. Over the next decade alone, “miraculous medals” became a popular devotional object for millions of French Catholics. The

“With Knives Drawn”

189

Virgin also reportedly told Catherine Labouré to found an association devoted to the Immaculate Conception.70 At some point in the mid- to late nineteenth century, this Daughters of Mary affiliate of the Daughters of Charity emerged in various Mexican cities and towns, where non-elite single women enthusiastically joined its ranks. In a 1901 published account, Padre Gabino Chávez, who had directed the town of Irapauto’s Daughters of Mary Immaculate for thirty years, described the “startling growth of our Association among the poor and popular classes,” and acknowledged that some disparaged the Daughters of Mary for being an “association of seamstresses, servants, and people of lowly lineage.”71 Padre Chávez furthermore claimed that by the turn of the twentieth century, Mexico had 352 local Associations of the Daughters of Mary Immaculate, with a striking twenty-five thousand female members across the country.72 Although clearly founded by Jesuit missionaries, the Guatemalan Association of the Daughters of Mary Immaculate built on yet another lay female initiative coming out of the Spanish city of Barcelona. According to the Guatemalan association’s instructional manual, which was a reprint of a manual originally published in Madrid in 1853, this particular Marian sodality emerged in 1849 when a young woman in Barcelona told her confessor that she wanted to organize some of her friends and acquaintances to make daily visits to an image of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception. They would ask the Virgin, in the name of all members, to “defend and protect them from the spirit of temptation that everywhere creates snares, obstacles, and setbacks for gullible youth.”73 Her confessor enthusiastically approved the idea, believing it to be divinely inspired. Within days, the Barcelona association included seven young women, one for each daily visit of the week, and soon thereafter the group expanded to thirty-one, so that each member visited Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception once a month. Over the next two years, Barcelona’s Association of the Daughters of Mary Immaculate experienced remarkable growth. By 1850, it had 2,000 women. One year later, that number had surged to 6,200 within Barcelona itself, and another 16,000 members across forty towns.74 By 1854, their rapid success apparently inspired Jesuit missionaries to introduce this Marian Association an ocean away in Guatemala. From Guatemala City, Jesuit missionaries then took this pioneering model to other towns and cities in Central America as well as to Ecuador.75 The Guatemalan Daughters of Mary manual described the association’s expansion as effortless and therefore divinely inspired. “It has spread almost by itself, proof that it is the work of the Virgin and not the work of men.”76 But human contexts also clearly framed Church officials’

190

Chapter Six

rapid authorization of this new association. Under the leadership of Pope Pius IX (1846–1878), the Catholic hierarchy explicitly embraced affective and physical forms of religiosity, including popular devotions to the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, and the Sacred Heart.77 This official embrace of affective piety signified a dramatic shift from the Church’s ambivalent stance during much of the early modern era and the rationalizing efforts of enlightened Catholic reformers in the eighteenth century. Furthermore, by the midnineteenth century, the Church’s early modern restraints on active lay female religiosity had also largely crumbled. Faced with unprecedented challenges and fighting for survival, Church officials around the globe more unanimously embraced the vital apostolic potential of active laywomen, including non-elite women. Laywomen’s innovative and adaptive responses to nineteenth-century realities also clearly played a key role in the organization’s success. Its organizational format, dividing the larger association into groups (coros) of thirty-one women who each visited an image of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception once a month, bore a striking resemblance to another highly successful lay female organization, the Vela Perpetua, which was expanding rapidly throughout Mexican towns and cities around the same time. As Margaret Chowning’s recent study shows, the Mexican Vela Perpetua associations, in which elite women organized daily all-day vigils for the Eucharist (Blessed Sacrament), circumvented many of the challenges facing traditional confraternities after Independence. Like the Vela Perpetua, Guatemala’s Daughters of Mary did not rely on endowments, fixed incomes, or properties, and thus avoided this sore source of political controversy and financial instability amid repeated government appropriations. Once a year the Daughters of Mary came together in a public procession, but in general, like the Vela Perpetua, the association dedicated itself to individualized and contemplative prayer, forms of devotion more amenable to nineteenth-century state officials.78 The organizational model and non-elite character of Guatemala’s Daughters of Mary allowed the association to quickly gain authorization and expand its ranks. As an all-female sodality, Guatemala’s Daughters of Mary sidestepped the Vela Perpetua’s controversial move to place female officeholders over male participants and more easily and quickly secured the support of the local bishop.79 Guatemala’s non-elite Marian association was also highly accessible and flexible. Members were to visit and pray before an image of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception once a month, but that image could be in any church of their choosing, or even in their own home. The Guatemalan Daughters of Mary could also make their monthly visit to the Virgin of Immaculate Conception quite short, as the manual made no mention of a minimum time requirement.

“With Knives Drawn”

191

While innovative in some respects, Guatemala’s Association of the Daughters of Mary also built on local devotional trends in ways that likely heightened its appeal among Guatemala City’s non-elite women. The century from 1850 to 1950 may be known as the Marian Age, but Marian devotion was certainly not new to the modern era. The Virgin Mary, as Queen of Heaven, was long believed to be the most compassionate and powerful intercessor for souls both living and in Purgatory. Over two centuries, countless female will-makers in Guatemala’s capital expressed devotion to one or more of the city’s many beloved images of Mary, such as Our Lady of the Rosary in the Dominican Church, the Virgin of Sorrows of the Hillside, and Our Lady of the Rosary of Santa Cruz. Readers may recall that this latter image in the Santa Cruz chapel was the catalyst for Anna Guerra de Jesús’s dramatic conversion experience in the late seventeenth century. Eighteenth-century chroniclers also highlighted individual and collective female devotions to local Marian images in Guatemala’s capital. Franciscan chronicler Fr. Francisco Vásquez, for example, noted a special relationship between women facing difficult child labors and the image of Our Lady of Loreto in the San Francisco Convent. According to Fr. Vásquez, many cured themselves by using the oil from her lamp to make a cross on the affected body part.80 And Dominican chronicler Fr. Francisco Ximénez recounted several stories of women who were miraculously healed by praying to Our Lady of Sorrows of the Hillside and applying candle wax from her altar to their bodies. He also indicated that a group of women had taken responsibility for sweeping and tending her chapel.81 Like confraternities, the Daughters of Mary also revolved around devotion to a particular saint in visual form, in this case the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception, and members gained indulgences, assurance of an easier path to salvation, for their various devotional activities. Daughters of Mary also provided spiritual support to one another, visiting those who were sick and praying for fellow daughters in need and for those who had passed.82 In addition to cultivating female devotional networks, members gained opportunities to develop relationships with Jesuit directors of the association. Like confraternities and Third Orders, the Daughters of Mary also provided opportunities for members to develop personal identities based on moral norms and devotional practices. 83 Members were to dress modestly and separate themselves from worldly pleasures. The manual further outlined a series of recommended daily devotional practices, including spiritual exercises and prayers, fifteen to thirty minutes of meditation, reading devotional texts, and attending Mass. In addition to these daily practices, members were to frequent the sacraments of confession and communion, ideally confessing once a week, pray the

192

Chapter Six

Stations of the Cross (Via Crucis) one Friday a month, make an offering to the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the first Friday of the month, and engage in acts of charity and ascetic practices such as fasting.84 Guatemala’s non-elite Association of the Daughters of Mary also appears to have expanded on the local religion’s long tradition of female leadership positions within confraternities. Neither Jesuit chronicler Rafael Pérez nor Guatemala’s 1855 manual described the nuts and bolts of how the association operated, but clearly leadership and organization was required to coordinate membership and ensure daily visits to the Virgin of Immaculate Conception. An early twentieth-century manual for the Daughters of Mary Immaculate in Quito, Ecuador, which seems to have been founded in the 1860s by Jesuit missionaries from Guatemala, offers a more detailed portrait of leadership opportunities and organization. Of course, this manual may reflect a regionally distinct organizational structure, or how that structure had developed by the early twentieth century. Nevertheless, it illuminates potential leadership opportunities within the Guatemalan association, or how those positions may have developed over time. According to the Ecuadorian manual, the Association’s clerical director operated alongside a consejo directivo (board of directors) made up of the female president and vice president, two secretaries, two treasurers, sacristans, and group directors who each coordinated a coro or team of thirty-one women.85 Members elected these officials each year. While most posts were eligible for reelection, the rules required election of a new president annually. The governing council met once a month with the clerical director. They managed monthly alms from members, oversaw the caretaking of the sodality’s principal image of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception, and kept the stock and inventory of items dedicated to the veneration of the image. At the beginning of each month, the directors of each coro, or team, handed out cards to their members with the date of their monthly visit. They also visited any group members who were gravely ill and informed the clerical director so that he could provide pastoral care to the sick.86 While Guatemala had a long tradition of female leaders operating alongside male leaders in confraternities, the Daughters of Mary f­ ormally institutionalized a system of all-female self-governance. For laboring single women, these leadership positions offered new ways to act as lay evangelizers, collaborate closely with priests and missionaries, and establish and exercise their own spiritual authority. The dramatic growth of non-elite Marian sodalities like the Daughters of Mary Immaculate in Guatemala also highlights how nineteenth-century Church officials came to embrace the capacities of non-elite women to act as lay spiritual leaders.

“With Knives Drawn”

193

But not all non-elite women stood to gain from this new devotional association. The Daughters of Mary excluded single mothers, women who had lived in consensual unions, women separated from their husbands, and widows. Put more simply, the Daughters of Mary was intended primarily for young women and girls and was explicitly open only to virgins, or at least for women who had maintained a reputation of virginity. Of course, some women likely “passed” as virgins. The Daughters of Mary may also have been more flexible in practice than in theory. This had certainly been the case for Third Orders, at least in Guatemala, where the Rule technically allowed only wealthy individuals of impeccable virtue and missionaries emphasized the entry of young vulnerable maidens but in reality allowed some widows, abandoned wives, and even single mothers to profess as tertiaries. There were important distinctions between Third Orders and the Daughters of Mary, however, which suggest that the nineteenth-century association was more rigidly exclusive than its colonial predecessors. While the most popular Third Order in Guatemala, the Franciscan Third Order, explicitly identified itself as an order of repentant sinners, the Daughters of Mary and other similar non-elite Marian associations heavily emphasized female sexual purity and virginity. As Mary Vincent puts it about Jesuit Marian sodalities in Spain, “the chaste and virtuous female body was a powerful tool and, as the devotion to Mary Immaculate suggested, the virginal female body could be more than that.”87 Thus, while the Daughters of Mary offered new devotional opportunities to many non-elite single women, it also reflected and reinforced narrower ideals of feminine piety. If Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries in early eighteenth-century Guatemala cultivated flexible feminine models of reformed sinners, models accessible to women like Anna Guerra de Jesús, their nineteenth-century counterparts looked to female purity and innocence as a strategic line of defense against the onslaught of challenges to the Church. The Daughters of Mary in Guatemala City notably omitted any reference to Anna Guerra de Jesús, while their counterparts in Quito, Ecuador, took their own seventeenth-century local holy woman, beata Mariana de Jesús, as a secondary holy patron after the Virgin. 88 The pope’s elevation of Mariana de Jesús to the status of a beatified figure in 1853 partially explains this discrepancy. But Quito’s Daughters of Mary also explicitly invoked Mariana as a model of sexual purity. A prayer within their manual read, “Oh Mariana de Jesús, Lily of Purity who devoted yourself to Jesus and Mary . . . who with great horror loathed sin and preserved immaculate the stole of baptismal innocence.” Another described the local holy woman as “an exemplar of perfection” and “model of Christian youth.”89

194

Chapter Six

neither republican mother nor daughter of mary The exclusive nature of the Daughters of Mary Association and its emphasis on the value of female virginity illuminates new kinds of challenges and limitations facing many laboring women in nineteenth-century Guatemala City. While several structural changes undeniably afflicted poor single women, evidence from wills illustrates how non-elite women continued in their daily lives to invoke diverse ideals of female conduct through hard work, religious practices, and devotional networks. Lina Antonia Pinto, for example, who made out her will in 1850, fit neither the Marian ideal nor the ideal of Republican Motherhood.90 Born to a single mother and unnamed father, Lina was a laboring woman who had lost two husbands and was separated from her third husband because he had abused her and given her a “bad life.” Lina further noted that none of her husbands had any wealth to speak of before marrying. She and her first husband had acquired some properties through their joint labors, but she bitterly noted that her subsequent husbands had squandered these assets. Nor did Lina have any children who might be able to help contribute to the household through their labors. And yet, through her own work, Lina owned a house and some furnishings. She had also cultivated active devotional networks during her lifetime. The rescinding of many anticlerical laws as well as economic growth during the 1850s allowed some confraternities to recover and even thrive, and Lina was a member of a confraternity dedicated to an image known as Our Lady of the Rosary of the Pueblo de las Vacas. In a sign of her active devotional relationship with this confraternity, Lina left the lay brotherhood a pious endowment based on the value of her house in order to fund a weekly mass for the good of her soul and that of her first husband. She also offered a tantalizing glimpse of ongoing female leadership, noting that the confraternity’s female capitana, alongside its mayordomo and the Candelaria parish priest, should act as patrons for the endowment. While access to priests had clearly declined significantly, Lina was also able to count on a priest to act as executor to her will. Although opportunities to join confraternities were far more limited in the post-Independence era, Lina’s will illustrates how some confraternities survived and recovered during the conservative era. Women who participated in religious brotherhoods likely found enhanced opportunities to play key roles as participants, benefactors, and leaders. Although membership lists are not available for Guatemala City’s nineteenth-century confraternities, studies of post-Independence Mexico suggest that women came to dominate surviving confraternity memberships even more than

“With Knives Drawn”

195

they had during the colonial era.91 Furthermore, confraternities that survived in nineteenth-century Guatemala often enjoyed greater lay autonomy and stronger lay leadership due to declining numbers of priests and pastoral instability.92 There were also some new associational opportunities for non-elite women of various backgrounds. Although the Daughters of Mary appears, by far, to have been the most popular and powerful association for non-elite women in midnineteenth century Guatemala City, the Jesuits also founded other kinds of devotional congregations in the 1850s such as the Congregation of the Good Death. This congregation was open to people of all classes, ages, sexes, and conditions. Members gathered together on Sundays to pray, read devotional texts, listen to clerical instruction on achieving a “good death,” and contemplate the Blessed Sacrament. According to Jesuit chronicler Rafael Pérez, “the number of associates grew incredibly and the monthly communions were so numerous, it showed the great acceptance with which this new pious practice had been received.”93 Padre Pérez also briefly referenced the formation of another new congregation dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, sometimes referred to as the Apostolate of Prayer in other global Jesuit missions, which met the first Friday of each month to engage in spiritual exercises. He declined to comment on the demographic makeup of the Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Guatemala City, but in other parts of Latin America, women and laboring groups dominated memberships.94 In Mexico, for example, the Apostolate of Prayer dedicated to the Sacred Heart had 250,000 affiliates nationwide at the turn of the twentieth century, with women dramatically outnumbering men nine to one.95 Wills illustrate how many women also cultivated more informal devotional networks. María Josefa López identified herself in her 1858 will as a single woman who owned her own house as well as a market stall on the plaza.96 She lived near the Cerro del Carmen, at the far north of the city, and had developed devotional ties to the nearby Mercedarian convent church, as well as the more distant Dominican convent church. Although she did not explicitly identify as a member of the Brotherhood of Charity in the Dominican Church, she clearly had a relationship with this lay organization, because she named one of its members as her executor. María Josefa affirmed other devotional ties to the Dominican Church, specifically to the image of the Virgin of Solitude, which she instituted as one of her heirs. She also had special devotion to the image of the Nazarene Christ in the Mercedarian Church, which she also named as an heir. María Josefa directed the value of her market stall, as well as the merchandise within, which she valued at approximately 80 pesos, to the image of the Nazarene Christ. She directed all the rest of her belongings,

196

Chapter Six

including her house, and some jewelry she had inherited from her brother, to the Virgin of Solitude. María Ortiz noted in her 1858 will that she belonged to two confraternities, the Brotherhood of Jesus and the Brotherhood of Our Lady of Sorrows in the Candelaria parish, but her closest devotional ties appear to be with the Franciscan Third Order, although she was apparently not a member herself.97 Born to a single mother, María Ortiz had an hijo natural as a single woman herself before marrying. Although she identified as married at the time she made out her will, María barely referenced her husband. She never mentioned mutual assets acquired in the course of marriage but claimed sole ownership of two houses worth 150 pesos each, as well as clothes and other belongings totaling 450 pesos. In a subsequent will made out four years later, María sharply clarified that her husband had never shared his wealth with her in any way, although she had paid for their housing for almost a decade, and that they acquired and managed their assets separately.98 She left her hijo natural as primary heir but reserved one fifth of her assets as a pious donation for the Franciscan Third Order. In particular, María wanted to donate to the Third Order two personal images of Jesus the Christ Child and Our Lord of Humility and Patience, noting that she bought them with that end in mind. She also noted that she had two chains and a cross, made out of silver, which her son had used when he participated in the Holy Thursday procession. She indicated that he should keep these items for the procession; however, if he should stop participating, the objects should go to the Third Order as well. As these cases illustrate, laboring women continued to act as pious donors in ways that put them at the forefront of efforts to rebuild the Church during the conservative reprieve from anticlerical legislation. By the midnineteenth century, female will-makers were almost three times as likely as their male counterparts to leave money or material assets to the Church. Approximately 55 percent of female will-makers sampled between 1850 and 1870 left something to the Church, compared to 21 percent of male will-makers. Twenty-four percent of female willmakers declared their soul as primary heir, compared to just 3 percent of male will-makers. Since the mideighteenth century, female will-makers in Guatemala’s capital had been more likely than their male counterparts to direct material wealth toward pious ends. But historically, men who left pious directives tended to leave larger gifts to the Church than women. By the mid- to late nineteenth century, that was no longer the case. Male will-makers appear especially reluctant to create religious endowments or foundations, which the Church had long relied on for secure sources of funding for salaries and ritual costs. While approximately one quarter of

“With Knives Drawn”

197

female will-makers created a pious endowment, only 2 percent of male will-makers did the same. Of course, non-elite women’s pious donations often remained exceedingly humble. Juana Rivera, a poor widow without children, left ten pesos for the Bethlemite beatas and ten pesos for the Franciscan convent, in addition to funding a ritual round of nine masses for her soul and masses for family members.99 Others had slightly more to give. Juana Bautista Larrazábal, a single woman, born the daughter of a single mother, had spent most of her life as a servant for Padre Antonio Larrazábal. She may have even grown up in his household given that she had taken his last name. Padre Larrazábal had also given her 500 pesos in gratitude for her service. This sum she left for the good of her soul, directing 100 pesos to the nuns of Santa Clara “to remedy some of their necessities.”100 In exchange, she asked that they keep her soul in their prayers. Olaya Arévalo, a laboring widow with no kids, also left her soul as primary heir. It’s unclear what she did for a living, but she pointedly noted that her husband had contributed nothing and all her belongings represented the product of her personal labor. She was not quite sure the value of her assets but noted that they did not exceed 1,000 pesos. All this she wanted to leave “in favor of the Church, the poor, and pious works.”101 Other women directed their resources toward favored public devotions, helping to fund feast days and religious celebrations, which had been under attack during the years of liberal rule and by Bourbon reformers before Independence. Eulalia Flores, a single mother of three, and born herself to a single mother, directed one fifth of her assets toward an endowment to perpetually fund the annual celebration in honor of the Blood of Christ in the Propaganda Fide missionary college church. 102 Similarly, María de Jesús González, who described herself as a single woman, “of an honest state,” born to a single mother, noted in her 1858 will that she wanted the value of her house given to benefit the image of the Holy Child of Atocha in the cathedral.103 She underscored that everything she owned was the product of her own hard work, as her mother had left her nothing. It appears that María de Jesús had made a living by renting out rooms, and she intended for the ongoing rents to fund three days of the religious festival in honor of the Holy Child of Atocha for the good of her soul and the souls in Purgatory. And single woman María del Patrocinio Contreras wanted all of her assets, which she estimated at a value between 100 and 1,000 pesos, directed toward the religious festival for Our Lady of Mercy celebrated by the Jesuits in the Mercedarian convent church.104 María does not appear to have been affiliated with the ­Jesuit-founded Association of the Daughters of Mary, as she declined to qualify her single status as “celibate” or “honest.” But her support for

198

Chapter Six

this Marian festival was clearly linked to her relationship with the recently returned Jesuit missionaries because she also entrusted them with arranging her burial and managing the creation of the endowment. Opportunities for lay autonomy and initiative are also apparent in the wills of women who funded celebrations for much beloved personal images of saints. María de la O Rodríguez created an endowment to fund “a jubilee day” on Epiphany for her personal nativity scene in a church of her executor’s choosing.105 María was a remarried widow, but apparently neither husband had contributed much, because she declared all her belongings to be the product of her work as a market woman. Among these belongings were two sheds, and María wanted her executors to rent out these sheds and use the proceeds for the pious endowment. When her family and executors could no longer be in charge of this celebration, she wanted it entrusted to the Propaganda Fide missionary college. The case of single mother Dominga Barrera further illustrates how women barred from participation in the Association of the Daughters of Mary Immaculate actively participated in and promoted the cult of Immaculate Conception. By the time she made out her will in 1858, Dominga had raised her two children outside marriage.106 It is unclear how she made a living, and she does not appear to be a home owner. But Dominga claimed the value of her total assets at around 1,000 pesos. She left her children as heirs, but directed 100 pesos toward an endowment to perpetually fund an annual celebration for her personal statue of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception in the Holy School of Christ church. Evidence from wills also highlights how laboring women adapted to the changing religious landscape. During the colonial period, non-elite women outside marriage had cultivated strong devotional networks with male religious orders. But Bourbon reforms followed by the dramatic closure of convents and exile of friars in the 1820s took a severe toll on Guatemala’s male orders, a toll not easily reversed during the conservative era. For example, the Mercedarian convent had only one friar, who was “very old and sick,” in 1853, after almost fifteen years of conservative rule.107 Wills suggest that women adapted to this reality in part by cultivating stronger devotional relationships with female convents and beaterios. Through the early nineteenth century, female will-makers paid minimal attention to female religious communities, at least in the context of their wills. Less than 10 percent of female will-makers indicated a devotional relationship to female convents and beaterios during the colonial period. But by the midnineteenth century, close to 25 percent of female will-makers highlighted their connection to female religious orders, slightly surpassing, for the first time, the number of women who affirmed relationships with male orders.

“With Knives Drawn”

199

When male convent churches had hundreds of friars, they provided the safest spiritual security for perpetual mass foundations. Put simply, large male convent populations had historically ensured that mass requests would be carried out.108 The dramatically diminished numbers of friars in the nineteenth century changed that calculus, and female will-makers seem more inclined to create endowments in female convent churches. Vicenta Escalante, born to a single mother and widowed at the time of her will, left various religious images to the Carmelite Convent of Santa Teresa and also created a humble endowment of 100 pesos to fund masses in perpetuity in the Carmelite convent church.109 She named the abbess of the convent as patron of the foundation. Similarly, Josefa Gregoria Beleche, a widow who owned a small store, which she added, had been acquired with her own personal labor and without any intervention by her late husband, wanted all her assets directed to the Convent of Santa Catarina.110 She asked that the nuns invest the capital and use the annual interest payments to fund masses for the good of her soul. Likewise, Rosalía Sandoval, a poor widow who had an illegitimate son from before her marriage, said, “all of my son’s hard work and my own as well has been in order to fund a capellanía (endowment)” in the Santa Catarina convent church, “so that the parish priest says in this church a certain number of annual masses for my soul and that of my son.”111 Laboring women’s stronger devotional ties to female convents and beaterios probably reflected factors beyond simply the decline of male religious orders. Terry Rugeley argues that women in the nineteenth-­century provincial Mexican town of Merida had a special relationship to female convents where they had received some education.112 This may have been the case in Guatemala City, although further research is required to understand female education in Guatemala’s convents and beaterios in the decades after Independence. But there were certainly other local devotional trends framing laywomen’s connections to female religious communities. Women like Vicenta Escalante who affirmed close relationships with the Carmelite Convent of Santa Teresa in the midnineteenth century likely developed those connections during the lifetime of mystic and holy woman Sor María Teresa Aycinena. The spiritual renewal efforts within the Beaterio de Belén, led by local holy woman Encarnación Rosal beginning in the early 1850s also appear to have fostered support among non-elite women. Manuela Agatona Beteta, the woman who so vividly described her physical defense of the archbishop during Independence, also left 50 pesos to help with the construction of the Beaterio de Belén’s church.113 And poor single woman Vicenta Celiz noted that she wanted to leave her personal images of the Crucified Christ and Our Lady of Sorrows to the beatas of Belén.114 Marian piety may have also supported

200

Chapter Six

relationships between non-elite women and female religious communities. Some laboring single women certainly connected their relationship with a female convent to their participation in the cult of the Immaculate Conception. For example, single market woman María Cesaría Bolaños, whose story opened this chapter, donated her image of Our Lady of Immaculate Conception to the Carmelite Convent of Santa Teresa, “so that they keep and venerate it.”115 Similarly, María Petrona Milán, a single woman, left her soul as primary heir and donated an image of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception to the Capuchin nuns, “imploring them to commend me to God.”116

conclusion There is no tidy explanation for what happened to laboring women in nineteenth-century Guatemala City. The dramatic decline of confraternities, male religious orders, and the clerical population undeniably undermined laboring women’s devotional opportunities and networks and threatened their ability to establish moral status and access social and spiritual support. Furthermore, the Church’s promotion of a Marian feminine ideal and renewed emphasis on female sexual purity ultimately aligned with and perhaps reinforced anxieties about female sexual independence in nineteenth-century Guatemala and other parts of Latin America. And yet, at the same time, laboring women were not easily cast to the margins in post-Independence Guatemala. They were frequently at the center of heated and often violent debates about the role that the Church and religion would play in the new nation. Through their continued alliances with priests and friars and their fervent defense of the faith, non-elite women found new ways to establish moral status and spiritual authority within their communities. In battling against anticlerical legislation, these women also staked their own moral claim on political participation and shaped Guatemala’s popular conservatism. Laboring women furthermore took advantage of new devotional opportunities, collaborating with Jesuit missionaries, joining and leading the Association of the Daughters of Mary, and engaging in affective forms of piety with the full endorsement of Church officials from the local archbishop to the pope. While the Daughters of Mary and the Marian ideal clearly privileged young female virgins, the broader non-elite female community, including single mothers, poor widows, and separated wives, also found new and old ways to develop devotional networks, act as pious benefactors, and rebuild the Guatemalan Church during the conservative era.

Epilogue

; Rafael Carrera died on Good Friday in 1865. Guatemala’s conservative government outlived his death, but not by much. By the spring of 1869, liberal leaders Justo Rufino Barrios and Serapio Cruz, along with a small army, began launching attacks from their bases in Chiapas. What they lacked in numbers and popular support, the liberal insurgents made up for with newer technology, namely the Winchester and Remington repeating rifles.1 In the summer of 1871, Barrios and Cruz took Guatemala City and removed conservatives from leadership. As Ralph Lee Woodward notes, “The conservative era was over. It would not return to Guatemala.”2 Much like their predecessors of the 1830s, incoming liberals in the 1870s initiated a series of social, economic, and cultural reforms, although this time with a far more lasting impact. Less concerned with democracy and more interested in order and progress, this second generation of liberals successfully promoted the coffee export economy and more fully integrated Guatemala into the capitalist world market under a series of repressive dictators. They achieved this in large part through the confiscation of communal indigenous lands and a revival of forced labor systems. In Guatemala City, urbanization and modernization transformed daily life. The capital’s population doubled between 1875 and 1900 and the city underwent rapid modernization that significantly changed urban living conditions for the first time. Liberals were suspicious and openly hostile toward both the Church and non-elite women living outside patriarchal authority, as well as toward the alliances between them. One of their first orders of business was to expel all seventy-three Jesuits from the country. A little over a month later, the government exiled the archbishop as well. The Capuchin missionaries followed a year later. In 1872, liberals abolished all male religious orders and confiscated their properties because, as General Barrios

202

Epilogue

put it, “the aforementioned institutions were by their very nature a handicap to the reforms of modern civilization which proscribes theocracy in the name of liberty.”3 Residents who protested the expulsion of the Capuchin monks came under military gunfire, and violent revolts in Santa Rosa, Jutiapa, and Chiquimula after the expulsion of the Jesuits met with repressive military action.4 Over the next few years, Guatemalan liberals abolished lay brotherhoods and Third Orders, took over religious hospitals and charities, outlawed religious processions, and eliminated the tithe. In 1874, the government closed all female convents and beaterios, forcing exclaustration on Guatemala’s remaining 170 nuns. The Sisters of Charity was the only female religious order to survive, as the government depended on its labors in the Hospital de San Juan de Dios. Its members also took charge of the orphanage originally founded by the lay female Congregation of the Immaculate Conception in the 1850s. By the 1920s, the institutional Guatemalan Church was a shadow of its former self, with around just eighty priests ministering to a population of two million.5 Exhibiting a marked “patriarchal authoritarianism,” second-generation liberals also moved to curtail female independence, enhance male privilege, and promote the patriarchal nuclear family model. 6 Viewing female economic activity as irrelevant, and even as a threat to national order and progress, liberal officials attempted to regulate and control laboring women, particularly those who dominated petty marketing in the streets and plazas. Women continued to head households and fill the marketplaces, but the regulations undermined laboring women’s economic opportunities and aggravated the risk of female poverty.7 Liberal legislation was especially punitive toward poor single mothers and their children. Like many other Spanish American countries, Guatemala’s 1877 civil code followed Chile’s example, explicitly exempting men from paying child support for illegitimate children, unless they voluntarily chose to recognize their child. The law furthermore shielded men from investigations of paternity.8 One late nineteenth-century Guatemalan liberal defended the law by gesturing toward the ideal of marriage while subtly implying that poor single mothers could not be trusted to identify the father of their children: “Gentlemen, paternity is a fact shrouded in obscurity, in mystery; the Law cannot firmly and securely penetrate there; and if it attempts to decide what the very mother may ignore, it opens itself to making grave mistakes, which is why marriage has been established.”9 Assumptions about non-elite single women’s morally deviant nature clearly informed the new law. As Nara Milanich points out, Chilean reformers argued that female accusers, of “humble origin and immoral upbringing and lifestyle,” sought to trap innocent men “so as to collect child

Epilogue

203

support, dowries, or penalties.”10 It was not only single mothers who were suspect, but non-elite women in general. Reformers claimed that the testimony of female servants and other non-elite women, on which paternity cases often relied, could also not be trusted. By contrast, in a nod toward the ideals of marriage and motherhood, liberal reforms in Guatemala and other parts of Latin America strengthened the inheritance rights of married women and widows and ensured alimony for separated wives, as long as those wives had maintained their virtue.11 Indeed, the law shielding men from financial responsibility for illegitimate children ultimately favored married women by protecting marital assets.12 It would seem the liberal era initiated in the 1870s represents a decisive and abrupt end to this story, but there is also clearly evidence of continuity and survival. When a papal representative visited Guatemala in the 1920s, he lamented the endemic rates of informal unions and illegitimacy. This was, of course, nothing new for Guatemala City. But he also described the “profound religiosity” of the country, evident in Guatemalans’ “close attachment to the external facets of religion.”13 By “external facets,” he was apparently referring to the enduring devotion to religious images in homes and churches and the profusion of religious material culture such as miraculous medals, rosaries, and reliquaries; the survival of religious brotherhoods and confraternities; the care given to temples and altars; the vibrant celebrations of feast days and Holy Week’s magnificent processions; and the ongoing pilgrimages to local and regional shrines. Indeed, Guatemala’s most sacred pilgrimage site, the Black Christ of Esquipulas, was thriving in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, receiving tens of thousands of pilgrims from around Central America and southern Mexico every year and investing funds to renovate and expand the shrine.14 The foundation of this lay-led religious survival was already well established by the liberal era. Even under Carrera’s long conservative regime, the institutional Church had continued to struggle with clerical shortages and pastoral instability. Evidence from wills highlights how laypeople, laywomen in particular, were already developing adaptive responses to the weakness of the Church by the midnineteenth century. Families, individuals, and informal devotional networks were taking care of religious images and altars and funding and coordinating feast days and celebrations. Liberal legislation in the 1870s merely intensified the trend toward laicization that was already well under way. The survival and expansion of nineteenth-century pious associations, which were well adapted to liberal proclivities, further supported devotional continuities. The Association of the Daughters of Mary clearly endured because in 1908 a devotional “remembrance” of their annual

204

Epilogue

celebration in the Mercedarian church was published.15 Another Jesuitinspired pious association, the Apostolate of Prayer dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, also continued functioning because they too published a devotional text in Guatemala City in 1892.16 If local pious associations contended with a vehemently anticlerical context in late nineteenth-­ century Guatemala, they found enthusiastic support within the Vatican. By the late 1870s, under the pontificate of Leo XIII, Church officials began deliberately fomenting the widespread development of lay associations as a key component of efforts to renew and revive the global Church. Leo XIII’s momentous encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891, which responded to the challenges of modernity, capitalism, and socialism with a call for Catholic action on issues of poverty and labor rights, further inspired the development of new kinds of Catholic associations and societies. The first Latin American plenary council of bishops, which met in Rome in 1899, further reinforced the call to develop and expand lay associations.17 In Guatemala, dozens of new Catholic associations, societies, and labor organizations emerged by the early twentieth century. Among these were several specifically for women including the Association of Christian Mothers, the Association of Catholic Female Teachers, and the Catholic Union of Women in Commerce and Workshops (Sindicato Catolico de Señoras y Señoritas Empleadas de Comercio y Talleres).18 A political opening in the 1920s and 1930s allowed the Vatican to more forcefully push for the revival of the Guatemalan Church, bring back religious orders including the Jesuits, implement better training programs for clergy, and further support the development of lay associations. By the 1940s, the institutional Church in Guatemala finally began to stabilize and expand, particularly through the arrival of foreign clergy and religious orders.19 Scholars often describe this era in terms of centralization of power under the Vatican and a top-down reform movement, a Eurocentric “Romanization” that sought to homogenize the diverse global Catholic Church.20 But this study’s findings offer a different perspective. Much like during the early modern period when Church officials worried about the Protestant threat, late nineteenth-century Vatican efforts focused on energizing the laity and forming militant lay troops who could re-Christianize modern societies. Although Rome sought to direct the revitalization of the Church, the Vatican also remained heavily reliant on the initiative and enthusiasm of lay associations, and particularly laywomen who so dominated the membership lists. Furthermore, if the Vatican’s blueprint for Church renewal was part foreign imposition, it also built directly on models developed by local actors from the early modern period through the nineteenth century. Guatemala’s deviations from early modern policies regarding female enclosure, particularly its long history of clerical

Epilogue

205

collaboration with non-elite laywomen in the interests of evangelizing, educating, and offering social services, became official Church policy by the late nineteenth century. Forms of piety long popular among laywomen in Guatemala’s capital and in cities around the globe also took center stage in modern Catholic revivalism—devotions to the Sacred Heart, the Virgin Mary, the Eucharist, miraculous healing, affective piety, frequenting the sacraments, and active participation in charities and education. Today, Guatemala City is experiencing another wave of spiritual renewal with familiar echoes of the past. Lay female evangelizers reach out to friends and family in living rooms and around dinner tables. They walk the streets of their working-class neighborhoods knocking on doors and visiting hospital patients. Inside churches, market women, servants, and other laboring women are born again through ecstatic emotional and physical encounters with the divine. They do battle with the devil, experience divine revelations, and find miraculous cures for themselves and their loved ones. They embrace an ascetic lifestyle, find ways to morally reform their husbands, and gain vital social and spiritual support in the midst of poverty, migration, and an epidemic of gang violence and organized crime. But today women in Guatemala City usually find these spiritual experiences in an Evangelical or Pentecostal church rather than in a traditional Catholic setting. Protestantism, particularly Evangelical and Pentecostal branches, have flourished in Latin America in the last forty years, but nowhere more so than Guatemala, where a striking 40 percent of the population is now Protestant. This seismic shift in Latin American religious affiliation took scholars by surprise, especially since so many priests and bishops in the region “opted for the poor” in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and explicitly allied with peasants and urban workers who sought social justice, structural responses to entrenched poverty, and freedom from brutal military regimes. Initial explanations for the phenomenon were reminiscent of nineteenthcentury liberal rhetoric—Evangelicals and Pentecostals were dupes and pawns of conservative and reactionary leaders, or foreign imperialists, who used otherworldly spirituality to thwart revolutionary progress. But more recent scholarship on Latin American Protestantism considers how gender and class have framed this process, particularly given that so many urban converts are working-class women. These studies highlight how Evangelicalism and Pentecostalism offer concrete responses to women’s daily realities and domestic struggles, and at the same time reform gender roles by enhancing female status and domesticating wayward or abusive male partners.21 By contrast, progressive Catholicism or liberation theology frequently overlooked domestic issues like abuse, alcoholism, birth control, and divorce, or subsumed them within a broader mission to

206

Epilogue

transform the public political and economic systems. This study’s longer historical perspective suggests that the success of Evangelical and Pentecostal Protestantism also derives from its ability to build on Guatemala’s local religion, particularly forms of devotional expression and networking historically favored by laboring women. The Catholic Church, post Vatican II, largely moved in a different direction, toward a more rational and “modern” faith, and away from miracles, prophecies, revelations, and emotional forms of piety. But by the 1980s, Latin American bishops, acutely aware of competition from Evangelicals and Pentecostals, threw their support behind a lay Catholic movement known as Catholic Charismatic Renewal (CCR), which aims to spiritually renew individuals and the broader Church through baptism in the Holy Spirit. Like Pentecostal churches, CCR groups engage in emotional and physical forms of prayer, encounter the divine directly through the Holy Spirit, speak in tongues, and experience miraculous healing. The Guatemalan bishops offered the strongest support for the movement, noting the “fruits of the action of the Holy Spirit in terms of deepened spiritual lives of laypersons and priests,” even as they offered a familiar warning about the need for clerical supervision so that Charismatic groups did not stray into unorthodox or overly emotional forms of prayer.22 Today, there are over one million Charismatic Catholics in Guatemala, or almost 10 percent of all Guatemalan Catholics.23 In Brazil and Colombia, Charismatics represent more than one quarter of all Catholics. Although research remains remarkably limited on this lay Catholic movement, R. Andrew Chesnut notes for Brazil that “laywomen run the CCR from top to bottom.”24 Once again, missionary zeal and competition for devotees is expanding opportunities for poor women to assert their spiritual interests and shape local and global religion. Far from the margins, these women are at the forefront of a spiritual renewal with potentially broad implications for religious practice, gender relations, family life, and civic engagement. Indeed, many Guatemalan working-class women have stepped into the role of global missionaries as they migrate to cities and towns across the United States. A story about Guatemala’s capital is now also a story about Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, DC.

Glossary

Beata  Pious laywoman who took informal or revocable vows such as chastity and obedience. Beaterio  Religious house or community of beatas or pious laywomen who took informal vows. Capitana  Lay female leader of a confraternity or religious brotherhood. Casta Mixed-race. Colegio  School, usually run by members of the Church or pious laywomen, and often built on monastic models. Criollo/a  American-born individual of Spanish descent. Diputada  Lay female representative of a confraternity. Donado/a  Male or female servant in a convent who took informal vows. Doncella  Maiden or unmarried virgin. Hijo/a Natural  Child born to unmarried parents who were free to marry. This form of illegitimacy constituted a lesser stain than that produced through adultery or a union with a priest. Madres mayores  Lay female officials, or senior mothers, of a confraternity. Mayordomo/a  Lay male or female steward or administrator of a confraternity. Memoria de misas  Perpetual endowment of masses. Mestizo  Typically used to describe an individual of mixed Spanish and indigenous descent. Mulato  Typically used to describe an individual of mixed Spanish and African descent. Pliego  Sealed document. Recogimiento/Casa de Recogidas  Religious house, shelter, or school where women voluntarily retreated or were involuntarily placed by ecclesiastical or secular officials. Soltera  Single woman who cannot claim virginity. Vecina  Local, citizen, or resident. Via Crucis  Way of the Cross (or Stations of the Cross) devotion.

This page intentionally left blank

Notes

introduction 1.  Will of María Inés Gil, 1761, Sig. A1, Leg. 1001, Exp. 9494, Escribano José Matías Guzmán, Fols. 17f–20f, Archivo General de Centroamérica (henceforth referred to as AGCA). 2.  Christopher Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, 1541–1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), p. 62. 3.  See Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, ­Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Richard Boyer, Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). 4.  Will of María Inés Gil, 1764, Sig. A1, Leg. 495, Exp. 8898, Escribano José de Azurdia, Fols. 3f–5v, AGCA. 5.  Will of María Inés Gil, 1761, Sig. A1, Leg. 1001, Exp. 9494, Escribano José Matías Guzmán, Fol. 19f, AGCA. “Respecto a mi orfandad y soledad.” 6.  Jay Kinsbruner, The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), p. 113. 7.  Catherine Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala: The Eve of Independence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), pp. 61, 117; Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, p. 234. 8.  See for example, Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala; Karen Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007); Jane Mangan, Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); and Kimberly Gauderman, Women’s Lives in Colonial Quito: Gender, Law, and Economy in Spanish America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003). 9.  See, for example, Lisa Vollendorf, The Lives of Women: A New History of Inquisitorial Spain (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005); Nora E. Jaffary, False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Nancy E. van Deusen, Between the Sacred and the Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of Recogimiento in Colonial

210

Notes to Introduction

Lima (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Steve Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); Mary Elizabeth Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, eds., Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992). 10.  See, for example, Jacqueline Holler, Escogidas Plantas: Nuns and Beatas in Mexico City, 1531–1601 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005); Jaffary, False Mystics; Kathleen A. Myers, Neither Saints nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); María Emma Mannarelli, Hechiceras, beatas, y expósitas: Mujeres y poder inquisitorial en Lima (Lima: Ediciones del Congreso del Perú, 1998); Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, “Negotiating Sanctity: Holy Women in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” Church History 64, no. 3 (1995); and Perry, Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Spain. 11. Jaffary, False Mystics, pp. 37, 48, 53. 12.  Elizabeth Lehfeldt, “Discipline, Vocation, and Patronage: Spanish Religious Women in a Tridentine Microclimate,” Sixteenth Century Journal 30, no. 4 (Winter 1999), p. 1010. 13.  See ibid.; Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990); Craig Harline, “Actives and Contemplatives: The Female Religious of the Low Countries Before and After Trent,” Catholic Historical Review 81, no. 4 (1995); and Susan Dinan, “Female Religious Communities Beyond the Convent,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. Jane Couchman, Allyson Poska, and Katherine McIver (Farnham, UK: Routledge, 2013). 14.  Some scholars identify support among local officials for lay female religiosity, but these studies often explore clerical networks with elite laywomen and the eventual pressures to cloister. See Barbara Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Holler, Escogidas Plantas. 15.  William Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981). 16.  William Taylor, “Between Nativitas and Mexico City: An Eighteenth-­ Century Pastor’s Local Religion,” in Local Religion in Colonial Mexico, ed. Martin Austin Nesvig (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), pp. 91–92. 17.  This discussion of my approach to William Christian’s model of local religion, and other small portions of this introduction, originally appeared in Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara, “Intimate Indulgences: Local Religion and Salvation in Eighteenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala,” Colonial Latin American Review 23, no. 2 (2014). Small portions of this chapter also appeared in Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara, “Holy Women and Hagiography in Colonial Latin America,” History Compass 12, no. 9 (2014), and Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara, “Quiet Voices and Laconic Sources: A Synoptic Approach to Wills,” in Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America: Essays on Synoptic Methods and Practices, ed. Karen

Notes to Introduction

211

Melvin and Sylvia Sellers-García (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming). 18.  William J. Callahan, “The Spanish Church,” in Church and Society in Catholic Europe in the Eighteenth Century, ed. William J. Callahan and David Higgs (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 43. 19.  Luke Clossey, Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Mission (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 3. 20.  On early modern hagiographies of non-elite or non-European holy women, see Jodi Bilinkoff, Related Lives: Confessors and their Female Penitents, 1450– 1750 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Ellen Gunnarsdóttir, Mexican Karismata: The Baroque Vocation of Francisca de los Ángeles, 1674–1744 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Antonio Rubial García, Profetisas y solitarios: Espacios y mensajes de una religión dirigida por ermitaños y beatas laicos en las ciudades de Nueva España (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2006); Myers, Neither Saints nor Sinners; Allan Greer, Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Diefendorf, From Penitence to Charity. 21.  Martha Few, Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), p. 5. See also Laura Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003). 22.  See Jaffary, False Mystics. 23.  See Myers, Neither Saints nor Sinners, p. 3; J. Michelle Molina and Ulrike Strasser, “Missionary Men and the Global Currency of Female Sanctity,” in Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), ed. Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf (Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2009); and Barbara Diefendorf, “Rethinking the Catholic Reformation: The Role of Women,” in Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800). 24.  Kathleen A. Myers and Amanda Powell, eds., A Wild Country out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), p. xxi. 25.  See Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets. 26.  Ibid., p. 25. 27.  See, for example, Allyson Poska, “Elusive Virtue: Rethinking the Role of Female Chastity in Early Modern Spain,” Journal of Early Modern History 8, no. 1–2 (2004): p. 135; Nicole von Germeten, Violent Delights, Violent Ends: Sex, Race, and Honor in Colonial Cartagena de Indias (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013); María Emma Mannarelli, Private Passions and Public Sins: Men and Women in Seventeenth-Century Lima, trans. Sidney Evans and Meredith Dodge (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007); and Robert McCaa, “La viuda viva del México Borbónico: Sus voces, variedades, y vejaciones,” in Familias novohispanas: siglos XVI al XIX, ed. Seminario de Historia de la Familia and Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru (México, D.F.: Colegio de México, 1991).

212

Notes to Introduction

28.  Poska, “Elusive Virtue,” p. 144. 29. Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala, p. 224. 30.  Richard Boyer, “Honor Among Plebeians: Mala Sangre and Social Reputation,” in The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America, ed. Lyman Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998), p. 156. 31.  Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, “Scandal at the Church: José de Alfaro Accuses Doña Theresa Bravo and Others of Insulting and Beating his Castiza Wife, Josefa Cadena (Mexico, 1782),” in Colonial Lives: Documents on Latin American History, 1550–1850, ed. Richard Boyer and Geoffrey Spurling (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 216. 32.  Boyer, “Honor Among Plebeians,” pp. 161–62. 33.  Heidi Kelley, “Unwed Mothers and Household Reputation in a Spanish Galician Community,” American Ethnologist 18, no. 3 (1991): p. 565. 34.  Karen Graubart identifies a similar pattern in women’s wills in colonial Peru. Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat, pp. 62, 96. 35.  Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. ix, 2, 4. 36.  See, for example, Edward Wright-Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887–1934 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); and Benjamin Smith, The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, Society, and Politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750–1962 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012). For the French context, see Susan Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990); and Caroline Ford, Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). 37.  See for example, Elizabeth Dore, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Gender and the State in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, ed. Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); Rebecca Earle, “Rape and the Anxious Republic: Revolutionary Colombia, 1810–1830,” in Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America; Sarah Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780–1854 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999); Christine Hünefeldt, Liberalism in the Bedroom: Quarreling Spouses in Nineteenth-Century Lima (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); and Arlene Díaz, Female Citizens, Patriarchs, and the Law in Venezuela, 1786–1904 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). 38.  William Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010), p. 166. 39.  My use and approach to wills was initially inspired by the works of Carlos Eire and Silvia Arrom. See Carlos Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Notes to Introduction

213

Press, 1995); and Silvia Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985). 40.  See Michel Vovelle, Piéte baroque et déchristianisation en Provénce au XVIIIe siècle. Les attitudes devant la mort d’après les clauses des testaments (París: Libraire Plon, 1973); Pierre Chaunu, La mort à París, XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (París: Fayard, 1978); and Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). For religious studies based on wills in Spain and Spanish America, see Brian Larkin, The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010); Martina Will de Chaparro, Death and Dying in New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007); Verónica Zárate Toscano, Los nobles ante la muerte en México: Actitudes, ceremonias, y memoria (1750–1850) (México, D.F.: Colegio de México, 2000); Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory. 41.  J. Davis, Religious Organization and Religious Experience (London: Academic Press, 1982), p. 1. 42.  Richard Boyer cites James Lockhart’s comment that in the field of social history, historians have “concentrated on fleshed-out portrayals of individual cases and skeletal aggregate statistics of numerous cases, while rarely adopting the procedure of looking at a moderate number of cases in as much detail as possible.” Boyer, Lives of the Bigamists. p. 7. 43.  To be more precise, this number represents will-makers, rather than wills. Husbands and wives rarely made out wills together, but when they did, I counted each spouse separately. And when I came across will-makers who made out more than one will, I counted them only once for quantitative purposes. 44. Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, pp. 61–63, 83. See also Gauderman, Women’s Lives in Colonial Quito, pp. 26, 30. 45.  Brian Larkin, The Very Nature of God, p. 20. 46.  On the “exceptionally large” gender imbalance in Guatemala’s capital, see Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala, p. 115; Inge Langenberg, “Urbanización y cambio social: El traslado de la ciudad de Guatemala y sus consecuencias para la población y sociedad urbana al fin de la época colonial (1773–1824),” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 36 (1979). 47.  Padrones formados por los Alcaldes de Barrio de Orden del Superior Govierno en el año de 1805, Sig. A1, Leg. 2190, Exp. 15738, AGCA. 48. Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, p. 143. 49. Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala, p. 191. 50.  Stephanie Fink De Backer, Widowhood in Early Modern Spain: Protectors, Proprietors, and Patrons (Leiden: Brill, 2010), p. 2. 51. Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala, pp. 61, 117. 52. Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, p. 114. 53.  Allyson Poska and Elizabeth Lehfeldt, “Redefining Expectations: Women and the Church in Early Modern Spain,” in Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds, ed. Susan E. Dinan and Debra Myers (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 22.

214

Notes to Introduction and Chapter One

54. Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat, p. 100. 55.  See, for example, Caterina Pizzigoni, ed., The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico’s Toluca Valley, 1650–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012); Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat; and Frank Salomon, “Indian Women of Early Colonial Quito as Seen through Their Testaments,” The Americas 44, no. 3 (1988). 56. Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala, p. 184. 57. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, p. 94. 58.  Ibid., p. 169. 59.  For further discussion of urban plebeian society, see R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660– 1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994).

chapter one 1.  Antonio de Siria and José Toribio Medina, Vida de doña Ana Guerra de Jesús, escrita por el p. Antonio de Siria, y por encargo del gobierno de El Salvador reimpresa a plana y renglón, precedida de un breve prólogo, por J.T. Medina (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1925 [1716]), p. 99. 2.  Antonio de Siria, Vida admirable y prodigiosas virtudes de la sierva de Dios D. Anna Guerra de Jesús sacada de lo que ella misma dexó escrito por orden de sus confessores (Guatemala: Br. Antonio de Velasco, 1716). 3.  Kristine Ibsen, Women’s Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), p. 11. See also Asunción Lavrin and Rosalva Loreto López, eds., Monjas y beatas: la escritura femenina en la espiritualidad barroca novohispana siglos XVII y XVIII (México, D.F.: Universidad de las Américas-Puebla, 2002), p. 17. 4.  On expanding the definition of hagiography to include noncanonized holy people, see Bilinkoff, Related Lives, p. 3. 5.  Cited in Ibsen, Women’s Spiritual Autobiography, p. 11. 6.  See Jaffary, False Mystics, pp. 48, 53. 7.  Juan Antonio Platero, Ana Guerra de Jesús ante la historia y la teología mística (Bilbao: Talleres de Encuadernaciones Belgas, 1969). 8.  Readers may notice that I refer to Anna Guerra de Jesús, and other laymen and women, by their first names, while I frequently refer to Jesuit Padre Antonio Siria and other priests by their full names or last names. This decision is in accordance with recent scholarship and also reflects historical norms. Padre Antonio Siria consistently referred to Anna by her first name, or as Doña Anna, while he referred to priests by their full name and title, for example, Padre Juan Cerón. For modern scholarship, see, for example, Bilinkoff, Related Lives; and Gunnarsdóttir, Mexican Karismata. 9. Bilinkoff, Related Lives, p. 9. 10.  On the historical task of situating holy people in their historical contexts, see Greer, Mohawk Saint, p. viii. 11. Myers, Neither Saints nor Sinners, p. 12.

Notes to Chapter One

215

12.  Antonio de Siria, Vida admirable y prodigiosas virtudes de la v. sierva de Dios D. Anna Guerra de Jesús (San Salvador: Dirección General de Publicaciones del Ministerio de Educación, 1962), p. 38. 13.  Ibid., p. 53. 14.  Ibid., pp. 41–42. On narrative templates for female saints and holy women in early modern period, see Myers and Powell, A Wild Country. 15. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), pp. 63–65, 68. Siria notes the “inopia de ministros y falta de pasto espiritual.” 16.  Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, p. 328; Antonio Rubial García, “Los santos milagreros y malogrados de la Nueva España,” in Manifestaciones religiosas en el mundo colonial Americano. Espiritualidad barroca colonial: Santos y demonios en América, ed. Clara García Ayluardo and Manuel Ramos Medina (México, D.F.: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex, 1993), p. 80. 17. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), p. 68. 18.  Ibid., pp. 54, 60–61. “atormentarle el cuerpo y más combatirle el espíritu.” 19.  On domestic abuse in colonial Mexico, see Stern, The Secret History of Gender; Boyer, Lives of the Bigamists. Kimberly Gauderman argues for colonial Quito that society and the legal system generally opposed excessive domestic abuse of wives. But poor women and women in isolated rural areas had less recourse to support. See Gauderman, Women’s Lives in Colonial Quito. 20. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), pp. 61, 73. Siria contrasts the “suelo estéril de su patria” to the “fecundo de Guatemala” and describes the Jesuits as a “luz para su enseñanza y escudo para su defensa.” 21.  Pedro Cortés y Larraz and Gilberto Aguilar Avilés, Descripción geográficomoral de la diócesis de Goathemala: Parroquías correspondientes al actual territorio salvadoreño (San Salvador: Dirección de Publicaciones e Impressos, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y el Arte, 2000), p. 104. 22.  Sylvia Sellers-García, Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire’s Periphery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), p. 63. 23. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), p. 67. 24. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, p. 110; Martha Few, “Women, Religion, and Power: Gender and Resistance in Daily Life in Late-Seventeenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala,” Ethnohistory 42, no. 4 (1995). 25.  Miles Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, 1680 to 1840 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), pp. 92–93. Wortman cites Guatemalan chronicler Francisco Fuentes y Guzman’s assertion that Santiago’s fountain and plaza were “second only to Lima.” See Francisco Antonio de Fuentes y Guzmán, J. Antonio Villacorta C., Ramón A. Salazar, and Sinforoso Aguilar, Recordación florida: Discurso historial y demostración natural, material, militar y política del reyno de Guatemala, 2nd ed., vol. 1, 3 vols. (Guatemala: Tipografía nacional, 1932 [1690]): p. 215. 26.  Verle Lincoln Annis, The Architecture of Antigua Guatemala, 1543–1773 (Guatemala: Universidad de San Carlos, 1968), pp. 80–97, 166–72; Domingo Juarros and Ricardo Toledo Palomo, Compendio de la historia de la Ciudad de Guatemala (Guatemala: Academia de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala, 2000 [1808]), pp. 155–59.

216

Notes to Chapter One

27.  Margaret Chowning, Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent, 1752–1863 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 9. 28. Annis, The Architecture of Antigua Guatemala, pp. 165–66; Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, p. 110. Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano de Guatemala (hereafter cited as AHAG). Fondo Diocesano, Secretaria de Gobierno, Visitas de los Monasterios de esta ciudad desde 1659 hasta 1780. According to Annis’s estimates, there were more than 300 professed nuns in Santiago’s three convents in 1700, which represented approximately 10 percent of the total elite Spanish female population. 29. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, p. 110. 30.  On collaboration and competition between religious orders and secular priests, see Karen Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain, 1570–1800 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012). 31. Platero, Ana Guerra de Jesús, p. 183. 32. Annis, The Architecture of Antigua Guatemala, p. 104; Benjamin Reed, “Devotion to Saint Philip Neri in Mexico City, 1659–1821: Religion, Politics, Spirituality, and Identity,” Richard E. Greenleaf Visiting Scholar Presentation (University of New Mexico, Latin American and Iberian Institute, 2011). 33.  Isidro Félix de Espinosa and Lino Gómez Canedo, Crónica de los Colegios de Propaganda Fide de la Nueva España (Washington, DC: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1964 [1746]), p. 546. 34.  Francisco Vásquez and Lázaro Lamadrid, Crónica de la provincia del Santísimo nombre de Jesús de Guatemala de la orden de n. seráfico padre san Francisco en el reino de la Nueva España (Guatemala: Tipografía nacional, 1937 [1714]), p. 387. “No cesaron todos cuantos confesores había de oír confesiones de hombres y mujeres de todos estados.” 35.  Libros de Cofradías de San Sebastián, Fondo Parroquial, San Sebastián: Sección Sacramental, AHAG. Although confraternity records are incomplete for Santiago de Guatemala, records show that in 1691 the Hermandad de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad in the San Sebastián parish had 412 members and the Hermandad de la Caridad de San Roque had 283 members. 36.  See Miguel Álvarez Arévalo, Jesús de Candelaria en la historia, el arte, y la tradición de Guatemala (Guatemala: Consejo Nacional para la Protección de la Antigua Guatemala, 1983); Mario Alfredo Ubico Calderón, Historia de Jesús Nazareno de San Jerónimo: Hoy conocido como Jesús Nazareno de la Merced de la Antigua Guatemala (Guatemala: Consejo Nacional para la Protección de la Antigua Guatemala, 1999). Francisco Ximénez, Carmelo Sáenz de Santa María, and Francis Gall, Historia de la provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala, orden de Predicadores/David Vela; paleografía (modernizada parcialmente), notas e índice analítico y temático: Francis Gall (Guatemala: Sociedad de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala, 1971), p. 185. 37.  J. Joaquin Pardo, Pedro Zamora Castellanos, and Luis Luján Muñoz, Guía de Antigua Guatemala (Guatemala: Editorial “José de Pineda Ibarra,” 1969), p. 171.

Notes to Chapter One

217

38. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), p. 62. “Que aquel augusto nombre había de ser luz para su enseñanza, escudo para su defensa, trayéndola de tan lejas tierras a el abrigo de su casa y a el gobierno de su Compañía.” 39.  For further discussion of how hagiographical texts expressed local and regional pride and celebrated particular religious orders, see Ronald Morgan, Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600–1810 (Tucson: ­University of Arizona Press, 2002); Antonio Rubial García, La santidad controvertida: Hagiografía y conciencia criolla alrededor de los venerables no canonizados de Nueva España (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999); David Brading, The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 40. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), p. 68. “pues la hermana en cuya casa vivía se hallaba en tan grande pobreza, que no la pudo socorrer con un pan.” 41.  Silvia Arrom, “Desintegración familiar y pauperización: Los indigentes del hospicio de pobres de la ciudad de México, 1795,” in Familia y vida privada en la historia de Iberoamérica: Seminario de historia de la familia, ed. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru (México, D.F.: Colegio de México, 1996), pp. 125, 127. See also McCaa, “La viuda viva del México Borbónico,” p. 323. 42. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), pp. 226–27. 43.  Cited in Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala, pp. 61, 115. 44.  See van Deusen, Between the Sacred and the Worldly, pp. 64–65. 45. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, pp. 82–83, 234. 46.  Ibid., pp. 47, 51. 47. Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, pp. 93, 98. 48. Few, Women Who Live Evil Lives, p. 26. 49.  Ibid., pp. 24–32. 50.  Van Deusen, Between the Sacred and the Worldly, p. 71. 51.  See Jessica Delgado, Laywomen and the Making of Colonial Catholicism in Mexico, 1639–1790 (New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming), chap. 5; Holler, Escogidas Plantas; Josefina Muriel, Los recogimientos de mujeres: Respuesta a una problemática social novohispana (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1974); van Deusen, Between the Sacred and the Worldly. 52. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), p. 69. “Apenas llegó a la presencia de aquella común Madre de los pecadores, cuando comenzó a sentirse interiormente movida a que se confesase . . . salió de la iglesia sin conocerse a sí misma.” 53.  Ibid., pp. 70–75. 54.  Myers and Powell, A Wild Country, p. 304. 55.  Caroline Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), p. 60. 56. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), pp. 75–80, 250. On this devotional tradition, see Maureen Flynn, Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400–1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 141. 57. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), pp. 90–95, 100–104, 163.

218

Notes to Chapter One

58.  Nancy E. van Deusen, “Reading the Body: Mystical Theology and Spiritual Actualisation in Early Seventeenth-Century Lima,” Journal of Religious History 33, no. 1 (2009): p. 14. 59. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), p. 75. 60. Myers, Neither Saints nor Sinners, p. 3. 61. Bilinkoff, Related Lives, p. 31; Gabriella Zarri, “Living Saints: A Typology of Female Sanctity in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 225, 236. 62. Myers, Neither Saints nor Sinners, p. 25. 63.  See Robert Orsi, “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion,” in Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, ed. David D. Hall (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 9. Orsi notes, “Some of the most characteristic idioms of American Christianity were crafted in response to the movements of masses of people from farms to cities.” 64.  See John Coakley, “Gender and the Authority of Friars: The Significance of Holy Women for Thirteenth-Century Franciscans and Dominicans,” Church History 60, no. 4 (1991); Anna Benevenuti Papi, “Mendicant Friars and Female Pinzochere in Tuscany: From Social Marginality to Models of Sanctity,” in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 89, 93; and Bilinkoff, Related Lives, pp. 13–15. 65.  Andrew Keitt, Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain (Leiden: Brill, 2005), p. 98. 66.  These findings are based on a survey of every will made out in Santiago de Guatemala during three selected years between 1700 and 1720 (1700, 1705, 1717). I found a total of sixty female wills and sixty-eight male wills. Forty-seven female will-makers (80 percent) affirmed a devotional connection to a religious order, compared to twenty-eight male will-makers out of a total of sixty-eight (41 percent). Eighteen female will-makers out of sixty (30 percent) claimed to be a tertiary of a male religious order, specifically the Franciscan order, while only two male will-makers out of sixty-eight claimed to be a tertiary (3 percent). 67.  Brian Belanger, “Between the Cloister and the World: The Franciscan Third Order of Colonial Querétaro,” The Americas 49, no. 2 (October 1992): p. 157. 68. Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, pp. 24, 48. 69.  Gazeta de Guatemala, 12 de junio, 1730, Biblioteca Nacional de Guatemala. The Gazeta de Guatemala recorded in 1730 that the Franciscan convent regularly had 120 friars in residence, up from approximately 90 friars in residence in the 1690s. Additionally, the Franciscan community of Santiago witnessed the foundation of a distinct Franciscan missionary convent, or “college” in 1700. By 1740, the missionary college had reached its allotted capacity of thirty-five friars. 70.  Catherine Mooney highlights a similar dynamic in medieval Europe. Catherine M. Mooney, “Nuns, Tertiaries, and Quasi-Religious: The Religious Identities of Late Medieval Holy Women,” Medieval Feminist Forum 42 (2006): p. 86. 71. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), pp. 68, 73–74.

Notes to Chapter One

219

72.  Van Deusen, “Reading the Body,” p. 12. See also Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), p. 192. 73. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), pp. 253–54. 74.  Vásquez and Lamadrid, Crónica de la provincia, p. 384. 75. Platero, Ana Guerra de Jesús, pp. 181, 185. For more discussion of mental prayer and the controversies surrounding its relationship with the heretical illuminist movement, see Jaffary, False Mystics, pp. 29, 35–36; Stephen Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 65. 76. Platero, Ana Guerra de Jesús, p. 183. 77.  Matthew O’Hara, “The Supple Whip: Innovation and Tradition in Mexican Catholicism,” American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): pp. 1374, 1386. 78. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), p. 86. 79.  Juarros and Palomo, Compendio de la historia, p. 151. 80.  Jesús Manuel Sariego Rodríguez, Tradición Jesuita en Guatemala: Una aproximación histórica (Guatemala: Universidad Rafael Landivar, Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas, 2011), pp. 10–11. 81. Bilinkoff, Related Lives, p. 19. 82.  Ibid., p. 18. See also Gunnarsdóttir, Mexican Karismata, p. 42. 83. Ibsen, Women’s Spiritual Autobiography, p. 13. See also Michael Maher, “Confession and Consolation: The Society of Jesus and Its Promotion of General Confession,” in Penitence in the Age of Reformations, ed. Katharine Jackson Lualdi and Anne Thayer (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), p. 190. 84.  J. Michelle Molina, To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520–1767 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), p. 173. See also Mannarelli, Hechiceras, beatas, y expósitas, p. 45. 85.  Inga Clendinnen, “Ways to the Sacred: Reconstructing “Religion” in Sixteenth Century Mexico,” History and Anthropology 5 (1990): p. 110. On the role of emotions in Jesuit spiritual methods, see Maher, “Confession and Consolation,” p. 190. 86. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), p. 87. “Descubrió una luz muy clara con que percibía la gravedad de sus pasadas culpas y la singular clemencia de Dios en no haberla castigado como merecía: de aquí le nació un dolor tan sentido, que prorrumpiendo en copiosas lágrimas se le despedazaba con su fuerza el Corazón.” 87.  Ibid., p. 164. After sixteen long years, Siria recounts that Anna “vido entrar a Dios en su alma y que a palos iba despidiendo los vicios y las pasiones.” 88.  Ibid., p. 136. “Fueron estas palabras agudos cuchillos que traspasaron su afligido corazón.” 89.  Mary Dunn, “‘The Cruelest of All Mothers’: Marie de l’Incarnation, Motherhood, and Christian Discipleship,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 28, no. 1 (2012): 50. See also Benevenuti Papi, “Mendicant Friars and Female Pinzochere in Tuscany,” p. 89. 90.  Elizabeth Rhodes, “Join the Jesuits, See the World: Early Modern Women in Spain and the Society of Jesus,” in The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the

220

Notes to Chapter One

Arts, 1540–1773, ed. John O’Malley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), p. 38. 91. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), p. 90. “libre y desembarazada de todo cuidado que pudiese impedirle el familiar trato con Dios.” 92.  Anna began an “account of her life” in 1689 at the behest of her Jesuit confessor, Padre Juan Cerón. Ibid., p. 208. At least some if not all of Anna’s spiritual writings survived until the twentieth century in the Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano de Guatemala and selections were published in the appendix of Platero, Ana Guerra de Jesús. Unfortunately, the current location of Anna’s spiritual diaries is unknown. 93. Platero, Ana Guerra de Jesús, p. 534. “Estando penada por la quebradura de cabeza de mi hija oí: No te den cuidado esas penas porque con ellas redobló Catalina sus coronas.” 94.  Ibid., pp. 535–36. “Estando para salir de Santo Domingo de rogar a el santo a Santa Catalina de Sena y a Santa Rosa, por la salvación de mi hija que estaba para morir, o que le alcanzaran más paciencia si permanecía la enfermedad fui advertida, que le pidiera lo mismo a San José. Hícelo así y . . . oyó mi alma esta voz, que la decía San José hoy me la llevo.” 95.  Ibid., p. 543. “Yo me olvidaba de ella. . . . Yo no sé cómo era esto; porque aunque me compadecía de verla padecer, la entregaba a los trabajos como si no fuese mi hija y así siempre desde muy tierna edad fue de su vida y despegada de mí para padecer a solas.” 96.  Ibid., p. 546. “No hay cómo decir lo que padeció en diez años que allí estuvo sin que tuviese quien la mirase como una niña.” 97. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), pp. 86, 125–45. 98.  On elite nuns’ freedom to change confessors, see Asunción Lavrin and Rosalva Loreto López, eds., Diálogos espirituales: Manuscritos femeninos hispanoamericanos siglos XVI–XIX (Puebla, México: Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades de la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2006), p. 23. 99. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), pp. 208–9. 100.  Jodi Bilinkoff, “Confession, Gender, Life-Writing: Some Cases (Mainly) from Spain,” in Penitence in the Age of Reformations, ed. Katharine Jackson Lualdi and Anne Thayer (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), p. 174. 101. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), p. 171. “en adelante disponía por sí mismo atender a su dirección.” See also Rubial García, Profetisas y solitarios, p. 64. Rubial García suggests that Siria’s depiction of Anna’s divine spiritual direction indicated that “la sujeción a los confesores no era absoluta.” This conclusion seems to go too far, however, since Siria also repeatedly emphasized Anna’s obedience to her confessors, noting, for example, that Anna knew “claramente que en apartarse de esta sujeción se oponía al gusto de su Dios.” Siria, Vida admirable (1962), p. 203. 102. Bilinkoff, Related Lives, p. 18. 103.  Rhodes, “Join the Jesuits, See the World,” p. 43. See also Molina, To Overcome Oneself, p. 55. 104. Molina, To Overcome Oneself, p. 54. 105.  Asunción Lavrin, “María Marcela Soria: Una Capuchina queretana,” in Diálogos espirituales: Manuscritos femeninos hispanoamericanos siglos XVI–

Notes to Chapters One and Two

221

XIX, ed. Asunción Lavrín and Rosalva Loreto López (Puebla, México: Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades de la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2006), p. 86.

chapter two 1. Bilinkoff, Related Lives, pp. 25, 31. 2.  Diefendorf, “Rethinking the Catholic Reformation,” p. 33. 3.  Segments of this chapter originally appeared in Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara, “Holy Women and Hagiography.” 4.  Belanger, “Between the Cloister and the World,” p. 159. 5.  Juan Lasso de la Vega, Compendio de las obligaciones, excelencias, privilegios, è indulgencias del v. Orden Tercero de Penitencia de n.p.s. Francisco: Con la novíssima constitución de n. smo. P. Benedicto XIII en que su santidad por favor especial nuevamente confirma la regla, estatuos, gracias, indulgencias, y otros indultos apostolicos (Seville: n.p., 1626, Google Books), pp. 68–69, 72–73. 6.  See Pamela Voekel, Alone Before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 118–20; A. J. R. Russell-Wood, “Prestige, Power, and Piety in Colonial Brazil: The Third Orders of Salvador,” Hispanic American Historical Review 69, no. 1 (1989): p. 64; Belanger, “Between the Cloister and the World,” p. 159. 7.  See Nora Siegrist de Gentile, “Familias de la Orden Tercera de San Francisco en Buenos Aires. Identidad de sus miembros y relaciones con España en los siglos XVIII y XIX,” in Familias iberoamericanas: Historia, identidad, y conflictos, ed. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru (México, D.F.: Colegio de México, 2001); and Pilar Foz y Foz, “Hipótesis de un proceso paralelo: La enseñanza de Zaragoza y la enseñanza nueva de México,” in Memoria del II Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español: Monasterios, beaterios, recogimientos, y colegios: Homenaje a Josefina Muriel, ed. Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español, Josefina Muriel, and Manuel Ramos Medina (Chimalistac, México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México CONDUMEX, 1995), p. 64. 8. Gunnarsdóttir, Mexican Karismata, p. 104. 9. Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, p. 96. 10.  Espinosa and Canedo, Crónica de los Colegios, p. 335. “Ser promotores y solicitadores de los aumentos de la Orden Tercera de Penitencia . . . y que pudiesen admitir a los fieles cristianos a la recepción y profesión de su santo habito.” 11.  Ibid., p. 792. 12.  David Rex Galindo, “Propaganda Fide: Training Franciscan Missionaries in New Spain” (Ph.D. diss., Southern Methodist University, 2010), p. 304; Vásquez and Lamadrid, Crónica de la provincia, pp. 417–21. 13. Gunnarsdóttir, Mexican Karismata, p. 89. 14.  Espinosa and Canedo, Crónica de los Colegios, p. 506. 15. Gunnarsdóttir, Mexican Karismata, pp. 6, 139. 16.  Lasso de la Vega, Compendio de las obligaciones, p. 66. “Principalmente con las mujeres que comúnmente llaman beatas, porque si estas se descubren

222

Notes to Chapter Two

públicamente engañada de mal espíritu, o que no viven como deben, todo el Orden padece por ellas.” 17. Jaffary, False Mystics, pp. 92–93. 18. Gunnarsdóttir, Mexican Karismata, pp. 45–47. 19.  Ximénez, María, and Gall, Historia de la provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala, p. 440. “Pero padece de una enfermedad intolerable, que es la de las revelaciones. . . . Y supongo que esto, por la mayor parte, procede de vulgaridad y de hablillas de gente ordinaria, porque en echándose un habito de tercera, cualquier vieja luego tiene revelaciones y habla con Dios, con que engaña a la gente ordinaria.” 20.  Ibid., pp. 440–44. 21.  Espinosa and Canedo, Crónica de los Colegios, p. 506. 22.  Ibid. “La pompa y vanidad de los adornos del siglo.” 23.  Darleen Pryds, Women of the Streets: Early Franciscan Women and Their Mendicant Vocation (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2010), p. 28. See Isidoro Nardi and Urban Sacchetti, Vita di S. Rosa Viterbese del Terz’Ordine di S. Francesco (Roma: Nella Stamperia del Varese, 1686). 24.  Will of Doña Ignes de Fuentes y Guzmán, 1717, Sig. A1, Leg. 1272, Exp. 9763, Escribano Mateo Ruiz Hurtado, Fols. 61f–68v, AGCA. 25.  Will of Doña Leonor de la Parra, 1705, Sig. A1, Leg. 740, Exp. 9233, Escribano José de León, Fols. 116v–118v, AGCA. 26.  Will of Doña Clara de Espino, 1705, Sig. A1, Leg. 740, Exp. 9233, Escribano José de León, Fols. 140v–142v, AGCA. 27.  Will of María García, 1700, Sig. A1, Leg. 610, Exp. 9103, Escribano Diego Coronado, Fols. 51v–52v, AGCA. 28.  Will of Vitoria de Paredes, 1700, Sig. A1, Leg. 699, Exp. 9192, Escribano Felipe Díaz, Fols. 173v–176f, AGCA. 29.  Will of Juana de la Fé y Velasco, 1717, Sig. A1, Leg. 1375, Exp. 98661, Escribano Juan de Ulloa y Moscoso, Fols. 141f–144v, AGCA. 30.  Will of Nicolasa Díaz del Castillo, 1717, Sig. A1, Leg. 1410, Exp. 9901, Escribano Diego Leonardo Valenzuela, Fols. 1f–3v, AGCA. 31.  Will of Antonia de Aguilar, 1717, Sig. A1, Leg.1410, Exp. 9901, Escribano Diego Leonardo Valenzuela, Fols. 55v–57v, AGCA. 32. Jaffary, False Mystics, p. 92. 33.  Fr. Joseph Belén de la Orden de San Francisco y Comisario visitada de su Tercera Orden de Penitencia, 1699, Sig. A1, Leg. 5786, AGCA. Fr. Joseph Belén, Franciscan Friar and Visiting Commissary of the Franciscan Third Order, noted that some individuals in a provincial mining town of Honduras as well as San Miguel in modern-day El Salvador were wearing the habit of the Third Order and acting indecently. He mentioned no such problem in the capital. 34.  Will of María Nicolasa de Aparicio, 1705, Sig. A1, Leg. 1006, Exp. 9499, Escribano Francisco Herrera Samayoa, Fols. 196v–198v, AGCA. 35.  Will of Vitoria de Paredes, 1700, Sig. A1, Leg. 699, Exp. 9192, Escribano Felipe Díaz, Fols. 173v–176f, AGCA. 36.  Will of Juana de la Fé y Velasco, 1717, Sig. A1, Leg. 1375, Exp. 98661, Escribano Juan de Ulloa y Moscoso, Fols. 141f–144v.

Notes to Chapter Two

223

37.  Will of Nicolasa Díaz del Castillo, 1717, Sig. A1, Leg. 1410, Exp. 9901, Escribano Diego Leonardo Valenzuela, Fols. 1f–3v, AGCA. 38.  Vásquez and Lamadrid, Crónica de la provincia, p. 411. “O Padre mío, como me han de admitir en esta Santa Orden, siendo yo tan gran pecador, y que he sido tan escandaloso en esta ciudad?. . Por eso mismo, porque esta Orden es de penitentes, y aunque admite inocentes, para pecadores arrepentidos la fundó San Francisco.” 39.  Ibid., p. 437. 40.  María Dolores Pérez Baltazar, “Beaterios y recogimientos para la mujer marginada en el Madrid del siglo XVIII,” in Memoria del II Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español: Monasterios, beaterios, recogimientos, y colegios: Homenaje a Josefina Muriel, ed. Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español, Josefina Muriel, and Manuel Ramos Medina (Chimalistac, México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México CONDUMEX, 1995), p. 384. 41.  Josefina Muriel, La sociedad novohispana y sus colegios de niñas (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2004), p. 77. 42. Gunnarsdóttir, Mexican Karismata, p. 139. 43.  Testimonio del difunto Don Pedro Cabrero Fernández, 1772 (1789), Sig. A1. L. 3015, E. 28996, Fols. 31f–32f, AGCA. See also Juarros and Palomo, Compendio de la historia, p. 159. 44. Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala, p. 248. On the absence of harsh punishments, see Mannarelli, Private Passions and Public Sins, p. 53. 45. Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala, p. 248. See also Poska, “Elusive Virtue,” pp. 142–43. On Spanish legal norms, see Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, pp. 64–65. 46.  Multiple female will-makers indicated that they were widows who had borne illegitimate children after the death of their husbands. There was no indication that their status as single mothers had threatened their authority over their legitimately born children. See for example, Will of María Bernal, 1700, Sig. A1, Leg. 699, Exp. 9192, Escribano Felipe Díaz, Fols. 44f–45v, AGCA. 47.  See Jessica Delgado, “Sin Temor de Dios: Women and Ecclesiastical Justice in Eighteenth-Century Toluca,” Colonial Latin American Review 18, no. 1 (April 2009); Juan Javier Pescador, “Entre la espada y el olivo: Pleitos matrimoniales en el Provisorato Eclesiástico de México, siglo XVIII,” in La familia en el mundo iberoamericano, ed. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru and Cecilia A. Rabell (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1994). 48. Mannarelli, Private Passions and Public Sins, p. 54. 49.  Asunción Lavrin, “Introduction: The Scenario, the Actors, and the Issues,” in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Asunción Lavrin (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), pp. 8–9. 50.  Poska, “Elusive Virtue,” p. 135. 51.  Índice de Juicios Civiles y Criminales, AHAG. 52.  Visitas a los curatos de la Capital, 1686–1769, Fondo Diocesano, Secretaria de Gobierno Eclesiástico, AHAG. The Remedios parish priest pointed to “embriaguez como vicio más dominante.”

224

Notes to Chapter Two

53.  Ibid. The parish priest of San Sebastián noted “que en esta feligresía se hallan los mismos vicios que en otras partes . . . por lo que mira al concubinato,” but he emphasized “el vicio más abominable y dominante es el de la embriaguez.” 54.  Charles Noel, “Missionary Preachers in Spain: Teaching Social Virtue in the Eighteenth Century,” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (October 1985): p. 876; Rex Galindo, “Propaganda Fide,” pp. 322, 331. 55.  Coakley, “Gender and the Authority of Friars,” p. 457. 56.  Allan Greer, “Colonial Saints: Gender, Race, and Hagiography in New France,” William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2000): p. 329. 57. Myers, Neither Saints nor Sinners, p. 6. 58.  Joan C. Bristol, “‘Although I Am Black, I Am Beautiful’: Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, Black Carmelite of Puebla,” in Gender, Race, and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas, ed. Nora E. Jaffary (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007). 59.  Greer, “Colonial Saints,” p. 325. 60.  Luis Coteguera finds similar patterns in the hagiography of a poor Spanish woman. Luis Corteguera, “The Making of a Visionary Woman: The Life of Beatriz Ana Ruiz, 1666–1735,” in Women, Texts, and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World, ed. Marta Vicente and Luis Corteguera (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003), p. 172. 61. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), p. 201. “en los peligros de el mundo la perfección más heroica de una vida ajustada y religiosa.” 62.  Ibid., p. 81. 63.  Ibid., p. 83. “que iban descaeciendo en el fervor comenzado aquellas tiernas plantas que dejó en la ciudad faltándoles el riego de sus consejos y el cultivo de su enseñanza.” 64.  Ibid. “dejando la soledad, volverse a asistirlas y de nuevo a fomentarlas, y es que como Dios la iba disponiendo para introducir en su alma el espíritu apostólico de su Compañía, que igualmente atiende a la propia salvación y a la de los prójimos, no la quería retirada en los desiertos, sino comerciando con las almas los intereses de la gracia y los negocios de su mayor gloria.” 65.  Ibid., p. 229. “hija legítima de aquel abrasado ardiente espíritu de el esclarecido Patriarca y fundador de la Compañía de Jesús . . . fué en el celo que siempre ardió en su pecho muy encendido de la salud y conversión de las almas.” 66.  Ibid., pp. 238–39. “llegó a conseguir el que muchas saliesen de su mal estado, logrando por su favor las mejoras de una nueva ejemplar vida.” 67.  Ibid., p. 231. “Tomando Dios por instrumento a esta sierva suya para sacar, como de hecho sacó, a innumerables personas.” 68.  See Myers, Neither Saints nor Sinners, p. 37. 69. Platero, Ana Guerra de Jesús, p. 554. “que no me metiera con Catalina, que no era mi hija sino de Santo Domingo y Santa Rose y que supiera que no la había criado Dios para religiosa ninguna, sino para Beata.” 70. Rapley, The Dévotes; Harline, “Actives and Contemplatives,” p. 561. 71. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), p. 229. “celo que siempre ardió en su pecho muy encendido de la salud y conversión de las almas,” into “eficaces medios que le eran permitidos en su estado y sexo.”

Notes to Chapter Two

225

72.  Ibid., p. 81. “fueron sin número las almas que siguiendo sus pasos y sus ejemplos dejaron los desórdenes de su estragada vida y se volvieron a Dios.” 73.  Ibid., p. 201. “muchas nobles, piadosas y devotas doncellas.” 74.  Ibid., p. 231. “lo fervoroso de sus exhortaciones, ya con sus obsequios y servicios, o ya con otros industriosos medios que había aprendido en la escuela de la caridad.” 75.  Ibid., p. 80. “vanidad y desenvoltura en los trajes y costumbres, que estaba entonces muy usada en esta ciudad.” 76.  Ibid., pp. 138–39. “lo fué suavemente disponiendo para una confesión general de toda su vida, que hizo muy en breve con el V. Maestro don Bernardino de Ovando.” 77.  Ibid., pp. 147–48. “santos consejos y fervorosas razones de Da Anna, haciéndose cargo de sus trabajos . . . y no apartándose de su presencia hasta ponerlo en gustosa tranquilidad.” 78.  See Coakley, “Gender and the Authority of Friars”; Sharon Farmer, “Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives,” Speculum 61, no. 3 (1986). 79. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), pp. 231, 362–63. “con afable entereza y familiaridad . . . Recibió la mujer como de un oráculo sus palabras y poniendo luego en ejecución sus santos consejos, al cabo de un mes murió.” 80.  Ibid., pp. 238–48. 81. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, pp. 83, 234. 82. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), p. 248. “ganar almas y reducir pecadores.” 83.  Ibid., p. 73. “permitió Dios que creyese había pecado para que por las experiencias de sí misma sintiera más vivamente el infeliz estado de los pecadores y lograra juntamente continuos recuerdos para humillarse y abundante material para arrepentirse.” 84.  Ibid., p. 89. “que abrigando a sus polluelos con las alas . . . y le dijo: éstos son los pecadores que se vuelven a mí y tú eres una de ellos; mira cómo los recojo en mi seno; no temas, porque quien estuviere amparado de mis alas, no se perderá jamás.” 85.  Ibid., p. 84. Siria describes how after Anna’s conversion experience she heard an interior voice say “Ya naciste,” and that this provoked a “grande admiración que una mujer ya crecida en la edad pudiese estar recién nacida.” 86.  Caroline Walker Bynum, “Foreword,” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), p. x. 87.  Lehfeldt, “Discipline, Vocation, and Patronage,” p. 1016. 88.  Lavrin and Loreto López, Diálogos espirituales, p. 15. Lavrin and Loreto López describe the spiritual autobiography of an abandoned wife in seventeenthcentury Lima as a “singular” text, “ya que ninguna otra mujer de esta condición, que sepamos, escribió sobre estos aspectos de su vida.” 89.  Lehfeldt, “Discipline, Vocation, and Patronage,” pp. 1009–10. 90.  On Mexican and Peruvian institutions, see Muriel, Los recogimientos de mujeres; Holler, Escogidas Plantas; and van Deusen, Between the Sacred and the Worldly.

226

Notes to Chapter Two

91.  Pardo, Zamora Castellanos, and Luján Muñoz, Guía de Antigua Guatemala, pp. 129–31. 92.  J. Joaquín Pardo, Efemérides de la Antigua Guatemala, 1541–1779 (Guatemala: Unión Tipográfica, 1944), pp. 75, 80, 113–14. On July 15, 1683, the bishop of Guatemala petitioned the crown to found “una casa donde sean recogidas . . . las mujeres perdidas y de mal vivir.” 93.  René Johnston Aguilar, “La Casa de Recogidas: Un ejemplo de la situación de la mujer durante la Colonia,” Anales de la Academia de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala LXXXVI (2011): p. 49. 94.  Diligencias practicadas para que Antonia de Sarate le haga vida maridable con su marido, 1747, Fondo Diocesano, Juzgado Eclesiastico, Divorcios, Caja 1 (1744–1780), Fols. 1f–5f, AHAG. Antonia de Sarate testified that she had lived apart from her husband for many years since he left the city and was unjustifiably placed in the Casa de Recogidas at the request of her mother. Antonia further argued that being incarcerated in the Casa de Recogidas could cause marital discord, as her husband would assume that the incarceration indicated guilt of a scandalous sexual crime. The judges ruled in her favor and returned her to her mother’s house. 95.  Van Deusen, Between the Sacred and the Worldly, pp. 62–63. See also Mary Elizabeth Perry, “Magdalens and Jezebels in Counter-Reformation Spain,” in Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain, ed. Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 131. 96.  Divorcios, Caja 1 (1744–1780) y Caja 2 (1773–1790), Fondo Diocesano, Juzgado Eclesiastico, AHAG. 97. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), p. 152. 98.  Harline, “Actives and Contemplatives,” p. 550; Susan E. Dinan, “Spheres of Female Religious Expression in Early Modern France,” in Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds, ed. Susan E. Dinan and Debra Meyers (New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 85. 99. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), pp. 227–28. “doctrinase con sus consejos y las fervorizase con sus ejemplos.” 100.  Ibid., p. 252. 101.  Will of Vitoria de Paredes, 1700, Sig. A1, Leg. 699, Exp. 9192, Escribano Felipe Díaz, Fols. 173v–176f, AGCA. 102.  Third Order Regular of St. Francis, and Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, Sumario de la regla y otras advertencias que deben guardar los Hermanos Profesos del Sagrado Orden, llamado de los Tericarios de Penitencia, que por especial voluntad y revelación de Dios, fundó N.S.P. San Francisco, después de la primera de los Frayles Menores y segunda de Santa Clara, (México, D.F.: D. Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1786). 103.  Celia Cussen, “The Search for Idols and Saints in Colonial Peru: Linking Extirpation and Beatification,” Hispanic American Historical Review 85, no. 3 (2005): pp. 432, 437–38. 104.  J. Joaquín Pardo, Miscelánea histórica: Guatemala, siglos 16 a 19, vida, costumbres, sociedad (Guatemala: Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala,

Notes to Chapter Two

227

1978), p. 42; Victoria Reifler Bricker, The Indian Christ, the Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), p. 55. 105.  See Bricker, The Indian Christ, the Indian King; Kevin Gosner, Soldiers of the Virgin: The Moral Economy of a Colonial Maya Rebellion (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992). 106.  For further discussion of this trend, see Myers, Neither Saints nor Sinners, p. 66; and Gunnarsdóttir, Mexican Karismata, p. 19. 107.  Rubial García, Profetisas y solitarios, p. 39. 108. Myers, Neither Saints nor Sinners, p. 42; van Deusen, Between the Sacred and the Worldly, p. 122. 109.  Ernesto Chinchilla Aguilar, La Inquisición en Guatemala (Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, 1999), pp. 67–74, 174–76. Chinchilla Aguilar finds for the period between 1600 and 1750 only 27 Guatemalan Inquisition cases of “heterodoxos en general,” which included cases of false mysticism and illuminist heresies as well as some kinds of heretical propositions, compared to 142 cases of witchcraft, 110 cases of solicitation in the confessional, and 79 cases of bigamy. For the cases of false mysticism and illuminist heresies between 1600 and 1750, Chinchilla Aguilar mentions only cases of friars, laymen, and two nuns, one of them from Chiapas. 110.  Ximénez, María, and Gall, Historia de la provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala, pp. 444–45. “Sábese que se dio cuenta al Santo Tribunal, pero no sabemos de su resulta, lo que se presume es que como es cosa en que esta metido el señor obispo, no ha tomado resolución en acuesta materia.” 111. Bilinkoff, Related Lives, pp. 30–31. 112.  Benevenuti Papi, “Mendicant Friars and Female Pinzochere in Tuscany,” p. 86. 113.  Bridget Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England, 1660–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 143, 145. 114. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), pp. 136, 150. “Amada mía, ya no tienes marido en la tierra porque profesará el que tenías; de hoy en adelante yo soy tu esposo y como tal tomo la posesión de tu cuerpo para afligirlo con dolores; toda eres mía y hasta tus hijos los recibo por mi cuenta y les doy la posesión de padre.” 115.  Stephen Haliczer, “Sexuality and Repression in Counter-Reformation Spain,” in Sex and Love in Golden Age Spain, ed. Alain Saint-Saëns (New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1999), p. 87. 116.  Juan Luis Vives, The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual, trans. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 [1523]), pp. 206–7. 117.  Marina Caffiero, “From the Late Baroque Mystical Explosion to the Social Apostolate, 1650–1850,” in Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present, ed. Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 185. 118. Bilinkoff, Related Lives, p. ix. See also Keitt, Inventing the Sacred, p. 106. 119.  Rubial García, Profetisas y solitarios, p. 13.

228

Notes to Chapters Two and Three

120.  Ibid. See also Molina, To Overcome Oneself, 7. 121. Gunnarsdóttir, Mexican Karismata, 12. Gunnarsdóttir borrows the concept of the Catholic Reformation as a form of spiritual renewal from H. Outram Evennett. See O. Evennett, ‘Counter-Reformation Spirituality,’ in The Counter Reformation: The Essential Readings, ed. David Luebke (London: Blackwell, 1999). 122.  Lavrin and Loreto López, Monjas y beatas, pp. 11, 17. 123.  Molina and Strasser, “Missionary Men,” p. 156. See also Greer, “Colonial Saints,” p. 326. 124. Molina, To Overcome Oneself, p. 9. See also Rosalva Loreto López, “Oir, ver y escribir. Los textos hagio-biográficos y espirituales del Padre Miguel Godínez. ca. 1630,” in Diálogos espirituales: Manuscritos femeninos hispanoamericanos siglos XVI–XIX, ed. Asunción Lavrín and Rosalva Loreto López (Puebla, México: Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades de la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2006), pp. 156–57. 125. Bilinkoff, Related Lives, p. 33. 126.  Corteguera, “The Making of a Visionary Woman,” pp. 165, 172. 127.  Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela, Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580–1750, 1st ed. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000), p. 8. “Verdaderas apostólicas.” 128.  Mary Dunn, “Claude Martin, Marie de l’Incarnation, and Female Religious Identity in Seventeenth-Century New France,” Catholic Historical Review 100, no. 3 (2014): p. 473. 129.  Vera Tudela, Colonial Angels, p. 8; Dunn, “Claude Martin,” pp. 472–73. 130.  Clark Colahan, The Visions of Sor María de Agreda: Writing, Knowledge, and Power (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994), pp. 95, 98. 131. Gunnarsdóttir, Mexican Karismata, pp. 94, 96, 180. 132.  Vera Tudela, Colonial Angels, p. 5. 133.  Diego de Córdova y Salinas and Lino Gómez Canedo, Crónica franciscana de las provincias del Perú (Washington, DC: Academy of American ­Franciscan History, 1957 [1651]), p. 951. “Por este medio predicaba todos los días.” 134.  Ibid., p. 957. “Iba por las calles a buscar los indios, y con la suavidad y gracia de sus palabras, que Dios derramaba en sus labios, atraía a muchos.” 135.  Cussen, “The Search for Idols and Saints in Colonial Peru,” p. 434. 136. Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, p. 163.

chapter three 1.  Will of María Nicolasa de Aparicio, 1705, Sig. A1, Leg. 1006, Exp. 9499, Escribano Francisco Herrera Samayoa, Fols. 196v–198f, AGCA. 2. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, p. 98. 3.  See Christine Hünefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor Among Lima’s Slaves, 1800–1854 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Maria Odila Silva Dias, Power and Everyday Life: The Lives of Work-

Notes to Chapter Three

229

ing Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995); Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala. 4.  On the Tortuguero neighborhood, see Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, pp. 48, 268n11. 5.  In the Libro de la Cofradía del Santísimo Sacramento from the Remedios Parish, the 1684 elections noted that “fueron nombradas para barrer y lavar ropa de la Iglesia por capitanas Nicolasa Candelaria y Petrona Bernal.” Other records from the Cofradía del Carmen mention the election of “capitanas del culto” and “capitanas del novenario,” and “capitanas mayores de misas meseras y hospedería de los de fuera,” suggesting that women in these positions paid alms to support masses and specific religious festivals or provided shelter for religious pilgrims. See Libro de elecciones e inventarios de la Cofradía de San Gerónimo, 1676–1725, Libros de Cofradías de San Sebastián, Fondo Parroquial, San ­Sebastián, Sección Sacramental, AHAG; Libro de la Hermandad de la Cofradía de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, Libros de Cofradías de Remedios, Fondo Parroquial, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, Sección Sacramental, AHAG; Libro de la Cofradía del Santísimo Sacramento, Libros de Cofradías de Remedios, Fondo Parroquial, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, Sección Sacramental, AHAG; Libro de Erección y Estatuto de la Cofradía de Nuestra Señora del Carmen del Cerro, 1667–1816, Sig. A1, Leg. 5779, Exp. 48565, Fols. 14v–23v, AGCA. 6.  Zoila Rodríguez Girón, Dámaris Menéndez, and Octavio Axpuac, “Las capillas de morenos y naturales del templo de Santo Domingo en Santiago de Guatemala,” in XX Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2006: Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología, ed. Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, Juan Pedro Laporte, Bárbara Arroyo, and Héctor E. Mejía (Guatemala: Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, Instituto de Antropología e Historia, 2007), p. 1515. 7.  See Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets. 8.  Segments of this chapter originally appeared in Leavitt-Alcántara, “Intimate Indulgences” and Leavitt-Alcántara, “Quiet Voices.” 9. Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, pp. 106–7. 10.  J. Manuel Santos Pérez, Élites, poder local y régimen colonial: El cabildo y los regidores de Santiago de Guatemala, 1700–1787 (Cádiz: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cádiz, 1999), p. 20. 11. Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, p. 113. 12.  Luis Luján Muñoz, “Santiago de Guatemala y Puebla de los Ángeles: Sus relaciones culturales,” in Teoxché: Madera de Dios: Imaginería colonial guatemalteca, ed. Isabel Paiz de Serra (México, D.F.: Embajada de Guatemala en México, 1997), pp. 28–29; Barbara B. Mauldin, “Images of the Christ Child: Devotions and Iconography in Europe and New Spain” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 2001), p. 193. 13. Annis, The Architecture of Antigua Guatemala, pp. 102–3, 212, 218. 14.  See David Brading, “Tridentine Catholicism and Enlightened Despotism in Bourbon Mexico,” Journal of Latin American Studies 15, no. 1 (1983). 15.  Adriaan van Oss, Catholic Colonialism: A Parish History of Guatemala, 1524–1821 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 138.

230

Notes to Chapter Three

16.  Ibid., pp. 137–38. 17.  Karen Melvin identifies a similar dynamic throughout eighteenth-century Mexico. See Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, p. 120. 18.  Chinchilla Aguilar, La Inquisición en Guatemala, p. 79. 19.  See, for example, Consideraciones cristianas para todos los días del mes, (Nueva Guatemala: Don Manuel Arévalo, 1803). 20.  Alicia Bazarte Martínez and Clara García Ayluardo, Los costos de la salvación: Las cofradías y la Ciudad de México, siglos XVI al XIX (México, D.F.: Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas: Instituto Politécnico Nacional: Archivo de la Nación, 2001), p. 115. 21.  In contrast to European trends, historians of Mexico have found ample evidence of generous pious bequests into the early nineteenth century. See, for example, Larkin, The Very Nature of God; María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano, Gisela von Wobeser, and Juan Guillermo Muñoz Correa, eds., Cofradías, capellanías y obras pías en la América colonial (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1998); and Zarate Toscano, Los nobles ante la muerte en México. 22.  For further discussion of Mexico’s cemetery debates, see Voekel, Alone Before God. 23.  On the decline in confraternity memberships in Mexico City, see Larkin, The Very Nature of God, pp. 204–5. 24.  Brian Larkin, “Confraternities and Community: The Decline of the Communal Quest for Salvation in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City,” in Local Religion in Colonial Mexico, ed. Martin Austin Nesvig (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), p. 195. 25.  Jesús María García Añoveros, Población y estado sociorreligioso de la Diócesis de Guatemala en el último tercio del siglo XVIII (Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 1987), p. 59. 26.  Ibid., pp. 67, 72. García Añoveros cites Cortés y Larraz, “Las cofradías contribuyen para ornamentos, cera, vinos, hostias y cuanto es necesario en las parroquias y no solamente para esto, sino para edificar y reparar los templos que a causa de los temblores padecen mucho en todo el Arzobispado y en tanto grade que no hay que contar para estos gastos en otro ramo . . . . Las cofradías es casi lo único con que se puede contar para la asistencia de los curas y ministros necesarios para el servicio de las parroquias.” 27.  El Regidor Sindico sobre que se quiten los que demandan limosnas por las calles y queden solo los que expresa, reforma de procesiones y prohibición del uso de capirotes, 1793, Sig. A1, Leg. 42, Exp. 1037, AGCA; Testimonio del acordado pasado al Supremo Gobierno sobre que no salgan en las procesiones tapados, empalados, y disciplinantes, 1797, Sig. A1, Leg. 2604, Exp. 21398, AGCA; Providencia para que no se permita que persona alguna baya al Calvario los viernes de Cuaresma por la madrugada, ni la mañana del Domingo de Pascua de Resurrección haya concurso en el Patio de dicho Convento de Santo Domingo, 1802, Sig. A1, Leg. 22, Exp. 629, AGCA. 28.  Will of Isabel de Pinzón, 1705, Sig. A1, Leg. 740, Exp. 9233, Escribano José de León, Fols. 75f–77f, AGCA.

Notes to Chapter Three

231

29.  Ibid., Fol. 75v. “Declaro por mis bienes las casas de mi morada de las cuales me hizo gracia y donación el Licenciado Juan Antonio Dávalos.” 30.  Ibid., Fol. 76f. “Que las casas de mi morada sea para las dichas mis tres hijas para que vivan hermanablemente; esto atento a que en la dicha donación que me hizo de ellas el dicho Licenciado Juan Antonio Dávalos excluyó a mis hijos varones de que tengan derecho alguno a dichas casas.” 31.  Ibid., Fol. 75v. 32.  Will of Antonia Pérez, 1705, Sig. A1, Leg. 740, Exp. 9233, Escribano José de Leon, Fols. 195v–196v, AGCA. 33.  Will of Antonia de Leiva, 1705, Sig. A1, Leg. 1006, Exp. 9499, Escribano Francisco Herrera Samayoa, Fols. 173f–175v, AGCA. 34.  Libro de elecciones, bulas, ordenanzas, y diligencias de la Hermandad de Nuestra Señora de la Caridad, 1691–1744, 1759–1776, Libros de Cofradías de San Sebastián, Fondo Parroquial, San Sebastián, Sección Sacramental, AHAG; Libro de ordenanzas, elecciones, e inventarios de la Hermandad de (la Caridad) de San Roque, 1686–1732, Libros de Cofradías de San Sebastián, Fondo Parroquial, San Sebastián, Sección Sacramental, AHAG; Libro de la Cofradía de Santísimo Sacramento, 1672–1732, Libros de Cofradías de Remedios, Fondo Parroquial, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, Sección Sacramental, AHAG. 35.  Nicole von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), p. 46. 36.  Ibid., p. 41. 37.  Margaret Chowning, “La feminización de la piedad en México: Género y piedad en las cofradías de españoles. Tendencias coloniales y pos-coloniales en los arzobispados de Michoacán y Guadalajara,” in Religión, política, e identidad en la independencia de México, ed. Brian Connaughton (México, DF: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2010), pp. 481, 483. 38.  Asunción Lavrin, “Cofradías Novohispanos: Economías material y espiritual,” in Cofradías, capellanías, y obras pías en la América colonial, ed. María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano, Gisela von Wobeser, and Juan Guillermo Muñoz Correa (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1998), p. 50. “reforma de sus costumbres, pureza de conciencia, y ajuste de la vida.” 39.  Bazarte Martinez and Garcia Ayluardo, “Patentes o sumarios de indulgencies,” p. 118. 40.  This analysis builds on Matthew O’Hara’s application of Vered Amit’s notion of “relational identities” to religious brotherhoods in colonial Mexico. Matthew O’Hara, “The Orthodox Underworld of Colonial Mexico,” Colonial Latin American Review 17, no. 2 (2008): p. 243. 41.  Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, p. 42. 42.  Libro de elecciones e inventarios de la Cofradía de San Gerónimo, 1676– 1725, Libros de Cofradías de San Sebastián, Fondo Parroquial, San Sebastián, Seccion Sacramental, AHAG. 43.  Rafael Castañeda García, “Piedad y participación femenina en la cofradía de negros y mulatos de San Benito de Palermo en el Bajío novohispano, siglo XVIII,” Nuevo Mundo, Mundos Nuevos Débats (2012).

232

Notes to Chapter Three

44.  See Edward W. Osowski, “Carriers of Saints: Traveling Alms Collectors and Nahua Gender Roles,” in Local Religion in Colonial Mexico, ed. Martin Austin Nesvig (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), p. 44; von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers. 45.  Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, p. 45. 46.  Mario Alfredo Ubico Calderón, “Procesiones poco conocidas en Santiago capital del Reino de Guatemala en la época colonial,” Tradiciones de Guatemala 54 (2000), Guatemala: Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, Centro de Estudios Folklóricos, p. 154. 47.  Libro de la Hermandad de la Cofradía de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, 1673–1785, Libros de Cofradías de Remedios, Fondo Parroquial, Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, Sección Sacramental, Fols. 6f, 21f, AHAG. 48.  Libro de Erección y Estatuto de la Cofradía de Nuestra Señora del Carmen del Cerro, 1667, Sig. A1, Leg. 5779, Exp. 48565, Fols. 14f–16f, AGCA. 49.  Licencia para pedir limosna, Cofradía de San Benito de Palermo, 1793, Sig. A1, Leg. 105, Exp. 2246, AGCA; Cofradía de la Cruz del Milagro, Sig. B9, Leg. 1294, Exp. 31401, AGCA. 50.  Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, pp. 43, 69. 51.  Unlike Mexico City where many parishes were racially segregated until the late eighteenth century, Santiago’s parishes were multiracial from their inception. Lutz, Santiago de Guatemala, p. 47. 52.  Lasso de la Vega, Compendio de las obligaciones, pp. 68–69, 72–73. 53.  Will of Antonia de Aguilar, 1717, Sig. A1, Leg. 1410, Exp. 9901, Escribano Diego Leonardo Valenzuela, Fols. 55v–57v, AGCA. 54.  Lavrin, “Introduction: The Scenario, the Actors, and the Issues,” p. 10. 55.  Will of Antonia de Aguilar, 1717, Sig. A1, Leg. 1410, Exp. 9901, Escribano Diego Leonardo Valenzuela, Fols. 55v–57v, AGCA. 56.  Will of Juana de la Fé y Velasco, 1717, Sig. A1, Leg. 1375, Exp. 98661, Escribano Juan de Ulloa y Moscoso, Fols. 141f–144v, AGCA. 57.  Ibid. “Como yo Juana de la Fe y Velasco vecina de esta ciudad de Santiago de Guatemala hermana de la tercera orden de Penitencia del Señor San Francisco mujer legitima de Don Juan de Salazar que se haya ausente de esta ciudad más tiempo de veinte años.” 58.  See for example, Rebecca Earle, “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!!’ Race, Clothing, and Identity in the Americas (17th–19th Centuries),” History Workshop Journal, no. 52 (2001), 175–95; Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat, pp. 3, 19; Mangan, Trading Roles, pp. 139–40; von Germeten, Violent Delights, Violent Ends, pp. 145–47. 59.  Quoted in Earle, “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!!’” p. 182. 60.  I am grateful to Gretchen Starr-Lebeau for alerting me to this possibility. Gretchen Star-Lebeau, personal communication, April 2015. 61. Siria, Vida admirable (1962), p. 268. 62.  Cited in Thomas Calvo, “¿La religión de los ‘ricos’ era una religión popular? La Tercera Orden de Santo Domingo (México), 1682–1693,” in Cofradías, capellanías y obras pías en la América colonial, ed. María del Pilar Martínez

Notes to Chapter Three

233

López-Cano, Gisela von Wobeser, and Juan Guillermo Muñoz Correa (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1998), p. 85. 63.  Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 46. 64.  Francisco Antonio de Montalvo and Agustín Estrada Monroy, Vida admirable y muerte preciosa del venerable hermano Pedro de San José Betancur, fundador de la Compañía Bethlemítica en las Indias Occidentales (Guatemala: Tip. Nacional, 1974 [1683]), p. 28. 65.  Juarros and Palomo, Compendio de la historia, p. 144. 66.  Ricardo Toledo Palomo, Retratos del santo hermano Pedro: Pedro de San José de Betancurt en el arte (Guatemala: Caudal, 2002), p. 72. Toledo Palomo notes that the early eighteenth-century painting of Hermano Pedro de San José in the Franciscan tertiary habit served as the basis for at least one nineteenth-century series of estampas, cheap prints, which would have been widely distributed. 67.  Thomas Calvo, “¿La religión de los ‘ricos’ era una religión popular?,” p. 77. 68.  On the Franciscan Confraternity of the Cord, see Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, p. 145. 69.  Will of Manuela de Jesús y Molina, 1755, Sig. A1, Leg. 882, Exp. 9375, Escribano Antonio González, Fols. 311v–315f, AGCA. 70.  For discussion of the spiritual economy of salvation, see Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); Lavrin, “Cofradías Novohispanos,” pp. 49–50. 71. Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory, p. 172. 72.  For analyses of elite pious foundations and the spiritual economy in which they functioned, see Martínez López Cano, von Wobeser, and Muñoz Correa, Cofradías, capellanías y obras pías en la América colonial; Gisela von Wobeser, Vida eterna y preocupaciones terrenales: Las capellanías de misas en la Nueva España, 1700–1821 (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999). 73.  Marta Eugenia García Ugarte, “Impacto de las fundaciones piadosas en la sociedad queretana (siglo XVIII),” in Cofradías, capellanías y obras pías en la América colonial, ed. María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano, Gisela von Wobeser, and Juan Guillermo Muñoz Correa (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1998), p. 247. 74. Voekel, Alone Before God, p. 134. 75.  Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, p. 41. 76. Larkin, The Very Nature of God, p. 240. 77.  Von Germeten, Black Blood Brothers, p. 41. 78.  Will of María Antonia de Castillo, 1761, Sig. A1, Leg. 492, Exp. 8895, Escribano José de Azurdia, Fols. 84f–85f, AGCA. 79.  Will of Melchora de los Reyes, 1750, Sig. A1, Leg. 1457, Exp. 9947, Escribano Juan José Zavala, Fols. 85v–88v, AGCA. 80.  Will of María Nicolasa de Acebedo, 1761, Sig. A1, Leg. 1069, Exp. 9562, Escribano Diego Antonio Milán, Fols. 66f–68v, AGCA.

234

Notes to Chapter Three

81.  Will of Juana Hernández, 1761, Sig. A1, Leg. 1001, Exp. 9494, Escribano José Matías Guzmán, Fols. 381f–384f, AGCA. 82.  Will of María Esperanza de la Selva, 1755, Sig. A1, Leg. 1131, Exp. 9624, Escribano Manuel Ordóñez, Fols. 24f–24v, AGCA. 83.  Ibid. “Para adorno y decencia de la Iglesia por el mucho amor que la tengo.” 84.  Will of Petrona Carrillo, 1770, Sig. A1, Leg. 967, Exp. 9460, Escribano Antonio Guzmán, Fols. 7f–8f, AGCA. 85. Eire, From Madrid to Purgatory, p. 200. 86.  Michael Costeloe, Church Wealth in Mexico: A Study of the Juzgado de Capellanías in the Archbishopric of Mexico, 1800–1856 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 60. Costeloe notes that the Mexican fiscal in 1813 described capellanías as “trust funds . . . established for the benefit of family members.” 87.  William Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 87. 88.  On corporate capellanía patrons and beneficiaries, see John Schwaller, Origins of Church Wealth in Mexico: Ecclesiastical Revenues and Church Finances, 1523–1600 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985), pp. 117–18. 89.  von Wobeser, Vida eterna y preocupaciones terrenales, p. 14. 90.  Gisela von Wobeser, El crédito eclesiástico en la Nueva España, siglo XVIII (México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1994), p. 24. 91. Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, p. 135. 92. Gauderman, Women’s Lives in Colonial Quito, pp. 85–86. 93.  Will of María de la Encarnación Marroquín, 1761, Sig. A1, Leg. 1001, Exp. 9494, Escribano José Matías Guzmán, Fols. 87v–89v, AGCA. 94. Annis, The Architecture of Antigua Guatemala, p. 219. 95.  Will of María Antonia Matamoros, 1761, Sig. A1, Leg. 888, Exp. 9381, Escribano Antonio González, Fols. 129v–130v, AGCA. 96.  Will of Manuela Flores, 1761, Sig. A1, Leg. 1001, Exp. 9494, Escribano José Matías Guzmán, Fols. 305f–307f, AGCA. 97. Schwaller, Origins of Church Wealth in Mexico, p. 121. 98. Burns, Colonial Habits, p. 143. 99. Oss, Catholic Colonialism, p. 137. 100. Burns, Colonial Habits, pp. 158, 164, 180. 101.  Libros de Fundaciones de San Felipe Neri, Fondo Diocesano, Secretaria de Gobierno, San Felipe Neri, Libro de Fundación, Tomos 1 y 2, AHAG. 102.  The total value of the seventeen foundations was 26,052 pesos. Women’s foundations accounted for 13,200 pesos, or slightly more than half of all investments. 103.  Will of María Inés Gil, 1761, Sig. A1, Leg. 1001, Exp. 9494, Escribano José Matías Guzmán, Fol. 19f, AGCA. 104.  Will of Gertrudis Paniagua, 1761, Sig. A1, Leg. 1001, Exp. 9494, Escribano José Matías Guzmán, Fols. 242v–246f, AGCA. 105.  Will of Juana Ventura Muños del Oro, 1770, Sig. A1, Leg. 895, Exp. 9388, Escribano Sebastián González, Fols. 395f–396v, AGCA.

Notes to Chapter Three and Part Two

235

106.  In the sample of wills from 1700 to 1720, fifteen out of twenty male will-makers who named priests as executors were married, while only five out of twenty-three female will-makers who named priests as executors were married. In the sample of wills from 1750 to 1770, twelve out of nineteen male will-makers who named priests as executors were married, while only one out of twenty-three female will-makers who did the same was married. 107.  Twenty-six percent of elite women and 27 percent of elite men named priests as executors in the sample of wills from 1750 to 1770. Twenty-one percent of non-elite men relied on priests as executors. 108. Stern, The Secret History of Gender, p. 99. 109.  See Delgado, Laywomen and the Making of Colonial Catholicism, chap. 2. 110.  Kathryn Burns, Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 126. 111. Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, p. 134. 112.  For further discussion of urban parishes in Mexico City, see Matthew O’Hara, A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico, 1749–1857 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 113. Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, pp. 119, 149. 114.  Will of María Inés Gil, 1761, Sig. A1, Leg. 1001, Exp. 9494, Escribano José Matías Guzmán, Fol. 19f, AGCA. 115.  Will of María Inés Gil, 1764, Sig. A1, Leg. 495, Exp. 8898, Escribano José de Azurdia, Fols. 3f–5v, AGCA.

part two 1.  Christophe Belaubre, “El traslado de la capital del Reino de Guatemala (1773–1779). Conflicto de poder y juegos sociales,” Revista Historia, no. 57–58 (2008): pp. 27–28. 2.  María Cristina Zilbermann de Luján, Aspectos socioeconómicos del traslado de la ciudad de Guatemala (1773–1783) (Guatemala: Academia de Geografía e Historia, 1987), p. 149. 3.  Gisela Gellert, “Ciudad de Guatemala: Factores determinantes en su desarrollo urbano,” Mesoamérica 29 (junio 1994), p. 13. 4.  Zilbermann de Luján, Aspectos socioeconómicos del traslado, pp. 105, 149. 5.  Langenberg, “Urbanización y cambio social,” p. 358. 6.­­  Gellert, “Ciudad de Guatemala,” p. 8. 7.  Belaubre, “El traslado de la capital,” pp. 30–34. 8.  Padrones formados por los Alcaldes de Barrio de Orden del Superior Gobierno, 1805, Sig. A1, Leg. 2190, Exp. 15738, AGCA. In the San Juan de Dios neighborhood, women represented 64 percent of the population. In the populous Capuchinas neighborhood, women represented 63 percent of the population. 9.  Padrón echo en fines de Diciembre de 1796 por el Alcalde de Barrio don Pedro José de Gorriz, correspondiente al Quartel de Santo Domingo y Barrio de las Capuchinas, 1796, Sig. A1, Leg. 5344, Exp. 45056, AGCA; Padrón del Barrio del Perú del Cuartel de San Juan de Dios formado por los ­comicionados

236

Notes to Part Two and Chapter Four

Regidor D. Juaquin Valdés y D. José María Barrutia, 1819, Sig. B84, Leg. 1130, Exp. 25982, AGCA; Padrón del Quartel de San Agustín, varrio de San Juan de Dios hecho por el Regidor Manuel Oliver y Asturias, 1824, Sig. B84, Leg. 1130, Exp. 25984, AGCA; Padrón general del Barrio de San José, en el Quartel de la Merced de Guatemala, formado por el Regidor José Echeverría y el comicionado por la hacienda Publica Ciudadano Cleto Córdova, 1825, Sig. B84, Leg. 1131, Exp. 25989, AGCA. See also Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala, p. 9. 10.  Langenberg, “Urbanización y cambio social,” pp. 360–62.

chapter four 1.  Sajid Alfredo Herrera, “Primary Education in Bourbon San Salvador and Sonsonate, 1750–1808,” in Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759–1821, ed. Jordana Dym and Christophe Belaubre (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007), p. 22. 2.  Despacho sobre establecimiento de Escuelas de Niñas, 1780, Sig. A1, Leg. 6091, Exp. 55304, Fol. 1v, AGCA. “La educación de las niñas es un principio que infaliblemente ha de producir la de todo el Pueblo y el cultibo racional de sus abitantes de uno y otro sexo por que destinándose estas a ser madres nadie puede ignorar la influencia y maiores proporciones que tienen ellas para inspirar el gusto de la instrucción a sus hijos, de cuio cuidado se encargan más particularmente y con mayor frequencia que los Padres en los tiempos de la niñez.” 3.  Real cedula de 20 de junio sobre que se informe acerca de la fundación, estado y demás circunstancias de la Casa de enseñanza llamada de la Cruz del Milagro, 1816, Sig. A1, Leg. 262, Exp. 5770, Fol. 27f, AGCA. “Mayor necesidad que tienen aquellas de que se les proporciones la educación conveniente: Aumentándose aquella tanto más, cuanto mayor es el influjo y predominio que ejerce la mujer sobre el hombre en todas las edades.” 4. Voekel, Alone Before God, pp. 72, 119, 144. 5. Chowning, Rebellious Nuns, p. 206. Chowning discusses how in Mexico “progressive Catholics began to develop priorities for reform that differed from those of the state” by the 1780s. 6. Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images, pp. 10, 204–5. 7.  O’Hara, “The Supple Whip,” p. 1375. 8.  Don Vicente Muños sobre que se le de alguna ayuda de costa para alivio de la Casa Escuela del Pueblo de Pinula, 1792, Sig. A1, Leg. 154, Exp. 3045, Fols. 1f–1v, AGCA. 9.  Ibid., Fol. 6f. “Por esta mi real cedula concedo a la mencionada Casa Escuela las tierras demonizadas el Sobrerito . . . y que de su cultivo y cría de ganados resultara mucho beneficio.” 10.  M. Raquel Saravia, La enseñanza primaria en Guatemala durante la época colonial (Guatemala: Universidad de San Carlos, 1972), p. 138. 11.  Don Vicente Muños sobre que se le de alguna ayuda, 1792, Sig. A1, Leg. 154, Exp. 3045, Fol. 3f–3v, AGCA.

Notes to Chapter Four

237

12. Saravia, La enseñanza primaria en Guatemala, p. 139. 13.  Don Vicente Muños sobre que se le de alguna ayuda, 1792, Sig. A1, Leg. 154, Exp. 3045, Fols. 1f, 2v, 12f, AGCA. 14.  Ibid., Fol. 1f–2v. “Bajo la dirección de unas Matronas que viven en casa de recogimiento, dotada, y mantenida con el caudal e industria de aquel.” 15. Saravia, La enseñanza primaria en Guatemala, p. 138. 16. Chowning, Rebellious Nuns, p. 189. 17. Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala, p. 155. 18.  Testimonio del difunto Don Pedro Cabrera Fernández, 1789, Sig. A1. Leg. 3015, Exp. 28996, Fol. 31f–32f, AGCA. 19.  Ralph Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914 (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 106. 20.  Ibid., p. 105. 21.  Mary Peckham Magray, The Transforming Power of Nuns: Women, Religion, and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 9–11. 22.  Josefina Muriel, La sociedad novohispana, pp. 276, 291. 23.  Pilar Foz y Foz, La revolución pedagógica en Nueva España, 1754–1820: (María Ignacia de Azlor y Echeverz y los colegios de la enseñanza), 2 vols., Vol. 1 (Madrid: Instituto “Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (C.S.I.C.),” 1981), pp. 365–70. 24. Chowning, Rebellious Nuns, p. 188. 25.  David Brading, Church and State in Bourbon Mexico: The Diocese of Michoacán, 1749–1810 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 98. 26.  Ibid., p. 101. 27. Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images, p. 166. 28.  See Margaret Chowning, “The Catholic Church and the Ladies of the Vela Perpetua: Gender and Devotional Change in Nineteenth-Century Mexico,” Past and Present, no. 221 (November 2013): pp. 226, 235; Silvia Arrom, Volunteering for a Cause: Gender, Faith, and Charity in Mexico from the Reform to the Revolution (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016). 29.  Dorothy Tanck de Estrada, “Tensión en la torre de marfil. La educación en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII mexicano,” in Ensayos sobre historia de la educación en México, ed. Josefina Zoraida Vázquez (México, D.F.: Colegio de México, 1981), p. 32; Muriel, La sociedad novohispana, p. 216. 30.  Belanger, “Between the Cloister and the World,” pp. 164, 167; Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, p. 146. 31. Chowning, Rebellious Nuns, p. 155. See also Isabel Arenas Frutos, “Innovaciones educativas en el mundo conventual femenino. Nueva España, siglo XVIII: El Colegio de Niñas de Jesús María,” in Memoria del II Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español: Monasterios, beaterios, recogimientos, y colegios: Homenaje a Josefina Muriel, ed. Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español, Josefina Muriel, and Manuel Ramos Medina (Chimalistac, México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México CONDUMEX, 1995), p. 445. 32.  Foz y Foz, La revolución pedagógica, Vol. 1, p. 264.

238

Notes to Chapter Four

33. Jaffary, False Mystics, p. 92. 34. Ibid. 35. Brading, Church and State in Bourbon Mexico, p. 98. 36.  Dorothy Tanck de Estrada, “The ‘Escuelas Pías’ of Mexico City: 1786– 1820,” The Americas 31, no. 1 (1974): p. 52. 37. Saravia, La enseñanza primaria en Guatemala, p. 78. Archbishop Francos y Monroy founded the Escuela de San José de Calasanz and the Escuela de San Casiano, with the support of the ecclesiastical and city councils, in 1792. 38.  Tanck de Estrada, “The ‘Escuelas Pías’ of Mexico City,” p. 59. 39.  Mónica Bolufer, Mujeres e ilustración: La construción de la feminidad en la ilustración española (València: Diputació de València, Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 1998), p. 127. 40.  Olwen Hufton and Frank Tallett, “Communities of Women, the Religious Life, and Public Service in Eighteenth-Century France,” in Connecting Spheres: European Women in a Globalizing World, 1500 to the Present, ed. Marilyn Boxer and Jean Quataert (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 100. 41.  Carmen Castañeda, “Relaciones entre beaterios, colegios, y conventos femeninos en Guadalajara, época colonial,” in Memoria del II Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español: Monasterios, beaterios, recogimientos, y colegios: Homenaje a Josefina Muriel, ed. Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español, Josefina Muriel, and Manuel Ramos Medina (Chimalistac, México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México CONDUMEX, 1995), p. 455. 42.  Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, “Reffugium Virginum. Beneficencia y educación en los colegios y conventos novohispanos,” in Memoria del II Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español: Monasterios, beaterios, recogimientos, y colegios: Homenaje a Josefina Muriel, ed. Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español, Josefina Muriel, and Manuel Ramos Medina (Chimalistac, México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México CONDUMEX, 1995), p. 435. 43.  Constituciones de la Casa Escuela de Pinula, Sig. A1, Leg. 16, Exp. 431, Fols. 9f–10f, AGCA. 44.  Herrera, “Primary Education,” p. 21; Muriel, La sociedad novohispana, p. 415. 45.  Tanck de Estrada, “Tensión en la torre de marfil,” p. 64. 46.  Don Vicente Muños sobre que se le de alguna ayuda, 1792, Sig. A1, Leg. 154, Exp. 3045, Fol. 10v, AGCA. “No se les permita a las indizuelas hablen en su lengua ni una palabra sino en Castellano, todo imponiéndoles alguna pena a la que no quisiere hablar Castellano.” 47.  Tanck de Estrada, “Tensión en la torre de marfil,” p. 64. 48.  Dorothy Tanck de Estrada, La educación ilustrada, 1786–1836: Educación primaria en la Ciudad de México (México, D.F.: Colegio de México, 1977), pp. 13, 15. 49.  Herrera, “Primary Education,” p. 24. 50.  El común de Pinula pide licencia para sacar de sus comunidades ocho pesos mensuales para un maestro Músico que enseñe a aquellos naturales, 1792, Sig.

Notes to Chapter Four

239

A1, Leg. 154, Exp. 3048, Fols. 1f–2f, AGCA. “El coro de esta iglesia parroquial se halla en grave decadencia en cuanto a sus oficiales y cantores necesarios para la celebración de los Divinos oficiales y cantores necesarios para la celebración de los Divinos Oficios, y demás funciones sagradas.” 51.  Don Vicente Muños sobre que se le de alguna ayuda, 1792, Sig. A1, Leg. 154, Exp. 3045, Fol. 2f, AGCA. 52. Chowning, Rebellious Nuns, p. 206. 53.  De los autos prohibiéndose la salida de Indias e Indios de Jocotenango para amas de leche, 1797, Sig. A1, Leg. 154, Exp. 3063, Fol. 3f, AGCA. 54.  Ibid., Fol. 17f. Pineda brought forward as an example the case of María Cantán, who had to leave her two-month-old baby behind when she was forced to travel to Guatemala City to serve as a wet nurse. Tragically, the infant died in her absence due largely to inadequate nutrition. 55.  Constituciones de la Casa Escuela de Pinula, 1795, Sig. A1, Leg. 16, Exp. 431, Fols. 10f–10v, AGCA. “Estarán con separación en un mismo Estrado en una punta las indizuelas y en otra las ladinas.” 56.  Laura E. Matthew, “‘Por que el color decide aquí en la mayor parte la nobleza’: Una carta de Fr. José Antonio Goicoechea, Guatemala, siglo XIX,” Mesoamérica 55 (enero–diciembre 2013): p. 159. 57.  Ann Twinam, Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), pp. 292–93. 58.  Don Vicente Muños sobre que se le de alguna ayuda, 1792, Sig. A1, Leg. 154, Exp. 3045, Fols. 1v–2v, AGCA. “Se encontraron generalmente instruidas en el Idioma Castellano, Doctrina Cristiana y ocupadas unas en leer y escribir otras en hilar y tejer el algodón con bastante finura, bordar, coser, hacer flores de mano, y medias a la Abuja: otras en beneficiar las colmenas de la Hacienda de Abejas que tienen dentro de la propia casa, blanquear, y labrar la cera con tanta perfección, y consistencia como la de el Norte y finalmente diestras muchas en tocar varios instrumentos y cantar todos los tonos, de la Iglesia.” 59.  Robert Jones Shafer, The Economic Societies in the Spanish World (1763– 1821) (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1958), pp. 48, 212, 215. 60.  Noticia de la pública distribución de los premios aplicados a las mejores hilanderas al torno enseñadas en la Escuela Patriótica de la Nueva Guatemala, celebrada en 4 de Noviembre de 1795 (Guatemala: Oficina de la Viuda de D. Sebastian de Arevalo, 1796), p. 5. Google Books. 61.  Ibid., p. 6. “Fueron tan rápidos los progresos, que a pocos días corrió la voz por toda la Ciudad. El Sr Presidente y muchas personas de ambos sexos así de la primera distinción, como de todas clases concurrieron a ver, y cerciorarse de ello, y admiraron con satisfacción los adelantamientos, y la sencillez, y buen orden de la enseñanza.” 62. Muriel, La sociedad novohispana, pp. 291–92. 63.  Elisa Luque Alcaide, La educación en Nueva España en el siglo XVIII (Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1970), p. 184. 64.  Foz y Foz, “Hipótesis de un proceso paralelo,” p. 69. 65. Brading, Church and State in Bourbon Mexico, p. 98.

240

Notes to Chapter Four

66. Saravia, La enseñanza primaria en Guatemala, p. 73. “El alivio de los enfermos y la enseñanza y educación de los niños, instruyéndolos en las primeras letras.” 67.  Ibid., pp. 75, 77. 68.  Tanck de Estrada, “The ‘Escuelas Pías’ of Mexico City,” p. 54. 69.  La educación ilustrada, pp. 17, 176–77. 70. Saravia, La enseñanza primaria en Guatemala, p. 129. 71. Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, p. 151. 72.  Ibid., pp. 154, 156. 73.  Hufton and Tallett, “Communities of Women,” p. 95. 74.  Don Vicente Muños sobre que se le de alguna ayuda, 1792, Sig. A1, Leg. 154, Exp. 3045, Fol. 1v–2v, AGCA. 75. Muriel, La sociedad novohispana, pp. 278, 292. 76.  Belanger, “Between the Cloister and the World,” p. 165. 77.  Sarah A. Curtis, Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000), pp. 9, 88. 78. Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, p. 163. 79.  Archbishop Cayetano Francos y Monroy is quoted in Carlos Meléndez Chaverri, “La Ilustración en el reino de Guatemala,” in Historia general de Guatemala, tomo III: Siglo XVIII hasta la independencia, ed. Jorge Luján Muñoz and María Cristina Zilbermann de Luján (Guatemala: Asociación de Amigos del País, 1995), p. 614. 80. Saravia, La enseñanza primaria en Guatemala, p. 129. 81.  Los vecinos del barrio de la Hermita sobre fundación de una escuela de enseñanza pública para niñas en el convento que dejaron las Monjas Claras, 1795, Sig. A1, Leg. 16, Exp. 431, Fols. 1f, 6f, AGCA. 82.  On elite attitudes, see Holler, Escogidas Plantas, para. 142–45. 83.  Mario Humberto Ruz and Claudia M. Báez Júarez, eds., Memoria eclesial guatemalteca: Visitas pastorales, vol. 1 (México: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2002), p. 404. 84.  Andrés Lira González, “Las escuelas de primeras letras en la Municipalidad de Guatemala hacia 1824. Un intento para organizar la educación elemental,” Latinoamérica, Anuario de estudios latinoamericanos de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México 3 (1970): p. 127. 85.  Asunción Lavrin, Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), pp. 245–46. 86.  Mónica Díaz, Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010), p. 47. 87.  Ibid., pp. 48, 53. 88. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, p. 249. 89.  Kathryn Burns, “Andean Women in Religion: Beatas, ‘Decency’ and the Defence of Honour in Colonial Cuzco,” in Gender, Race, and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas, ed. Nora E. Jaffary (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 83–84, 87–89.

Notes to Chapter Four

241

90. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, pp. 259, 269. 91. Díaz, Indigenous Writings from the Convent, pp. 53, 56–57. 92. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, p. 244. 93.  Foz y Foz, “Hipótesis de un proceso paralelo,” p. 69. 94.  Foz y Foz, La revolución pedagógica, Vol. 1, p. 418. 95. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, pp. 255–56. 96.  Aprobación de constituciones para Colegio de Matronas Seculares y Maestras de Niñas Indias de esta ciudad, 1807, Sig. A1, Leg. 219, Exp. 5164, Fol. 1f, AGCA. 97.  Ibid., Fols. 3v–4f. 98.  Ibid., Fol. 4v. “El mal estado en que se halle la educación del Beaterio persuade la necesidad de buscar arbitrio para mejorarla, parece que no hay otro medio que poner una Española de Rectora y de Priora una India.” 99. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, pp. 261, 265; Díaz, Indigenous Writings from the Convent, p. 108. 100.  Ibid., Fol. 7v. “explicar los días de fiesta, un punto de doctrina Cristiana después de la misa, concluyendo con una moralidad (1/4 hora) usando Evangelio, y algunas veces descenderá a las virtudes sociales del sexo, a los principios de Buena educación, amor del trabajo, odio al ocio y al vicio. No omitirá explicar las obligaciones de una Madre de familia, el respeto, amor, obediencia, a los maridos, y superioras, la honestidad con que han de educar especialmente a las hijas, y la constante aplicación al trabajo.” 101.  Aprobación de constituciones para Colegio de Matronas, 1807, Sig. A1, Leg. 219, Exp. 5164, Fol. 11v, AGCA. “Señor, Dios mío, yo os suplico que esta obra que en vuestro nombre comienzo se prosiga y acabe con Vuestro divino favor para Gloria ultra y provecho mío, amen.” 102.  Ibid., Fols. 2v–4f, 12f. 103.  Ibid., Fols. 3v, 7f–8f. 104.  Ibid., Fols. 5v–6f. 105.  Juarros and Palomo, Compendio de la historia, p. 156. 106. Rapley, The Dévotes, p. 57. 107.  Juarros and Palomo, Compendio de la historia, p. 156. See also Saravia, La enseñanza primaria en Guatemala, p. 117. 108. Curtis, Educating the Faithful, pp. 64, 74. 109. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, p. 266. 110.  Ibid., p. 267. 111.  Los vecinos del Barrio de la Hermita, 1795, Sig. A1, Leg. 16, Exp. 431, Fol. 4f, AGCA. 112.  Real cedula de 20 de junio, 1816, Sig. A1, Leg. 262, Exp. 5770, Fol. 15v, AGCA. 113.  Los vecinos del barrio de la Hermita, 1795, Sig. A1, Leg. 16, Exp. 431, Fol. 4f, AGCA. 114.  Real cedula de 20 de junio, Sig. A1, Leg. 262, Exp. 5770, Fol. 5f, AGCA. 115.  Método que deberá observarse en la Escuela que ha de establecerse en la Casa de Enseñanza pública de Nuestra Señora de la Visitación, 1804, Sig. A1, Leg. 4042, Exp. 31184, Fol. 1f, AGCA.

242

Notes to Chapter Four

116.  Real cedula de 20 de junio, 1816, Sig. A1, Leg. 262, Exp. 5770, Fol. 1f, AGCA. “Hoy no solo ha cerrado la puerta al sexo varonil, sino que cada día se resiste, se dificulta y se estrecha más y más la entrada y salida de las mismas alumnas.” 117.  Ibid., Fols. 10v–12f. 118.  Ibid., Fol. 9v. 119. Curtis, Educating the Faithful, p. 46. 120.  “Real cedula de 20 de junio,” 1816, Sig. A1, Leg. 262, Exp. 5770, Fol. 5f. 121.  Ibid., Fol. 8f. “El cello siempre grande y siempre incansable de dicha Señora Perfecta: que tanto esta, como las Colegiales encargadas de la enseñanza sobre ser de una conducta ejemplar y religiosa, están perfectamente instruidas en todos los ramos propios de su instituto, y llenas de celo, caridad, y dulzura.” 122.  Ibid., Fols. 8f–8v. “Con suficiente decencia y mayor que lo que permite su pobreza.” 123.  Ibid., Fol. 6f–7f. “Debiéndose a la solicitud y diligencias de dicha Señora y a la tarea de sus niñas el que hayan podido subsistir tantos años destituidas de socorros humanos.” 124.  Ibid., Fol. 6f. “He visto desde sus principios que habrá de 23 años este establecimiento piadoso fundado y sostenido por dicha Señora para la educación cristiana y domestica de varias niñas pobres que quieren vivir en voluntario y edificante encierro, y para la publica enseñanza de las mujercitas en la doctrina cristiana, leer, coser, y demás que conviene a su sexo y edad. Que con tan largo trato he visto siempre la unión, concordia, y arreglo con que viven lo interior.” 125.  Ibid. “Que todo lo perteneciente al culto divino, lo tenían, aunque pobre con mucho aseo y limpieza y todo conforme a rito y por último que de este piadoso establecimiento han salido algunas niñas para religiosas y otras han abrasada el matrimonio.” 126.  Ibid., Fol. 5f–5v. “Sin nota alguna del menor desorden, antes por el contrario grande recogimiento.” 127.  Ibid., Fol. 16f. “Una maestra de edad Madura, laboriosa, y de probidad . . . inflexible en su celo religioso, constante en el gobierno de sus alumnas, y diligente en adquirir con sus arbitrios y cortas manufacturas aquellas la manutención de todas, la subsistencia de las habitaciones arruinadas y del culto.” 128.  Ibid., Fol. 21f. 129. Lavrin, Brides of Christ, p. 307. 130. Gibson, A Social History of French Catholicism, p. 105. 131.  Brian Connaughton, Clerical Ideology in a Revolutionary Age: The Guadalajara Church and the Idea of the Mexican Nation (1788–1853), trans. Mark Alan Healey (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2003), p. 81. 132.  Margaret Chowning, “The Consolidación de Vales Reales in the Bishopric of Michoacán,” Hispanic American Historical Review 69, no. 3 (1989): p. 465. 133. Muriel, La sociedad novohispana, pp. 263–64.

Notes to Chapter Five

243

chapter five 1.  Lorenzo Montúfar, Reseña histórica de Centro América, vol. 1 (Guatemala: Tip. de “El Progreso,” 1878), chap. 4. 2.  See Christophe Belaubre, “Poder y redes sociales en Centroamérica: El caso de la orden de los Dominicos (1757–1829)” Mesoamérica 41 (2001), p. 71; David Chandler, Juan José de Aycinena: Idealista conservador de la Guatemala del siglo XIX (Antigua, Guatemala: Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica, 1988), pp. 6–7. 3.  For discussion of these historiographical trends, see Robert Orsi, “Abundant History: Marian Apparitions as Alternative Modernity,” in Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World, ed. Anna-Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen, and Catrien Notermans (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 217–18; Smith, The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico, p. 4. 4.  The private collection of documents held by the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad includes eyewitness depositions, spiritual examinations of Sor María Teresa, images of the bloodstained handkerchiefs, and the lengthy, almost daily, account kept by Franciscan friar José Buenaventura Villageliu. When I first began researching Sor María Teresa in 2005, these documents were unavailable to the scholarly community while the investigation into Sor María Teresa’s potential canonization proceeded. This private collection became available in 2014. 5.  See Wright Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism, p. 9; David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Nineteenth-Century Germany (New York: Knopf, 1994), pp. 15, 29; Thomas Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), pp. 37, 75–76. 6.  Atestado del Arzobispo, 17 de mayo, 1816, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 7.  Información medico-jurídica sobre las llagas de Sor María Teresa Ayzinena, monja Carmelita, 1818, Fol. 8v, Genaro García Collection G372, Benson Library, University of Texas, Austin. 8.  Depositions were made on May 17, May 24, May 31, June 7, and June 14. Atestados del Arzobispo, 1816, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 9.  Atestado del Arzobispo, 17 de mayo, 1816, Fol. 1, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. “Vio también con los expresados que de las llagas de las manos salía sangre con alguna abundancia que le había teñido las palmas, y algunos paños de lienzo.” 10.  Ibid., Fol. 2. “En el dedo anular de la derecha un anillo entre el pellejo que le formaba una especie de piedra.” 11.  Ibid., Fols. 2–3. “Hizo los últimos movimientos tan extraordinarios que se cernía la cama, y se hacía un arco su cuerpo, pero sin desviar los pies y las manos del lugar en que los puso desde que se traspuso; pasados estos extremos, se puso lo mismo que un cadáver sin aliento ni seña alguna de vida, hasta las moscas se le entraban a la boca y por los ojos que le quedaron entre abiertos.”

244

Notes to Chapter Five

12.  Ibid., Fol. 3. “apaciblemente con color sonrosado y con voz natural y perceptible.” 13.  Atestado del Arzobispo, 2 de julio de 1816, Fol. 1, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 14.  Depositions were recorded on July 2–5, 22, 27, and 30, and on August 5, 7–8, 12, 23, and 26. Atestados del Arzobispo, 1816, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 15.  Atestado del Arzobispo, 5 de julio, 1816, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 16.  Atestado del Arzobispo, 8 de agosto, 1816, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 17.  Atestado del Arzobispo, 3 de Julio, 1816, Fols. 1–2, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 18.  Atestado del Arzobispo, 2 de Julio, 1816, Fol. 2, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. “Tres corazones muy perfectos, como arrojando llamas de fuego, de sangre fresca y colorada, una cruz bien formada sobre el mayor y más elevado de ellos, la figura de un anillo con tres piedras, como el que se ve actualmente en su dedo anular, y también la figura de la Llaga que tiene en el costado, otra figura como de una monja vestida y una pequeña llama, al parecer entre los dos corazones, todo de sangre fresca y de color encendida.” 19.  Atestado del Arzobispo, 3 de Julio, 1816, Fol. 2, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. “Cuatro corazones de sangre muy fresca y colorada, bien formados con llamas de fuego, y que en el de abajo estaba una cruz perfecta, hacia un lado, una corona con un clavo en el centro, tres clavos al lado de la cruz, la figure de la Llaga del costado junto al Corazón de arriba.” 20.  Sor María Teresa affirmed that angels were producing the images with her blood during multiple depositions in July and August 1816. Atestados del Arzobispo, 1816, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 21.  Información medico-jurídica, 1818, Fol. 79v, Genaro García Collection G372, Benson Library, University of Texas, Austin. 22.  Ibid., Fols. 95f–96f, 101v–102f. 23.  Ibid., Fol. 39v. 24.  Primera relación de los sucesos que se han observado en la R.M. María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad, 1816, Genaro García Collection G366, Benson Library, University of Texas, Austin. 25.  Dictamen de los prodigios que obraba Sor María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad, religiosa Carmelita de Guatemala, 1816, Fondo Episcopal, Serie Santo Oficio de la Inquisición, Caja 1816, Exp. 52, Fol. 1f, Archivo Histórico del Arzobispado de México (AHAM). 26.  José Buenaventura Villageliu, Apuntes de las cosas extraordinarias de la Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad, 1816–1824, Fol. 202, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad.

Notes to Chapter Five

245

27.  Información medico-jurídica, 1818, Fols. 95f–96, Genaro García Collection G372, Benson Library, University of Texas, Austin. 28.  Atestado de Pedro Molina, 5 de Julio, 1816, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 29.  Atestado del Arzobispo, 22 de Julio, 1816, Fols. 3–4, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. “Es todo obra de Dios, sin que intervenga habilidad, artificio, industria, ni malicia de nadie.” 30.  Atestado del Arzobispo, 27 de Julio, 1816, Fol. 1, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 31.  Atestado del Arzobispo, 26 de agosto, 1816, Fol. 2, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 32.  Libro de Actas de Cabildo, 20 de agosto 1816, Fol. 99v, Sig. A1, Leg. 2192, Exp. 15743, AGCA. 33.  Libro de Actas de Cabildo, 16 de agosto, 1816, Fol. 101, Sig. A1, Leg. 2192, Exp. 15742, AGCA. “Siendo este un prodigio tan admirable parecía extraño que el Ayuntamiento no tuviere un testimonio autentico en su archivo para transmitirlo a la posteridad, y habida la necesaria conferencia se acorde que se compren tres pañuelos.” 34.  Ibid., Fols. 104–105. “Armario del secreto más reducido puesto de firme con seis llaves.” 35.  For discussion of scholarly approaches to “moments of presence,” see Orsi, “Abundant History.” 36.  Ian MacInnes, “Stigmata on Trial: The Nun of Portugal and the Politics of the Body,” Viator 31, no. 1 (2000): p. 386. 37. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 131, 84. 38.  Ibid., pp. 74, 116, 184. 39. Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images, p. 97. 40. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 206, 214–15. 41.  Ibid., pp. 186, 218, 220. 42.  Ibid., p. 131. 43.  Ibid., pp. 186–87. 44.  Testimonio del acordado pasado al Supremo Gobierno sobre que no salgan en las Procesiones tapados, empalados, y disciplinantes, 1797–1801, Sig. A1, Leg. 2604, Exp. 21398, Fols. 1–41, AGCA; El Regidor Sindico sobre que se quiten los que demandan limosnas por las calles y queden solo los que expresa Reforma de Procesiones y prohibición del uso de Capirotes, 1793–1797, Sig. A1, Leg. 42, Exp. 1037, Fols. 1–14, AGCA; Haga que se cumplan las providencias dictadas en tiempos anteriores, prohibiendo el uso de cubrirse los rostros para colectar limosnas, asistir a las procesiones, y disciplinarse o hacer otros actos de los que se llaman penitencia publica, 1824, Sig. B78, Leg. 864, Exp. 21228, Fol. 66, AGCA. 45. Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, p. 143. 46.  Luis Luján Muñoz, Semana Santa tradicional en Guatemala (Guatemala: Esso Central America, 1982), p. 71. 47. Blackbourn, Marpingen, p. 29. 48.  See Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies; Blackbourn, Marpingen.

246

Notes to Chapter Five

49.  See Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images. 50.  Ibid., pp. 173, 177. 51.  Ibid., p. 177. 52.  Villageliu, Apuntes de las cosas extraordinarias, Fol. 2, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 53.  Atestado del Arzobispo, 27 de Julio, 1816, Fol. 3 and Atestado del Arzobispo, 30 de Julio, 1816, Fol. 2, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 54. Blackbourn, Marpingen, p. 261. 55. Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies, p. 56. 56.  For discussion of these historiographical trends, see Silvia Arrom, “Mexican Laywomen Spearhead a Catholic Revival: The Ladies of Charity, 1863–1910,” in Religious Culture in Modern Mexico, ed. Martin Austin Nesvig (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007); Chowning, “The Catholic Church and the Ladies of the Vela Perpetua”; Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred; Ford, Divided Houses. 57.  Relación de Madre María Santa Ana de los prodigios que el Señor hace con nuestra dichosa y feliz hermanita María Teresa, Fols. 35–36, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 58.  Información medico-jurídica, Genaro García Collection G372, Fol. 78f, Benson Library, University of Texas, Austin. “Se han multiplicado tanto estas impresiones que casi no ha habido mujercilla que las desease tener en su pañuelo que no las haya obtenido.” 59.  Ibid., Fols. 95f–95v, 101v. 60.  Will of Josefa de la O Retes, 1810, Sig. A1, Leg. 824, Exp. 9317, Escribano José Francisco Gavarrete, Fols. 154f–155v, AGCA. 61.  Will of Felipa Jacobo Melgar, 1810, Sig. A1, Leg. 824, Exp. 9317, Escribano José Francisco Gavarrete, Fols. 152f–154f, AGCA. “La conciencia de dicha mi hija para que en todo se sujete a lo que disponga, según y cómo ya tengo dispuesto.” 62.  Relación de Madre María Manuela de Santa Ana, Fols. 33–34, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 63.  Información medico-jurídica, Genaro García Collection G372, Fol. 8v, Benson Library, University of Texas, Austin. 64.  Relación de Madre María Manuela de Santa Ana, Fol. 34, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. Both Narciso Esparragosa and Pedro Molina testified to this as well. Información medico-jurídica, Genaro García Collection G372, Fols. 14f–14v, 79v, Benson Library, University of Texas, Austin. 65.  Belaubre, “Poder y redes sociales en Centroamérica,” pp. 70–71. 66.  Timothy Hawkins, José de Bustamante and Central American Independence: Colonial Administration in an Age of Imperial Crisis (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), pp. 98, 126, 135.

Notes to Chapter Five

247

67.  Ibid., pp. 192, 196. 68. Wright-Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism, p. 28. 69.  Brian Connaughton, “Conjuring the Body Politic from the Corpus Mysticum: The Post-Independent Pursuit of Public Opinion in Mexico, 1824–1854,” The Americas 55, no. 3 (January 1999): p. 471. 70.  For discussion of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexican Independence, see Brian Connaughton, “¿Politización de la religión o nueva sacralización de la política? El sermon en las mutaciones públicas de 1808–1824,” in Religión, política, e identidad en la independencia de México, ed. Brian Connaughton (México, D.F.: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2010). 71.  Agustín Estrada Monroy, Datos para la historia de la Iglesia en Guatemala, vol. 2 (Guatemala: Sociedad de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala, 1974), pp. 221–28. 72.  Mario Rodríguez, The Cádiz Experiment in Central America, 1808–1826 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 115–16. 73. Hawkins, José de Bustamante, pp. 196–97. 74. Connaughton, Clerical Ideology in a Revolutionary Age, p. 84. 75.  Ibid., p. 81. 76.  Ibid., p. 30. 77.  Connaughton, “Conjuring the Body Politic,” p. 470. 78.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 4, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 79.  Ibid., Fol. 55. 80.  Atestados del Arzobispo, 5 de abril de 1817, Fol. 1, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 81.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fols. 40, 55, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 82.  Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden, “Introduction,” in Angels, Demons, and the New World, ed. Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 2. 83.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fols. 51, 55–56, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 84.  Dictamen de Fr. Félix Castro, 30 de Noviembre, 1816; Dictamen de Fr. Mariano José López Rayón, 20 de diciembre, 1816, private collection of Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 85.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 65, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 86.  Atestado del Arzobispo, 5 de abril, 1817, Fol. 1, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 87.  Ibid., Fol. 2. “Con inalterable paz y conformidad en la voluntad del Señor.” 88.  Ibid. “En nombre de Jesucristo te mando por obediencia que dejes las muletas, y andes sin ellas buena y sana.” 89.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 34, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. “En que se observase al pie de la letra la regla y constituciones.”

248

Notes to Chapter Five

90.  Ibid., Fols. 59, 61, 100. 91.  Ibid., Fol. 46. 92.  Ibid., Fols. 15, 22, 30. 93.  Richard Kagan, “Politics, Prophecy, and the Inquisition in Late-SixteenthCentury Spain,” in Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, ed. Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 106. 94.  Jodi Bilinkoff, “Teresa of Jesus and Carmelite Reform,” in Religious Orders of the Catholic Reformation: In Honor of John C. Olin on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday, ed. Richard L. DeMolen (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994), p. 172. 95.  Ibid., p. 173. 96. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, pp. 70, 73. 97.  Bilinkoff, “Teresa of Jesus,” p. 174. See also Magnus Lundberg, Mission and Ecstasy: Contemplative Women and Salvation in Colonial Spanish America and the Philippines (Uppsala: Swedish Institute of Mission Research, 2015), p. 30. 98.  William J. Callahan, Church, Politics, and Society in Spain, 1750–1874 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 80–81. 99. Chowning, Rebellious Nuns, p. 156. 100.  Bilinkoff, “Teresa of Jesus,” p. 173. 101.  María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad Aycinena y Piñol, Diario de la Madre María Teresa de Santísima Trinidad Aycinena Orden Carmelitas Descalzas, 1814, AHAG. 102.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fols, 48, 82, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. “Desde que se empezaron a divulgar las misericordias que Dios hacía en la Madre María Teresa, y por consiguiente estaba ya con esta observancia.” 103.  Ibid. “Muchos quedaron sin licencias de confesar monjas . . . fue no poco lo que se habló en toda la ciudad contra Su Ilma., y la Madre María Teresa, de donde presumía provenía aquella reforma, y la aversión que se aumentó a las cosas extraordinarias de la misma en casi todos los confesores.” 104.  Información medico-jurídica, Genaro García Collection G372, Fol. 102f, Benson Library, University of Texas, Austin. “Las alteraciones que ha habido en el monasterio ha sido aumentar el número de las Religiosas contra lo prevenido en las Constituciones, quitarles la libertad de Confesores tan encargada por Santa Teresa.” 105.  Dictamen de los prodigios que obraba Sor María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad, 1816, Fondo Episcopal, Serie Santo Oficio de la Inquisición, caja 16, exp. 52, Fol. 1f, AHAM. 106.  Información medico-jurídica, Genaro García Collection G372, Fol. 35v, Benson Library, University of Texas, Austin. 107.  Ahlgren, “Negotiating Sanctity,” pp. 374, 380. 108.  MacInnes, “Stigmata on Trial,” p. 382. 109. Jaffary, False Mystics, pp. 36, 98.

Notes to Chapter Five

249

110.  Ibid., p. 90. 111.  See Haliczer, Between Exaltation and Infamy, pp. 96–101, 115. 112.  Información medico-jurídica, Genaro García Collection G372, Fol. 31f, Benson Library, University of Texas, Austin. 113.  Atestados del Arzobispo, 1816, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 114.  See Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies, pp. 142–44; Blackbourn, Marpingen, p. 29. 115.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 84, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 116. Hawkins, José de Bustamante, p. 200. 117.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 84, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. “Presentarlo se seguirían males en la república, que Dios quería que los interesados en él le hicieran sacrificio de su honor, devolviéndolo al Rey sin abrirlo, que obrando con esta cristiandad perdonando las injurias, haría Dios que el honor de todos quedara mejor restablecido.” 118. Hawkins, José de Bustamante, p. 201. 119.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fols. 86–89, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 120. Hawkins, José de Bustamante, p. 200. 121.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 91, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 122. Hawkins, José de Bustamante, p. 201. 123.  Ibid., p. 200. 124.  Kagan, “Politics, Prophecy, and the Inquisition,” p. 119. 125.  John Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 15. 126. Hawkins, José de Bustamante, pp. 203–4. 127.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 94, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. “Gracias a Dios no tengo obligación de gobernarme por revelaciones.” 128. Ibid., 85. 129.  Información medico-jurídica, Genaro García Collection G372, Fol. 118f, Benson Library, University of Texas, Austin. 130.  Ibid., Fols. 126v–130v. “Un asunto, cuyo conocimiento no correspondía al Santo Oficio, sino al Ilmo. Sor Arzobispo.” 131.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 109, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 132.  Información medico-jurídica, Fols. 105v–106f, Genaro García Collection G372, Benson Library, University of Texas, Austin. “Dicha religiosa por medio del Villageliu, hizo fuertísimas diligencias para que no se abriera dando por cierto que produciría la apertura gravísimos daños lo que resulta del todo falso, el haber dicho que Jesucristo la había asegurado que los malos no la creerían para su mayor condenación siendo, como es muy repugnante que el no dar crédito a una

250

Notes to Chapter Five

revelación privada sea motivo de aumento de condenación: todo esto tiene al Declarante inclinado a creer pasivamente ilusa a dicha Religiosa.” 133.  Ibid. “Que está inclinado a que en los prodigios y hechos referidos de Sor María Teresa hay muchísima ilusión.” 134. Ibid., 101f. “El pueblo está dividido en opiniones en orden a la certidumbre o incertidumbre de los prodigios y hechos de Sor María Teresa Aycinena, que la mayor parte de las Personas instruidas le parece, que no los creen.” 135.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 121, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 136. Hawkins, José de Bustamante, p. 194. 137.  Ibid., Fols. 94, 96, 102. 138.  Atestado de José Mariano Méndez, 16 de febrero 1818, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad; Dictamenes de 1816–1819, Fol. 1, private collection of Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. “Es una de aquellas almas muy privilegiadas y favorecidas del Señor, que no se conoce en ella amor propio . . . inspirados de Dios y no sugeridos del demonio, ni movidos de la naturaleza corrupta.” 139.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 122, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización de Madre María Teresa Aycinena de la Santísima Trinidad. 140.  Ibid., Fol. 143. See also Dictamen de Fr. José Buenaventura Villageliu, 23 de febrero, 1819; private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización de Madre María Teresa Aycinena de la Santísima Trinidad; Dictamen de Fr. Mariano Pérez de Jesús, 17 de mayo de 1819, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización de Madre María Teresa Aycinena de la Santísima Trinidad. 141.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fols. 165, 170, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización de Madre María Teresa Aycinena de la Santísima Trinidad. 142.  Dictamen de los prodigios que obraba Sor María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad, 1816, Fondo Episcopal, Serie Santo Oficio de la Inquisición, Caja 1816, Exp. 52, AHAM. 143.  See Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990). 144.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 51, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización de Madre María Teresa Aycinena de la Santísima Trinidad. 145.  Ibid., Fol. 160. “La voluntad del Rey era la de Dios.” 146.  Ibid., Fols. 160, 162. “Que la Santa Madre le había dicho en él, que ya nada decía a Su Ilma., porque no hacia lo que se le mandaba.” 147.  Ibid., Fol. 180. 148.  Ibid., Fols. 182–183. “El Señor Vicario no conviene en ningún convento, ni de confesor de estas monjas. Su corazón es bueno y no tiene malicia, mas su entendimiento esta ofuscado con la influencia de acá dentro y por voluntad o permisión de Dios. Los daños en las almas son graves.” 149.  Ibid. “El entregar Vuestra Señor Ilma. la viña de Jesucristo a un extraño ha sido para encontrarla destrozada, y para un desenfreno de iniquidad, y de pasiones en las almas. . . . Que Vuestra Señor Ilma. tome por su consultor y tenga acuerdo con el Padre Villageliu.”

Notes to Chapter Five

251

150.  Ibid., Fols. 195–196. “Apenas hay cinco hombres apostólicos entre los que se llaman amigos de Dios . . . soy instrumento de la providencia, y hablo, aunque no quiera.” 151.  Ibid., Fol. 295. “La conducta que ha tomado Ilma . . . es ajena de un verdadero Pasto, que se aparta demasiado de su rebaño, se extraña, y se corre de ampararlas, y se esconde cuando se advierte hay lobos de pillaje. . . . Que a V.S. Ilma. le domina el temor . . . y no le deja aquella libertad que Dios quiere en el gobierno de su grey.” 152.  Ibid., Fols. 298, 300. “Se inquietaba, ni preguntaba, ni averiguaba, ni tenia empeño de sus revelaciones, antes lo contrario cuando encontró . . . que nada creía, y las despreciaba todas, sintió un sumo gusto, y daba gracias a Dios.” 153.  Anselmo Ortiz, Informe breve sobre el espíritu de la Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad Aycinena, Religiosa Carmelita descalza y fundadora de la nueva Recolección de la misma Orden, 1825, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 154.  The preface to Villageliu’s account was signed and dated 12 de septiembre de 1835 in Havana, Cuba, by Archbishop Ramón Casaus y Torres. Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 1, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. “En algún tiempo conviene hacer uso de estos y otros papeles guardados.” 155. Wright-Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism, p. 24. 156. Coakley, Women, Men, and Spiritual Power, pp. 221. 157. Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies, pp. 143–44. 158.  Información medico-jurídica, Genaro García Collection G372, Fol. 98f, Benson Library, University of Texas, Austin. 159.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fols. 143, 167, 198, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 160.  Ibid., Fols. 202, 252. “La gente, tanto de esta ciudad, como las que viven fuera, le llevaban pañuelos y cosas semejantes para que la Madre María Terea los usara y después les volvieran, con el fin de usarlos en sus enfermedades y que en efecto se les daba ese consuelo.” 161.  Jose Maria Navarro, “Carta que el Sr. Cura encargado de la Parroquia de Ntra. Sra. de Candelaria, Presbítero José María Navarro, ex Carmelita descalzo, le mandó al R.P. Fr. José Manuel de Jesús Alcántara de la misma orden, sobre algunos pormenores de la enfermedad y muerte de la R.M. María Teresa Francisca de la Santísima Trinidad, Religiosa de las Carmelitas descalzas de esta ciudad, 16 de febrero, 1842,” (Guatemala: Sr. Manuel Barberena, 1842), private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. “Fue generalmente querida y estimada por sus agigantadas virtudes, y principalmente por la mucha caridad que cuotidianamente ejercía con todos los que llegaban al torno a implorar el remedio de sus necesidades.” “El torno y portería se veían sucesivamente ocupados con toda especie de gentes que llegaban a saber de su madre.” 162.  Dictamen de Fr. Mariano Pérez de Jesús, 17 de mayo de 1819, Fol. 6, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización de Madre María Teresa Aycinena de la Santísima Trinidad. “Madre y Consuelo universal de pobres, enfermos,

252

Notes to Chapter Five

y necesitados.” “Excitando para su Socorro la piedad de sus parientes y de otras muchas personas . . . cuantos jóvenes de ambos sexos ha procurado y conseguido colocar en colegios, conservatorios, o casas de mucho gobierno.” 163.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fols. 261, 268, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 164.  Ibid., Fol. 198. “Estas noticias movieron a su Ilustrísima a aliviar a la Madre María Teresa, pues ya no existía el tribunal.” 165.  Belaubre, “Poder y redes sociales en Centroamérica,” p. 71. 166.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 203, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. “No conviene a la religión, ni a V. Majestad, pues entre ellos hay insurgentes y calvinistas.” On elite criollo support for freedom of press and El Editorial Constitucional, see Hawkins, José de Bustamante, pp. 131–32, 144. 167.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 254, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. “Publicar una excomunión contra los que continuasen en los partidos que se han formado en esta ciudad con motivo de las elecciones populares que ordena la constitución política de la monarquía.” 168.  Libro de Actas de Cabildo, 14 de junio, 1821, Sig. A1, Leg. 2194, Exp. 15747, Fol. 151f, AGCA. “Lejos de haber nada de milagroso en las impresiones . . . más bien se percibe en las ocurrencias que la motivaron, principios de hipersticion que alucinando al pueblo ofender la verdadera religión, agregándose a lo expuesto y a la total falta en pruebas que hubo para reputar portentosas tales sucesos.” 169.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 266, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. “La independencia es un castigo de Dios y así no hay más que sufrir.” 170. Hawkins, José de Bustamante, p. 156; Rodríguez, The Cádiz Experiment, p. 215. 171. Smith, The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico, pp. 215–16. 172.  Sarah Chambers and Lisa Norling, “Choosing to Be a Subject: Loyalist Women in the Revolutionary Atlantic,” Journal of Women’s History 20, no. 1 (2008): pp. 40–41. 173. Rodríguez, The Cádiz Experiment, pp. 161, 224–25. 174.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 276, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 175. Chowning, Rebellious Nuns, pp. 223–24. 176.  Villageliu, Apuntes, Fol. 278, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad. 177.  “A los Centro americanos,” San Salvador: Imprenta del Gobierno de S. Salvador, 1824, Taracena Flores Collection, F1438 M8 A468, Benson Library, University of Texas, Austin. “La de los escandalosos titiriteros milagros de estos tiempos atribuidos a la inocente e incauta madre Teresa allá por los años de 15 hasta 20 en que se hizo idolatrar a la parte del pueblo sencillo dándole a creer que era obra angelical. . . . Todo con los perniciosos fines de hacer creer a los pueblos que por no ser ya realistas, se alejaba de sus altares.” 178.  Zilbermann de Luján, Aspectos socioeconómicos del traslado, p. 149.

Notes to Chapters Five and Six

253

179. Rodríguez, The Cádiz Experiment, p. 15. 180. Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, p. 261. 181.  Lowell Gudmundson, “Society and Politics in Central America, 1821– 1871,” in Central America, 1821–1871: Liberalism Before Liberal Reform, ed. Lowell Gudmundson and Héctor Lindo-Fuentes (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995), p. 108. 182.  Douglass Sullivan-González, Piety, Power, and Politics: Religion and Nation Formation in Guatemala, 1821–1871 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), p. 60. 183.  For discussion of the Marian images and Independence politics in Mexico, see Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images. 184. Sullivan-González, Piety, Power, and Politics, pp. 64, 67. 185.  Dictamen de Fr. Mariano Pérez de Jesús, 17 de mayo de 1819, Fol. 6, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización de Madre María Teresa Aycinena de la Santísima Trinidad. “¡Ah cuantos consejos verbales! ¡Cuantas cartas! ¡Cuantas diligencias por medio de los confesores o de otras personas a propósito para logro de este fin! Y que llorar, orar, padecer, y por decirlo así, luchar con Dios por la publica tranquilidad, por la salud, libertad y restablecimiento de Nuestro Smo. Padre Pio VII y de nuestro Católico Rey y Sr Don Fernando VII y pacificación de sus Reinos.” 186.  Ibid. “Creo que en esta parte del mundo entero es deudor a Madre María Teresa del remedio cuasi inesperado de muchos de sus males, y de que no le hayan venido otros mayores, porque estoy cierto, que todo lo ha solicitado de Dios incesantemente con lágrimas de sus ojos y con sangre de su inocente cuerpo.” 187.  Anselmo Ortiz, Informe breve sobre el espíritu de la Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad Aycinena, 1825, private collection of the Asociación Pro Canonización Madre María Teresa de la Santísima Trinidad, Fol. 21. “No es esto exageración, el mismo Dios revelo que a no haber estado esta alma de por medio, hubiera sentido Guatemala la espada de la divina justicia como lo ha experimentado toda la Europa y América, pues las culpas nuestras, nuestros vicios y escándalos sino son mayores que en otras tierras a lo menos son iguales.” 188.  Ibid., Fol. 10. “Sabido es lo que los salvadoreños han inventado para destruirla, acabarla y aniquilarla.” 189.  Ibid., Fols. 9–10. “Si Dios no castigó a Guatemala como a los demás Pueblos de la América, ha sido porque la Madre María Teresa como en otro tiempo libro a su Patria de que se perdiera . . . lo mismo ha hecho ella por su gente guatemalteca, que tantos males y persecuciones tuvo que sufrir de ellos. . . . Dios oyó sus oraciones como las oye siempre.”

chapter six 1.  Will of María Cesaría Bolaños, 1850, Protocolos de José María Gavarette, Fols. 50f–51v, AGCA. 2.  Gellert, “Ciudad de Guatemala,” p. 25. Gellert cites Antonio Batres y Jáuregui, La América Central ante la historia, 1821–1921: Memorias de un siglo, 3 tomos (Guatemala: Tipografía Nacional, 1949), pp. 375–76.

254

Notes to Chapter Six

3.  Gudmundson, “Society and Politics,” p. 79. 4.  Congreso Centroamericano de Historia and Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz, eds., Mujeres, género e historia en América Central durante los siglos XVIII, XIX, y XX (México, D.F.: UNIFEM, Oficina Regional de México, Centroamérica, Cuba y República Dominicana., 2002); Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz, ed., Entre silencios y voces: Género e historia en América Central, 1750–1990 (San José, Costa Rica: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 2000). 5.  See for example, Díaz, Female Citizens; Hünefeldt, Liberalism in the Bedroom. 6.  Dore, “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back,” pp. 22–23. 7. Chambers, From Subjects to Citizens, p. 206. 8.  Ralph Lee Woodward, Rafael Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Guatemala, 1821–1871 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993), p. 59. 9.  Gellert, “Ciudad de Guatemala,” pp. 17, 19, 28. 10.  Henry Dunn, Guatimala: Or, the Republic of Central America, in 1827–8: Being Sketches and Memorandums Made During a Twelve–Months’ Residence (Detroit: Blaine Ethridge Books, 1981 [1829]), pp. 97–100. 11. Wortman, Government and Society in Central America, pp. 245–46, 260. 12.  Gellert, “Ciudad de Guatemala,” p. 22. 13.  Jordana Dym, From Sovereign Villages to National States: City, State, and Federation in Central America, 1759–1839 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), p. xx. 14.  Mark Szuchman, Order, Family, and Community in Buenos Aires, 1810– 1860 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988), p. 212. 15.  Mark Wasserman, Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Men, Women, and War (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), p. 13. 16.  Out of eighty-four female will-makers from 1850 to 1870, thirty-seven had never been married and thirty-four were widows. 17.  Lista de tiendas, 1829, Sig. B1, Leg. 1127, Exp. 25843, AGCA; Tiendas fuera del Mercado, 1829, Sig. B1, Leg. 1127, Exp. 25844, AGCA. 18.  Lista de vendedoras de ropa del portal, 1829, Sig. B1, Leg. 1127, Exp. 25847, AGCA; Lista de estanquilleros de la capital, 1829, Sig. B1, Leg. 1127, Exp. 25850, AGCA; Lista de chicherías, 1829, Sig. B1, leg. 1127, Exp. 25854, AGCA. 19.  Lista de los personas que tienen panaderías en este vecindario, 1829, Sig. B1, Leg. 1127, Exp. 25848, AGCA. 20.  “La Familia: El Matrimonio,” Gaceta de Guatemala, 26 de marzo 1857, Biblioteca Nacional de Guatemala. “El matrimonio es un lazo sagrado que une a los esposos para que juntos sufran las adversidades o participen de los placeres de la vida.” 21.  Ibid. “La virtud es el más bello ornamento de la mujer . . . siendo el principal deseo de la mujer el agradar a su marido, nada debe descuidar de lo que la conduzca a este resultado. El esmero, la limpieza, la gracia, y un poco de elegancia, tienen un atractivo inocente y secreto de que un marido no se puede desentender.”

Notes to Chapter Six

255

22.  “La Familia: El Matrimonio,” Gaceta de Guatemala, 2 de abril 1857, Biblioteca Nacional de Guatemala. “El Corazón de una madre es un tesoro de ternura para sus hijos y una Buena madre es la providencia de toda la familia. . . . El padre, entregado siempre a las ocupaciones exteriores, distraído sin cesar por los cuidados que exigen sus negocios y relaciones particulares, no puede por si solo asegurar el orden y la felicidad de la familia. Encumbre esto especialmente a la madre de familia, cuyo único placer es pensar en el bienestar de los demás.” 23.  For Mexican case studies, see Terry Rugeley, Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800–1876 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001), p. 74; Chowning, “The Catholic Church and the Ladies of the Vela Perpetua,” pp. 205–9. 24. Sullivan-González, Piety, Power, and Politics, p. 52. 25. Woodward, Rafael Carrera, p. 52. 26. Sullivan-González, Piety, Power, and Politics, p. 30. 27.  Ibid., pp. 22, 33. 28.  Ibid., p. 21. 29.  Ibid., pp. 23–24, 33. 30.  Ildefonso de Ciáurriz, Vida del siervo de Dios, P. Fr. Esteban de Adoáin: Capuchino misionero apostólico en América y España (Barcelona: Herederos de Juan Gili, 1913). 31.  Will of Manuela Agatona Beteta, 1850, Protocolos de Juan Andreu, Fols. 139v–142v, AGCA. “Ella sola y sin apoyo defendió al arzobispo durante los tumultos de la independencia en la plaza mayor.” 32. Rodríguez, The Cádiz Experiment, p. 149. 33. Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred, p. 16. 34.  Alejandro Marure, Bosquejo histórico de las revoluciones de Centroamérica, desde 1811 hasta 1834 (Guatemala: Ministerio de Educación Pública, 1960 [1837]), p. 215. “Luego que se hizo pública esta orden, el populacho del barrio de San Sebastián se reunió tumultuariamente en las inmediaciones del Colegio de Cristo, dando voces subversivas y protestando que defenderían, a costa de su sangre, a los presbíteros misioneros.” 35.  Ibid. “La multitud agolpándose a los balcones gritaba: misión queremos viva la religión, muera la herejía, mueran los que no quieren misiones.” 36. Woodward, Rafael Carrera, p. 30. See also Mary Holleran, Church and State in Guatemala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), p. 89. 37. Marure, Bosquejo histórico, pp. 308–9. “Porque ya no les era dado tolerar el despotismo de los fiebres; e hicieron su despedida con muestras de tanto sentimiento, que algunas mujeres lloraron, llenándose todas de la mayor indignación.” 38.  Ibid., p. 309. “Algunas mujeres se arrojaron sobre él, le arrancaron bruscamente el bastón y el gorro que llevaba en la cabeza, con parte de los cabellos; en seguida le dieron repetidos golpes con el mismo bastón, mientras que otras le tiraban fuertemente de sus vestidos.” 39.  Ibid., p. 312. “La horda fanática y rabiosa, compuesta en su mayor parte de mujeres; como furias desencadenadas se echaron sobre el desventurado vicejefe, y con piedras, palos, y puñales, le dieron tantos y tan repetidos golpes.”

256

Notes to Chapter Six

40.  John L. Stephens, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan, 2 vols., vol. 1 (New York: Dover, 1969 [1841]), p. 198. 41. Marure, Bosquejo histórico, p. 433. “En las calles, en las plazas, en el campo, por todas partes se veía al sexo débil, ya llevando refrescos a las tropas y animándolas al combate, ya insultando y conduciendo con violencia a la cárcel a todos los hombres que encontraban sin divisas militares, ya golpeando las puertas y ventanas de las casas de los liberales, y hacienda resonar el grito amenazador de mueran los herejes, viva la Religión.” 42.  Ibid. “Estas cuadrillas de mujeres, armadas de una especie de lanzas, compuestas de un palo con dos o tres cuchillos atados a uno de sus extremos y capitaneadas por las que eran más conocidas por su poco honrosa profesión, pusieron en gran movimiento a toda la ciudad y llenaron de pavor a los pocos adictos que pudieran tener los salvadoreños en Guatemala.” 43.  Ibid., p. 433, n. 22. 44.  See for example, Silvia Arrom and Servando Ortoll, eds., Riots in the Cities: Popular Politics and the Urban Poor in Latin America, 1765–1910 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996). 45.  Gudmundson, “Society and Politics,” p. 106. 46.  Silvia Arrom, “Rethinking Urban Politics in Latin America before the Populist Era,” in Riots in the Cities: Popular Politics and the Urban Poor in Latin America, 1765–1910, ed. Silvia Arrom and Servando Ortoll (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996), pp. 5–6. 47.  Earle, “Rape and the Anxious Republic.” 48.  James Sanders, “‘A Mob of Women’ Confront Post-Colonial Republican Politics: How Class, Race, and Partisan Ideology Affected Gendered Political Space in Nineteenth-Century Southwestern Colombia,” Journal of Women’s History 20, no. 1 (2008): p. 69. 49.  Ibid., pp. 70–71. 50. Woodward, Rafael Carrera, p. 53. 51. Stephens, Incidents of Travel, 1, pp. 230, 32. 52.  Ibid., pp. 168–69. For an estimate of the number of pilgrims in the 1820s, see Miguel Muñoz, Doctrina cristiana sobre el culto de las imágenes y noticia verdadera de la imagen milagrosa que se venera en el santuario del pueblo de Esquipulas, con una novena al fin dedicada al dulcísimo nombre de Jesús (Guatemala: El Porvenir, 1889), p. 23. 53.  Rafael Pérez, La Compañia de Jesús en Colombia y Centro-América después de su restauración. Segunda parte: Desde el restablecimiento de la Compañia de Jesús en Guatemala en 1851, hasta su segunda expulsion de la Nueva Granada en 1861. 3 vols., vol. 2 (Valladolid: L. N. de Gaviria, 1897), pp. 88–89. 54.  Francisco Broto, Vida de la sierva de Dios Madre María Encarnación Rosal fundadora de las Betlemitas, hijas del sagrado corazón de Jesús (Madrid: Editorial y Librería del Corazón de María, 1931), pp. 109–21. 55.  Shannon McGhee Hernández, “Charity, the State, and Social Order in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala, 1778–1871” (master’s thesis, University of Texas, Austin, 1992), pp. 144–46.

Notes to Chapter Six

257

56.  Ibid., p. 136. 57.  Ibid., p. 97. 58. Pérez, La Compañia de Jesús, 2, p. 96. 59.  La Prefecta de las Hermanas de la Congregación de la Inmaculada Virgen María, a nombre de dicha congregación que en el empeño de establecer una casa de Huérfanas y desamparadas, 12 de abril 1854, Sig. B7, Leg. 859, Exp. 20754, AGCA. See also “Casa de Huérfanas,” Gaceta de Guatemala, 12 de abril 1854, Biblioteca Nacional de Guatemala. 60.  Silvia Arrom, Volunteering for a Cause, pp. 2–3, 6, 14. 61.  Rafael Pérez, La Compañia de Jesús en Colombia y Centro-América después de su restauración. Tercera parte: Desde su segunda expulsión de la Nueva Granada en 1861 hasta la de Guatemala el año de 1871. 3 vols., vol. 3 (Valladolid: L.N. de Gaviria, 1898), p. 107. “Jóvenes de familias decentes, para cultivar también esta edad delicada que más tarde ha de dar el tono a la ­sociedad.” 62.  Asociación de Hijas de la Purísima e Inmaculada Concepción de la Bienaventurada Virgen María, Oraciones para hacer la visita y otras provechosas á las asociadas (Guatemala: Impr. de la Aurora, 1855), p. 57. “Con aquel estado y condición en que Dios te haya puesto a ti y a tu familia, y si para sustentarte tienes que ayudarte de tu labor, darás gracias al Señor de que te haya puesto en el mismo estado que a la Virgen Santísima, la cual con el Patriarca San José tenían que sustentar al Hijo de Dios con el trabajo de sus manos.” 63. Pérez, La Compañia de Jesús, 2, p. 185. “Podríamos asegurar que de todas las Congregaciones fue esta la que más próspero y más frutos de bendición produjo, yendo siempre en aumento, extendiéndose a las aldeas vecinas de la capital y dando muestras de singular fervor y exactitud en el cumplimiento de sus deberes.” 64.  Gellert, “Ciudad de Guatemala,” p. 22. 65. Pérez, La Compañia de Jesús, 3, p. 107. “Severidad de costumbres que las hacia inaccesibles a toda pretensión menos honesta y las ponía a cubierto de los peligros que suele correr la juventud.” 66.  Ibid. “Era de verse en aquel día entrar por diversos puntos de la ciudad, falanges numerosísimas de jóvenes bien ordenadas y entonando canticos a la Santísima Virgen. Era esta la fiesta más popular y la comunión más numerosa, y cada año se aumentaba con las pequeñuelas que se acercaban por primera vez a la sagrada mesa.” 67.  Barbara Corrado Pope, “Immaculate and Powerful: The Marian Revival in the Nineteenth Century,” in Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, ed. Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles (Boston: Beacon Press, 1985), p. 173. 68.  John O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 198. 69.  Mary Vincent, “Gender and Morals in Spanish Catholic Youth Culture: A Case Study of the Marian Congregations 1930–1936,” Gender & History 13, no. 2 (2001): p. 278.

258

Notes to Chapter Six

70. Kselman, Miracles and Prophecies, pp. 78, 91. 71.  Gabino Chávez, La bandera de la pureza al fin del siglo Ojeada sobre la asociación de las hijas de María inmaculada, su origen é institución, su naturaleza y desarrollo, su incremento é influencia social (México, D.F.: Imprenta de Elizalde de San Lorenzo, 1901), pp. 26, 88. Google Books. “Aumento asombroso de nuestra Asociación entre las clases pobres y populares . . . una asociación de costureras, de criadas, y gente de baja estirpe.” 72.  Ibid., pp. 114–16. 73.  Asociación de Hijas, Oraciones para hacer la visita, p. 7. “Defendiera y preservara de tantos lazos, escollos y tropiezos como por todas partes tiende y prepara a la incauta juventud el espíritu tentador.” 74.  Ibid., p. 9. 75. Pérez, La Compañia de Jesús, 3, pp. 332–33. See also Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Manual de la Congregación de Hijas de María Inmaculada: Establecida en la Compañia de Jesús de Quito (Guayaquil: Libreria é Imprenta Gutenberg, 1910). 76.  Asociación de Hijas, Oraciones para hacer la visita, p. 9. “Pues se ha propagado casi por si misma; prueba de que es obra de la Virgen y no obra de los hombres.” 77.  Corrado Pope, “Immaculate and Powerful,” pp. 182–83; Blackbourn, Marpingen, p. 29. 78.  Chowning, “The Catholic Church and the Ladies of the Vela Perpetua,” pp. 210–12. 79.  Ibid., p. 212. 80.  Vásquez and Lamadrid, Crónica de la provincia, p. 226. 81.  Ximénez, María, and Gall, Historia de la provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala, pp. 185–88. 82.  Asociación de Hijas, Oraciones para hacer la visita, p. 6. 83.  On Vered Amit’s notion of “relational identities” and religious brotherhoods, see O’Hara, “The Orthodox Underworld of Colonial Mexico,” p. 243. 84.  Asociación de Hijas, Oraciones para hacer la visita, pp. 58–62. 85.  Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Manual de la Congregación de Hijas de María, p. 20. 86.  Ibid., pp. 21–30. 87.  Vincent, “Gender and Morals in Spanish Catholic Youth Culture,” p. 288. 88.  Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Manual de la Congregación de Hijas de María, p. 4. 89.  Ibid., pp. 161, 165. “Oh Mariana de Jesús, Azucena de pureza que ­consagraste a Jesús y a María . . . que con sumo horror aborreciste el pecado y conservaste inmaculada la estola de la inocencia bautismal.” “Oh Bienaventurada Mariana de Jesús, ejemplar de perfección . . . modelo de las jóvenes cristianas.” 90.  Will of Lina Antonia Pinto, 1850, Protocolos de Ramón Asensio, Fols. 174v–175v, AGCA. 91. Rugeley, Of Wonders and Wise Men, p. 82; Chowning, “La feminización de la piedad,” p. 496.

Notes to Chapter Six

259

92. Sullivan-González, Piety, Power, and Politics, pp. 49, 51. 93. Pérez, La Compañia de Jesús, 2, p. 167. “El número de asociados creció increíblemente y las comuniones mensuales numerosísimas daban a entender la grande aceptación con que había sido recibido la nueva practica piadosa.” 94.  Pablo José Hernández, Reseña histórica de la misión de Chile-Paraguay de la Compañia de Jesús desde su origen en 1836 hasta el centenario de la restauración de la compañia en 1914 (Barcelona: J. Pugés, 1914), p. 229. 95. Wright-Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism, p. 111. 96.  Will of María Josefa López, 1858, Protocolos de Ramón Salazar, Fols. 90f–91f, AGCA. 97.  Will of María Ortiz, 1858, Protocolos de Ramón Salazar, Fols. 38v–40f, AGCA. 98.  Will of Mercedes Ortiz, 1862, Protocolos de Ramón Salazar, Fols. 151f– 152v, AGCA. Although clearly made out by the same person, the 1858 will was under the name of María Ortiz, and the 1862 will was under the name of Mercedes Ortiz. 99.  Will of Juana Rivera, 1858, Protocolos de Ramón Salazar, Fols. 37v–38v, AGCA. 100.  Will of Juana Bautista Larrazábal, 1858, Protocolos de J. Domingo ­Toriello Sol, Fols. 82v–84f, AGCA. “Para remediar algún tanto sus necesidades.” 101.  Will of Olaya Arévalo, 1862, Protocolos de Juan Gavarrete, Fols. 222f– 223f, AGCA. “En favor de la Iglesia, de los pobres, o de obras pías.” 102.  Will of Eulalia Flores, 1862, Protocolos de Juan Vicente de León, Fols. 155v–157f, AGCA. 103.  Will of María de Jesús González, 1858, Protocolos de Ramón Asensio, Fols. 430v–432f, AGCA. 104.  Will of María del Patrocinio Contreras, 1862, Protocolos de Juan Andreu, Fols. 242v–243v, AGCA. 105.  Will of María de la O Rodríguez, 1862, Protocolos de Juan Vicente de León, Fols. 115v–118f, AGCA. 106.  Will of Dominga Barrera, 1858, Protocolos de Manuel Rodríguez, Fols. 114f–114v, AGCA. 107. Pérez, La Compañia de Jesús, 2, p. 132. 108. Melvin, Building Colonial Cities of God, p. 135. 109.  Will of Vicenta Escalante, 1850, Protocolos de José María Gavarrete, Fols. 6f–8f, AGCA. 110.  Will of Josefa Gregoria Beleche, 1858, Protocolos de Juan Vicente de León, Fols. 133v–135f, AGCA. 111.  Will of Rosalía Sandoval, 1862, Protocolos de Ramón Salazar (1862), Fols. 88f–89v, AGCA. “Todo el afán de mi hijo y el mío también ha sido fundar una capellanía” in the Santa Catarina convent church “para que digan en esta misma iglesia y por el cura de la parroquia cierto número de misas anuales por mi alma y la de mi hijo.” 112. Rugeley, Of Wonders and Wise Men, p. 86.

260

Notes to Chapter Six and Epilogue

113.  Will of Manuela Agatona Beteta, 1850, Protocolos de Juan Andreu, Fols. 139v–142v, AGCA. 114.  Will of Vicenta Celiz, 1858, Protocolos de José María Gavarrete, Fols. 70f–71f, AGCA. 115.  Will of María Cesaría Bolaños, 1850, Protocolos de José María Gavarette, Fols. 50f–51v, AGCA. “Para que en él se conserve y venere.” 116.  Will of María Petrona Milán, 1850, Protocolos de José María Gavarette, Fols. 50f–51v, AGCA. “Rogándoles me encomiende a Dios.”

epilogue 1. Sullivan-González, Piety, Power, and Politics, p. 121. 2. Woodward, Rafael Carrera, p. 348. 3. Holleran, Church and State in Guatemala. 4. Sullivan-González, Piety, Power, and Politics, pp. 121–22. 5.  Bonár Hernández, “Reforming Catholicism: Papal Power in Guatemala during the 1920s and 1930s,” The Americas 71, no. 2 (2014): p. 255. 6.  Gudmundson, “Society and Politics,” p. 119. 7.  David Carey, “‘Hard Working, Orderly Little Women’: Mayan Vendors and Marketplace Struggles in Early-Twentieth Century Guatemala,” Ethnohistory 55, no. 4 (2008): pp. 579, 582, 585. 8. Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala, p. 249. 9.  Gudmundson, “Society and Politics,” pp. 119–20. 10.  Nara Milanich, Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850–1930 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), p. 56. 11.  Carmen Diana Deere and Magdalena León, “Liberalism and Married Women’s Property Rights in Nineteenth-Century Latin America,” Hispanic American Historical Review 85, no. 4 (2005): p. 678; Komisaruk, Labor and Love in Guatemala, p. 249. 12. Milanich, Children of Fate, p. 67. 13.  Hernández, “Reforming Catholicism,” p. 261. 14.  Luis Diez de Arriba, Historia de la Iglesia Católica en Guatemala. Tomo 2: Crisis (Guatemala: s.n., 1989), p. 254. 15.  Recuerdo del 8 de agosto de 1908: Celebrado en la Iglesia de la Merced por las hijas de María (Guatemala: Arenales, 1908). 16.  J. B. Nolin, La Liga del Corazón de Jesús, Apostolado de la Oración (Guatemala: La Union, 1892). 17. Wright–Rios, Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism, pp. 98–99, 103. 18.  Patricia Harms, “‘God Doesn’t Like the Revolution’: The Archbishop, the Market Women, and the Economy of Gender in Guatemala, 1944–1954,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 32, no. 2 (2011): pp. 123, 32 n10. 19.  Hernández, “Reforming Catholicism,” p. 279. 20.  See ibid., p. 275; and R. Andrew Chesnut, Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 30.

Notes to Epilogue

261

21.  See Elizabeth Brusco, The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995); Chesnut, Competitive Spirits. 22.  Henri Gooren, “The Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Latin America,” Pneuma 34 (2012): p. 193. 23.  Ibid., p. 189. 24.  Ibid., p. 144.

This page intentionally left blank

Bibliography

abbreviations Archivo General de Centroamérica (AGCA) Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano de Guatemala (AHAG) Archivo Histórico del Arzobispo de México (AHAM) Ahlgren, Gillian T. W. “Negotiating Sanctity: Holy Women in Sixteenth-Century Spain.” Church History 64, no. 3 (September 1995): 373–88. Álvarez Arévalo, Miguel. Jesús de Candelaria en la historia, el arte, y la tradición de Guatemala. Guatemala: Consejo Nacional para la Protección de la Antigua Guatemala, 1983. Annis, Verle Lincoln. The Architecture of Antigua Guatemala, 1543–1773. Guatemala: Universidad de San Carlos, 1968. Arenas Frutos, Isabel. “Innovaciones educativas en el mundo conventual femenino. Nueva España, siglo XVIII: el Colegio de Niñas de Jesús María.” In Memoria del II Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español: Monasterios, beaterios, recogimientos, y colegios: Homenaje a Josefina Muriel, edited by Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español, Josefina Muriel, and Manuel Ramos Medina, 443–54. Chimalistac, México, D.F.: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México CONDUMEX, 1995. Ariès, Philippe. Western Attitudes Toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974. Arrom, Silvia. “Desintegración familiar y pauperización: Los indigentes del Hospicio de Pobres de la Ciudad De México, 1795.” In Familia y vida privada en la historia de Iberoamérica: Seminario de historia de la familia, edited by Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru and Cecilia Andrea Rabell. México, D.F.: Colegio de México, 1996. ———. “Mexican Laywomen Spearhead a Catholic Revival: The Ladies of Charity, 1863–1910.” In Religious Culture in Modern Mexico, edited by Martin Austin Nesvig, 50–77. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. ———. “Rethinking Urban Politics in Latin America before the Populist Era.” In Riots in the Cities: Popular Politics and the Urban Poor in Latin America,

264

Bibliography

1765–1910, edited by Silvia Arrom and Servando Ortoll, 1–16. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996. ———. Volunteering for a Cause: Gender, Faith, and Charity in Mexico from the Reform to the Revolution. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2016. ———. The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985. Arrom, Silvia, and Servando Ortoll, eds. Riots in the Cities: Popular Politics and the Urban Poor in Latin America, 1765–1910. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1996. Asociación de Hijas de la Purísima e Inmaculada Concepción de la Bienaventurada Virgen María. Oraciones para hacer la visita y otras provechosas á las asociadas. Guatemala: Imprenta de la Aurora, 1855. Batres y Jáuregui, Antonio. La América Central ante la historia, 1821–1921: Memorias de un siglo, 3 tomos (Guatemala: Tipografía Nacional, 1949). Bazarte Martínez, Alicia, and Clara García Ayluardo. Los costos de la salvación: las cofradías y la Ciudad de México, siglos XVI al XIX. México, D.F.: Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, 2001. Belanger, Brian. “Between the Cloister and the World: The Franciscan Third Order of Colonial Querétaro.” The Americas 49, no. 2 (October 1992): 157–77. Belaubre, Christophe. “Poder y redes sociales en Centroamérica: El caso de la orden de los Dominicos (1757–1829).” Mesoamérica 41 (2001): 31–76. ———. “El traslado de la capital del Reino de Guatemala (1773–1779). Conflicto de poder y juegos sociales.” Revista Historia, no. 57–58 (enero–diciembre 2008): 23–61. Benevenuti Papi, Anna. “Mendicant Friars and Female Pinzochere in Tuscany: From Social Marginality to Models of Sanctity.” In Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, edited by Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, 84–103. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Bilinkoff, Jodi. “Confession, Gender, Life-Writing: Some Cases (Mainly) from Spain.” In Penitence in the Age of Reformations, edited by Katharine Jackson Lualdi and Anne Thayer, 169–83. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000. ———. Related Lives: Confessors and Their Female Penitents, 1450–1750. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. ———. “Teresa of Jesus and Carmelite Reform.” In Religious Orders of the Catholic Reformation: In Honor of John C. Olin on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday, edited by Richard L. DeMolen, 165–88. New York: Fordham University Press, 1994. Blackbourn, David. Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in NineteenthCentury Germany. New York: Knopf, 1994. Bolufer, Mónica. Mujeres e ilustración: La construcción de la feminidad en la ilustración española. València: Diputació de València, Institució Alfons el Magnànim, 1998. Boyer, Richard. “Honor Among Plebeians: Mala Sangre and Social Reputation.” In The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America,

Bibliography

265

edited by Lyman Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, 152–78. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. ———. Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995. Brading, David. Church and State in Bourbon Mexico: The Diocese of Michoacán, 1749–1810. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. The First America: The Spanish Monarchy, Creole Patriots, and the Liberal State. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ———. “Tridentine Catholicism and Enlightened Despotism in Bourbon Mexico.” Journal of Latin American Studies 15, no. 1 (1983): 1–22. Bricker, Victoria Reifler. The Indian Christ, the Indian King: The Historical Substrate of Maya Myth and Ritual. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Bristol, Joan C. “‘Although I Am Black, I Am Beautiful’: Juana Esperanza De San Alberto, Black Carmelite of Puebla.” In Gender, Race, and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas, edited by Nora E. Jaffary, 67–80. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. Broto, Francisco. Vida de la sierva de Dios, Madre María Encarnación Rosal fundadora de las Betlemitas Hijas del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús. Madrid: Corazón de María, 1931. Brusco, Elizabeth. The Reformation of Machismo: Evangelical Conversion and Gender in Colombia. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Burns, Kathryn. “Andean Women in Religion: Beatas, ‘Decency’ and the Defence of Honour in Colonial Cuzco.” In Gender, Race, and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas, edited by Nora E. Jaffary, 81–94. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007. ———. Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. ———. Into the Archive: Writing and Power in Colonial Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Bynum, Caroline Walker. “Foreword.” In Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, edited by Catherine M. Mooney. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. ———. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion. New York: Zone Books, 1991. Caffiero, Marina. “From the Late Baroque Mystical Explosion to the Social Apostolate, 1650–1850.” In Women and Faith: Catholic Religious Life in Italy from Late Antiquity to the Present, edited by Lucetta Scaraffia and Gabriella Zarri, 176–204. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Callahan, William J. Church, Politics, and Society in Spain, 1750–1874. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. ———. “The Spanish Church.” In Church and Society in Catholic Europe in the Eighteenth Century, edited by William J. Callahan and David Higgs, 34–50. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Calvo, Thomas. “¿La religión de los ‘ricos’ era una religión popular? La Tercera Orden de Santo Domingo (México), 1682–1693.” In Cofradías, capellanías y obras pías en la América colonial, edited by María del Pilar Martínez

266

Bibliography

López Cano, Gisela von Wobeser, and Juan Guillermo Muñoz Correa, 75–90. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1998. Carey, David. “‘Hard Working, Orderly Little Women’: Mayan Vendors and Marketplace Struggles in Early-Twentieth Century Guatemala.” Ethnohistory 55, no. 4 (2008): 579–607. Castañeda, Carmen. “Relaciones entre beaterios, colegios, y conventos femeninos en Guadalajara, época colonial.” In Memoria del II Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español: Monasterios, beaterios, recogimientos, y colegios; Homenaje a Josefina Muriel, edited by Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español, Josefina Muriel, and Manuel Ramos Medina, 455–75. Chimalistac, México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México CONDUMEX, 1995. Castañeda García, Rafael. “Piedad y participación femenina en la cofradía de negros y mulatos de San Benito de Palermo en el Bajío novohispano, siglo XVIII.” Nuevo Mundo, Mundos Nuevos Débats (2012). doi:http://nuevomundo.revues .org/64478. Cervantes, Fernando, and Andrew Redden. “Introduction.” In Angels, Demons, and the New World, edited by Fernando Cervantes and Andrew Redden, 1–11. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Chambers, Sarah. From Subjects to Citizens: Honor, Gender, and Politics in Arequipa, Peru, 1780–1854. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999. Chambers, Sarah, and Lisa Norling. “Choosing to Be a Subject: Loyalist Women in the Revolutionary Atlantic.” Journal of Women’s History 20, no. 1 (2008): 39–62. Chandler, David. Juan José de Aycinena: idealista conservador de la Guatemala del siglo XIX. Antigua, Guatemala: Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamérica, 1988. Chaunu, Pierre. La mort à París: XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles. París: Fayard, 1978. Chávez, Gabino. La bandera de la pureza al fin del siglo Ojeada sobre la asociación de las hijas de María inmaculada, su origen é institución, su naturaleza y desarrollo, su incremento é influencia social. México, D.F.: Imprenta de Elizalde de San Lorenzo, 1901. Google Books. Chesnut, R. Andrew. Competitive Spirits: Latin America’s New Religious Economy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Chinchilla Aguilar, Ernesto. La Inquisición en Guatemala. Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, 1999. Chowning, Margaret. “The Catholic Church and the Ladies of the Vela Perpetua: Gender and Devotional Change in Nineteenth-Century Mexico.” Past and Present, no. 221 (November 2013): 197–237. ———. “The Consolidación De Vales Reales in the Bishopric of Michoacán.” Hispanic American Historical Review 69, no. 3 (1989): 451–78. ———. “La feminización de la piedad en México: Género y piedad en las cofradías de españoles. Tendencias coloniales y pos-coloniales en los arzobispados de Michoacán y Guadalajara.” In Religión, política, e identidad en la inde-

Bibliography

267

pendencia de México, edited by Brian Connaughton, 475–514. México, D.F.: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2010. ———. Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent, 1752– 1863. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Christian, William. Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Ciáurriz, Ildefonso de. Vida del siervo de Dios, Esteban de Adoáin: Capuchino misionero apostólico en América y España. Barcelona: Herederos de Juan Gili, 1913. Clendinnen, Inga. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517– 1570. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———. “Ways to the Sacred: Reconstructing “Religion” in Sixteenth Century Mexico.” History and Anthropology 5 (1990): 105–41. Clossey, Luke. Salvation and Globalization in the Early Jesuit Mission. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Coakley, John. “Gender and the Authority of Friars: The Significance of Holy Women for Thirteenth-Century Franciscans and Dominicans.” Church History 60, no. 4 (December 1991): 445–60. ———. Women, Men, and Spiritual Power: Female Saints and Their Male Collaborators. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Colahan, Clark. The Visions of Sor María De Agreda: Writing, Knowledge, and Power. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1994. Congreso Centroamericano de Historia and Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz, eds. Mujeres, género e historia en América Central durante los siglos XVIII, XIX, y XX. México, D.F.: UNIFEM, Oficina Regional de México, Centroamérica, Cuba y República Dominicana, 2002. Connaughton, Brian. Clerical Ideology in a Revolutionary Age: The Guadalajara Church and the Idea of the Mexican Nation (1788–1853). Translated by Mark Alan Healey. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2003. ———. “Conjuring the Body Politic from the Corpus Mysticum: The Post-Independent Pursuit of Public Opinion in Mexico, 1824–1854.” The Americas 55, no. 3 (January 1999): 459–79. ———. “¿Politización de la religión o nueva sacralización de la política? El sermon en las mutaciones públicas de 1808–1824.” In Religión, política, e identidad en la independencia de México, edited by Brian Connaughton, 160–200. México, D.F.: Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, 2010. Consideraciones cristianas para todos los días del mes. Nueva Guatemala: Don Manuel Arévalo, 1803. Cope, R. Douglas. The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994. Córdova y Salinas, Diego de, and Lino Gómez Canedo. Crónica franciscana de las provincias del Perú. Washington, DC: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1957 [1651]. Corrado Pope, Barbara. “Immaculate and Powerful: The Marian Revival in the Nineteenth Century.” In Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in

268

Bibliography

S­ acred Image and Social Reality, edited by Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. ­Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles, 173–200. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. Corteguera, Luis. “The Making of a Visionary Woman: The Life of Beatriz Ana Ruiz, 1666–1735.” In Women, Texts, and Authority in the Early Modern Spanish World, edited by Marta Vicente and Luis Corteguera. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003. Cortés y Larraz, Pedro, and Gilberto Aguilar Avilés. Descripción geográficomoral de la diócesis de Goathemala: (Parroquías correspondientes al actual territorio salvadoreño). San Salvador: Dirección de Publicaciones e Impressos, Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y el Arte, 2000. Costeloe, Michael. Church Wealth in Mexico: A Study of the ‘Juzgado De Capellanías’ in the Archbishopric of Mexico, 1800–1856. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1970. Cruz, Anne J., and Mary Elizabeth Perry, eds. Culture and Control in CounterReformation Spain. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Curtis, Sarah A. Educating the Faithful: Religion, Schooling, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2000. Cussen, Celia. “The Search for Idols and Saints in Colonial Peru: Linking Extirpation and Beatification.” Hispanic American Historical Review 85, no. 3 (2005): 417–48. Davis, J. Religious Organization and Religious Experience. London: Academic Press, 1982. Deere, Carmen Diana, and Magdalena León. “Liberalism and Married Women’s Property Rights in Nineteenth-Century Latin America.” Hispanic American Historical Review 85, no. 4 (2005): 627–78. Delgado, Jessica. Laywomen and the Making of Colonial Catholicism in Mexico, 1639–1790. New York: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. ———. “Sin Temor de Dios: Women and Ecclesiastical Justice in Eighteenth-­ Century Toluca,” Colonial Latin American Review 18, no. 1 (April 2009): 99–121. Desan, Susan. Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990. Dias, Maria Odila Silva. Power and Everyday Life: The Lives of Working Women in Nineteenth-Century Brazil. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1995. Díaz, Arlene. Female Citizens, Patriarchs, and the Law in Venezuela, 1786–1904. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Díaz, Mónica. Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010. Diefendorf, Barbara. From Penitence to Charity: Pious Women and the Catholic Reformation in Paris. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ———. “Rethinking the Catholic Reformation: The Role of Women.” In Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), edited by Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf, 31–59. Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2009.

Bibliography

269

Díez de Arriba, Luis. Historia de la Iglesia Católica en Guatemala. Tomo 2: Crisis. Guatemala: s.n., 1989. Dinan, Susan. “Female Religious Communities Beyond the Convent.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, edited by Jane Couchman, Allyson Poska, and Katherine McIver. Farnham, UK: Routledge, 2013. Dinan, Susan E. “Spheres of Female Religious Expression in Early Modern France.” In Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds, edited by Susan E. Dinan and Debra Meyers, 71–92. New York: Routledge, 2001. Dore, Elizabeth. “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Gender and the State in the Long Nineteenth Century.” In Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, edited by Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux, 3–32. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. Dunn, Henry. Guatimala: Or, The Republic of Central America, in 1827–8: Being Sketches and Memorandums Made During a Twelve-Months’ Residence. Detroit: Blaine Ethridge Books, 1981 [1829]. Dunn, Mary. “Claude Martin, Marie de l’Incarnation, and Female Religious Identity in Seventeenth-Century New France.” Catholic Historical Review 100, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 459–85. ———. “‘The Cruelest of All Mothers’: Marie de l’Incarnation, Motherhood, and Christian Discipleship.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 28, no. 1 (Spring 2012): 43–62. Dym, Jordana. From Sovereign Villages to National States: City, State, and Federation in Central America, 1759–1839. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Earle, Rebecca. “Rape and the Anxious Republic: Revolutionary Colombia, 1810–1830.” In Hidden Histories of Gender and the State in Latin America, edited by Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux, 127–46. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. ———. “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!!’ Race, Clothing, and Identity in the Americas (17th–19th Centuries).” History Workshop Journal, no. 52 (2001): 175–95. Eire, Carlos. From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in SixteenthCentury Spain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Espinosa, Isidro Félix de, and Lino Gómez Canedo. Crónica de los Colegios de Propaganda Fide de la Nueva España. Washington, DC: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1964 [1746]. Estrada Monroy, Agustín. Datos para la historia de la Iglesia en Guatemala. Vol. 2. Guatemala: Sociedad de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala, 1974. Evennet, Outram, “Counter-Reformation Spirituality.” In The Counter Reformation: The Essential Readings, edited by David Luebke, 47–64 (London: Blackwell, 1999). Farmer, Sharon. “Persuasive Voices: Clerical Images of Medieval Wives.” Speculum 61, no. 3 (1986): 517–43. Few, Martha. “Women, Religion, and Power: Gender and Resistance in Daily Life in Late-Seventeenth-Century Santiago de Guatemala.” Ethnohistory 42, no. 4 (1995): 627–37.

270

Bibliography

———. Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. Fink De Backer, Stephanie. Widowhood in Early Modern Spain: Protectors, Proprietors, and Patrons. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Flynn, Maureen. Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400–1700. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. Ford, Caroline. Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Foz y Foz, Pilar. “Hipótesis de un proceso paralelo: La Enseñanza de Zaragoza y La Enseñanza Nueva de México.” In Memoria del II Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español: Monasterios, beaterios, recogimientos, y colegios, edited by Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español, Josefina Muriel, and Manuel Ramos Medina, 63–82. Chimalistac, México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México ­CONDUMEX, 1995. ———. La revolución pedagógica en Nueva España, 1754–1820: (María Ignacia de Azlor y Echeverz y los colegios de la enseñanza). 2 vols. Vol. 1, Madrid: Instituto “Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (C.S.I.C.),” 1981. Fuentes y Guzmán, Francisco Antonio de, J. Antonio Villacorta C., Ramón A. Salazar, and Sinforoso Aguilar. Recordación florida: Discurso historial y demostración natural, material, militar y política del reyno de Guatemala. 2nd ed. 3 vols. Guatemala: Tipografía nacional, 1932 [1690]. García Añoveros, Jesús María. Población y estado sociorreligioso de la Diócesis de Guatemala en el último tercio del siglo XVIII. Guatemala: Editorial Universitaria, Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 1987. García Ugarte, Marta Eugenia. “Impacto de las fundaciones piadosas en la sociedad queretana (siglo XVIII).” In Cofradías, capellanías y obras pías en la América colonial, edited by María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano, Gisela von Wobeser, and Juan Guillermo Muñoz Correa, 247–62. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1998. Gauderman, Kimberly. Women’s Lives in Colonial Quito: Gender, Law, and Economy in Spanish America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Gellert, Gisela. “Ciudad de Guatemala: Factores determinantes en su desarrollo urbano (1775 hasta la actualidad).” Mesoamérica 29 (junio 1994): 1–68. Gibson, Ralph. A Social History of French Catholicism, 1789–1914. London: Routledge, 1989. Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Pilar. “Reffugium Virginum. Beneficencia y educación en los colegios y conventos novohispanos.” In Memoria del II Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español: Monasterios, beaterios, recogimientos, y colegios: Homenaje a Josefina Muriel, edited by Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español, Josefina Muriel, and Manuel Ramos Medina, 429–42. Chimalistac, México: Centro de Estudios de Historia en México CONDUMEX, 1995. Gooren, Henri. “The Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Latin America.” Pneuma 34 (2012): 185–207.

Bibliography

271

Gosner, Kevin. Soldiers of the Virgin: The Moral Economy of a Colonial Maya Rebellion. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992. Graubart, Karen. With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550–1700. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007. Greer, Allan. “Colonial Saints: Gender, Race, and Hagiography in New France.” William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 2 (April 2000): 323–48. ———. Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Gudmundson, Lowell. “Society and Politics in Central America, 1821–1871.” In Central America, 1821–1871: Liberalism Before Liberal Reform, edited by Lowell Gudmundson and Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, 79–131. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1995. Gunnarsdóttir, Ellen. Mexican Karismata: The Baroque Vocation of Francisca de los Ángeles, 1674–1744. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Haliczer, Stephen. Between Exaltation and Infamy: Female Mystics in the Golden Age of Spain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. “Sexuality and Repression in Counter-Reformation Spain.” In Sex and Love in Golden Age Spain, edited by Alain Saint-Saëns. New Orleans: University Press of the South, 1999. Harline, Craig. “Actives and Contemplatives: The Female Religious of the Low Countries Before and After Trent.” Catholic Historical Review 81, no. 4 (1995): 541–67. Harms, Patricia. “‘God Doesn’t Like the Revolution’: The Archbishop, the Market Women, and the Economy of Gender in Guatemala, 1944–1954.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies 32, no. 2 (2011): 111–39. Hawkins, Timothy. José De Bustamante and Central American Independence: Colonial Administration in an Age of Imperial Crisis. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Hernández, Bonár. “Reforming Catholicism: Papal Power in Guatemala During the 1920s and 1930s.” The Americas 71, no. 2 (2014): 255–80. Hernández, Pablo José. Reseña histórica de la misión de Chile-Paraguay de la Compañia de Jesús desde su origen en 1836 hasta el centenario de la restauración de la compañia en 1914. Barcelona: J. Pugés (s. en c.), 1914. Herrera, Sajid Alfredo. “Primary Education in Bourbon San Salvador and Sonsonate, 1750–1808.” In Politics, Economy, and Society in Bourbon Central America, 1759–1821, edited by Jordana Dym and Christophe Belaubre. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2007. Hill, Bridget. Women Alone: Spinsters in England, 1660–1850. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. Holler, Jacqueline. Escogidas Plantas: Nuns and Beatas in Mexico City, 1531– 1601. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Holleran, Mary. Church and State in Guatemala. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949. Hufton, Olwen, and Frank Tallett. “Communities of Women, the Religious Life, and Public Service in Eighteenth-Century France.” In Connecting Spheres:

272

Bibliography

­ uropean Women in a Globalizing World, 1500 to the Present, edited by MariE lyn Boxer and Jean Quataert, 93–103. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Hünefeldt, Christine. Liberalism in the Bedroom: Quarreling Spouses in Nineteenth-Century Lima. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. ———. Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor Among Lima’s Slaves, 1800–1854. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Ibsen, Kristine. Women’s Spiritual Autobiography in Colonial Spanish America. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Jaffary, Nora E. False Mystics: Deviant Orthodoxy in Colonial Mexico. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Johnston Aguilar, René. “La Casa de Recogidas: Un ejemplo de la situación de la mujer durante la Colonia.” Anales de la Academia de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala LXXXVI (2011). Juarros, Domingo, and Ricardo Toledo Palomo. Compendio de la historia de la Ciudad de Guatemala. Guatemala: Academia de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala, 2000 [1808]. Kagan, Richard. “Politics, Prophecy, and the Inquisition in Late-Sixteenth-Century Spain.” In Cultural Encounters: The Impact of the Inquisition in Spain and the New World, edited by Mary Elizabeth Perry and Anne J. Cruz, 105–20. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Keitt, Andrew. Inventing the Sacred: Imposture, Inquisition, and the Boundaries of the Supernatural in Golden Age Spain. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Kelley, Heidi. “Unwed Mothers and Household Reputation in a Spanish Galician Community.” American Ethnologist 18, no. 3 (1991): 565–80. Kinsbruner, Jay. The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Komisaruk, Catherine. Labor and Love in Guatemala: The Eve of Independence. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. Kselman, Thomas. Miracles and Prophecies in Nineteenth-Century France. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983. Langenberg, Inge. “Urbanización y cambio social: El traslado de la Ciudad de Guatemala y sus consecuencias para la población y sociedad urbana al fin de la época colonial (1773–1824).” Anuario de Estudios Americanos 36 (1979). Larkin, Brian. “Confraternities and Community: The Decline of the Communal Quest for Salvation in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City.” In Local Religion in Colonial Mexico, edited by Martin Austin Nesvig, 189–213. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. ———. The Very Nature of God: Baroque Catholicism and Religious Reform in Bourbon Mexico City. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010. Lasso de la Vega, Juan. Compendio de las obligaciones, excelencias, privilegios, è indulgencias del v. Orden Tercero de Penitencia de n.p.s. Francisco: Con la novíssima constitución de n. smo. P. Benedicto XIII en que su santidad por favor especial nuevamente confirma la regla, estatuos, gracias, indulgencias, y otros indultos apostolicos. Seville: n.p., 1626. Google Books.

Bibliography

273

Lavrin, Asunción. Brides of Christ: Conventual Life in Colonial Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008. ———. “Cofradías novohispanos: Economías material y espiritual.” In Cofradías, capellanías, y obras pías en la América colonial, edited by María del Pilar Martínez López-Cano, Gisela von Wobeser, and Juan Guillermo Muñoz Correa, 49–64. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1998. ———. “Introduction: The Scenario, the Actors, and the Issues.” In Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, edited by Asunción Lavrin, 1–46. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989. ———. “María Marcela Soria: Una Capuchina queretana.” In Diálogos espirituales: Manuscritos femeninos hispanoamericanos siglos XVI–XIX, edited by Asunción Lavrín and Rosalva Loreto López, 74–93. Puebla, México: Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades de la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2006. Lavrin, Asunción, and Rosalva Loreto López, eds. Diálogos espirituales: Manuscritos femeninos hispanoamericanos siglos XVI–XIX. Puebla, México: Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades de la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2006. ———, eds. Monjas y beatas: la escritura femenina en la espiritualidad barroca novohispana siglos XVII y XVIII. México, D.F.: Universidad de las AméricasPuebla, 2002. Leavitt-Alcántara, Brianna. “Holy Women and Hagiography in Colonial Spanish America.” History Compass 12, no. 9 (2014): 717–28. ———. “Intimate Indulgences: Local Religion and Salvation in EighteenthCentury Santiago de Guatemala.” Colonial Latin American Review 23, no. 2 (2014): 252–79. ———. “Quiet Voices and Laconic Sources: A Synoptic Approach to Wills,” in Imagining Histories of Colonial Latin America: Essays on Synoptic Methods and Practices, edited by Karen Melvin and Sylvia Sellers-García (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, forthcoming). Lehfeldt, Elizabeth. “Discipline, Vocation, and Patronage: Spanish Religious Women in a Tridentine Microclimate.” Sixteenth Century Journal 30, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 1009–30. Lewis, Laura. Hall of Mirrors: Power, Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Lipsett-Rivera, Sonya. “Scandal at the Church: José de Alfaro Accuses Doña Theresa Bravo and Others of Insulting and Beating His Castiza Wife, Josefa Cadena (Mexico, 1782).” In Colonial Lives: Documents on Latin American History, 1550–1850, edited by Richard Boyer and Geoffrey Spurling, 216–23. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Lira González, Andrés. “Las escuelas de primeras letras en la municipalidad de Guatemala hacia 1824. Un intento para organizar la educación elemental.” Latinoamérica, Anuario de estudios latinoamericanos de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México 3 (1970): 117–40.

274

Bibliography

Loreto López, Rosalva. “Oir, ver y escribir. Los textos hagio-biográficos y espirituales del Padre Miguel Godínez. ca. 1630.” In Diálogos espirituales: Manuscritos femeninos hispanoamericanos siglos XVI–XIX, edited by Asunción Lavrín and Rosalva Loreto López, 154–83. Puebla, México: Instituto de Ciencias Sociales y Humanidades de la Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2006. Luján Muñoz, Luis. “Santiago de Guatemala y Puebla de los Ángeles: Sus relaciones culturales.” In Teoxché: Madera de Dios: Imaginería colonial guatemalteca, edited by Isabel Paiz de Serra, 27–31. México, D.F.: Embajada de Guatemala en México, 1997. ———. Semana Santa tradicional en Guatemala. Guatemala: Esso Central America, 1982. Lundberg, Magnus. Mission and Ecstasy: Contemplative Women and Salvation in Colonial Spanish America and the Philippines. Uppsala: Swedish Institute of Mission Research, 2015. Luque Alcaide, Elisa. La educación en Nueva España en el siglo XVIII. Sevilla: Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos, 1970. Lutz, Christopher. Santiago de Guatemala, 1541–1773: City, Caste, and the Colonial Experience. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. MacInnes, Ian. “Stigmata on Trial: The Nun of Portugal and the Politics of the Body.” Viator 31, no. 1 (2000): 381–98. Magray, Mary Peckham. The Transforming Power of Nuns: Women, Religion, and Cultural Change in Ireland, 1750–1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Maher, Michael. “Confession and Consolation: The Society of Jesus and Its Promotion of General Confession.” In Penitence in the Age of Reformations, edited by Katharine Jackson Lualdi and Anne Thayer, 184–200. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000. Mangan, Jane. Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Mannarelli, María Emma. Hechiceras, beatas, y expósitas: Mujeres y poder inquisitorial en Lima. Lima: Ediciones del Congreso del Perú, 1998. ———. Private Passions and Public Sins: Men and Women in Seventeenth-Century Lima. Translated by Sidney Evans and Meredith Dodge. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Martínez López Cano, María del Pilar, Gisela von Wobeser, and Juan Guillermo Muñoz Correa, eds. Cofradías, capellanías y obras pías en la América colonial. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1998. Marure, Alejandro. Bosquejo histórico de las revoluciones de Centroamérica, desde 1811 hasta 1834. Guatemala: Ministerio de Educación Pública, 1960 [1837]. Matthew, Laura E. “‘Por que el color decide aquí en la mayor parte la nobleza’: Una carta de Fr. José Antonio Goicoechea, Guatemala, siglo XIX.” Mesoamérica 55 (enero–diciembre 2013): 153–67. Mauldin, Barbara B. “Images of the Christ Child: Devotions and Iconography in Europe and New Spain.” Ph.D. diss., University of New Mexico, 2001.

Bibliography

275

McCaa, Robert. “La viuda viva del México borbónico: Sus voces, variedades, y vejaciones.” In Familias novohispanas: siglos XVI Al XIX, edited by Seminario de Historia de la Familia and Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, 299–324. México, D.F.: Colegio de México, 1991. McGhee Hernández, Shannon. “Charity, the State, and Social Order in Nineteenth-Century Guatemala, 1778–1871.” Master’s thesis, University of Texas, Austin, 1992. Meléndez Chaverri, Carlos. “La Ilustración en el reino de Guatemala.” In Historia general de Guatemala, tomo III: Siglo XVIII hasta la independencia, edited by Jorge Luján Muñoz and María Cristina Zilbermann de Luján. Guatemala: Asociación de Amigos del País, 1995. Melvin, Karen. Building Colonial Cities of God: Mendicant Orders and Urban Culture in New Spain, 1570–1800. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Milanich, Nara. Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850– 1930. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Molina, J. Michelle. To Overcome Oneself: The Jesuit Ethic and Spirit of Global Expansion, 1520–1767. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Molina, J. Michelle, and Ulrike Strasser. “Missionary Men and the Global Currency of Female Sanctity.” In Women, Religion, and the Atlantic World (1600–1800), edited by Daniella Kostroun and Lisa Vollendorf, 156–79. Toronto: University of Toronto Press in association with the UCLA Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 2009. Montalvo, Francisco Antonio de, and Agustín Estrada Monroy. Vida admirable y muerte preciosa del venerable hermano Pedro de San José Betancur, fundador de la Compañía Bethlemítica en las Indias Occidentales. Guatemala: Tip. Nacional, 1974 [1683]. Montúfar, Lorenzo. Reseña histórica de Centro América. Vol. 1. Guatemala: Tip. de “El Progreso,” 1878. Mooney, Catherine M. “Nuns, Tertiaries, and Quasi-Religious: The Religious Identities of Late Medieval Holy Women.” Medieval Feminist Forum 42 (2006): 68–92. Morgan, Ronald. Spanish American Saints and the Rhetoric of Identity, 1600– 1810. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002. Muñoz, Miguel. Doctrina cristiana sobre el culto de las imagenes y noticia verdadera de la imágen milagrosa que se venera en el santuario del pueblo de Esquipulas, con una novena al fin dedicada al dulcisimo nombre de Jesús. Guatemala: El Porvenir, 1889. Muriel, Josefina. Los recogimientos de mujeres: Respuesta a una problemática social novohispana. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1974. ———. La sociedad novohispana y sus colegios de niñas. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2004. Myers, Kathleen A. Neither Saints nor Sinners: Writing the Lives of Women in Spanish America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

276

Bibliography

Myers, Kathleen A., and Amanda Powell, eds. A Wild Country out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Nardi, Isidoro, and Urban Sacchetti. Vita di S. Rosa Viterbese del Terz’Ordine di S. Francesco. Roma: Nella Stamperia del Varese, 1686. Noel, Charles. “Missionary Preachers in Spain: Teaching Social Virtue in the Eighteenth Century.” American Historical Review 90, no. 4 (October 1985): 866–92. Nolin, J. B. La Liga del Corazón de Jesús, Apostolado de la Oración. Guatemala: La Union, 1892. Noticia de la pública distribución de los premios aplicados a las mejores hilanderas al torno enseñadas en la Escuela Patriótica de la Nueva Guatemala, celebrada en 4 de Noviembre de 1795. Guatemala: Oficina de la Viuda de D. Sebastian de Arevalo, 1796. Google Books. O’Hara, Matthew. A Flock Divided: Race, Religion, and Politics in Mexico, 1749–1857. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. ———. “The Orthodox Underworld of Colonial Mexico.” Colonial Latin American Review 17, no. 2 (2008): 233–50. ———. “The Supple Whip: Innovation and Tradition in Mexican Catholicism.” American Historical Review 117, no. 5 (2012): 1373–401. O’Malley, John. The First Jesuits. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. Orsi, Robert. “Abundant History: Marian Apparitions as Alternative Modernity.” In Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World, edited by Anna-Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen, and Catrien Notermans, 215– 26. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. ———. Between Heaven and Earth: The Religious Worlds People Make and the Scholars Who Study Them. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005. ———. “Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion.” In Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice, edited by David D. Hall, 3–21. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Osowski, Edward W. “Carriers of Saints: Traveling Alms Collectors and Nahua Gender Roles.” In Local Religion in Colonial Mexico, edited by Martin Austin Nesvig, 155–86. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Oss, Adriaan van. Catholic Colonialism: A Parish History of Guatemala, 1524– 1821. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Pardo, J. Joaquín. Efemérides de la Antigua Guatemala, 1541–1779. Guatemala: Unión Tipográfica, 1944. ———. Miscelánea histórica: Guatemala, siglos 16 a 19, vida, costumbres, sociedad. Guatemala: Universidad de San Carlos de Guatemala, 1978. Pardo, J. Joaquin, Pedro Zamora Castellanos, and Luis Luján Muñoz. Guía de Antigua Guatemala. Guatemala: Editorial “José de Pineda Ibarra,” 1969. Pérez Baltazar, María Dolores. “Beaterios y recogimientos para la mujer marginada en el Madrid del siglo XVIII.” In Memoria del II Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español: Monasterios, beaterios, recogimientos, y colegios: Homenaje a Josefina Muriel, edited by Congreso Internacional El Monacato Femenino en el Imperio Español, Josefina Muriel,

Bibliography

277

and Manuel Ramos Medina, 381–94. Chimalistac, México: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México CONDUMEX, 1995. Pérez, Rafael. La Compañia de Jesús en Colombia y Centro-América después de su restauración. Segunda parte: Desde el restablecimiento de la Compañia de Jesús en Guatemala en 1851, hasta su segunda expulsión de la Nueva Granada en 1861. 3 vols. Vol. 2. Valladolid: L. N. de Gaviria, 1897. ———. La Compañia de Jesús en Colombia y Centro-América después de su restauración. Tercera parte: Desde la segunda expulsión de la Nueva Granada en 1861 hasta la de Guatemala el año de 1871. 3 vols. Vol. 3. Valladolid: L.N. de Gaviria, 1898. Perry, Mary Elizabeth. Gender and Disorder in Early Modern Spain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. ———. “Magdalens and Jezebels in Counter-Reformation Spain.” In Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain, edited by Anne J. Cruz and Mary Elizabeth Perry, 124–44. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Pescador, Juan Javier. “Entre la espada y el olivo: Pleitos matrimoniales en el Provisorato Eclesiástico de México, siglo XVIII.” In La familia en el mundo iberoamericano, edited by Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru and Cecilia A. Rabell, 193– 226. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1994. Pizzigoni, Caterina, ed. The Life Within: Local Indigenous Society in Mexico’s Toluca Valley, 1650–1800. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Platero, Juan Antonio. Ana Guerra de Jesús ante la historia y la teología mística. Bilbao: Talleres de Encuadernaciones Belgas, 1969. Poska, Allyson. “Elusive Virtue: Rethinking the Role of Female Chastity in Early Modern Spain.” Journal of Early Modern History 8, no. 1–2 (2004): 135–46. Poska, Allyson, and Elizabeth Lehfeldt. “Redefining Expectations: Women and the Church in Early Modern Spain.” In Women and Religion in Old and New Worlds, edited by Susan E. Dinan and Debra Myers, 21–42. New York: Routledge, 2001. Pryds, Darleen. Women of the Streets: Early Franciscan Women and Their Mendicant Vocation. St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2010. Rapley, Elizabeth. The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France. Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990. Recuerdo del 8 de Agosto de 1908: Celebrado en la Iglesia de la Merced por las hijas de María. Guatemala: Arenales, 1908. Reed, Benjamin. “Devotion to Saint Philip Neri in Mexico City, 1659–1821: Religion, Politics, Spirituality, and Identity.” Richard E. Greenleaf Visiting Scholar Presentation. University of New Mexico, Latin American and Iberian Institute, 2011. Rex Galindo, David. “Propaganda Fide: Training Franciscan Missionaries in New Spain.” Ph.D. diss., Southern Methodist University, 2010. Rhodes, Elizabeth. “Join the Jesuits, See the World: Early Modern Women in Spain and the Society of Jesus.” In The Jesuits II: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts, 1540–1773, edited by John O’Malley, 33–49. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

278

Bibliography

Rodríguez, Mario. The Cádiz Experiment in Central America, 1808–1826. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978. Rodríguez Girón, Zoila, Dámaris Menéndez, and Octavio Axpuac. “Las capillas de morenos y naturales del templo de Santo Domingo en Santiago de Guatemala.” In XX Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala, 2006: Museo Nacional de Arqueología y Etnología, edited by Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemeala, Juan Pedro Laporte, Bárbara Arroyo, and Héctor E. Mejía, 1512–28. Guatemala: Ministerio de Cultura y Deportes, Instituto de Antropología e Historia, 2007. Rodríguez Sáenz, Eugenia, ed. Entre silencios y voces: género e historia en América Central, 1750–1990. San José, Costa Rica: Editorial de la Universidad de Costa Rica, 2000. Rubial García, Antonio. Profetisas y solitarios: Espacios y mensajes de una religión dirigida por ermitaños y beatas laicos en las ciudades de Nueva España. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2006. ———. La santidad controvertida: Hagiografía y conciencia criolla alrededor de los Venerables no canonizados de Nueva España. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999. ———. “Los santos milagreros y malogrados de la Nueva España.” In Manifestaciones religiosas en el mundo colonial americano. Espiritualidad barroca colonial: Santos y demonios en América, edited by Clara García Ayluardo and Manuel Ramos Medina, 71–105. México, D.F.: Centro de Estudios de Historia de México Condumex, 1993. Rugeley, Terry. Of Wonders and Wise Men: Religion and Popular Cultures in Southeast Mexico, 1800–1876. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001. Russell-Wood, A. J. R. “Prestige, Power, and Piety in Colonial Brazil: The Third Orders of Salvador.” Hispanic American Historical Review 69, no. 1 (1989): 61–89. Ruz, Mario Humberto, and Claudia M. Báez Júarez, eds. Memoria eclesial guatemalteca: Visitas pastorales. Vol. 1. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2002. Salomon, Frank. “Indian Women of Early Colonial Quito as Seen Through Their Testaments.” The Americas 44, no. 3 (1988): 325–41. Sanders, James. “‘A Mob of Women’ Confront Post-Colonial Republican Politics: How Class, Race, and Partisan Ideology Affected Gendered Political Space in Nineteenth-Century Southwestern Colombia.” Journal of Women’s History 20, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 68–89. Santos Pérez, J. Manuel. Élites, poder local y régimen colonial: El cabildo y los regidores de Santiago de Guatemala, 1700–1787. Cádiz: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Cádiz, 1999. Saravia, M. Raquel. La enseñanza primaria en Guatemala durante la época colonial. Guatemala: Universidad de San Carlos, 1972. Sariego Rodríguez, Jesús Manuel. Tradición Jesuita en Guatemala: Una aproximación histórica. Guatemala: Universidad Rafael Landivar, Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas, 2011.

Bibliography

279

Schwaller, John. Origins of Church Wealth in Mexico: Ecclesiastical Revenues and Church Finances, 1523–1600. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985. Sellers-García, Sylvia. Distance and Documents at the Spanish Empire’s Periphery. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014. Shafer, Robert Jones. The Economic Societies in the Spanish World (1763–1821). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1958. Siegrist de Gentile, Nora. “Familias de la Orden Tercera de San Francisco en Buenos Aires. Identidad de sus miembros y relaciones con España en los siglos XVIII y XIX.” In Familias iberoamericanas: Historia, identidad, y conflictos, edited by Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru. México, D.F.: Colegio de México, 2001. Siria, Antonio de. Vida admirable y prodigiosas virtudes de la V. sierva de Dios D. Anna Guerra De Jesús. San Salvador: Dirección General de Publicaciones del Ministerio de Educación, 1962 [1716]. ———. Vida admirable y prodigiosas virtudes de la v. sierva de Dios D. Anna Guerra de Jesús sacada de lo que ella misma dexó escrito por orden de sus confessores. Guatemala: Br. Antonio de Velasco, 1716. Siria, Antonio de, and José Toribio Medina. Vida de doña Ana Guerra de Jesús, escrita por el p. Antonio de Siria, y por encargo del gobierno de El Salvador reimpresa a plana y renglón, precedida de un breve prólogo, por J.T. Medina. Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1925 [1716]. Smith, Benjamin. The Roots of Conservatism in Mexico: Catholicism, Society, and Politics in the Mixteca Baja, 1750–1962. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012. Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Manual de la Congregación de Hijas de María Inmaculada: Establecida en la Compañia de Jesús de Quito. Guayaquil: Libreria é Imprenta Gutenberg, 1910. Stephens, John L. Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan. 2 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Dover, 1969 [1841]. Stern, Steve. The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Sullivan-González, Douglass. Piety, Power, and Politics: Religion and Nation Formation in Guatemala, 1821–1871. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. Szuchman, Mark. Order, Family, and Community in Buenos Aires, 1810–1860. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988. Tanck de Estrada, Dorothy. La educación ilustrada, 1786–1836: Educación primaria en la Ciudad De México. México, D.F.: Colegio de México, 1977. ———. “The ‘Escuelas Pías’ of Mexico City: 1786–1820.” The Americas 31, no. 1 (July 1974): 51–71. ———. “Tensión en la torre de marfil. La educación en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII mexicano.” In Ensayos sobre historia de la educación en México, edited by Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, 24–113. México, D.F.: Colegio de México, 1981. Taylor, William. “Between Nativitas and Mexico City: An Eighteenth-Century Pastor’s Local Religion.” In Local Religion in Colonial Mexico, edited by Martin Austin Nesvig. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006.

280

Bibliography

———. Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in Eighteenth-Century Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. ———. Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2010. Third Order Regular of St. Francis, and Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros. Sumario de la regla y otras advertencias que deben guardar los Hermanos Profesos del Sagrado Orden, llamado de los Tericarios de Penitencia, que por especial voluntad y revelación de Dios, fundó N.S.P. San Francisco, después de la primera de los Frayles Menores, y segunda de Santa Clara. México, D.F.: D. Felipe de Zúñiga y Ontiveros, 1786. Toledo Palomo, Ricardo. Retratos del santo hermano Pedro: Pedro de San José de Betancurt en el arte. Guatemala: Caudal, 2002. Twinam, Ann. Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999. ———. Purchasing Whiteness: Pardos, Mulattos, and the Quest for Social Mobility in the Spanish Indies. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015. Ubico Calderón, Mario Alfredo. Historia de Jesús Nazareno de San Jerónimo: Hoy conocido como Jesús Nazareno de la Merced de la Antigua Guatemala. Guatemala: Consejo Nacional para la Protección de la Antigua Guatemala, 1999. ———. “Procesiones poco conocidas en Santiago capital del Reino de Guatemala en la época colonial.” Tradiciones de Guatemala 54 (2000): 153–87. van Deusen, Nancy E. Between the Sacred and the Worldly: The Institutional and Cultural Practice of Recogimiento in Colonial Lima. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. ———. “Reading the Body: Mystical Theology and Spiritual Actualisation in Early Seventeenth-Century Lima.” Journal of Religious History 33, no. 1 (2009): 1–27. Vásquez, Francisco, and Lázaro Lamadrid. Crónica de la provincia del Santísimo nombre de Jesús de Guatemala de la orden de n. seráfico padre san Francisco en el reino de la Nueva España. Guatemala: Tipografía nacional, 1937 [1714]. Vera Tudela, Elisa Sampson. Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580–1750. 1st ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000. Vincent, Mary. “Gender and Morals in Spanish Catholic Youth Culture: A Case Study of the Marian Congregations 1930–1936.” Gender & History 13, no. 2 (2001): 273–97. Vives, Juan Luis. The Education of a Christian Woman: A Sixteenth-Century Manual. Translated by Charles Fantazzi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000 [1523]. Voekel, Pamela. Alone Before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Vollendorf, Lisa. The Lives of Women: A New History of Inquisitorial Spain. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005. von Germeten, Nicole. Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006.

Bibliography

281

———. Violent Delights, Violent Ends: Sex, Race, and Honor in Colonial Cartagena de Indias. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2013. von Wobeser, Gisela. El crédito eclesiástico en la Nueva España, siglo XVIII. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1994. ———. Vida eterna y preocupaciones terrenales: Las capellanías de misas en la Nueva España, 1700–1821. México, D.F.: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1999. Vovelle, Michel. Piéte baroque et déchristianisation en Provénce au XVIIIe siècle. Les attitudes devant la mort d’après les clauses des testaments. París: Libraire Plon, 1973. Wasserman, Mark. Everyday Life and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Mexico: Men, Women, and War. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. Weber, Alison. Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990. Will de Chaparro, Martina. Death and Dying in New Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Woodward, Ralph Lee. Rafael Carrera and the Emergence of the Republic of Guatemala, 1821–1871. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993. Wortman, Miles. Government and Society in Central America, 1680 to 1840. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Wright-Rios, Edward. Revolutions in Mexican Catholicism: Reform and Revelation in Oaxaca, 1887–1934. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Ximénez, Francisco, Carmelo Sáenz de Santa María, and Francis Gall. Historia de la provincia de San Vicente de Chiapa y Guatemala, orden de Predicadores/ David Vela; paleografía (modernizada parcialmente), notas e índice analítico y temático: Francis Gall. Guatemala: Sociedad de Geografía e Historia de Guatemala, 1971. Zárate Toscano, Verónica. Los nobles ante la muerte en México: Actitudes, ceremonias, y memoria (1750–1850). México, D.F.: Colegio de México, 2000. Zarri, Gabriella. “Living Saints: A Typology of Female Sanctity in the Early Sixteenth Century.” Translated by Margery Schneider. In Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, edited by Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi, 219–304. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Zemon Davis, Natalie. Society and Culture in Early Modern France. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975. Zilbermann de Luján, María Cristina. Aspectos socioeconómicos del traslado de la Ciudad de Guatemala (1773–1783). Guatemala: Academia de Geografía e Historia, 1987.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

Adrián de San José, 117 Adultery, 29–30, 52, 61, 174, 207 Affective piety, 32, 104, 142, 172, 190, 205 Africans, 1, 3, 26, 54, 62, 72, 79, 112–15, 207; religious traditions, 80–81. See also Free blacks; Mulattas/os Ágreda, Sor María de, 69 Alcohol. See Drunkenness Alimony, 203 Alumbradismo (Illuminism), 64 Amit, Vered, 231n40 Angels, 68, 134, 139, 143, 149–50, 165, 168, 172, 244n20 Anticlericalism, 163, 168, 179, 181–84, 194, 196, 200, 204 Apostolate of Prayer (Congregation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus), 195, 204 Arrom, Silvia, 12, 186, 212n39 Asceticism, 31, 34, 43, 192, 205. See also Fasting; Penitential piety Association of Catholic Female Teachers, 204 Association of Christian Mothers, 204 Association of the Daughters of Mary Immaculate, 187–200, 203; distinct models of, 188–89; female leadership, 190, 192; female sexual purity, 193; Jesuit missionaries, 187–88. See also Marian piety; Virgin Mary, Immaculate Conception

Associations. See Female congregations Aycinena, Juan Fermín, 134 Aycinena, Juan José, 146, 170, 186 Aycinena, Luz Batres, 186 Aycinena, María Teresa, 8, 15, 134– 72, 199, 243n4; convent reform, 151–54; covenant theology, 169–71; female devotees, 143–46; Imitatio Cristi, 141–42, 172; Inquisition, 134, 136, 154–57, 159, 161–66; miraculous images, 138–40; mystical crucifixion, 134, 137–42; politics, 146–49, 157–60, 162–63, 166–71. See also Casaus y Torres, Ramón Baroque, 83, 104, 113, 145, 150 Barrios, Justo Rufino, 201 Beatas, 3, 34–35, 37, 45–46, 56, 63–64, 96, 108, 185, 193; Bethlemite, 88, 117, 119, 197, 199; Council of Trent, 19–20, 33, 45, 60; definition of, 20, 207; education, 104, 106, 109–11, 117–26, 128, 132; enlightened Catholicism, 118, 120; hagiography, 67–68; Indias, 120–26; Inquisition, 63–64, 109–10, 155. See also Beaterios; Tertiaries Beaterio de Belén, 27, 38, 88, 117, 128–30, 185, 197, 199. See also Rosal, Encarnación

284

Index

Beaterio de Indias, 104–5, 119–28, 130–31 Beaterio de Santa Rosa, 2, 56 Beaterios, 25, 56, 61, 107, 138, 202, 207; education, 107–12, 116–31; moral crimes, 50–51; non-elite women, 106, 198–99; and Third Orders, 43, 45, 47, 50–52, 106. See also Beaterio de Belén; Beaterio de Indias; Beaterio de Santa Rosa Belén, Jospeh Fr., 222n33 Betancurt, Hermano Pedro de San José, 27, 35, 117, 141, 146; Franciscan tertiary habit, 83–85 Bethlemites, 27, 35, 84, 88, 129, 141, 179, 197; and education, 116–17, 119. See also Betancurt, Hermano Pedro de San José Bilinkoff, Jodi, 20, 66 Bilocation, 68–69 Blacks. See Free blacks Body, 22, 66, 68, 137–38, 140–42, 147, 149, 170, 191, 193 Books. See Devotional texts Bourbon reforms, 85, 104, 110–14, 133, 155, 198 Boyer, Richard, 7, 213n42 Brazil, 206 Bristol, Joan, 54 British, 169, 184 Brotherhood of Charity, 73, 186, 195 Burial, 49, 62, 73, 97, 198; confraternities, 76, 78, 89; preferences, 76, 90, 173; secularization. See also Cemeteries; Death Burns, Kathryn, 95–96 Businesses, 176–77 Bustamante, José de, 146–48, 156–60 Cabildo. See City council Calvary Church, 44, 142 Cano, Isabel, 62, 70 Capellanías, 199, 234n86, 259n111. See also Spiritual economy Capirote, 77

Capitana, 73, 80–81, 194, 207, 229n5. See also Confraternities, female leadership of Capuchinas (neighborhood), 235n8 Capuchin convent (female), 200 Capuchin missionaries, 180, 185; expulsion, 201–2 Carmelite Convent (of Santa Teresa), 36, 56, 134, 137, 144, 151–54, 161–62, 164–65, 168, 173, 199–200 Carrera, Rafael, 9, 169–70, 175, 179, 184–85, 201, 203. See also Conservatives Casa de Recogidas, 31, 60–61, 207, 226n94 Casaus y Torres, Ramón, 134, 136–38, 140, 143, 146–51, 153–59, 161–72, 179–80, 251n154 Castas, 13, 70, 207 Castro, Félix, 151, 161 Catarina de San Juan (la China Poblana), 67 Catherine of Sienna, 33, 38, 65 Catholic Church, 9, 75, 87, 172, 206; early modern, 42, 65; global, 5, 175; liberal reforms, 169, 175, 179; nineteenth-century, 9, 187, 204; salvation, 87. See also Catholicism Catholicism: early modern, 3–5, 19–20, 33, 36–37, 39–40, 42, 50, 54–56, 62, 65–68, 104, 107, 118, 133, 190, 204; enlightened, 77, 104, 119–20, 136, 149, 156–57, 172, 190; global, 5, 8–9, 33, 40, 42, 65–71, 106, 133, 136, 172; local, 3–5, 8, 14, 33–34, 52–53, 60–65, 76–77, 97, 101, 110, 142–46, 172, 191–92, 206; medieval, 33, 37, 46, 65–66, 118, 141–42, 218n70; nineteenth-century, 9, 163; progressive or Social, 104, 185, 205; Spanish, 5, 33, 158 Catholic Union of Women in Commerce and Workshops, 204

Index Celibacy, 65–66, 104 Cemeteries, 76 Census data (padrones), 11, 29, 100, 174, 176, 235n8 Cerón, Juan, 36, 38–39, 62, 214n8, 220n92 Chambers, Sarah, 174 Charismatic Catholicism (Catholic Charismatic Renewal), 206 Charity, 6, 29, 31, 57, 62, 87, 107, 118, 121, 130, 144, 165, 177, 192, 202, 205. See also Brotherhood of Charity; Daughters of Charity; Ladies of Charity; Sisters of Charity Chastity, 37, 66, 110, 121; alternative ideals, 7, 74, 177; feminine ideals, 6, 50, 52, 79, 126, 132 Chávez, Gabino, 189 Chesnut, R. Andrew, 206 Chiapas, 22, 24, 63, 140, 201, 227n109 Chicheria, 177 Child support, 51, 174, 180, 202. See also Fathers; Paternity Chilean civil code, 202 Chinchilla Aguilar, Ernesto, 227n109 Chiquimula, 202 Cholera, 169, 176, 184–85 Chowning, Margaret, 79, 190, 236n5 Christ, 77, 147, 151, 160, 162, 172, 188; Black Christ of Esquipulas, 185, 203; Blood of, 197; Child, 2, 97, 196; Crucified, 199; gendered medieval constructs, 141–42; Holy Child of Atocha, 197; of Humility and Patience, 196; images of, 76, 88, 97, 143, 185, 195–97, 199; imitation of, 8, 136, 141–42, 172; mystical body of, 149; mystical marriage, 137; Nazarene, 110, 116, 142, 195; Passion of, 137–38, 141–42, 172; Sacred Heart, 88, 138, 185, 190, 192, 195, 204–5; shrines, 143, 185; suffering of, 32, 37. See also Via Crucis (Way of the Cross)

285

Christian, William, 4, 210n17 City council, 111, 141, 146–48, 157, 166 Civil codes, 174, 202 Clendinnen, Inga, 37, 83 Clergy, 8, 40, 63, 68, 100, 104, 149, 170, 179, 182, 183, 185, 204. See also Catholic Church; Missionaries; Priests Clossey, Luke, 4 Clothing, 2, 36, 87, 130, 141, 177, 186; and moral status, 81–84. See also Tertiaries, habit worn in public Coffee, 2, 201 Colegio de Doncellas, 60 Colegio del Cristo Crucificado/College of the Crucified Christ (La Recolección), 25–26, 75. See also Propaganda Fide Colegio de Nuestra Señora de la Presentación (El Niñado), 60, 129 Colegio de Nuestra Señora de la Visitación. See Cruz del Milagro school Colegio de Pinula, 104, 107–19, 128, 130–31, 165; Bourbon reforms, 105, 109, 112; educational reform, 111–18; laywomen, 105–11; race, 106, 112–16. See also Education Colegio de Vizcainas, 109 Colegios, 112–13, 125, 131, 165, 207. See also Beaterio de Indias; Colegio de Doncellas; Colegio de Pinula; Cruz del Milagro school; Education Colombia, 183, 206 Commerce (petty), 101, 174, 176. See also Businesses Company of Mary (La Enseñanza), 107–9, 116, 118, 123 Concepción convent, 25, 154 Concubinage, 52. See also Informal unions Confession, 20, 36, 52, 66–67, 96, 125, 150, 153, 191; Franciscan missionaries, 26, 53; general, 32, 57;

286

Index

Confession (continued ) and Jesuits, 35–41; non-elite single women, 20–22, 29, 31–33, 35–41, 54–57, 80, 96, 130, 145, 180, 183, 191, 220n101; parish priests, 96–97; solicitation, 64, 227n109 Confraternities (Religious Brotherhoods), 14, 26, 36, 43, 76, 88, 194, 203; decline, 8, 174, 177–78, 183, 190, 200; education, 109, 117–18; and enlightened Catholicism, 104, 118; female leadership of, 73, 80–81, 121, 192, 194, 207; local religion, 76–77, 98; membership, 27, 77, 79; non-elite women, 5, 34, 64, 73–74, 77–82, 86, 88–90, 95, 97–98, 110, 121, 145, 174, 177–78, 183, 190–92, 194–96 Confraternity of the Cord, 86, 89, 109, 118 Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. See Propaganda Fide Congregation of San Felipe Neri, 26, 93, 97, 100, 138 Congregation of the Good Death, 195 Congregation of Women of the Immaculate Conception, 186 Congregations. See Female congregations Conservatives, 8–9, 116, 146, 166, 168–69, 182, 205; Catholic Church, 179, 184–85, 194, 196, 198, 200, 203; and liberals, 168, 175, 182; popular conservatism, 9, 15, 167, 169, 180, 184, 200; Rafael Carrera, 169, 184–85, 201; and women, 135, 175, 184, 194, 196, 200 Consolidación de vales reales, 132 Convents (female), 5, 24–26, 36, 46–47, 54–56, 59, 62, 65, 68, 75, 106, 134, 137–39, 142, 144, 150–51, 161–65; confraternities, 77, 88; Council of Trent, 3–4, 33, 41–43, 60; education, 107, 109, 112–13, 123, 127, 131–32;

exclaustration, 202; liberal reforms, 168, 202; native women, 121–26; non-elite women, 88, 90, 173, 198–200; populations, 34; reforms, 109, 132, 151–54, 158, 162, 165; religious endowments, 90, 92–93; will-makers, 10, 198. See also Nuns; Religious orders (female); Vida común reforms Córdova y Salinas, Diego, 70 Corpus Christi Convent (Mexico City), 122 Cortés y Larraz, Pedro, 22, 77, 99 Costeloe, Michael, 234n86 Coteguera, Luis, 224n60 Council of Trent, 3–4, 19, 33, 44, 60, 65, 67, 107 Counter Reformation, 59, 66 Courts, 51; nineteenth-century, 174, 176 Covenant Theology, 169–71 Criada/o, 92, 258n71 Crime, 101, 119, 175–76, 205; religious or sexual, 30, 52, 60–61, 64, 110, 226n94 Criollo/a, 21, 48, 54, 60, 106, 136, 160, 207; girls’ schools, 112, 114, 119, 127, 129; Independence-era politics, 146–49, 156–60, 166–69, 171 Croquer, Antonio, 131, 162, 165 Cruz, Serapio, 201 Cruz del Milagro school, 104–5, 124, 127–32 Cussen, Celia, 62, 70 Daughters of Charity, 4, 107, 188, 189 Daughters of Mary. See Association of the Daughters of Mary Immaculate Davis, J., 10 Death, 10, 21; good death, 76, 78, 91, 195 Demographics, 1, 3, 11–13, 20, 22–23, 58, 81, 100, 112, 120, 144, 174, 176, 195, 202

Index Desan, Susan, 181 Devil, 21, 45, 55, 64, 80, 155, 161, 205 Devotion: collective, 4, 34, 36, 43, 78, 104, 110, 119, 125, 142; confraternities, 76–77, 80, 177; early modern Catholicism, 67, 104, 172; gendered trends, 8, 34–35, 90–91, 136, 143–46, 160; holy women, 19, 31–32, 54, 63, 69, 134, 140–46, 154, 156, 160, 164–65, 172; images, 27, 91, 178; medieval forms, 4, 141; nineteenth-century, 9, 136, 142–44, 166, 172, 175, 178–79, 183–200, 205; non-elite laywomen, 2, 9–10, 14, 33–36, 73–74, 78, 80, 88–92, 97, 119–20, 124, 129–32, 136, 178–79, 183–200, 205–6; Third Orders, 34, 43–44, 83, 177; urban, 26–27, 33. See also Devotional networks; Devotional texts Devotional networks, non-elite laywomen, 7–8, 14, 20, 31–32, 35, 40, 64, 71, 73, 78, 86, 88, 94–95, 97, 119, 133, 136, 145, 165, 172–73, 175, 177–78, 181, 191, 194–95, 198, 200, 203 Devotional texts, 27, 32, 35, 67, 76, 129, 191, 195. See also Literacy Divorce, ecclesiastical, 30–31, 47–48, 205; civil divorce, 183; and enclosure, 61 Domestic abuse, 22, 68, 215n19 Domesticity, 177. See also Feminine ideals Dominicans, 19, 43, 75, 92, 94, 97, 138, 188; Beaterio de Indias, 120 Don/Doña, 1, 93; Franciscan Third Order, 47–48, 85; as measure of social status, 13–14, 101 Donadas/os, 57, 62, 207 Doncellas, 31, 34, 47, 72, 82, 91, 94, 106, 173, 207; Franciscan Third Order, 44–45, 85. See also Single women Drunkenness, 52 Dunn, Henry, 175

287

Earthquakes, 30, 77; of 1717, 46, 64, 74–75; of 1773, 14, 99, 100–101, 106, 108, 111, 117, 119, 127, 133, 169, 176. See also Relocation (of capital) Economic Society of Friends of the Country (Guatemala), 115 Education, 90; beaterios, 108, 110, 119–26; Bourbon crown, 103–5, 109, 113–14, 126; feminine ideals, 103–5, 132; free grammar schools, 103, 105, 107–8, 111, 117, 119, 127–28, 131; non-elite laywomen, 7, 15, 104, 107–33; race, 112–16, 119–26; reform of, 15, 76, 103–4, 107, 111–19, 126; religious orders, 104, 107–11, 116–18, 126, 132; and Third Orders, 104–6, 109–10, 116–19, 125. See also Beaterio de Indias; Colegio de Pinula; Company of Mary; Cruz del Milagro school Eire, Carlos, 87, 212n39 El Salvador, 20–23, 28, 74, 168, 169, 222n33. See also San Salvador Enlightenment, 8, 15, 76; and Catholicism, 145, 147, 155, 160; education, 103–4, 110, 117–18, 120, 133 Epidemics, 30, 176 Epiphany, 198 Escoto, Luis, 130 Escuela de Cristo. See Holy School of Christ Escuela pública, 124. See also Education Esparragosa, Narciso, 138, 140, 145, 246n64 Espinosa, Isidrio Félix de, 26, 44–47, 49 Esquipulas (Black Christ of), 23, 185, 203 Estephania de San Joseph, 62, 70 Eucharist (Blessed Sacrament), 76, 140, 142, 190, 195, 205; as a symbol of social unity, 149 Evangelicalism, 205

288

Index

Evangelization, 27, 35, 42, 53, 63, 166; education, 118–20; hagiography, 67–68; and laywomen, 3, 34, 42, 47, 53, 57–59, 68–71, 133, 192, 205 Evennett, H. Outram, 228n121 Extirpation campaigns, 62 Famine, 30, 111, 175–76 Fasting, 130, 192. See also Penitential piety Fathers, 95, 177; and education, 103; illegitimate children, 1, 48, 51, 66, 72, 78, 89, 194, 202. See also Child support; Paternity Feast days, 2, 22, 27, 43, 76, 86, 89, 124–25, 127, 130, 150, 185, 197, 203 Female congregations: as active religious orders, 104–11, 116, 119, 125–26, 128, 130, 185, 188; lay associations, 5, 186–93, 195, 197–98, 200, 203–4. See also Association of the Daughters of Mary Immaculate Feminine ideals: alternative, 7–8, 54, 74, 78, 81, 83–84, 88, 177; early modern, 40, 54, 56, 79, 119, 125, 133; elite, 6; Enlightenment thought, 15, 105; flexible, 40, 53–60, 69–71; medieval, 4; native women, 121, 126; nineteenthcentury, 127, 132, 172, 174, 177, 200. See also Chastity; Republican Motherhood Feminization (of piety), 34, 107, 144 Few, Martha, 5 Flores, Cirilo, 181–82 France, 10, 144, 149, 181; female religious orders, 4, 68, 107, 118, 185, 188 Francisca de los Ángeles, 45, 47, 63, 69 Franciscans, 27, 34, 40, 70, 73, 89, 113–14, 120, 124, 138, 150, 188, 218n69; Bourbon reforms, 75–76,

85, 92; convent church, 24–25, 79, 89, 142, 160, 197; liberal reforms, 181–82; missionaries, 26, 41–53, 56, 58–60, 62–64, 66, 68–71, 94, 118, 120, 131, 151, 161, 165, 181, 193; religious chronicles, 4, 26, 44–47, 49, 70, 191; relocation of capital, 100. See also Propaganda Fide; Tertiaries; Third Orders Francis of Assisi, 27, 50, 82–83, 142, 152 Francos y Monrroy, Cayetano, 105, 119–20, 130, 238n37 Free blacks: confraternities, 73, 79–81; education, 106, 114–15; freed slaves, 49, 62, 72–73, 79; holy women, 62; Third Orders, 51, 106, 108; urban population, 1, 30; willmakers, 1–2, 13, 49, 72–73, 79. See also Africans; Mulattas/os Funerals, 19, 43, 73, 75–76, 78, 89 Gaceta de Guatemala, 177, 186 García-Peláez, Francisco (Archbishop), 179 Gavarrete, José María, 173 Gender, 3–8, 10, 14, 20, 30, 128, 177; demographics, 100, 176; holy women, 21, 54, 69–70, 162–64; migration patterns, 11–12; politics, 166–67, 173–74, 183–84; race, 121, 126; religious practice, 33–34, 37, 39, 42, 44–45, 47, 50, 53, 79, 81, 88, 90, 95, 136, 141–45, 160, 205–6; sin, 50–51. See also Feminine ideals Graubart, Karen, 12, 212n34 Guatemala, 3–13, 21, 26, 34, 44, 46, 49, 62, 69, 132–34, 143, 187–93, 200; archives, 9; Catholic Church in, 77, 100, 148, 153, 164, 169–70, 175, 178–81, 185, 200, 202–6; confraternities, 77, 202; courts, 51–52; economy of, 88, 133, 169, 175, 201; education, 103–5, 111,

Index 113, 119–20, 122, 132–33; Independence, 167, 170–71; Inquisition, 63–65, 154–56; Kingdom/audiencia of, 1–2, 22–23, 61, 100, 113, 157; Mexican Provincial Councils, 128, 153; nineteenth-century, 172, 174–76, 178–84; politics, 136–37, 146–48, 156–60, 166–71, 178, 181–85, 201–3; religious orders, 75–76, 114, 120, 164, 168–69, 198–99; and San Salvador, 169; sexual mores, 52. See also Guatemala City; Santiago de Guatemala Guatemala City, 23; Catholic Church, 15, 100, 185, 196–97, 200–206; construction, 14, 99–101; demographics, 100, 176; education, 103–6, 117, 119, 122, 127–28; María Teresa Aycinena, 134, 139– 53, 160, 167; non-elite women, 9, 15, 100–101, 174–75, 178, 182, 186–87, 189–206; politics, 157, 159, 167–69, 182, 184, 201–3; relationship with Central American provinces, 168–69, 182, 184; religious practice, 178, 185–200, 201–6; socioeconomic conditions, 99–101, 175–76 Gudmundson, Lowell, 169 Guerra, Catalina, 38, 56 Guerra de Jesús, Anna: active religiosity, 35, 54–58, 68–70, 118; death, 19, 41; El Salvador, 21–22; female mysticism, 32–33, 35; hagiography, 19–20, 33, 39, 41, 53–54, 65–70, 134; marriage, 21–22, 29, 37–39, 65–66; as model of female piety, 54–61, 67–70, 193; and motherhood, 21, 32, 37–38; relationship to sacraments, 21–22, 29, 31–32, 35–40; Santiago de Guatemala, 22–31; spiritual direction, 31–32, 35–40. See also Guerra, Catalina; Jesuits Gunnarsdóttir, Ellen, 67, 228n121

289

Hagiography, 19, 32; expanding definition, 214n4; as historical source, 5, 20–21; models of feminine piety, 33, 53–54, 66–68; native women, 121–22. See also Guerra de Jesús, Anna Hidalgo y Costilla, Miguel, 115, 147–48 Hijo/a natural, 1, 48, 72, 78, 88–89, 94, 196. See also Illegitimacy; Paternity; Single women Holy School of Christ, 26, 36, 57, 65, 97, 198 Holy Week, 77, 142, 196, 203. See also Lent Holy women, 5, 19, 21, 32, 39–41, 50, 53, 59, 136; apostolic mission, 65–70; Imitation of Christ, 142; race, 62–63, 121; relationships with priests, 164; visions and prophecies, 158. See also Aycinena, María Teresa; Feminine ideals; Guerra de Jesús, Anna; Hagiography Honor: non-elite women, 6–7, 74, 78, 88; religious institutions, 60, 112, 129, 131; sex, 51; and social status, 13–14; and Third Orders, 34, 45, 47–50, 73, 82, 158. See also Don/ Doña Hospital de San Juan de Dios, 185–86, 202 Husbands, 48, 57, 66, 89, 205; and abuse, 21, 194; domestic economy, 86, 180, 194, 196–99; legal privileges, 65, 174; nineteenth-century ideals, 177; property law, 11–12; spousal abandonment and separation, 29–31, 34, 37, 40, 49, 54, 59– 62, 95, 145, 193–94; will-making, 213n43. See also Child support; Marriage; Paternity; Widows Ideals. See Feminine ideals Illegitimacy, 1, 14; rates of, 3, 6, 29, 58, 180, 203, 207, 223n46. See also

290

Index

Illegitimacy (continued ) Hijo/a natural; Paternity; Single women Images (of Christ, Mary, and saints): female devotion, 2, 31–32, 34–35, 73, 80–81, 86–88, 91, 94, 121, 134, 138–41, 143–46, 161, 164–65, 173, 178, 188–92, 194–200; local religion, 4, 27, 31, 75–77, 84–85, 88, 91, 178, 203; and María Teresa Aycinena, 134, 138–41, 143–46, 150, 155, 161, 164–65; politics, 170, 182. See also Christ; Virgin Mary Imitatio Cristi, 141–42 Immaculate Conception. See Virgin Mary, Immaculate Conception Independence/Post-Independence, 115, 134, 138, 144; Catholic Church, 8–9, 15, 100, 108, 134–37, 147–49, 156–57, 163, 168–71, 174–75, 178–200; female education, 132–33; gender, 136, 166–67; Inquisition, 156; non-elite women, 6–9, 15, 101, 167, 174–78, 180– 200; politics, 3, 134–37, 146–49, 156–60, 166–71, 179–84; religious practice, 142–49, 156–60, 180–84, 186–200; socioeconomic conditions, 175–77 Indians, 2–3, 26, 29–31, 44, 53, 62–63, 69–71, 75, 83, 94, 163, 167, 176, 183, 185, 201; confraternities, 80–81; demographics, 13; education, 104–5, 108, 112–14, 116, 118–26, 133; and popular conservatism, 185; relocation of villages, 99; revolts, 42, 169, 184; spiritual status, 120–23; wills, 12–13. See also Repartimiento Indigo, 74, 88, 101, 126, 133, 169 Indulgences, 76, 79, 87, 191 Informal unions, 6–7, 29, 48, 52–53. See also Illegitimacy Inheritance law, 2, 11–12, 87, 203

Inquisition, 67, 143; missionaries, 46, 63, 69–70; non-elite women, 3, 20, 30, 80; religious laywomen, 20, 46, 63, 109–10; as historical source, 5, 9; in Guatemala, 63–64, 227n109. See also Aycinena, María Teresa, Inquisition Insurgency, 166 Jaffary, Nora, 3 Jesuits, 19, 24, 204, 219n85; abolition, 162; expulsions, 75, 201–2; female education, 116, 118; hagiography, 4–5, 20, 27, 41–42, 53–60, 67–70; missionary movements, 5, 9, 36, 42, 53–60, 67–71, 118, 175, 180, 185–89, 195, 197–98, 200; native women, 116, 118, 122; nineteenth-century, 175, 180, 185–93, 195, 197–98, 200; nonelite women, 19–20, 22, 27, 35–43, 50, 53–62, 65, 67–71, 118, 175, 180, 186–93, 195, 197–98, 200; recogimientos, 50, 61–62; spiritual direction, 36–40. See also Marian piety; Religious orders (male); Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Jutiapa, 202 Komisaruk, Catherine, 13, 213n46 Labouré, Catherine, 188–89 Ladies of Charity, 186 La Enseñanza. See Company of Mary La Ermita (neighborhood), 127 Laicization, 8, 108, 203 Larkin, Brian, 77 Larrazábal, Antonio, 197 Lavrin, Asucnion, 19, 40, 51, 79, 225n88 Laywomen: active religiosity, 3–4, 33–35, 42, 104–11, 180–200; early modern Catholicism, 3–7, 20, 33–35, 39–40, 42–54, 56, 59, 65–71; enlightened Catholi-

Index cism, 104, 116; local religion, 4–5, 14–15, 21, 33–36, 40, 42, 47–53, 60–65, 78–98, 143–46, 172, 178, 180–200, 204–6; nineteenth-­ century Catholicism, 8–9, 15, 143–46, 178, 180–200; sources, 5, 9–14; Third Orders, 43–51, 81–86. See also Beatas; Guerra de Jesús, Anna; Tertiaries Legitimacy. See Illegitimacy Lent, 77, 125, 134, 137, 142, 148–49. See also Holy Week Leo XIII, 204 Liberals, 146–48, 166–69, 171, 201; Catholic Church, 8–9, 134, 142, 163, 167–69, 178–79, 181–84, 201–2; civil codes, 174, 202; gender, 136, 184; women, 8–9, 134, 174–75, 181–84, 202–3 Liberation Theology, 205 Lima, 4, 22–23, 30–31, 33, 38, 42, 54, 56, 60–64, 70–71, 110, 225n88 L’Incarnation, Marie de, 68 Literacy, 35, 70, 111–12, 117 Local religion, 3–5, 14; Santiago de Guatemala, 60–65, 76–77, 97–98, 101, 110, 142–43, 146, 172, 192, 206. See also Confraternities; Images; Spiritual economy Lockhart, James, 213n42 Loma, Enrique, 131 López, Melchor, 26, 44 López Rayón, Mariano, 131, 140, 144–45, 151, 154, 160, 164 Loreto López, Rosalva, 225n88 Lutz, Christopher, 13, 25, 58 Manuel de la Madre de Dios, 140 Margil de Jesús, Antonio, 26, 44–45, 56, 69 María de la Visitación (Nun of Lisbon), 155 María Manuela de Santa Ana, 144–45 Mariana de Jesús (Lily of Quito), 193

291

Marian piety, 175, 187–93, 199–200. See also Virgin Mary Market women, 29–30, 83, 173–74, 176–77, 195, 198, 200, 202, 205 Marriage, 1, 51; civil codes, 174, 183, 202–3; early modern Catholicism, 65–66; female holiness, 21, 65–66; feminine ideals, 7, 104, 177, 202–3; girls’ schools, 112, 131–32; promise, 48, 51, 180; property, 11–12, 48, 86, 180, 196; spiritual or mystical, 32, 137; urban context, 12, 33, 58, 174, 176. See also Husbands; Wives Martínez, Bernardo, 154, 156–60, 164 Marure, Alejandro, 181–83 Masses, 229n5; perpetual endowments of, 86, 89–97, 207; pious bequests in wills, 2, 73, 76, 197, 199; relationships between women and priests, 93–97. See also Capellanías; Spiritual economy Matías Delgado, José, 138, 156 Maya, 46, 62–63. See also Indians Méndez, José Mariano, 161 Mendicants. See Religious orders (male) Mercedarians, 64–65, 78–79, 86, 89, 100, 108, 117, 130, 140, 151, 154, 160, 164, 187, 195, 197–98, 204 Merida, 199 Mexican Provincial Councils, 110, 121, 128 Mexico, 9, 19–20, 36, 45, 47–48, 51, 63, 67, 69, 77, 79–81, 95, 98, 104, 108, 111–12, 120, 123, 128, 140, 143, 147–48, 153, 167, 170, 176, 179, 189, 194–95, 203 Mexico City, 4, 11–12, 22, 30–31, 42, 50, 60–61, 63–64, 68, 71, 76, 83, 107, 109–11, 116–18, 121–23, 140, 154–55, 159, 162 Migration, 2, 11–14, 22, 29, 75, 205; and religious practice, 20, 33–34, 47, 62, 65, 88

292

Index

Milanich, Nara, 202 Military, 169, 176, 183–84, 202, 205. See also Warfare Miracles, 27, 54, 135–37, 143, 147–50, 185, 191, 206; nineteenthcentury Catholicism, 149, 156–57, 163, 188, 203, 205; women, 143–46. See also Aycinena, María Teresa Miraculous medals, 188, 203 Missionaries, 4–5, 9, 26, 34–36, 104, 152, 161, 165–66; Bourbon reforms, 70; and education, 118, 120–21, 126, 131; hagiography, 67–68; lay female evangelizers, 42, 47, 53–59, 68–71; models of feminine piety, 42, 53, 59, 62–63, 65–68, 71, 193; nineteenth century, 180, 185–89, 192, 201; non-elite single women, 15, 41–53, 62–63, 66–68, 71, 94, 166, 175, 189, 192, 198, 200, 206; politics, 167, 181; and sexual morality, 52, 58, 61. See also Jesuits; Propaganda Fide Missions: early modern, 4, 68; urban, 26, 44, 58, 63, 69–70, 118, 181, 185. See also Missionaries Modernization, 7, 201 Molina, Pedro, 138, 140, 144–45 Moneylending, 89 Montúfar, Lorenzo: eighteenth-century mayor, 105; nineteenth-century historian, 135 Mooney, Catherine, 218n70 Morazán, Francisco, 169 Motherhood: female holiness, 37; religious experience, 21–22, 32, 38; social utility of, 104–5, 114, 132–33. See also Republican Motherhood Mulattas/os, 1, 30, 49, 62, 72, 79–80; attempted beaterio, 106, 108; education, 106, 114; tertiaries, 51, 106, 108 Muñoz, Vicente, 105–6, 111, 115 Muriel, Josefina, 19 Music, 21; female education, 112–14

Myers, Kathleen, 5, 54 Mystical Body of Christ, 67, 149 Mysticism: false, 3, 20, 63–64, 110, 155, 160, 162, 227n109; female, 5, 8, 15, 19–20, 32, 35, 40–41, 63, 68–69, 134, 136–37, 140–62, 164–65, 170–73, 199 Nativity (scene), 2, 88, 198 Non-elite women, 20–22; confraternities, 78–81, 194; early modern Catholicism, 3–6, 20, 67–68; economic status of, 101; education, 103, 105–6, 111–12; female convents, 199; María Teresa Aycinena, 136, 143–46; nineteenth-century associations, 187–93, 195; popular conservatism, 180–84; post-Independence, 8, 173–80; priests, 8, 41–53, 61–65, 93–97, 180–84, 198–99; Republican Motherhood, 8, 174, 180–81, 194; sex and status, 5–7, 72–74, 193–94; sources, 9–14; in SpanishAmerican cities, 2–3, 5–6, 29–31, 101; spiritual economy, 86–93, 195–200; Third Orders, 81–86. See also Market women; Single women Noriega, José Esteban, 68 Notaries, 1–2, 9, 13, 72–73, 82, 95, 151, 159, 173. See also Wills Novena, 2, 86, 91, 197, 229n5 Nueva Guatemala. See Guatemala City Nun of Lisbon. See Maria de la Visitación Nuns, 4–5, 8, 15, 19, 26, 34, 36, 40, 59, 68, 127, 132; apostolic calling, 68–69, 107; confessors, 39, 56, 67, 152–54; convent reforms, 153; Council of Trent, 60, 66–67; exclaustration, 202; false mysticism, 155; laywomen, 88, 173, 197, 199–200; liberals, 168; native women, 121–23, 126; nineteenth-century reform, 107, 132, 163; rhetoric of humility, 56. See also Aycinena,

Index María Teresa; Convents (female); Vida común reforms O’Hara, Matthew, 36, 104, 231n40 Orellana, José de, 106 Orphans, 2, 30, 45, 49, 60, 62, 65, 91, 94, 97, 118–19, 129, 186, 202 Orsi, Robert, 7, 218n63, 245n35 Ortiz, Anselmo, 138, 144–45, 150, 163, 170–71 Ovando, Bernardino de, 31–32, 35–36, 55, 57, 62 Parishes, 26–27, 63, 65, 90; Candelaria, 131, 194, 196; confraternities, 77–81, 216n35, 229n5; education, 111, 113, 117, 127, 131; native doctrinas, 75, 92, 96; nineteenth century, 179–80; priests, 96–97, 179–80, 199; race, 13, 81, 232n51; records, 9, 79; religious endowments, 92; Remedios, 36, 52, 80, 88, 97, 229n5; rural, 22; San Sebastián, 52, 79–80, 127, 216n35 Paternity, 202–3. See also Child support; Fathers Payes, María Ignacia Mercedes, 168 Penitential piety, 26, 31–32, 36, 44, 49–50, 77, 83, 129–30, 132, 142, 148, 149, 152–53, 160, 165, 192 Pentecostalism, 205 Pérez, Rafael, 187, 192, 195 Pérez, Tomás, 68 Pérez de Jesús, Mariano, 131, 165, 170 Perfecta, Antonia, 127–32 Pilgrimage, 143–44, 188, 203 Pineda, Manuel José de, 113–14, 239n54 Pinula, 105. See also Colegio de Pinula Pius VI, 149 Pius VII, 149, 170 Pius IX, 188, 190 Pope, 149, 162, 193, 200 Poska, Allyson, 6, 52

293

Powell, Amanda, 5 Prayer, 2, 31–32, 35, 38, 43, 57, 66, 69, 73, 76, 88, 94, 108, 124, 126, 129–31, 142–44, 150, 152, 157, 170, 188, 190–97, 206; mental prayer, 35–36, 129, 131, 219n75 Priests, 26, 35–36, 89, 106, 164, 205– 6; confession, 36, 39–40, 65–67; confraternities, 77, 88; education, 109–10, 113–14, 127–31; enforcement of sexual morality, 6, 51–52; enlightened Catholicism, 149; hagiography, 68; María Teresa Aycinena, 134–40, 145, 158–59; nonelite women, 3, 5, 8, 14–15, 19–20, 35, 40, 42, 48–49, 51–54, 60–67, 70–71, 73–74, 77, 93–97, 119, 128–31, 135, 172–73, 178, 180–84, 192, 194–95, 199–200; politics, 149, 158, 166, 181–85; population of, 26, 29, 100, 108, 178–80, 185, 202; race, 121; religious endowments, 90; in rural areas, 21–22. See also Clergy; Franciscans; Jesuits; Religious orders (male) Prison: María Teresa Aycinena, 150–51; religious ministries, 26, 36, 57, 118, 186; and women, 30–31, 60–61, 186 Processions, 77, 185, 190, 196, 202–3 Propaganda Fide, 26, 34, 69–70, 75, 118, 131, 138, 151, 170, 181, 197; non-elite single women, 42–53, 56, 63–65, 94, 198. See also Franciscans; Margil de Jesús, Antonio; Third Orders Property: female home ownership, 90–93, 97, 100; law, 11–12, 174, 181; male, 93. See also Inheritance law Prophecy, 157–59, 161 Protestantism, 39, 65, 204–6; Reformation, 67, 152 Protests, 30, 111, 202; women, 181–83, 202 Puebla (Mexico), 67

294

Index

Purgatory, 76, 78, 87–89, 150, 158, 161, 165, 191, 197 Querétaro (Mexico), 45, 47, 51, 63, 69, 109, 118 Quetzaltenango, 23, 181, 187 Quintana, María, 68 Race: confraternities, 79–81, 86; education, 105–6, 110, 112–17, 119–26, 130, 133; as flexible category, 7, 74, 82–83; hagiography, 5, 53, 62, 70; Independence, 167; missionaries, 53, 63, 70; politics, 183–85; Third Orders, 40, 43, 45; urban demographics, 1, 13, 30, 72 Raymond of Capua, 65 Real Colegio de Indias de Guadalupe, 116, 122 Rebellion, 5, 146, 148, 169, 184. See also Insurgency; Violence; Warfare Recogimiento, 55, 131; as religious shelter or prison, 31, 50–51, 60–62, 106, 129, 207, 226n94. See also Casa de Recogidas Recolección Convent (College of the Crucified Christ), 25–26, 34, 44, 75, 94, 131, 151, 160, 181, 197–98, 218n69 Relics, 69, 145, 164; cult of, 141, 172 Religious brotherhoods. See Confraternities Religious chronicles, 3–4, 26, 44–47, 49, 64, 70, 83, 121, 138, 187, 191–92, 195. See also Espinosa, Isidrio Félix de; Vásquez, Francisco; Ximénez, Francisco Religious orders (female), 151, 198; active, 107–8, 132–33, 152. See also Convents (female); Nuns Religious orders (male), 3, 14, 20, 26, 34, 87–88, 96–97, 152, 185, 204; Bourbon reforms, 70, 75–76, 92, 99, 104, 179; education, 104, 109, 111, 116–18, 126; enlightened Catholicism, 104; exile of, 164, 169,

201; female piety, 33–36, 63, 78, 132, 178, 186, 198–99; hagiography, 68–69, 217n39; Liberals, 168, 181–82, 201; relationship with secular clergy, 26, 63, 216n30; relocation of capital, 99. See also Franciscans; Jesuits; Propaganda Fide Relocation (of capital), 14–15, 99–101, 106, 108, 111, 117, 119, 127, 133 Remedios (parish): confraternities, 13, 25, 36, 52, 80, 88, 97, 229n5 Repartimiento, 114 Repentance, 46, 49–50, 53, 59, 61, 67, 83, 193 Republican Motherhood, 8, 174, 177, 180–81, 194, 203 Rerum Novarum, 204 Riots, 157, 181–83 Ritual, 113, 131, 142, 180, 196; spaces, 133 Robledo, Francisco, 127, 130 Romanization, 204 Rome, 4, 149, 162, 188, 204 Rosal, Encarnación, 185, 199 Rosary, Our Lady of the. See Virgin Mary Rose of Lima, 33, 54 Rose of Viterbo, 46–47 Rubial García, Antonio, 220n101 Rugeley, Terry, 199 Ruiz, Beatriz Ana, 68 Sacraments: access, 21–22, 118, 127, 183; early modern Catholicism, 66; education, 118–19, 124–27, 131; frequency of engagement, 21–22, 26–27, 31, 36, 54, 56, 106, 119, 126, 131, 183, 191, 205; women prohibited from delivering, 59, 69 Sacred Heart (of Jesus), 88, 138, 190, 192, 195, 204–5; Sorrows of the Sacred Heart, 185 Saints, 67, 75–77; female, 21, 31–32; male, 21; relics, 141. See also Images; Virgin Mary

Index Salvation, 6, 38, 76, 143, 150, 152, 161, 164; missionaries, 27, 53, 55, 96; religious associations, 76, 191; spiritual economy, 76–77, 86–94; and suffering, 141; will-making, 2, 10, 86–94. See also Death; Purgatory Sampson Vera Tudela, Elisa, 69 Sanders, James, 184 San José (chapel), 91 San Juan de Dios (neighborhood), 235n8 San Salvador, 23, 173, 182; bishopric controversy, 167–68. See also El Salvador San Sebastián (parish/neighborhood), 13, 25, 47, 52, 64, 78–80, 127, 181, 216n35 Santa Catalina Convent, 24–25, 154 Santa Clara Convent, 127, 168 Santa Rosa (town), 202 Santiago de Guatemala: as audiencia capital, 1, 22; Catholic Church, 24–26, 34, 41–44, 46–47, 75–77, 86–93; confraternities, 77–81; demographics, 1–2, 13, 22; earthquakes, 14, 30, 77, 99; economy, 74–75; female enclosure, 60–62; illicit sexuality, 6, 52–53, 58; Inquisition, 63–65; local religion, 5, 26–27, 36, 41–49, 63, 76–85; migration, 13, 22; relocation of capital, 99–101; social and cultural trends, 23–31, 75–77; spiritual economy, 86–93; women, 5, 11, 13, 29–31, 33–35, 40–49, 60–65, 78–98. See also Guatemala City Schools. See Education Secularization, 7, 10, 174, 178 Sex and sexuality: Catholic Church, 8, 20–21, 39, 48, 50–52, 58, 60, 65, 121, 132, 175, 180, 193, 200; female honor, 6–7, 74; identity, 69, 142; illicit, 51–52, 57–58, 61, 63, 95, 226n94; post-Independence, 8, 174, 180, 184; Spanish law,

295

51; tolerance, 6, 51–52; women, 6–8, 20–21, 39, 50–52, 54, 57–58, 60–61, 65, 95, 121, 132, 174–75, 184, 193, 200. See also Chastity; Informal unions Single women: associations of, 187–93, 195, 200; confraternities, 78–79, 178, 194, 196; early modern Catholicism, 3, 5, 39, 42, 45, 51– 53, 60–62, 65–67; and education, 106, 119, 128, 133; Inquisition, 20, 42; marriage market, 12, 112, 174, 176; moral status of, 7, 14, 74, 81–86, 97–98, 128, 175, 177, 193, 200, 202–3; nineteenth-century Catholicism, 136, 143–46, 172, 175, 188–93; post-Independence, 6, 174–78, 180, 200; priests, 15, 39, 41–49, 53, 60–62, 65–67, 93–97, 119, 128, 166, 175, 178, 180, 188, 198; regulation of, 29–31, 60–62, 174, 202; religious experience, 38; in Spanish American cities, 2–3, 12, 29, 60–62; Spanish law, 12, 51; spiritual economy, 77, 86–93, 175, 196–200; Third Orders, 34, 40–49, 51, 77, 81–86, 119; tolerance of, 42, 52–53, 60–62, 71; will-making, 9–12, 72. See also Doncellas; Sex and sexuality; Soltera; Widows Siria, Antonio de, 19–22, 27–32, 35–42, 53–62, 65–70, 214n8 Sisters of Charity, 185, 202 Slaves, 7, 13, 26, 54, 72, 79, 83, 153; freed, 49, 58, 62, 67, 72, 74, 79 Society of Jesus. See Jesuits Soltera, 72, 82–83, 207. See also Single women Spain, 5–6, 44, 51–52, 60, 66, 75, 80, 99, 111, 115, 147, 149, 167–68, 188, 193 Spiritual economy: definition, 86; elite, 87, 233n72; non-elite women, 87–98, 100, 183 Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, 36–37, 59, 67

296

Index

Starr-Lebeau, Gretchen, 233n66 Stations of the Cross. See Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) Stephens, John Lloyd, 182–85 Stern, Steve, 95 Stigmata, 134, 137, 140–43, 145, 147, 149, 150, 152, 161; gender, 142, 154 Sullivan-González, Douglass, 170, 179 Taylor, William, 4, 104, 143 Tekakwitha, Catherine, 67, 122 Teresa of Avila, 145, 155; convent reform, 151–53; gendered rhetoric, 162–63 Tertiaries, 27, 40, 142; Council of Trent, 33, 41, 60; definition and Rule, 20, 33, 43, 62; education, 104–6, 108–9, 110, 116, 118, 120, 122, 127–29; female saints, 33, 47, 54; Franciscan missionaries, 40–50, 53, 62; gendered patterns, 33, 42–43, 177–78; habit worn in public, 73, 82–84, 128–29; Inquisition, 63–64, 109–10; as lay evangelizers, 47, 53, 58; male, 76, 85; mulatta, 106; non-elite and single women, 34–35, 40–53, 56, 62–65, 70, 73, 82–86, 104, 106, 110, 122, 125, 127–29, 145, 193, 218n66 Third Mexican Council. See Mexican Provincial Councils Third Orders, 20, 35, 97, 188; Council of Trent, 20; decline and abolition, 177–78, 202; definition, 33; Dominican, 125; education, 105–10, 116–19; enlightened Catholicism, 104, 116–18; Franciscan, 40–53, 62, 64, 73, 76–77, 82–86, 105–6, 193, 196, 222n33; and nineteenth-century associations, 191–93; Rule of, 34, 43, 62. See also Tertiaries Tithe, 178–79, 181, 202

Toledo Palomo, Ricardo, 233n66 Tortuguero (neighborhood), 73, 91, 229n4 Twinam, Ann, 6 Two Republics, 30 United Provinces of Central America (Federal Republic of Central America), 176 Urbanization, 33, 201 Ursulines, 68, 107 Vásquez, Francisco, 26, 49–50, 191 Vatican, 204; Vatican II, 206. See also Pope; Rome Vela Perpetua, 190 Via Crucis (Way of the Cross), 44, 125, 142, 192, 207 Vida común reforms, 109, 152–54 Villageliu, José Buenaventura, 150–51, 153–54, 157–63, 165–68, 243n4 Vincent, Mary, 193 Vincent de Paul, 185–86 Violence, 63, 119, 157–58, 170, 176, 181–83, 200, 202, 205. See also Crime; Domestic abuse; Riots; Warfare Virgin Mary, 124–25; apparitions and visions, 143, 151; confraternities, 73, 78–81; images of, 2, 31, 73, 86, 89, 94, 173, 189, 191–92, 194, 196, 198–99, 200; Immaculate Conception, 173, 186–93, 198, 200; nineteenth-century associations and devotions, 185–93, 197–98, 202, 205; Our Lady of Belén, 97; Our Lady of Carmen, 73, 81, 92; Our Lady of Loreto, 191; Our Lady of Mercy, 64, 86, 89, 197; Our Lady of Remedies, 80; Our Lady of Slavery, 79; Our Lady of Sorrows, 78–79, 86, 97, 191, 196, 199; Our Lady of the Incarnation, 173; Our Lady of the Rosary,

Index 2, 31, 73, 94, 191, 194; Our Lady of the Visitation, 127. See also Marian piety Visitandines, 107 Vives, Juan Luis, 66 Voekel, Pamela, xii, 104 Von Germeten, Nicole, 79 Vovelle, Michel, 10 Walker Bynum, Caroline, 141–42 Warfare, 12, 133, 176 Wet nurses, 114 Widows, 9–12, 37, 62, 72, 86, 128, 177, 197–200; confraternities and Third Orders, 34, 40, 43, 47–49, 51, 53, 78–81; hagiography, 59, 68; legal rights, 11–12, 203, 223n46; marriage market, 12, 174, 176; miraculous devotions, 143–46; moral theology, 66; nineteenth-century associations, 175, 193; priests, 30, 95–98; spiritual economy, 87–93 Wills, 1, 3, 75–76, 146, 212n34, 223n46, 235n106, 235n107; demographic characteristics, 10–14, 75, 101, 145, 176, 254n16; female religious practice, 33–34, 40–43, 47–49, 62–64, 72–74, 76, 78, 82, 84–91, 93–97, 145, 173, 175, 178,

297

180, 191, 194–99, 203, 218n66; methodological approach, 9–14, 212n39, 213n43; nineteenth-century shifts, 178; property, 91, 93, 101; Spanish law, 1–2, 72 Witchcraft, 5, 64, 227n109 Wives, 7, 132, 186; abandoned/separated, 11–12, 30–31, 40, 42, 43, 47–49, 51, 53, 55, 59–61, 63, 65, 78, 82, 175, 177, 193, 200, 203; indigenous, 114; liberal reforms, 174, 203; property rights, 11, 203; social and moral role of, 103, 177; willmaking, 213n43. See also Domestic abuse; Marriage; Motherhood Women: early modern Catholicism, 19, 39, 50, 66; Enlightenment, 103, 133, 145, 160; nineteenth-century Liberals, 8, 135, 174, 183–84; political participation, 183–84. See also Holy women; Laywomen; Market women; Non-elite women; Single women, Widows Woodward, Ralph Lee, 201 Wright-Rios, Edward, 163 Ximénez, Francisco, 46, 64, 191 Zúñiga, Baltasar de, 121