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GODMOTHERS AND GODDAUGHTERS l 141 Jesuit history of Chile claims that after fighting for Christianity Catalina ended her days as a penitential nun; a 1653 Mexican broadside announces the Nun Ensign ’s death with an apocryphal account of the burial of her remains with the saintly Bishop of Puebla Juan de Palafox y Mendoza. The extraordinary life of this woman, even when it did not follow the Church’s ideal, became a tool for building local histories and identity. This sampling of portraits of religious women during the colonial period helps us see how the Catholic Church was instrumental in developing and controlling women’s spiritual lives. Within a set of rigid guidelines for female spirituality, women still managed to negotiate places for themselves as mystics, authors, convent founders , counselors, teachers, and even soldiers. The contrast we have seen between official Church texts about these women and their own autobiographical writings helps us to appreciate the variety of responses by both men and women to period norms. By 1750, with the Bourbon Reforms and the increased secularization of society, monasticism declined and the search for local saints waned. The nineteenthcentury Mexican reform initiated by Benito Juárez—and its closing of convents—and the twentieth-century Revolution further loosened the Church’s hold over national projects. And yet several of these same religious figures, still venerated today in some communities, have been used to create a new identity for a culturally rich Mexico . Marı́a de San José’s two convents have been restored and opened as colonial art museums. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s convent is a university, and her secular works are widely published. A folkloric statue of Catarina de San Juan, affectionately renamed as “La China Poblana” (Puebla’s Asian woman), greets visitors to Puebla and highlights the exotic racial diversity of colonial Mexico. The lives of New Spain’s religious women and men provide a rich source for understanding the intricate relationship between Church and society, between individuals creating their own life paths and institutional requirements, between the changing interpretations of rules for ideal Christian behavior and the early modern process of producing hagiographic and confessional life narratives. Through this complex dynamic, people articulated and authorized identities for themselves and their communities as they established European beliefs in a New World, beliefs that continue to impact society in the twenty-first century. SOURCES: For lengthier studies of the women mentioned in this essay, see Kathleen Ann Myers: Neither Saint Nor Sinner: Writing the Lives of Spanish American Women (2003). See also Asunción Lavrin, “Women and Religion in Spanish America,” in Women and Religion in America: The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods, ed. Rosemary R. Ruether and Rosemary S. Keller (1981), 2: 42–78; and Josefina Muriel, Cultura femenina novohispana (1982). Antonio Rubial studies canonization attempts and biographies in La santidad controvertida (1999). For a full-length study and translation of Marı́a de San José’s journals, see Kathleen Myers and Amanda Powell, A Wild Country Out in the Garden: The Spiritual Journals of a Colonial Mexican Nun (1999). Recent publications and translations of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s works include Obras completas, ed. Alfonso Méndez Plancarte (1994); A Sor Juana Anthology, trans. Alan S. Trueblood (1988); The Answer/La respuesta, trans. Electa Arenal and Amanda Powell (1994); Nina Scott, “ ‘If You Are Not Pleased to Favor Me, Put Me Out of Your Mind . . . ’: Gender and Authority in Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and the Translation of Her Letter to the Reverend Father Maestro Antonio Nuñez of the Society of Jesus,” Women’s Studies International Forum 2 (1988): 429–438; “Carta de Sera fina de Christo, Convento de N.P.S. Gerñonimo de México en 1 de febrero de 1691 años,” ed. Elı́as Trabulse, trans. Alfonso Montelongo, in Sor Juana & Vieira, Trescientos Años Despue ́s, ed. K. Josu Bijesca and Pablo A. Brescia (1998), 183–193. The original biographies about Catarina de San Juan are Alonso Ramos, De los prodigios de la Omnipotencia y milagros de la Gracia en la vida de la venerable Sierva de Dios Catharina de S Joan (vol. 1, 1689; vol. 2, 1690; vol. 3, 1692), and José del Castillo Graxeda, Compendio de la vida y virtudes de la venerable Catarina de San Juan [1692] (1987). Catalina de Euraso ’s alleged autobiography has been published in the original Spanish and translated: Vida i sucesos de...

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