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University of Nevada, Reno the Scandalous Case of Isabel De La University of Nevada, Reno The Scandalous Case of Isabel de la Cruz Mejía: Healing, Ethnicity, and Gender in Seventeenth-Century Mexico A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Art in History By Angela Chase Dr. Linda A. Curcio-Nagy/Thesis Advisor December, 2013 THE GRADUATE SCHOOL We recommend that the thesis prepared under our supervision by ANGELA CHASE entitled The Scandalous Case Of Isabel De La Cruz Mejía: Healing, Ethnicity, And Gender In Seventeenth-Century Mexico be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS Dr. Linda A. Curcio-Nagy, Advisor Dr. Kevin Stevens, Committee Member Dr. Darrell Lockhart, Graduate School Representative Marsha H. Read, Ph. D., Dean, Graduate School December, 2013 i Abstract During the seventeenth century, the colony of New Spain experienced a dearth of formally trained and affordable medical practitioners due to the education, cost, and socioeconomic requirements dictated by the Protomedicato. In this absence, Novohispano society learned to heal itself. Influenced by Iberian, Mesoamerican, and African religious and medical traditions, popular healers of mixed caste, gender, and ethnicity learned to heal in a hybrid colonial context. Heavily influenced by popular Spanish Catholicism, urban casta healers like Isabel de la Cruz Mejía functioned as intermediaries between their elite criollo clientele and the native peddlers of empirical healing remedies. They practiced a healing methodology that incorporated many types of knowledge and rituals that colonial society expected and accepted, and thus worked within socially demarcated frameworks by using effective gossip networks, accepted hybrid rituals, and popular religious beliefs. As a hybrid figure, the female casta healer put herself in a liminal position whereby she could easily be denounced to the Holy Office of the Inquisition. The case of Isabel de la Cruz Mejía demonstrates the ways in which the Inquisition was utilized by different segments of society for personal reasons that were in turn connected to larger colonial issues such as class, race, gender, and identity. Her case also suggests that there existed a fine line between magic, healing, and popular piety in colonial New Spain. ii Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Popular Healing in Seventeenth-Century Mexico 34 Chapter 3: The Circumstances of Failure 70 Chapter 4: The Goals and Politics of the Inquisitorial Process in New Spain 101 Chapter 5: Conclusion 138 Bibliography 146 Appendix 157 1 Chapter One: Introduction On June 4, 1644 Doña Balthasara de Valcazar denounced the mestiza or mulata Isabel de la Cruz Mejía to the Inquisition of New Spain for being a charlatan healer, sorcerer, and for presuming to have a pact with the devil that aided her in performing malevolent activities in distant places.1 Isabel’s case officially began on September 1, 1651, thirteen years after she was first summoned to the house of Doña Balthasara, the wife of Don Rodrigo de Valcazar, a retired alcalde for the city of Mexico, to help heal the doña’s ailing grandson. It ended with Isabel being banished from New Spain for no less than five years, after receiving two hundred lashes at a public auto de fe on November 6, 1652. What should have been a routine medical call turned into a decade- long drama regarding gossip, gender, ethnicity, and class issues. All of which was connected to the question of whether or not Isabel possessed true clairvoyant and healing abilities, or if she was only a poor, lying casta pretending to possess such capabilities for monetary gain. Isabel’s case raises questions about how healing functioned in the colony of New Spain during the seventeenth century. What “education” was needed to be a healer? What were the racial and gendered aspects of healing as a profession? How did popular conceptualizations of healing contribute to the ways in which a casta woman such as Isabel became a healer? What role did gossip play with regards to healing? How significant was religion to the profession of healing? By working in an occupation that 1 “Isavel de la Cruz Mexia quarterona de mestiza o morisca nacio de Mexico, viuda. Por embustera, zahorí con presumpcion detener pacto con el demonio referiendo cosas que estaban en partes muy distantes,” BANC MSS 96/95 m v. 6:4, cover of file. 2 was traditionally the domain of the indigenous peoples of colonial Mexico, Isabel’s case highlights how popular ideas about health superseded ethnic, racial, gendered, and even religious boundaries. As such, the case also raises scholarly questions regarding how the Inquisition as an institution was utilized during the colonial era and which segments of society sought its authoritarian aid and why. Isabel’s case demonstrates how seventeenth-century Mexicans had sociocultural expectations concerning who could be a proper healer, what role the Inquisition should play in regulating health and healing, and the ways in which class, race, and gossip structured society. It was expected that healers were female, of mixed race, were a part of social circles and gossip networks, and practiced a learned healing method that differed from the formally accepted Spanish medical system. As such, healers blended localized religious elements with empirical knowledge of native flora and fauna, and acquired their abilities either through divine grace, ancestry, or close association with other reputable healers. Isabel’s basic knowledge of herbs and drinks, clairvoyance, divine grace at birth, and strategic use of gossip and rumor demonstrates how she was a product of her society’s views regarding healing. Popular Healing, Magic, and Medicine Popular healers were a staple of seventeenth-century Mexican society because health concerns were basic features of the social landscape. Illness and death were a constant occurrence in the daily lives of colonial inhabitants; and, they sought answers and help from healers for a variety of different ailments. Men and women like Isabel could be found though out the capital peddling their healing concoctions, remedies, and ingredients to aid in combatting disease and death. Such popular healing methods were 3 socially circumscribed and people expected the integration of spirituality and the basic incorporation of scientific knowledge of herbs to be part of a healer’s repertoire. Efficacy of a healer’s power was also spread via gossip and rumor, and thus reputation was a huge determinant in how healers survived and thrived in their field. Hence, class, gender, and magic accompanied popular religious rituals and practices as integral elements to notions of healing and medicine during the colonial era. The professionalization of medicine was both limited to class and race and its discussion in the colonial context is best understood as hybrid and socially constructed. This means that colonial Spanish medicine was not merely a syncretic product of the blending of Spanish and native approaches. On the surface, the transmission of Spanish medicine into New Spain conformed to the same dynamic that characterized the diffusion of other elements of Iberian culture to the New World: an elite/formal level and a popular/informal level existed; but, in reality, such a binary is not entirely indicative of colonial medical approaches.2 At the time of contact, Spanish medicine was dominated by Greek humoral pathology, which was not entirely different from Mesoamerican healing practices and beliefs of hot and cold properties.3 Motivated by a fascination with what they deemed witchcraft, and a general curiosity at the effectiveness and use of unknown herbs and techniques, the colonists were especially impressed with native medicine, and quickly spread word of its wonders.4 While indigenous healing techniques remained the more utilized and trusted source by the majority of the New Spain’s 2 Luz María Hernández Sáenz and George M. Foster, "Curers and Their Cures in Colonial New Spain and Guatemala: The Spanish Component," in Mesoamerican Healers eds. Brad R. Huber and Alan R. Sandstrom (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001): 22. 3 Hernández Sáenz and Foster, "Curers and Their Cures,” 19. 4 Hernández Sáenz and Foster, "Curers and Their Cures,” 21. 4 population during the early part of the colonial era, any supposed separation of Spanish versus native medicine quickly disintegrated as time passed, especially in the urban centers. The social complexity of early colonial Mexico created opportunities for “enterprising practitioners to peddle their goods and skills as the demand for medicines grew and new forms of healing evolved.”5 This meant that there existed a variety of practitioners who dispensed care and catered to different classes and illnesses simultaneously. Many of the colonial practitioners were neither licensed nor recognized by the Royal Protomedicato, the Crown’s official medical board. This was most certainly due to the requirements and rules regarding the qualifications for a certified physician. The necessary racial purity, economic standing, university degree, and license to practice barred the majority of society from becoming physicians while simultaneously exalting those who could and did.6 This meant that the great majority of legally approved physicians in New Spain were criollos (Spaniards born in the New World) who saw the medical profession as an opportunity for social advancement, prestige, and a respectable income.7 Due to the racial and gendered monopoly concerning physicians, those who were rejected from the officially sanctioned medical field usually became technically illegal practitioners. Such practitioners operated within what the Protomedicato or elites deemed as the acceptable fringe positions that, while unsanctioned, were allowed and flourished 5 Sherry Fields, Pestilence and Headcolds: Encountering Illness in Colonial Mexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 40. 6 Luz María Hernández Sáenz, Learning to Heal: The Medical Profession in Colonial Mexico, 1767–1831 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1997), 21. 7Hernández Sáenz, Learning to Heal, 63.
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