The Path to the Convent

"Hermanita, cuando has de dejar de decir que quieres ser capuchina?" Aquí yo le respondía: "Cuando lo haya conseguido lo dejaré de decir." "Little sister, when will you stop saying you wish to be a Capuchin?" And I answered: "When I become one I will stop saying it."

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Renouncing family and the comforts of home to live forever within the restricted walls of a convent was a choice of life that today seems too remote and too demanding for our highly secularized lifestyle. And yet, hundreds of women in Mexico, as elsewhere in Spain and Spanish America, chose profession and perpetual enclosure over marriage or life as a secular single woman. Only a few of them left testimonies to explain their decisions or disclose their feelings about taking the veil. We have to explore many sources to re-create not just the world in which they lived but also the social circumstances, religious convictions, and faith that encouraged them to enter a convent and remain in it. The recorded official request to enter a convent as a novitiate stated that the petitioner had always had an inclination for living a religious life, but this formulaic pattern does not necessarily cast light on the personal motives behind the decision. However, the validity of the vocation should not be dismissed simply because it was expressed following a legal formula. It is true that while some nuns confessed they had suffered while adapting to what originally appeared as a compelling choice to them, others considered themselves happy and privileged by professing. In trying to understand the world of female cloisters between the late sixteenth and the late eighteenth centuries we have to accept that the resolution to enter into a convent remains a complex historical problem, the result of multilayered economic, familial, religious, and personal circumstances. What a novice was bound to accept when she took her final vows of profession was a way of life, a world with a culture of its own, quite different from that awaiting those who chose marrying and mothering children. The lives of those who entered the convent were not typical and the cloisters were special places to which only a chosen few could aspire. However, this exceptionality does not make conventual life less important than the life of laywomen. The cloisters were unique female worlds with an idiosyncratic blend of beliefs and religious observance, social consciousness and social practices, that were highly valued and respected in their own time.

QUALIFYING TO BECOME A NUN

Wanting to be a nun was not enough to gain access to a convent. Whether a young woman was fulfilling a vocation or simply being carried into the cloister by family ties or social pressure, the first consideration that she and her family had to bear in mind was whether or not she could fulfill the prerequisites demanded for profession. Factors of race and status in New World society had as much weight as the personal vocation of a potential novice. If the former did not meet specific standards, the doors of the convent remained closed to her regardless of the intensity of her desire or her faith. Because professing in a convent was thought to be as much a social issue as a personal one, race became a critical signifier in becoming a member of a religious community. Those aspiring to take the veil had to satisfy at least four requirements. Spanish descent expressed as "cleanliness of blood" (limpieza de sangre) was the first prerequisite. Race was a concern as early as the mid-sixteenth century, when it first became apparent that the unbridled sexuality of Spanish males was helping to create a racially diverse world by mating or marrying indigenous women. In those days, any woman of Spanish descent had high expectations of marrying well to a man of equal or better status than her own. But, adverse circumstances could thwart such aspirations. Too many poor men and women who arrived in the New World with hopes of climbing the social ladder and reaching an elite position in a rapidly evolving society were disappointed by their lack of success. Women whose parents or relatives never realized that dream were often regarded as endangered, and their virtue at stake, as they could potentially marry below their perceived station in life. They became candidates for protection in a religious community. In a letter to the Council of the Indies dated March 10, 1566, the Bishop of Tlaxcala, Fernando de Villagómez, pleaded for financial support for a house of "religious maidens" (doncellas religiosas), known as the beaterio of Santa Catalina de Sena. He argued that "maiden daughters of conquistadors, and honest Spanish people" were numerous and unable to marry their equals, because dowries were immoderately high. Being women, and thus fragile, it would be a good thing for the land to have a convent, "where the daughters of the good, could serve God, retaining their honor (honra)." The success of the Spanish settlement was linked to the preservation of the sexual purity of those descendants of Spaniards who wished to retain their honor by refusing to marry down. This was a compelling argument, almost a declaration of social policy.

It was also a forceful act of self-definition for the colonial elite, hardly thirty years after the conquest of Tenochtitlán. The top families of the emerging society were, according to the bishop, able to afford large dowries for their daughters. However, for those who were poor, the convent was a solution to their social predicament. For this sixteenth-century bishop, money was obviously important, but status mattered more. Shelter and virginity at the service of God were the venues to maintaining social standing if money was missing. The dual path of the "two states" for women, marriage or religious vows, was already in place and, apparently, as firmly rooted as it was in Spain. Whether or not the situation of women was exactly as depicted in the sixteenth-century document, and whether the choice between marriage and convent may have been exaggerated by the Bishop, the fact still stands that the official "construct" of women as weak and threatened, and the beaterios and convents as sites of shelter, was part of the mind-set of those who were shaping New Spain's society. That the idea had enough purchase among first settlers is proven by the arguments used by the founders of the convent of Jesús María in Mexico in 1581. Its proponents and supporters, all men of mature age and some social rank, stated that...