Nuns, Witches, and Testators: Women's Agency and Spiritual Capital in New Spain

Includes bibliographical references (pages 134-142).Investigating spiritual institutions and practices provides one of the best methods for analyzing the experiences and behavior of colonial Mexican women, as well as the avenues of advancement that were available to women from different racial and economic groups. Analyses of colonial Mexican women and spirituality also reveal how poor Spanish women,\ud mixed-race women called castas, African women, and indigenous women utilized sanctioned and unsanctioned spiritual practices to advance their own interests. This thesis argues that seventeenth and eighteenth-century colonial Mexican women consciously utilized a variety of spiritual practices to empower themselves socially and economically: they wrote wills that contained pious bequests and favored daughters as heirs, they became nuns or beatas, they worked in convents, they converted to Catholicism, they performed love magic rituals, and they practiced indigenous healing strategies in order to acquire spiritual capital and improve their daily lives. Role, textual, and comparative modes of analysis will be utilized to investigate the behavior and experiences of indigenous, Afro-Mexican, casta, and Spanish women in Spanish and Mexican Inquisition trials, testaments, and religious biographies called vidas. Textual and discourse analyses will be used to study the dominant religious, political, and legal discourse found within Inquisitional edicts, Spanish law codes, and treatises written by Inquisitors and Catholic clergymen. This research will demonstrate that a variety of women from different racial and social classes were active historical agents in seventeenth and eighteenth-century Mexico. Women in colonial Mexico exercised agency and utilized different expressions of spirituality\ud to consciously improve their lives; however their gender, race, and class status influenced the avenues of spirituality available to them. This research will challenge racist and gendered stereotypes of Mexican women`s passivity and men`s machismo, both legacies of the Black\ud Legend. In addition, this research will demonstrate that despite the presence of strong, patriarchal institutions, Mexican women were not completely subjugated in colonial society and that many were able to utilize and navigate these institutions to their advantage. Finally,\ud this research will illustrate the crucial ties between Spanish and colonial Mexican institutions, practices, and ideologies, especially as they pertain to women`s status and avenues of spiritual expressions