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Who Was Salvadora de los Santos Ramirez, Otomi Indian?
- University of South Carolina Press
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Who Was Salvadora de los Santos Ramirez, Otomi Indian? Dorothy Tanck de Estrada In August of the year 1762 a woman died in the city of Querétaro in New Spain, that is, in what we often call Colonial Mexico. She was one of thousands who perished in the epidemic of smallpox that swept through the country that year.1 Her name was Salvadora de los Santos Ramirez, and she was sixty-one years old.2 There were several things about her that might have captured the attention of her contemporaries. First, she died at an advanced age in an era when such longevity was uncommon.3 Second, Salvadora de los Santos knew how to read and write. This was unusual because she was an Otomi Indian, judged by many, including the Aztecs who were the most numerous Indian group in central Mexico, to be the most backward and uncouth people in the region.4 The Aztecs used the term Otomi to signify someone lazy and clumsy. Priests and other Indian groups considered their language extremely difficult; in fact, the first catechism in Otomi was not published until 1759, a century or more after religious texts existed in the other principal Indian languages of New Spain.5 More important was the fact that many people in Querétaro considered Salvadora de los Santos Ramirez a holy, even saintly Indian. One of the prominent Jesuit priests of the city, Father Antonio de Paredes, agreed with this opinion enough to write the story of Salvadora’s life and publish it at the end of 1762, only four months after her demise. The format for the eighty-page biography chosen by Father Paredes was that of a genre popular in the eighteenth century, the edifying letter. The Genre of the Edifying Letter The carta edificante, or edifying letter, was a type of publication written mainly by Jesuits, but also at times by clerics of other religious orders, with the purpose of describing a recently deceased person who was thought to have been exceptionally holy. The eight-volume bibliographical study of the printing press in New Spain compiled by José Toribio Medina mentions this type of literature. It first appeared in 1632, and these publications virtually ended in 1767 when the king Dorothy Tanck de Estrada 76 of Spain expelled the Jesuits from all of the empire, including New Spain. After 1767 very few edifying letters were published. Among them were two about Salvadora de los Santos (1784 and 1791). At times, instead of entitling the work “Edifying Letter,” the authors called the biography “Life” or “Exemplary Life” or just “Letter.” In most cases it was about a member of the Company of Jesus but sometimes concerned a nun, brother, friar, or diocesan priest. However, the book about Salvadora de los Santos was an exception. It was the only full-length biography of an Indian written and published in all of the Americas during the colonial period.6 The Jesuits often printed these edifying letters on their own press, located in the College of San Ildefonso in Mexico City. Most of these editions did not include the legally required preliminary approvals by ecclesiastical and civil censors or simply mentioned that they had “licenses” without giving any details. The last page of these works contained the “Author’s Protest,” in which he pointed out that he based the life described in the text on creditable witnesses but that these witnesses could be fallible so that the judgment of the virtues and miracles of a person was left to the Holy Mother Church as ordered in pontifical decrees.7 Information about the number of copies of each book printed from 1539 to 1821 in New Spain is almost impossible to find, since documentation concerning the printing presses has not yet been uncovered in the archives. However, it is certain that the first, 1762 edition of the edifying letter about Salvadora de los Santos sold quickly, since the book was immediately reprinted in 1763 and duly noted as a “reprint.” The historian of Querétaro, Joseph Maria Zelaa, stated in 1802, when describing the life of Salvadora de los Santos, that “Father Paredes wrote about her surprising and saintly life in an edifying letter, published in 1762 and reprinted the following year in order to satisfy the interest of many people who desired to have a copy.”8 Fortunately, in the case of the 1784 and 1791 editions of the biography of Salvadora de los...