Indigenous Writings from the Convent (review)

Although recent studies of early Native American literature have uncovered a wide range of primary texts, a paucity of works by women remains. Fortunately, Mónica Díaz expands the offerings in Indigenous Writings from the Convent, a wealth of sources from colonial Mexico “in which women emerge as agents who actively participate in the construction of their own identities” (1). While some of these texts were written by men about women in Indigenous convents, others were either written or narrated by the women themselves. The volume is deeply contextualized within the history of race, religion, and gender in New Spain. Those already familiar with the scholarship on Indigenous women in New Spain as well as those more generally interested in early American women writers will benefit from Díaz’s important insights into the power struggles faced by early American women and be intrigued by their abilities to manipulate conventions for their own benefit.

Díaz’s study is divided into six chapters and an introduction. The introduction admirably places Díaz’s scholarship within the context of feminist and postcolonial studies. Here Díaz reveals the influence on her work of important theorists of colonial Latin America, such as Rolena Adorno and Walter Mignolo. The first chapter expands upon this methodological overview by looking to the historical development of the cacicazgo (chieftainship) and ethnic identity in New Spain. It also historicizes ethnicity and examines how race and social stratification in early modern Spanish colonies differ from twenty-first-century understandings of these concepts. Scholars of the British, French, or Dutch colonies will find the methodological overview and historical background particularly helpful. The explication of inter-ethnic and gendered dynamics of power within colonial convents provides an intriguing counterpoint to views of Protestantism in the American colonies.

The construction of difference and its intersections with religious discourse in New Spain are central to the volume’s second chapter, much of which focuses upon the debate over whether to establish convents for Indigenous women. Through her close reading of testimonies, reports, and hagiographic narratives, Díaz shows that “gendered and racial constructions of colonial subjects are highly malleable” (22). This chapter also sets up her explication of early documents from the first Indigenous women’s convent in New Spain in the chapter to follow. Her rhetorical analysis of the repeated refrain of the nuns as “poor,” “wretched,” and “virtuous” will be of particular interest to scholars familiar with writings about the “Poor Indians” of New England (69–71). Yet despite her observation that “all nuns in New Spain were virtuous, but only the noble Indian nuns were poor and wretched,” Díaz does not further investigate the epithets. More attention to eighteenth-century rhetoric, such as in Laura M. Stevens’s The Poor Indians, would enrich this chapter.

The highlights of the volume are within its second half. Each of the latter three chapters is devoted to the analysis of a genre—biographies, sermons, letters—that emerged from the convents. The agency Díaz hopes to recover through her study comes across most clearly here, as we see these early women writers manipulate conventions for their own aims. Samples of the texts mentioned in these chapters are presented both in the original Spanish and in translation in appendices. For scholars eager to include in upcoming courses some of the works Díaz mentions in her book, these selections prove invaluable. Díaz’s focus on genre also enables scholars to pair the writings she analyzes with selections by Indigenous women from the British colonies as well as others from New Spain. For example, although today Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is perhaps most famous for her sonnets, she also wrote letters, some of which are included in the edition of her works translated by Pamela Kirk Rappaport. Likewise, letters and confessions by early Native American women from the British colonies are available in Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss’s Early Native...