Beyond Textual Literacies: Envisioning Religion through Afro-Peruvian Archives

This paper examines both the writings of Ursula de Jesus, (1604-1666), a Black woman born into slavery who lived in the Santa Clara convent (of the order of the Poor Clares) in Lima with her ama (owner) for 28 years as one of hundreds of slaves, as well as the visual literacies she demonstrates through written accounts. Ursula’s freedom was purchased by a nun in 1645, and Ursula became a free religious servant called a donada. In her diary, which she began writing at the advice of her confessor in the 1650s, Ursula recounts her mystical visions and conversations with Jesus, Mary, and various souls in purgatory. I argue her writings and the visual literacies they draw on reveal how multiple paradigms of blood were actively circulating in relation to colonial Peruvian understandings of religion. Blood was at once redemptive in a Christian understanding and potentially limiting when understood through racialized colonial frameworks that associate one’s ‘character’ with their bodily composition through fluids like blood. Drawing on the eucharistic understanding of the body of Christ as unifying likely influenced by her proximity to the Jesuits in Lima, Ursula reverses the colonial gaze to use blood for her own agendas based on her experiences as a formerly enslaved Black woman living among Spanish nuns.

This paper argues that Ursula’s account tells us about both the gendered and racialized dynamics of colonial Lima, within and outside of the convent as can be seen in the conversations she describes with souls in purgatory. At one point she recounts a conversation with a deceased woman named María Bran who worked in Santa Clara as a slave before her death. Ursula asks María if Black women and donadas are permitted to enter heaven, and María assures Ursula that this is possible through redemption in Christ. Here, I read Ursula as challenging the notion that racialized status on earth—often translated as ‘character’ but in the colonial period called calidad (quality)—could be equated with racialized judgement in the afterlife, a popular sentiment among Iberian audiences in colonial Latin America. As an Afro-Peruvian mystic Ursula imagined the spatial plane of purgatory and the Christian notion of afterlife as a site for speaking back against the race-based vitriol of her experiences in colonial Lima.

Following the conquest of Peru in the 1530s and the arrival of religious orders like the Augustinians, Franciscans, and Jesuits in subsequent decades, Catholic traditions introduced from Iberia underwent a series of transformations influenced by Indigenous Andean communities as well as African and African descended communities throughout the Andes. Many different archives—be they oral, visual, or textual—can be used to think beyond the simple paradigm of Indigenous-Spanish relations to include the influence of African and African descended communities in the production of ‘religion’ in colonial Peru. An account of one’s life—called a vida—was one genre of writing wherein both literate and non-literate individuals living in religious institutions recounted their daily activities by their own pen or through a priest acting as confessor. Such accounts of daily life provide insight into perceptions of the eucharist by lay people living among religious authorities.

One example of this writing is the diary of Ursula which I use to argue survivors of the Middle Passage and descendants of these survivors who were born into slavery in American cities but eventually granted freedom—like Ursula—should not be treated by scholars as merely passive audiences for the emergent category of religion in the colonial context. They were active participants in its forging. Ursula learned to read images in the contemplative tradition and had access to the many books of the Jesuit college that she either learned to read or heard others read aloud in the house of a well-known local mystic named Luisa Melgarejo de Sotomayor Melgarejo where she lived and labored as an enslaved child. Each of these elements of her early life would influence Ursula’s path to manumission and transition from enslaved laborer to free donada. Building on her ability to read images acquired under Melgarejo in her early life, Ursula’s meditation on Christ’s Passion and death was a frequent theme in her diary where she focused not only on the blood shed at the scene of the crucifixion but also on her own earthly body as inhibiting her ability to connect with his Spirit. Like many Christian mystics, she used mortification practices such as fasting and self-flagellation to elevate her understanding of Christ’s suffering on the cross during her time in the Santa Clara convent. As scholars like historian of the Andes Kathryn Burns have argued, the performance of religious poverty and suffering was gendered and enacted differently by men and women in colonial Peru.