Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580-1750, and: Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World, and: A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun (review)

Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580-1750 by Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2000, 222 pp., $30.00 hardcover, $16.95 paper.

Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World by Mary Giles. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, 400 pp., $49.00 hardcover, $19.95 paper.

A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun byMadre Maria de San Jose. Edited and translated by Kathleen A. Myers and Amanda Powell. Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 2000, 480 pp., $39.95 hardcover.

Identity, independence, and a voice: these three subversive characteristics in sixteenth-century women were punishable by death at the hands of the Inquisition. The Inquisition, ever on the lookout for heretics, investigated women who had converted to Catholicism from Judaism and who were guilty of quietly and privately practicing their former religion. Also, at a time when Spain was embarking on colonizing the New World and sending nuns over to establish religious communities,—a second form of colonialism after the Conquest which was political as well as religious—authorities discovered they had a unique problem to contend with, dissent in the Mexican convents. The three texts, Colonial Angels: Narratives of Gender and Spirituality in Mexico, 1580-1750 by Elisa Tudela, Women in the Inquisition edited by Mary E. Giles, and A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journey of a Colonial Mexican Nun edited by Kathleen Myers and Amanda Powell, provide first-person narratives and court testimony. Through these first-person documents, the authors describe the pious, political, racist, classist, and historical lives of the holy women inside and outside the convent and the Catholic Church's relationship with them. According to Tudela's sources, the belief was that the nuns in Mexico in the early eighteenth century had apparently "abandon[ed] the purity of their Peninsular origin and becom[e] otras, just as Sahagún had warned happened to all things and persons Spanish" (ix).

In Colonial Angels, Elisa Tudela argues that the traditional evaluations made by those who shared Bernardino de Sahagún's concern "about the power of the New World to transmogrify the Spaniards who traveled to it" are inadequate (ix). Their attempt to polarize the findings as presenting the colony and the Mother Country in either opposition or submission offers extreme views that ignore how Spaniards, Mexicans, and indigenous women negotiated the cultural shifts that occurred between the conquered and the conquerors. By looking at the lives and writings of the women in the Carmelite convent of San Jose in Mexico City, the first convent transplanted from Spain with its original spiritual and political difficulties intact, readers discover a microcosm that reflects the secular world's attempt to coexist harmoniously with the religious. Within the convent, confrontations among criollas (Spanish women born in America), gachupinas (Spanish women in America), and indias (indigenous women) concerning cultural and social issues appear in the writings—originally written in the "Teresian narrative tradition and . . . hagiography," then changing to writings that displayed the influence of the travel narrative (xiii). Readers discover the women's identity in a genre that no longer exhibited the strict control of Spanish writing. Instead, it reflected women representing themselves as vulnerable yet strong individuals, whose lives were displayed through "negotiation with priests, with literary tradition, with cultural values" (xii). Furthermore, through the characteristics of the hagiography genre—one that requires the writer to reflect about the conflicts experienced while living in a sinful community—the writings reveal the transmission of culture in this microcosmic environment as well as histories of...