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5: Spiritual Housekeepers of the Spanish Empire: The Ap
- University of New Mexico Press
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291 5 Spiritual Housekeepers of the Spanish Empire The Apóstolas of Peru (Antonia Lucía del Espíritu Santo and Josefa de la Providencia) F rom Madrid we move to Peru and Mexico, to which, in the early sixteenth century, Spaniards brought an imperial, nationalistic, and Christian worldview developed from thirteenth-century law and theory and codified under Alfonso X. As Peggy Liss explains, Within the ecumenical, medieval Christian construct, Spain was thought of as a single society, a subdivision of mankind [sic], set in a divinely ordered universe and based upon the primary Christian (Augustinian) assumption that life was fleeting, serving only to prepare human beings for eternal salvation.1 Spain governed its colonies through the two viceregal centers of Peru and Mexico, where the largest number of convents were founded. But the differences between Spain and its colonies, in every aspect of life, increased with the passage of time.2 Topography, ecology, and population—Indians, blacks, mestizos, and Creoles—influenced those changes. Social hierarchy was more complicated; as is characteristic of frontier societies, class differences in individual cases could mean all or nothing. The women of colonial convents took on greater symbolic and political importance than their peninsular Sisters, because the image of their Marian purity represented Spain’s providential transatlantic mission. Since convents generally were closer to centers of power in the colonies than in Spain, their social function was also more significant. They contributed to the establishment of new structures on the ruins and distortions of the old ones. Many aspects of convent culture were carried across the ocean, including Orders, Rules, and Constitutions; the Castilian and Latin languages in which monastic life was conducted; and the views of the women who served as initial founders. On the one hand, monastic life, then as now, retained an extranational quality. On the other, Spain considered every aspect of its colonies to be an extension of the Crown. Less than a century after 292 cHapTer five the conquest of Mexico, however, differences between people born on one side or the other of the Atlantic Ocean were large enough for a Provincial Superior to criticize the laxity of his charges, calling them “criollas regalonas y chocolateras” (pampered Creole women fond of chocolate), and for Creole nuns to resent and reject recently arrived gachupinas (Spanish women).3 Artisticandsocialstylesandgroupidentitieschanged.Thearchitecturaldesign of convents adapted to new circumstances. In the Americas, women religious often had separate living quarters, as well as retreats in buildings independent of the main communal structures. Despite their role in supporting the ideology of Spain’s imperial mission, many of the women religious were sisters and daughters of men engaged in a financial enterprise whose principal mechanism was the exchange of precious metals for “luxury and consumer products.”4 The attire in which the (nuns wearing crowns) were painted, the elegance of many nuns’ lives, and the decorativeness of their prose reflect the abundance of material wealth available to a few people in the colonies. Women’s writing, almost synonymous with nuns’ writing in the first three centuries of colonial Spanish America, demonstrates accretions from the popular vernacular, since women had lengthier and more intense contact with “substandard ” idiom than men did. The writing of some of the women transcribes colloquial speech in the various regions. The vernacular classicism of Castile was thereby strengthened, “for vernacular spoken by Indians and by African slaves was relegated to substandard status.”5 Nuns in the Americas partook of a multilingual culture, which included Spanish, Latin, and multiple indigenous and African tongues.6 This chapter and the next examine some nuns’ texts that exemplify how both the social rigidity and hierarchical fluidity of colonial society were adapted to convent life. In this chapter, we discuss a work produced by the first middle-class women who engineered the transformation of a lay religious house into a fullfledged convent in Peru. Several writings by aristocratic, bourgeois, and Indian nuns of Mexico are discussed in chapter 6. The only written legacy of Antonia Lucía del Espíritu Santo (1646–1709), aside from the Rules and Constitution of her institute, is the three-page report of a prophetic vision she allowed to escape from burning. Yet Madre Antonia Lucía is the protagonist of a work of collective authorship compiled by her spiritual Daughter and successor, Josefa de la Providencia. Relación del origen y fundación del monasterio del Señor San Joaquín de Religiosas Nazarenas . . . contenida en algunos apuntes de la vida...