Women in Early America

Thomas A Foster, Carol Berkin, Jennifer L Morgan

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781479812196
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The fascinating stories of the myriad women who shaped the early modern North American world from the colonial era through the first years of the Republic. Women in Early America goes beyond the familiar stories of Pocahontas or Abigail Adams, recovering the lives and experiences of lesser-known women?both ordinary and elite, enslaved and free, Indigenous and immigrant?who lived and worked in not only British mainland America, but also New Spain, New France, New Netherlands, and the West Indies. In these essays we learn about the conditions that women faced during the Salem witchcraft panic and the Spanish Inquisition in New Mexico; as indentured servants in early Virginia and Maryland; caught up between warring British and Native Americans; as traders in New Netherlands and Detroit; as slave owners in Jamaica; as Loyalist women during the American Revolution; enslaved in the President's house; and as students and educators inspired by the air of equality in the young nation. The contributors showcase new research and analysis informed by feminist theory, gender theory, new cultural history, social history, and literary criticism. Women in Early America heeds the call of feminist scholars to not merely reproduce male-centered narratives, "add women, and stir, " but to rethink master narratives themselves so that we may better understand how women and men created and developed our historical past.

1

Doña Teresa de Aguilera y Roche before the Inquisition

The Travails of a Seventeenth-Century Aristocratic Woman in New Mexico

Ramón A. Gutiérrez

April 11, 1663. Doña Teresa de Aguilera y Roche, the wife of New Mexico’s governor, Don Bernardo López de Mendizábal, found herself in a dank and dingy cell, a prisoner in the secret jail of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, close to Mexico City’s center. There she sat, hour after hour, day after day, until all the seasons had come and gone and nearly two years had passed. On December 19, 1664, her case was suspended for insufficient evidence. But for twenty-one months she had been stripped of her possessions, of all trappings of her aristocratic rank, cut off from communication with family and friends, and sustained on meager rations. The jail’s warden, Bartolomé de Galdiano, reported that Doña Teresa often sank into weeks of deep depression followed by hysterical bouts: “She is disconsolate . . . is very sorrowful and distraught and has been on the verge of committing an irrational act imperiling her life.” Indeed, her only pleasure seemed to be the two cups of hot chocolate she was allotted daily. Her days and nights were often filled with tears, with a cacophony of fractured memories that prison time only intensified, of muddled conversations, of insults and slights now more remote and difficult to reconstruct, and a yearning to be with her beloved Don Bernardo, her long-philandering husband who was now quite ill.1

Constantly she asked her jailers about his fate. Was he being held nearby? He was. Had his health deteriorated further? It had. To what extent? Long a sickly man, Don Bernardo’s condition had been made worst by the seven-month journey from Santa Fe to Mexico City shackled in a caged cart. The rigors of jail were all the more taxing. He petitioned his inquisitor to be transferred to Doña Teresa’s cell and into her care. Denied. Given his rapidly declining condition, certified by the jail’s physician, he asked to be moved to a cell with more light and better ventilation because he often gasped for air. No. As his health worsened, his inquisitor did agree to leave his cell door open during the day. There, in the secret prison of the Inquisition, Don Bernardo died. His interment record, dated September 16, 1664, noted that he had been buried in unconsecrated ground, in the jail’s own corral amid the odor of horses, rats, and mules. On April 30, 1671, the Holy Office exonerated Don Bernardo of all the charges that had been brought against him. Doña Teresa had his bones exhumed and placed in Mexico City’s Cathedral of Santo Domingo on May 12.

How Doña Teresa, wife of the governor of the Kingdom of New Mexico from 1658 to 1661, became entangled in the web of the Holy Office of the Inquisition is the complicated story here. The events are known through two very large procesos, or Inquisition court dockets, still extant in Mexico’s National Archive. The case against Doña Teresa consisted of forty-one counts of heresy, Judaism (judaizante), and sorcery, which all stemmed from her years in Santa Fe as the governor’s wife. Don Bernardo had 257 counts of heresy, Judaism, blasphemy, propositions contrary to the cult of the Church, and destruction of the Church’s authority, all of which likewise originated from his term as New Mexico’s governor. As they were husband and wife, some of the counts intersected, involving domestic marital behavior. Here we focus mainly on Doña Teresa’s case and her point of view, turning to the accusations against Don Bernardo at the essay’s end to understand the larger social milieu in which these cases emerged.2

Very few documents from seventeenth-century New Mexico still exist. The bulk were destroyed during the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, when the kingdom’s Indians rebelled against their Spanish overlords, killing the majority of the colonists and driving those who survived from the province until 1693. The only records that escaped destruction were those already housed in Spain, in Mexico City’s viceregal archives, or in the ecclesiastical repositories of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, the Office of the Holy Crusade, and Episcopal Sees, which were the regnant ecclesiastical courts of New Spain.

Unraveling the knowledge/power politics embedded in Inquisition cases is not an easy task. Beginning with the institution’s formal establishment in Mexico in 1571, its court and lawyers were used to curb the wealth and authority of the conquering citizen-soldier class whenever the Church felt its prerogatives and the primacy of its evangelization project slowed or affronted in any way. Then there were the carceral facts of confinement and torture by which testimony often emerged. One can only imagine how terrifying it must have been to be called before the Inquisition, particularly as one contemplated the punishments it was known to mete out. Its milder forms were exile and public humiliation in autos de fé. Being water-boarded, garroted, and then burned at the stake, though admittedly more rare, still occurred often enough to be emblazoned vividly in the social imagination. Historian Solange Alberro concludes that between 1571 and 1700, thirty-four to thirty-seven persons were consumed by such flames in New Spain.3

The Inquisition case against Doña Teresa de Aguilera y Roche is singular because it gives us a glimpse into the complex public and private life of a worldly, educated, aristocratic woman living in seventeenth-century Santa Fe, which by all assessments was a remote frontier place populated by rude and crude folk and surrounded by hostile indigenous groups. Provisioned by caravan three times yearly, Santa Fe in 1660 had a population that reached around eight hundred, of whom some two hundred called themselves “Spaniards.” Only thirty-five of them were capable of bearing arms. The entire Kingdom of New Mexico, which in the colonial period encompassed much of what are now the states of New Mexico and Arizona, counted only a total of 170 armed men and roughly two thousand persons residing in households headed by so-called Spaniards. Beyond Santa Fe, the majority of these residents were much more dispersed, living with their families, servants, and slaves close to the indigenous villages they had been entrusted to protect and Christianize, and from which they expected tribute in the form of food, work, and goods as part of their encomiendas, those grants of entrustment Spanish soldiers won for their labors of conquest. The Inquisition case against Doña Teresa is one of the few windows we have into the fractiousness of Santa Fe’s Hispanicized community on the eve of the 1680 Revolt of the Pueblo Indians from an aristocratic woman’s perspective.4

In the early seventeenth century the Inquisition brought charges against a number of visionary mystic women, known as iluminadas and beatas in Spain and the Americas, mostly for usurping the clergy’s jealously protected monopoly on the expression and interpretation of religious experience. There were cases too against indigenous and African slave women for practicing sorcery and love magic.5 But rarely were these women literate, and even more singular were the women who had the wherewithal to mount spirited defenses against their accusers before the Inquisition.6 Doña Teresa was such a woman. She was literate and learned, speaking Italian, French, and Spanish and reading broadly, even in Latin. She was pugnacious and testy, of course, made all the more so in her written declarations by her imprisonment, determined not to let the words of her accusers stand. Many times during her confinement she requested ink and paper to pen her own account of events, impeaching her unknown but suspected accusers, declaring that they had borne false witness against her, outlining the pettiness of her husband’s employees and her household staff, their malice and their envy, their intrigues and their sexual peccadillos, in which even the Franciscan friars were participants. No other woman in colonial New Mexico left such a record. Few were the women who penned accounts of their lives in colonial New Spain. Indeed, if one looks for similarly literate women in Mexico and Spain, only Doña Teresa’s younger contemporaries, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Sor María de Agreda (also known as María Fernández Coronel y Arana), come to mind. The former is well known; the latter was a Spanish Franciscan nun, the abbess of the convent in Agreda, Spain, who wrote extensively about her mystical flights to New Mexico and West Texas in the 1620s, putatively to assist the Franciscan friars Christianizing there.7

In the histories of colonial New Mexico, Doña Teresa de Aguilera y Roche is a marginal figure, often depicted as a bit player ensnared in her husband’s reckless machinations, brazenly appropriating most of the kingdom’s economic resources for himself, thereby sparking bitter struggles with the Franciscan friars and the local Spanish settlers, eventually landing him (and her) in the Inquisition’s jail.8 Other than this essay, no research has yet carefully studied Doña Teresa’s Inquisition case as a whole. María Magdalena Coll More’s superb but as of yet unpublished dissertation is an in-depth linguistic analysis of the seven-page self-defense document Doña Teresa wrote for the Inquisition.9 The rest of the published literature on Doña Teresa consists of either Spanish transcriptions of portions of her proceso or English translations of these.10 The entire case offers us a complex portrait of social and cultural relations in Santa Fe from the perspective of an elite woman, giving us entrée into the most intimate details of her private and public life. We learn how romances and illicit affairs reverberated locally, how they could rapidly provoke shifting political alliances, and the nature of licentiousness and its communal control by church and state. Most important perhaps is the window the case opens to how patriarchy operated in seventeenth-century New Spain. Though aristocratic women enjoyed considerably more autonomy over their persons in regard to movement and education, they nevertheless remained appendages of their fathers and husbands. Their fortunes rose and sank because of them. In the case of Doña Teresa de Aguilera y Roche, who spent almost three years in an Inquisition jail, her fate was dictated by the men who wanted to humiliate and punish her husband, not her.

* * *

Doña Teresa de Aguilar’s troubles with the Inquisition began at midnight on August 27, 1662, when Juan Manso, the recently appointed New Mexican commissary of the Holy Office arrived at her home with an arrest warrant that had been issued on March 22. Two hours earlier, at about ten o’clock, her husband, Governor Bernardo López de Mendizábal, who had been held prisoner since December 1661 awaiting the administrative review (residencia) of his governorship, was transferred into Manso’s custody, as the Inquisition’s warrant ordered. In the hours that followed they were each separately transported and jailed in the Franciscan convent at Santo Domingo Pueblo, some twenty miles south of Santa Fe. Throughout the rest of the summer Doña Teresa and Don Bernardo were confined there and “saw neither sun nor moon.”

Dr. Don Pedro Medina Rico (hereafter Dr. Medina) was appointed the inquisitor in Doña Teresa’s case. His arrest warrant ordered that she should be held in detention and her property immediately sequestered.11 Accordingly, one of the first documents in her docket is a property inventory, enumerating what were clearly the possessions of a woman of means. She owned “some gold earrings; a necklace and bracelets of glass beads, coral, and pearls.” In her pocket was found a “rosary made of black palm seeds . . . a small caplet, and a small cross, and a bronze [religious] medal that she said she needed for her use.” When arrested she wore “a bodice of satin plush with a flower pattern in brown, black, and white, lined with purple taffeta and with buttons of silver thread, a mantelet of scarlet wool, adorned with silver-tipped ribbons and lined in blue taffeta, with buttons of silver thread.” Among her many things, listed in 118 different categories, were “a quadroon girl called Clara, her slave . . . a mulatto boy called Diego, who is also a slave; four Indian women . . . one of the Quiviras is called María and the other Micaela; and one of the Apaches is called Isabel and the other Inés; [plus] another Indian of Mexican nationality, called Cristina.” There were several bags containing debt notes owed to her husband. She had all the things a wealthy woman needed for daily life: dresses and petticoats, shawls and handkerchiefs, shoes, stockings, slippers, hats, and gloves, along with bolts of cloth and all the tools necessary to fashion clothes: ribbons, needles, thread, thimbles, scissors, pincushions. Her kitchen was well appointed with pots and pans, towels and napkins, flints, candles and candlesticks, cups, knives and spoons, with pepper and “about three pounds of chocolate.” There were beds and bedding, furniture cases, a copy of the “bull of the Holy Crusade . . . a small book bound in boards titled El perfecto Cristiano, printed in Seville in 1642 . . . [and] a book bound in boards, titled Officium Beatae Mariae Virginis, printed in Antwerp in 1652.”12

The triennial Franciscan mission supply caravan between Santa Fe and Mexico City finally was ready to return south on October 6, 1662. With it traveled Doña Teresa, restrained in one of her husband’s carriages, while Don Bernardo was loaded onto a caged cart, with heavy shackles on his feet.13 The slow-moving convoy reached the Inquisition’s prison in Mexico City, roughly six months later, on April 10, 1663. The following morning the jail’s warden placed Doña Teresa in cell 17, in which she was allowed to keep Clara, her mulatto slave, “for now.” In successive weeks the jail’s warden and her inquisitor, Dr. Medina, exchanged letters over how much clothing, bedding, and personal effects she would keep in her cell, what the cost of her daily food ration would be, how much chocolate, wine, and sugar she would be allotted monthly, particularly during Lent, and what to do with the six other servants and slaves she still owned. Around April 20 Doña Teresa requested that she be moved to a nicer cell, one that was “comfortable and dry,” given that she had “come from so distant a place and [already] been a prisoner for so long a time.” Dr. Medina agreed because she was “a women raised amidst much pomp and luxury.”14

* * *

A few pages into Doña Teresa’s court record sit twenty-six affidavits Juan Manso collected in New Mexico in late 1661 and early 1662 as the Inquisition’s commissary. In these declarations several friars, citizens, and Doña Teresa’s household servants and retainers residing in the governor’s palace swore before God that they had heard her utter words and seen her perform deeds that led them to believe that she was a heretic, a Jew, and an active participant in the black arts.

On the morning of May 2, 1663, finally Doña Teresa stood face-to-face with Dr. Medina and his scribe. She was placed under oath and asked her name, age, occupation, residence, and nativity, how long she had been a prisoner, and the names of her parents and grandparents. Doña Teresa de Aguilera y Roche was forty years old, a native of Alexsandria (Italy), the wife of Don Bernardo López de Mendizábal, with no occupation. She had been arrested in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on August 27, 1662, and jailed in Mexico City on April 10, 1663. Her father, Don Melchor de Aguilera, was a Spanish soldier of considerable fame. He had served as governor of Alexsandria and of Monferrato and had become the infantry’s captain in Milan, then the admiral of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword: Meeting the Challenges of Early American Women’s History
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Women in Early America: Crossing Boundaries, Rewriting Histories
• 1. Doña Teresa de Aguilera y Roche before the Inquisition: The Travails of a Seventeenth-Century Aristocratic Woman in New Mexico
• 2. “Women Are as Knowing Therein as the Men”: Dutch Women in Early America
• 3. Women as Witches, Witches as Women: Witchcraft and Patriarchy in Colonial North America
• 4. Servant Women and Sex in the Seventeenth-Century Chesapeake
• 5. Rebecca Kellogg Ashley: Negotiating Identity on the Early American Borderlands, 1704–1757
• 6. Womanly Masters: Gendering Slave Ownership in Colonial Jamaica
• 7. Women at the Crossroads: Trade, Mobility, and Power in Early French America and Detroit
• 8. The Agrarian Village World of Indian Women in the Ohio River Valley
• 9. Loyalist Women in British New York City, 1776–1783
• 10. “I Knew That If I Went Back to Virginia, I Should Never Get My Liberty”: Ona Judge Staines, the President’s Runaway Slave
• 11. “The Need of Their Genius”: A Women’s Revolution in Early America
• Afterword: Women in Early America
• About the Contributors
• Index