Alone at the Altar: Single Women and Devotion in Guatemala, 1670-1870

By Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara

By 1700, Guatemala's capital was a mixed-race "city of women." As in many other cities across colonial Spanish America, labor and migration patterns in Guatemala produced an urban female majority and high numbers of single women, widows, and female household heads. In this history of religious and spiritual life in the Guatemalan capital, Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara focuses on the sizeable population of ordinary, non-elite women living outside of both marriage and convent. Although officials often expressed outright hostility towards poor unmarried women, many of these women managed to position themselves at the forefront of religious life in the city.

Through an analysis of over 500 wills, hagiographies, religious chronicles, and ecclesiastical records, Alone at the Altar examines how laboring women forged complex alliances with Catholic priests and missionaries and how those alliances significantly shaped local religion, the spiritual economy, and late colonial reform efforts. It considers the local circumstances and global Catholic missionary movements that fueled official collaboration with poor single women and support for diverse models of feminine piety. Extending its analysis past Guatemalan Independence to 1870, this book also illuminates how women's alliances with the Catholic Church became politicized in the Independence era and influenced the rise of popular conservatism in Guatemala.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Jan 9, 2018
• ISBN: 9781503604391

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Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Leavitt-Alcántara, Brianna, author.

Title: Alone at the altar : single women and devotion in Guatemala, 1670–1870 / Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017028675 (print) | LCCN 2017030514 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503604391 (electronic) | ISBN 9781503603684 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Single women—Religious life—Guatemala—History. | Catholic Church—Guatemala—History. | Guatemala—Religious life and customs. | Guatemala—Church history.

Classification: LCC BX1438.3 (ebook) | LCC BX1438.3 .L43 2017 (print) | DDC 282/.7281082—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017028675

Typeset by Newgen in 10/12 Sabon

Alone at the Altar

Single Women and Devotion in Guatemala, 1670–1870

Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

For Salvador, Mateo, and Joaquín

Contents

Tables, Maps, and Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction

PART I. SPIRITUAL CAPITAL: DEVOTIONAL NETWORKS AND A RELIGIOUS RENAISSANCE

1. City of Women, City of God: Poor, Single, and Holy in Santiago de Guatemala

2. Unlikely Allies: Missionaries and Laywomen

3. Sex, Honor, and Devotion

PART II. SHIFTING FOUNDATIONS: REFORM, REVOLUTION, AND SPIRITUAL RENEWAL

4. To Educate and Evangelize: Laywomen, Clergy, and Late Colonial Girls’ Schools

5. The Controversial Ecstasy of Sor María Teresa Aycinena

6. With Knives Drawn: Gender, Devotion, and Politics After Independence

Epilogue

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Tables, Maps, and Figures

TABLES

1. Number of will-makers per sampled years and per 20-year period

2. Number of male and female will-makers per 20-year period

3. Number of elite and non-elite female will-makers per 20-year period

MAPS

1.1. Map of colonial borders of the audiencia or Kingdom of Guatemala

1.3. Map of Santiago de Guatemala, ca. 1770

FIGURES

1.2. Antonio Ramírez, Cathedral of Santiago de los Caballeros (Guatemala, 1678)

1.4. Frontispiece, Antonio Siria and José Toribio Medina, Vida de doña Ana Guerra de Jesús, escrita por el p. Antonio de Siria, y por encargo del gobierno de El Salvador reimpresa a plana y renglón, precedida de un breve prólogo, por J.T. Medina (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1925 [1716])

3.1. Hermano Pedro de San José Betancurt, unknown artist (Guatemala, ca. 1720–1730)

3.2. Hermano Pedro de San José Betancurt, Estampa Suelta (looseleaf print, Guatemala, 1808)

5.1. Sor María Teresa Aycinena, unknown artist (Guatemala, ca. 1810–1820)

5.2. Pañuelo de 19 de agosto, 1816 (handkerchief from August 19, 1816)

Acknowledgments

This book was many years in the making and I am deeply indebted to various institutions, mentors, advisors, colleagues, friends, and family. Funding for this project came from multiple institutions. UC Berkeley’s History Department, Graduate Division, and the Muriel McKevitt Sonne Chair in Latin American History funded numerous summers in the archives during the earliest phases of my research. The Fulbright Hays Fellowship made it possible for me to spend a full year in the Guatemalan archives. Faculty Development funds from Centre College allowed me to spend two summers working with UC Berkeley’s microfilm files of the Archivo General de Centroamérica. The University of Cincinnati’s Faculty Research Grant and the Taft Research Center’s Summer Fellowship made it possible to do additional research in Guatemala, and the Taft Research Center Fellows Program gave me the invaluable gift of time to turn all that new research into this book.

I realize now that the seeds for this project were planted long ago in a class on Women and Religion in Latin America taught by Michael Stanfield and Lois Lorentzen at the University of San Francisco. Those seeds found rich soil in the graduate program at UC Berkeley and I would like to thank my mentors, William Taylor and Margaret Chowning, for their generosity and unwavering support over many years. I could not have asked for better guidance. Their thoughtful comments and insightful feedback at every stage of the research and writing process always challenged me to think more critically and more creatively about my sources and my writing. I am particularly grateful for William Taylor’s encouragement to approach the study of history as a restless discipline of context that requires synoptic thinking and boundless intellectual curiosity. Margaret Chowning showed me the value of a well-written narrative and a good table, and helped me to get there. Bill and Margaret were also models of generous collegiality and I benefited greatly from a circle of supportive colleagues during graduate study, including members of the UC Berkeley Latin American Writing Workshop. How I miss that workshop. Special thanks go to Rosemary Joyce, Linda Lewin, Mark Healey, Walter Brem, Sylvia Sellers-García, Jessica Delgado, Kinga Novak, Stephanie Ballenger, Jennifer Hughes, Kari Zimmerman, Paul Ramírez, Sean McEnroe, Karen Melvin, Brian Madigan, Larissa Kelly, Eloina Villegas, Heather Flynn Roller, Julia Sarreal, Chuck Witschorik, Celso Castilho, Beatrice Gurwitz, Camilo Trumper, Dalia Muller, Ricardo Fagoaga Hernández, and Rus Sheptak. I would also like to thank the librarians and staff at the Bancroft Library who regularly helped me to navigate their rich collections and have always been quick with friendly smiles and words of encouragement.

I am also indebted to numerous scholars and institutions in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Mexico for their guidance and support during my research. During my first summer forays into research, Carlos Cañas Dinarte, Juan Pedro Viquiera, Mario Humberto Ruz, Haroldo Rodas, Artemis Torres Valenzuela, Don Rafael Flores Rubén at the Archivo General del Arzobispado of San Salvador, and the staff and researchers at the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales de Mesoamerica (CIRMA) generously introduced me to sources and archives that laid the foundation for the development of my research. The Archivo General de Centro América (AGCA) has been a home away from home during my long research trips to Guatemala. The archivists, researchers, and staff at the AGCA offered me daily support, guidance, and comic relief. I would especially like to thank Director Anna Carla Ericastilla for helping me to navigate the archive and think in new ways about women in nineteenth-century Guatemala. My research assistant Mirian Soyos critically assisted in the process of locating and photographing every will produced in Guatemala’s capital during thirteen different years. I would also like to thank René Johnston Aguilar for his collegial support and for putting me in contact with Carlos Ibarguen and Luis Alberto Cogley of the Asociación Pro-Beatificación de Madre María Teresa Aycinena. The Asociación generously provided me with digital access to their private collection of documents relating to Madre María Teresa Aycinena. Alejandro Conde Roche at the Archivo Histórico Arquidiocesano Francisco de Paula García Peláez has assisted me numerous times over the years, both during research visits and with e-mailed inquiries from afar. The excellent support offered by the librarians and staff at the Benson Library at the University of Texas at Austin allowed me to get the most out of a very short research visit.

Over the years, this book has benefited greatly from the feedback of numerous colleagues. Kari Zimmerman, Matthew O’Hara, Silvia Arrom, Edward Wright-Rios, Pamela Voekel, Kenneth Mills, Karen Melvin, Sylvia Sellers-García, Jessica Delgado, and Gretchen Starr-Lebeau all read and commented on various drafts, articles, and presentations. I am thankful to the anonymous readers for Stanford Press who gave the manuscript a careful reading and provided valuable critiques. John Talmadge kindly provided me with advice on editing and the book proposal process. I consider myself incredibly fortunate to be surrounded by such a supportive department of colleagues at the University of Cincinnati. The History Department Research Seminar gave me opportunities to workshop new material. I am especially grateful to Isaac Campos, who provided feedback on various drafts of chapters and book proposals, and Erika Gasser, who read and commented on the entire manuscript and helped keep me sane during the writing process. It has been a true pleasure to work with the editorial staff at Stanford University Press. They have been prompt, professional, and supportive throughout this process. I would especially like to thank Margo Irvin, Nora Spiegel, Jay Harward, Gigi Mark, and Stephanie Adams.

Writing a book can be a lonely affair at times, and I thank my large and amazing community of family and friends for pulling me out of my office cave. Of course, I would have achieved little in this life without my parents, Jim Leavitt and Vicky and Rory Ry Elder. They have provided me with endless moral support and instilled in me a love of learning. Over these many years, my mom’s support ranged from babysitting to editing to all manner of household projects. My big family, including those I grew up with and those I have had the honor to add through marriage, has kept me grounded and in good spirits and I am eternally grateful for their support. My Salvadoran family, especially the generations of single moms and lay leaders, helped me to imagine this world and showed me all the ways this history remains present with us today. Completing this book without the help of Carrie Heidlebaugh would have been infinitely more difficult. She corralled the chaos of our boisterous home with two small boys and a puppy, allowing me to stay sane and happy throughout this labor-intensive project. My circle of lifelong friends is a rock of support. I would especially like to thank Carrie Gordon, Shana Baggaley, Casey McCormick, María Jose Perry, Lois Lorentzen, Teresa Walsh, Kari Zimmerman, and Adriana Martínez Perry. I thank my sons Mateo and Joaquín for being the most wonderful distractions ever and for giving me the gift of focus, ensuring that I got down to business during the workday so I could enjoy evenings at home. Finally, I thank my husband, Salvador, who is my home no matter where we find ourselves in the world, and we have found ourselves in many places. For the adventures that have been and for all those to come, thank you.

Introduction

In 1761, María Inés Gil fell ill and called a local notary to her bedside so that she could make out a will and put her temporal and spiritual affairs in order.¹ As María Inés sat with the notary that day, following the legal and religious formulas of will-making, she revealed much about her life. She was a vecina (resident or citizen) of Santiago de Guatemala (today Antigua), the colonial capital of the Kingdom of Guatemala (a province of New Spain roughly corresponding to modern Central America). Like most will-makers, she did not specify her racial status, but it is quite likely she was of mixed African descent, as she lived in a neighborhood closely associated with the free mulatto and free black community.² There are other indicators of racial mixture as well. By the eighteenth century, approximately 65 percent of Santiago’s population was mixed-race, and the percentage among non-elites was even higher. María Inés suggested her own non-elite status by declining to identify herself with the honorific title of doña. She was also an hija natural, that is an illegitimate child born to parents who faced no legal or ecclesiastical barriers to marriage. This intermediate status of illegitimacy placed María Inés above children born to adulterous or other scandalous unions, but her claim to this status was tenuous since she did not know, or chose not to identify her father. In any case, hijos naturales, and especially those not recognized by their fathers, carried the suspicion of racial mixture.³

María Inés opted to leave her marital status blank, but her will clearly indicates that she was a single woman. María Inés may have had one or more long-term consensual unions, because she had borne several illegitimate children during her lifetime, all of whom had died. She did not explain the circumstances of their births and made no mention of her children’s father or fathers. Indeed, in a subsequent will made a few years later, María Inés omitted all reference to her children.⁴ Like most will-makers at this time, she did not mention her occupation. But María Inés was apparently an enterprising woman. In the sidebar of her will, the notary somewhat unusually referenced her nickname, la grano de oro (the grain of gold). This phrase typically describes a profitable agricultural product, for example coffee in the nineteenth century, and thus suggests that María Inés made a living selling some valuable raw material. Business was apparently quite good. She included a house with a tile roof among her assets, and a subsequent will made out three years later indicated that she owned some furniture and clothing, and also had over 1,000 pesos in hard currency in her possession.

Spanish law required will-makers to divide up most of their estates (four fifths to be precise) equally among their children, followed by their parents. Because María Inés had no forced heirs, she was free to leave her soul as primary heir, directing all her assets toward her favored devotions and her own salvation. Her devotion to the Dominican Church, and particularly the sacred and much beloved image of Our Lady of the Rosary housed within, are most apparent. By the time she made out her first will, María Inés was already a pious benefactor of Our Lady of the Rosary, providing funds for a novena, a ritual round of masses, in honor of the sacred image. She donated her nativity scene to Our Lady’s altar, under which she wished to be buried dressed in a Dominican habit. In a more unusual act of devotion, María Inés noted her desire to entrust an indigenous boy she had raised to the care of a Dominican friar, hoping that the boy might apply himself to the service of the chapel of Our Lady of the Rosary. She also wanted to create three religious endowments, one to annually fund expenses related to Our Lady of the Rosary’s feast day, one to fund the daily illumination of six candles in front of the image during Mass or while the lay female community of the Beaterio de Santa Rosa prayed the rosary, and another to fund annual masses in honor of the Christ Child. For each endowment, María Inés named the Dominican friars as chaplains and patrons responsible for celebrating the masses and managing the foundations in perpetuity. Finally, María Inés entrusted the execution of her will to the Dominican provincial head. Toward the end of her will, she highlighted her close relationship with the Dominican friars in unusually explicit terms. She noted that the friars should enjoy wide control over her estate on the condition that they take care of her in her illness because I am orphaned and alone.⁵

María Inés’s situation as a non-elite single woman, and even as a single mother of illegitimate children, was quite common in colonial Spanish American cities. Labor and migration patterns often produced urban female majorities, high numbers of unmarried women, and female-headed households.⁶ Indeed, Santiago de Guatemala was very much a city of women by the eighteenth century, with women heading many households and illegitimacy rates hovering around 45 percent among the non-elite population.⁷ Recent studies highlight the critical economic roles played by non-elite women in colonial Spanish American cities.⁸ But we know remarkably little about the religious lives of women like María Inés Gil. What we do know comes mostly from Inquisition and criminal cases, prescriptive literature, and early modern Catholic decrees, all of which highlight official hostility toward laboring women living outside patriarchal authority.⁹

Nor did intensive piety necessarily save poor single women from scrutiny. Studies point out that the early modern Church was also increasingly concerned about female religious autonomy.¹⁰ Actively religious laywomen had played important roles in medieval Spanish cities as healers, nurses, teachers, alms collectors, shrine keepers, and devotional leaders. But the sixteenth-century Council of Trent moved decisively to enclose active laywomen in cloistered convents as part of a broader project to aggressively enforce Catholic orthodoxy. For the Spanish American context, Nora Jaffary argues that ongoing concerns about native and African idolatry, uncontrollable racial mixture, and threats to the colonial hierarchy heightened anxieties about active lay female religiosity and unorthodox religious practices. Jaffary finds that Mexican Inquisition officials were especially worried about non-elite independent women, women like María Inés Gil, and prosecuted them as false mystics more than any other group.¹¹

Wills left by women like María Inés Gil reveal another side to this story. Although official decrees required institutional enclosure of unmarried women and cloistered confines for active female religiosity, María Inés was able to navigate narrowing gender norms, participate in the spiritual economy, and cultivate alliances with powerful priests and religious orders. And she was not alone, according to my analysis of close to 550 wills between 1700 and 1870 and a variety of other sources including spiritual biographies, religious chronicles, school foundation records, and Inquisition files. Far from the margins, laboring women living outside marriage acted as lay evangelizers, teachers, benefactors, and devotional leaders over two centuries in Guatemala’s capital. Priests, friars, and archbishops frequently collaborated with these women and endorsed active religious paths for women outside convent walls. This book explores how and why non-elite single women forged alliances with the Church and how those alliances ultimately shaped local religion and the spiritual economy, late colonial reform efforts, and post-Independence politics in the colonial capital of Central America.

In some ways, this is a story about Church leaders in a modest provincial capital, away from close Inquisitorial oversight, adapting official doctrine according to local needs and circumstances. Guatemala’s capital was not alone in this. As Elizabeth Lehfeldt points out, even within Europe, the Council of Trent’s strict decrees regarding female enclosure were unevenly implemented across provincial towns and cities.¹² But most studies that consider this dynamic focus on organized communities of pious laywomen, like the French Daughters of Charity, or on the enduring permeability of convent walls and nuns’ extensive engagement in worldly affairs.¹³ Far less attention has been paid to local Church support for independent religious laywomen, particularly when those women were poor and unmarried.¹⁴ Alone at the Altar explores how the local context of Guatemala’s capital influenced levels of official tolerance and support for lay female religiosity and laboring women outside marriage.

My approach builds on William Christian’s concept of local religion. Christian found that Catholicism for early modern Spanish peasants centered on community-based devotions connected to particular places, images, and local sacred histories as opposed to the sacramental and liturgical emphasis of the Universal Church. Based on these findings, Christian argued more broadly that Catholic belief and practice invariably reflected distinctly local interpretations of Universal Catholicism.¹⁵ For historians of colonial Spanish America, local religion provides an alternative to binary categorizations of elite versus popular religiosity and rethinks scholarly approaches to religion that separate religious experience and practice from, as William Taylor puts it, the wider social, economic, and political network of which they are a part.¹⁶ While Christian originally examined local religion in a rural peasant context, the present analysis shifts attention to the urban religious landscape of a provincial capital of Spanish America, which connected with but also diverged from more powerful colonial centers such as Mexico City and Lima. This study further sheds light on the role that gender and marital status played in the formation of local religion.¹⁷

While local contexts are clearly at work, this is not a simple story of local religion at odds with the Universal Church, or colonial Church officials at odds with Rome. The eighteenth century witnessed a renewal of Catholic missionary movements, which one scholar describes as the most vigorous spiritual effort of the eighteenth-century church.¹⁸ As Luke Clossey points out, while historians often treat these efforts as a disjointed collection of individual missions, early modern mission history was in fact a macrohistorical phenomenon, that is, a single world-spanning enterprise.¹⁹ In Guatemala’s capital, missionaries revived medieval feminine ideals and forms of devotion and supported a vibrant spiritual renewal among lay populations. Eighteenth-century Franciscan missionary chronicles and the Jesuit-authored spiritual biography of a local holy woman, Anna Guerra de Jesús, illuminate how the encounters of local and global Catholicism, of missionary movements and enthusiastic female religiosity, forged diverse models of female piety and sustained support for active female ministries. Recent analyses of early modern hagiographies, which explore the complex relationships developed between priests and local holy women and the celebration of laywomen from non-elite and mixed-race backgrounds, provide a broader regional and global context for clerical alliances with laywomen in eighteenth-century Santiago and suggest the need to modify interpretations of early modern Catholicism as primarily repressive and hostile toward single women and lay female religiosity.²⁰

APPROACHING WOMEN AND RELIGION, SEX AND HONOR IN SPANISH AMERICA

A rich body of scholarship explores nuns and convent life in Spain and Spanish America. Laywomen, especially non-elite women, left a thinner paper trail and have proved a more elusive subject. Women prosecuted for religious deviance represent an important exception to this rule, and several studies take advantage of the rich and meaty testimonies provided by Inquisition trials. Martha Few’s study of witchcraft in colonial Guatemala, for example, considers how mixed-race women used informal religious practices and spiritual power to overtly challenge gender, racial, and colonial hierarchies and intervene in conflicts and problems in daily life.²¹ But other recent studies point out that the scholarly emphasis on power struggles can sometimes obscure how those accused of religious deviance saw themselves and their actions.²² The scholarly and popular soft spot for rebels can also overshadow the prominent role that women played in the expansion of Spanish Catholicism in the New World and the ambitious formation of a global Catholic Church.²³ As Kathleen Myers and Amanda Powell aptly note, women’s influence in the public life of colonial Spanish America came primarily through extensive participation in the orthodox religious world of the Catholic Church and its hierarchies, rather than rebellion.²⁴

Through an extensive analysis of wills, as well as a variety of other source materials, Alone at the Altar addresses several unresolved questions pertaining to non-elite women’s lived religious experiences and how they shaped local religion in colonial Spanish America. How did non-elite women relate to the female mystical tradition and missionary movements? What role did laboring women play in religious brotherhoods and new nineteenth-century pious associations? Did spiritual capital flow in just one direction, from the Church to poor women in the form of charity, or did laboring women participate actively in the spiritual economy, and if so, what impact did they have? And how did poor single women respond to religious change and the weakening of the Church in the late colonial period and the post-Independence era?

This book also explores how non-elite women living outside patriarchal control navigated questions of sex and honor. Scholars frequently point out that Spanish America was an honor-based culture in which female honor rested primarily on sexual virtue. Although Ann Twinam masterfully examined the ways in which elite women took advantage of loopholes in order to circumvent strict feminine ideals of sexual virtue and honor, the experiences of non-elite women remain unclear.²⁵ Elite women could be single mothers in private and virgins in public because elite society upheld a sharp distinction between carefully crafted public personas and private realities and colluded to keep elite women’s sexual indiscretions secret. But poor women could not access such loopholes. For poor women, private and public were inseparable and indistinguishable. There would be no carefully defined and manipulated disparities between their private and public worlds.²⁶

Given remarkably high levels of illegitimacy, especially among non-elite communities in Spanish and Spanish American cities, and the apparent complacency of local officials, some scholars question whether elite ideals of female chastity mattered at all in the daily lives of most people.²⁷ Allyson Poska goes so far as to argue that culturally or religiously required chastity was not central to gender expectations and sexual interaction in early modern Spain.²⁸ Evidence certainly suggests a surprising degree of social and legal tolerance in Guatemala and broader Spanish America toward female sexual activity outside marriage. It appears that prior sexual activity did not automatically restrict non-elite women’s marital prospects.²⁹ In Santiago de Guatemala, official concern about sexual morality was also muted, even among local priests and the ecclesiastical court, perhaps because the city lacked the infrastructure required to systematically prosecute and incarcerate women who engaged in informal unions.

But tolerance did not necessarily mean acceptance. Even though non-elites were clearly more tolerant toward sex outside the bounds of marriage, recent studies also indicate that non-elites cared, and often cared deeply, about their honor as well as their salvation according to orthodox Catholic belief and practice.³⁰ While basic survival was surely a prime concern for non-elites, economic well-being was always linked to reputation in colonial Spanish America. Within the complex internal hierarchies of non-elite communities, legitimacy, sexual morality, and behavior mattered and shaped social status as well as vital access to credit and mutual aid.³¹ Furthermore, in the deeply litigious society of colonial Spanish America, marriage and honor allowed non-elites to better protect their rights in court. Slave women, for example, defended their rights in court by emphasizing their status as wives and members of the Catholic community. As Richard Boyer puts it, Christian marriage attached every station of people to rights meant to be universal.³² Poor single women, whether they engaged in informal unions or not, were clearly at a disadvantage in this cultural context.

Alone at the Altar considers how some non-elite single women navigated these tensions by invoking ideals of female conduct other than chastity and enclosure. In its discussion of alternative feminine ideals, this study builds on anthropological studies that consider how female honor in Mediterranean societies reflects multiple factors, including, but not limited to, sexual behavior.³³ There are obvious interpretive risks to projecting modern ethnographic findings back in time; however, this argument resonates with the evidence provided by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wills from Guatemala’s capital. Single non-elite women like María Inés Gil frequently highlighted their piety and active devotional networks, as well as their hard work and resourcefulness.³⁴ Much as scholars recognize that race in colonial Latin America was a flexible category and individuals might claim multiple racial identities simultaneously, this study considers how gender ideals were malleable and multifaceted and poor single women could sometimes claim more than one moral status. To be clear, I do not assume that women’s religious practices or devotional networks were simply mundane survival strategies. Rather, this analysis of the ways in which gender, marital, and social status intersected with religious practice builds on Robert Orsi’s model of religion as a network of relationships that spans this world and the next and connects humans and sacred figures, while always remaining deeply enmeshed in the arrangements of the social world in which they exist.³⁵

CROSSING THE INDEPENDENCE DIVIDE

By crossing the boundary between early modern and modern, colonial and postcolonial, this study also explores issues of religious and gendered change and continuity. Secularization did not proceed in a linear fashion in Guatemala’s capital, nor were there clear battle lines between religious tradition and modernization. In the late colonial period, laywomen and their clerical allies pioneered educational initiatives, clearly drawing on medieval and early modern forms of piety, even as they expanded the scope and influence of lay female initiatives, challenged entrenched racial ideologies, and creatively engaged with modernizing royal reforms, Enlightenment thinking, and Catholic reform movements.

Devotional networks between non-elite laywomen and priests took on new religious and political significance, both locally and globally, during the revolutionary era and for decades after. Nineteenth-century liberals everywhere portrayed female allies of the Church as backward fanatics or as coerced pawns of a reactionary clergy. Only recently have scholars begun to question this overly simplistic portrait of the relationship between women, religion, and politics in nineteenth-century Europe and Latin America.³⁶ Building on this recent scholarship, Alone at the Altar explores how laboring laywomen, priests, and nuns creatively responded to rapid change and the onslaught of crises facing the Church at home and abroad. My case study of ecstatic nun Sor María Teresa Aycinena and her devotees, many of whom were priests and laywomen, illustrates how the Church’s weakened institutional power created an opening for assertive female claims to spiritual authority and a renewal of gendered devotional forms such as affective spirituality, imitation of Christ, and female mysticism. Although this famous, or infamous, nun did not become a unifying symbol for Guatemala, evidence suggests that her devotees forged the early foundations of a new kind of Catholic nationalism and Guatemalan identity.

Scholars generally agree that non-elite women suffered significant setbacks in post-Independence Latin America as new states strengthened patriarchal power and privileges. While elite and middle-class women gained some status through the ideal of Republican Motherhood, poor women faced increased stigmatization and repression amid growing concerns about uncontrolled female sexuality.³⁷ This study adds a religious and institutional dimension by considering how the weakening of the Church, especially the decline of religious brotherhoods and pastoral instability, undermined traditional forms of spiritual and social support for laboring women. The Church’s Marian female ideal and renewed emphasis on female sexual purity also likely heightened non-elite women’s vulnerability to stigmatization and repression.

But at the same time, evidence from wills also indicates that many women continued to find familiar ways to navigate new challenges, invoking diverse ideals of female conduct, cultivating devotional networks, and positioning themselves as pious benefactors helping to rebuild the Church. Indeed, the weakness of the institutional Church augmented the laicization of the faith, a process by which laypeople took greater initiative and control over Church life and charitable activities.³⁸ Furthermore, the pitched battles between liberals and conservatives provided laboring women in Guatemala City with new ways of establishing moral status and authority through their defense of the faith. Their actions shaped the development of popular conservatism in Guatemala and helped lay the foundation for Rafael Carrera’s rise to power and the long conservative era (1838–1871). As the Guatemalan Church rebuilt in the 1850s and 1860s, in the context of a global Catholic revival movement, laboring women in Guatemala City renewed alliances with returning Jesuit missionaries and took advantage of new devotional opportunities. These opportunities illuminate profound shifts within the nineteenth-century Catholic Church, as officials relied heavily on female support to navigate the rapid changes and challenges brought by the modern era and largely rejected early modern restrictions on active lay female religiosity.

METHODOLOGY AND SOURCES

Finding ordinary women and their daily devotional lives in the archival record is particularly challenging for colonial Central America. Lengthy Inquisition trial records, the kinds found in Mexico and Peru with rich and detailed testimonies, are all but absent for this region. For most of my research, Guatemala’s Cathedral archive was closed for reorganization, meaning that parish and convent records, as well as ecclesiastical court records, were all out of reach. Wondering if my research was doomed to a dead end, I began searching through a wide variety of sources and found some useful case studies and episodes: the 1717 spiritual biography of a local holy woman, the late colonial foundation of girls’ schools, and the devotion and controversy surrounding an ecstatic nun during Independence. But I struggled to see the connections between these disparate case studies until I opened a large volume of notary records and began reading through wills. I was aware that scholars had used wills to examine religious practice and beliefs as well as construct social histories of women.³⁹ Still, I was surprised by the sheer number of female will-makers in Guatemala’s colonial capital, particularly laboring single and widowed women, and the richness and variety of information about their religious and daily lives. After reading through and analyzing hundreds of wills, I realized that non-elite women living outside marriage were at the center of this story and provided a connective thread for the distinct case studies.

Because much of this study builds on an analysis of wills, it is important to clarify my methodological approach, the profile of will-makers, and some of the strengths and limitations of this source material. Wills in colonial and nineteenth-century Spanish America were formulaic documents, but also flexible, varying widely in length and detail. Some will-makers were terse. Others were chatty and went off script. But even the most forthcoming will-makers left gaps and silences. By the eighteenth century, will-makers in Guatemala’s capital generally declined to identify themselves with racial labels. Many non-elite people talked about their labor and sweat but did not specify what they did for work. Detailed inventories of belongings were also surprisingly rare, especially among non-elites. Thoughts, feelings, and motivations are rarely accessible.

But at the same time, the formulaic nature of wills required will-makers to reveal much about their lives. For more than a generation, historians have productively mined the formulaic fragments provided by wills to analyze subtle changes in religious mentalities and practices. Through a quantitative analysis of pious bequests in thousands of wills over long periods of time, historians like Michel Vovelle charted changing religious beliefs about salvation and death and the rise of secularization in early modern France.⁴⁰ This study builds on that quantitative methodology, counting how many will-makers were male or female, married, single, or widowed, elite or non-elite, how many left pious bequests, claimed membership in religious brotherhoods, left their soul as primary heir, expressed a devotional connection to a male or female convent church, or named a priest as executor or witness to their will.

Each of these quantitative markers measured over time has a story to tell, but I also wanted to explore how all these stories interacted. As anthropologist J. Davis points out, the language which shapes people’s notions of divinity, the practices of their religion, the questions and answers which are important to them, is typically fairly closely related to the daily experience of family, political, and economic life.⁴¹ To get at these intersections, I employed qualitative forms of analysis, examining a more moderate number of cases in as much detail as possible.⁴² In order to ensure the most representative sample possible and to consider the relationship between gender, marital status, social status, and religious practice, I examined every will, both male and female, made out in Guatemala’s capital in thirteen selected years between 1700 and 1870, for a total of 539 wills.⁴³ The selected years fell within four twenty-year time periods: 1700–1720, 1750–1770, 1800–1820, and 1850–1870. For the purposes of analysis, I aggregated the data from each twenty-year period (Table 1).

When I first began reading through wills, it seemed every other will-maker was a woman, and a non-elite single or widowed woman at that. Not quite, but very close. During the eighteenth century, a striking forty-five to fifty percent of will-makers in any given year were women. By the midnineteenth century, female will-makers actually outnumbered their male counterparts (Table 2). Spanish American women were often well represented among will-makers because Spanish law ensured that daughters and sons inherited equally, husbands and wives jointly shared ownership of all properties acquired during marriage, and widows regained control of their dowries as well as at least half of all community property. Spanish law also guaranteed that women over age twenty-five could engage in the full array of property and business transactions, including inheriting and bequeathing assets; buying, selling, renting, and administering real estate; lending; borrowing; and forming business partnerships.⁴⁴ Still, the number of female will-makers in eighteenth-century Santiago de Guatemala appears particularly high, even compared to other parts of colonial Spanish America. In eighteenth-century Mexico City, male will-makers outnumbered female will-makers two to one.⁴⁵ Although more research is necessary to understand this distinctively local trend, it appears related to the gendered migration patterns and the acute gender imbalance in the Guatemalan capital.⁴⁶ While census data is lacking for the eighteenth century, the 1805 census found that women represented 60 percent of the urban population.⁴⁷

TABLE 1. Number of will-makers per sampled years and per 20-year period

TABLE 2. Number of male and female will-makers per 20-year period

Consistently, the vast majority (over 80 percent) of female will-makers in Guatemala’s capital through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were living outside marriage, either as single or widowed women or less commonly as separated or abandoned wives. By contrast, roughly half of male will-makers were