Indigenous Writings from the Convent: Negotiating Ethnic Autonomy in Colonial Mexico by Mónica Díaz (review)

Colonial Latin American women’s studies have experienced much attention in the last decades, with literary studies that have emphasized the relation of women with mainstream religious institutions (Catholic Church, Inquisition). Many scholars have provided glimpses into religious women’s daily lives and expressions of resistance against power (usually male ecclesiastical authorities). This attention has resulted in a significant amount of studies of religious women’s writings in the last thirty years, and new approaches are needed to expand the canon of this subgenre. In this scholarly context, Mónica Díaz’s book offers new ways to read “conventual writing” at the same time that she reflects about theoretical notions that need reformulation within this genre in at least two directions in literary studies. First, Díaz approaches conventual writing considering both transatlantic and hemispheric studies that question traditional borders of twentieth-century academic knowledge. Second, Díaz’s overall scholarship examines issues of ethnicity and the fluidity of key concepts such as gender roles and identity, while looking into the feminine perception of the world as well as the construction of sources of knowledge by female subjects.

The main focus of Indigenous Writings is the textual negotiations of indigenous women that had to sort out many difficulties to participate in the convent’s life in colonial New Spain (Mexico). In spite of restrictions and prohibitions stemming from issues of gender, race, and ethnicity, the efforts of the indigenous nuns studied by Díaz succeeded with the foundation of convents for Indian women in eighteenth-century Mexico. In this way, one contribution of Díaz’s book to the field of Latin American colonial women’s studies is the access given to documents of unknown subjects and to hear their voices and the expression of their textual agency through their writings.

This book consists of six chapters in addition to an introduction and three appendixes of documents written in Spanish by Mexican Indian nuns and translated into English by the author. The six chapters are distributed in two distinct parts. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 examine the social, historical, and political context in which indigenous nobility of Mexico developed and negotiated their privileges and positions in Christian spaces during the colonial period. Chapter 1 studies the conditions that allowed the creation of convents for indigenous women, at first excluded from them because of their ethnicity. Chapter 2 examines what Díaz calls “the colonial ideology of difference” (p. 15) by which New Spain’s religious discourses debated the creation of such space for indigenous women. Chapter 3 studies the 1724–62 textual production about the opening of the Convent of Corpus Christi. With the frame developed by these chapters, Díaz enters into the analysis of different textual genres: biographies and hagiographies of indigenous nuns (chapter 4), sermons addressed to indigenous women (chapter 5), and letters by indigenous nuns who questioned the admission of Spanish and criollo nuns in their convent (chapter 6).

In this way, this monograph proposes that indigenous peoples saw convents not as another form of colonial domination but as a way to support their ethnic autonomy. Díaz takes the notions of “colonial domination” and “colonial difference” to another level by proposing to look at the formation and transformation of indigenous identities in New Spain and by looking at other initiatives that did not flourish in the official establishment of institutions, but did reflect on the issues of who is an Indian and why an Indian could not participate in the formation and governance of institutions in colonial Mexico.