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

Mónica Díaz has managed in this book to re-read and build on existing scholarship in many of the fields she investigates. Even more impressively, she has forged new interpretations by correlating her re-reading with knowledge from little-known sources. Her book is an elegant and well-written exploration of the complexities of colonial discourse about gender and ethnicity. In the first half of the study, she presents us with the context of her work and it is here that her wide and profound knowledge of the various disciplines of colonial studies becomes especially clear. In three chapters exploring the buildup to the first foundation of a convent specifically for indigenous women, she looks at ethnohistories, testimonies, hagiographies, and sermons, as well as the more general critical studies. This approach constitutes the distinguishing virtue of her study—a resolute insertion of the question of indigenous women's subject status and history into the wider one of indigenous subject status and history. This procedure allows a startling revelation: that indigenous women were agents in the construction of their own sense of identity and that this identity was one inextricably linked to a notion of history and ethnic allegiance.

In the second half of the book, Díaz examines three kinds of writings emerging from or connected to the convents founded for indigenous women: the biography/hagiography, the panegyric sermon, and the letter. Her analyses in these sections confirm her intuition of the hybrid nature of the spaces of discourse open to these women, and her detailed readings of various texts provide excellent illustration of how, by conforming to the established textual/political order, they were nonetheless able to establish alliances and manipulate power so that their ethnic autonomy was preserved to a large degree.

There is a wealth of fresh insight here. Díaz's interpretation of the panegyric sermons and their function as social texts is a prime example. The author builds on traditional literary scholarship, and by reading its findings alongside postcolonial and colonial theory is able to formulate some exciting ideas about what sermons and their internal and external dialogues signified in the world of New Spain. Díaz's epilogue asserts the continued difficulty of unraveling the complex web of colonial discourses.

Her book is a great contribution to tracing this complexity, and her thesis about the participation of religious indigenous women in the construction of a sense of ethnic identity and history is convincingly and elegantly supported by both the exposition of context and a detailed reading of source texts. The book concludes with three useful appendices of sources (and their translations) used in the study, including various manuscript writings by nuns (a vida and a number of letters) and a eulogy—all of which are difficult to obtain and will be of interest to the reader. There is also a very full and useful bibliography that helps to put Díaz's work in the interdisciplinary context where it belongs.