In 1528, the wife of a Spanish conquistador swept and swept and swept in her Mexico City mansion. Nothing exciting there. But she was naked and it was midnight and she said strange things, maybe prayed to a Mesoamerican god. Another Spanish woman denounced her to the vicar of the Inquisition resident in Mexico City. There is no specific language in this fragment of the first witchcraft investigation in Mexico about Nahua ritual or cosmology but everyone agreed that she learned the behavior from Nahua women. By 1570, two women – one a Spanish Canarian and the other a Seville-born mulata – were casting spells, using the hallucinogenic cactus peyote, and patles (Nahuatl for remedy, potion, or herbal medicine) in Zacatecas and Guanajuato. The Nahuatl words peyote and patle had entered their linguistic-cultural consciousness and became loanwords in written Spanish.Footnote ¹

These two cases frame the trajectory of this book – from the 1520s to 1571. The five decades after the Spanish arrival in central Mexico reveal a rapid process of acculturation. Traditional ethnohistory has studied Native responses to Spanish colonialism. This book does the opposite by telling the stories of non-Native women who adopted cultural forms, language, healing knowledge (tiçiyotl in Nahuatl, curanderismo in Spanish), and magic of the predominant Native cultures in which they lived. Acculturation was rapid but documentary evidence for Mesoamerican cultural influence on non-Native peoples evolved from vague intimations in the 1520s, to explicit linguistic discussions by the 1560s.

These three women also represent the ethnic complexity of post-contact Mexico among the non-Native population. The woman accused in 1528 was Catalina de Vergara, a Spaniard married to a conquistador. The Canarian was Catalina de Peraza, an illegitimate daughter of the Count of Gomera. The mulata was Bárbola de Zamora, born in Seville to a Spanish man and a dark-skinned woman of uncertain ethnicity, possibly Maghrebi (Moroccan/Algerian/Tunisian). This book also tells the stories of Senegambian slaves, Muslims or Muslim converts to Catholicism, Basques, and Andalucians. Some are Castilian but not of high status. In this period, the one high-status woman credibly accused of sorcery in Mexico, doña María de Anuncibay, was Basque.

These accused witches share certain traits. They were usually from regions of geographic or cultural-linguistic frontiers, like Andalucía, the Canaries, or the Basque region. Many were of mixed or vaguely “exoticized” looks – darker-skinned Andalucians who, like Canarian women, were viewed as unusually oversexed. Many were “Moriscas” – former Muslims or Maghrebi women from North Africa or of vague mixed ethnicities. Some were mulatas (of mixed African and Spanish ethnicity) of uncertain backgrounds. Even the clearly Catholic Spanish women accused of sorcery tended to come from lower social registers.

This book employs inquisitional investigation into sorcery, witchcraft, and magic-medicine as its central analytical device and archival evidence base. Surprisingly few witchcraft cases exist for Mexico before 1571. Other such cases investigated men and are the focus of a book to follow this study. This book is the first in a series of studies about acculturation of non-Native peoples to Mesoamerican culture, language, cosmology, and magic. The Xolotl Rite and Other Episodes in Mexican Cultural History book series offers microhistorical snapshots of how Spanish, mestizo, mulato, Maghrebi, Senegambian, Morisco and other non-Native peoples began to adopt elements of Mexican Native culture. The second book, The Xolotl Rite, or How Spanish and Mestizo Men Became Nahuatlized in Sixteenth-Century Mexico, trains sights on men, in balance with this book about women.

Contrary to popular or even scholarly belief, there were no witch crazes in Mexico. There were not even that many actual trials of women accused of sorcery or of being witches. But there are a lot of investigations. Inquisitional and ecclesiastical investigations into women who practiced sorcery are rich in cultural detail. Those investigations reveal suggestive and even lurid detail about the form that popular magic took in Mexico in the first decades after contact. I am not interested in acting like a police detective or priest in determining guilt or innocence, truth or falsehood, in these cases. Rather, I scrutinize the details for what they reveal about collective ideas about sorcery and magic. Those ideas, in turn, tell us a great deal about how, when, and why non-Native women adopted Native customs, rites, and plant materials. By “non-Native,” I mean women who were not ethnically Native. I avoid using the catch-all term “Spanish” even for the women born in Spain. Many women who migrated to Mexico from Spain were not ethnically Spanish per se. There were, of course, Spanish as well as Basque and Canarian women who were ethnic Europeans. Many women described as Morisca probably had mixed Spanish and Arab ethnicity. Other women had Maghrebi, mixed Spanish-African, or Spanish-Maghrebi backgrounds. And there were sub-Saharan African women, almost certainly from Senegambia in the period under study, who arrived in Mexico against their will as slaves.

This first book of the Xolotl Rite series focuses on women. Non-Native men and women adopted different elements of Mesoamerican culture. Men were more likely to venerate specific Mesoamerican gods, like Xolotl, and to engage in priest-like behaviors. Spanish and mestizo men were also more likely to engage with the shape-shifting sorcerer called nahualli. Non-Native women, on the other hand, were more likely to engage in plant medicine, love magic, and divination using corn kernels. Women were also the first non-Natives to use the hallucinogenic cactus peyote. Iberian women continued to employ Iberian forms of magic, like the ceremonial use of salt or vaginal bathwater mixed in food as love magic, and to act as healers and midwives. Iberian ideas about sorcery as linked to alcahuatería (pimping or procuring) flourished in Mexico, as did the belief in the evil eye (mal de ojo) and the unique role of midwives in curing it. But these Iberian forms of folk medicine (curanderismo) and sorcery (hechicería) mutated and integrated Mesoamerican materials and ritual forms. Eventually, these women began to resemble a Nahua healing specialist, tiçitl.

Women created extensive and complex social networks that straddled ethnic and class boundaries in sixteenth-century Mexico. Iberian and mixed-race women in Mexico operated as healers and sorceresses in a cosmopolitan world inhabited by majority Nahuas. Sorcery proliferated in multiethnic networks and non-Native women of both high and low status employed sorcery or hired sorceresses.

This book asks how non-Native women adapted to and adopted Native customs, rites, ceremonies, magic, and divination in Mexico in the first five decades after contact. Iberian and African women represented a small minority of all migrants – settler-colonists and slaves – in Mexico. Ethnically, these women lived in a world dominated by Native peoples – Nahuas, Zapotecs, Pames, Zacatecos, Purépuchas. They lived in a world where the language of the household, tianguis (marketplace), and the street was Nahuatl in central Mexico and Zapotec in Oaxaca. While nominally Catholic – though some migrant women were certainly Muslim – these women occupied an everyday world where Mesoamerican religion, ritual, cosmology, and iconography were present.

The vast majority of ethnohistorical scholarship has examined how Native peoples resisted, and responded and adapted to Spanish imperial rule in Mexico (and Latin America). Consequently, we have a rich and complex body of work that informs our understanding of the process of Native political adaptation and cultural-linguistic resilience in the face of demographic disaster and colonial rule. This book reverses that analytical gaze by asking how non-Natives responded to their majority Native cultural environment.

Why is this book only about the period before 1571? The date may seem arbitrary. But in November 1571, the first inquisitor general, Pedro Moya de Contreras, took the reins of the first centralized Holy Office of the Inquisition in Mexico. A similar Inquisition was formed in Lima. These new Inquisitions asserted centralized control over all investigations into heresy, Judaizing, sorcery, bigamy, and other crimes against the Catholic Church. Prior to this centralized Inquisition in Mexico, a multiplicity of authorities operated local inquisitions under the auspices of the bishop or run, sometimes illegally, by friar-missionaries. This new, centralized inquisitional authority also included a more extensive apparatus of functionaries. In practical terms, this new Inquisition investigated more crimes and accusations.

The second reason for a 1571 cut-off date is methodological. I am trying to unravel very early processes of acculturation. I have tried to begin this analysis as close to the 1521 collapse of Mexica Tenochtitlan as possible. The source base becomes increasingly scarcer the closer one approximates 1521. But there are sources for this period, even if few historians have fully appreciated their value. Accordingly, this book tries to untangle the very earliest examples of cultural adaptation to the Native Mesoamerican world. Working with a paucity of documentation is a perennial challenge of microhistory but, as this book will show, there are enough extant sources for us to trace the earliest forms of cultural exchange between Nahua and Iberian and (North) African women.

The activities of these various inquisitions in Mexico before 1571 provide a wealth of cultural details about women and their practices of magic and folk medicine. This book analyzes the records of these investigations as a series of case studies about acculturation. The book does not pretend to offer a complete portrait of all women in New Spain. Instead, it offers an entry point into a little understood period of Mexican cultural history.

Acculturation and Ethnohistory

Some readers will be surprised to hear me discuss Native as the dominant culture. I do not suggest that Spanish imperialism or colonization were not real. Of course, Spaniards became the dominant political entity, but at the local level, even, Natives retained considerable autonomy.Footnote ² Rather, I suggest that on a basic level, Native culture dominated everyday life. For example, in 1539, inquisitor Zumárraga condemned a Nahua woman known only as Ana de Xochimilco for sorcery.Footnote ³ She was a monolingual Nahuatl speaker and lived as a servant in the house of an apparently wealthy Spanish woman, Elvira de Herrera. Herrera explained, in detail, the forms of medicine that Ana performed in her household. Herrera was the only Spanish woman present for these medical procedures and none of the others present spoke Spanish. In the domestic space of a Spanish woman, Nahuatl was the spoken language.

At the local level outside of cities like Mexico, Puebla, and Valladolid, and towns like Oaxaca, Xalapa, or Toluca, the everyday culture and language was predominantly Native. Yet even in cities and towns, one was more likely to find tortillas than European bread, octli (or pulque, the alcoholic drink from fermented agave cactus liquid) than Spanish wine, stews using tomates/tomatoes and chile than caldo gallego (Spanish vegetable stew).

Language is an indicator of acculturation. When we think about the Spanish language in Mexico, Nahuatl-origin vocabulary stands out.Footnote ⁴ My interest here is in the development of the Spanish language as it reflects the cultural adaptation of cultural behaviors and concepts that Spaniards decided were best left in the Nahuatl language. Such linguistic change symbolizes the broader changes in non-Native women’s use of magic and sorcery. José Moreno de Alba categorizes Nahuatlism into two categories. The diachronic refer to words derived from Mexico but in common use outside of the region where they developed. Among the diachronic Nahuatlisms, we count chocolate, tomate/tomato, and chile. The synchronic Nahuatlisms are those which do not extend beyond the region where they developed. Among the synchronic, we can count escuincle (annoying kid), apapachar (caress, hug), tlapalería (hardware store), or epazote (common herb).Footnote ⁵

One of the earliest Nahuatl words to find itself in everyday Spanish parlance in Mexico was tianguis, an outdoor market, a word still in common use in Mexico. The Nahuatl word tianquiztli evolved to become tianguis in Spanish.Footnote ⁶ The Mexico City Spanish cabildo (city council) began using the word tianguis in April 1524 without explanation or translation. Such use continued in inquisitional trials led by Zumárraga in 1536–40 and continued unabated in viceregal documentation for decades thereafter.Footnote ⁷

Spanish words of Nahuatl origin have frequently undergone orthographic changes. Such changes are synecdoche for the broader cultural changes which I examine in this book. Consider words like molcajete, chocolate, or escuincl and Xoloitzcuintle. There are multiple such words in everyday use that underwent such changes. Molcajete is a grinding bowl made of volcanic rock with three short legs. People have been using the molcajete for centuries to grind chile and avocado, or anything that one can mash from which to make a sauce or thick chile. The original Nahuatl word for this is mulcaxitl, or bowl. Like many such Nahuatl words, the pronunciation was difficult for native Spanish speakers and so the word morphed into something more amenable, thus rendering molcajete.Footnote ⁸ Today there are words for individuals such as escuincle, derived from itzcuintli (dog) and Xoloitzcuintle (also dog, but with associations with divinity and with the god Xolotl), or chilpayate, both of which mean an annoying, bratty kid.Footnote ⁹ Or one thinks of phrases that would be impossible without their Nahuatl cultural reference: se petatió, or, they bit the dust – literally to lay down on their petate (Spanish for straw mat, from the Nahuatl petlatl) – for the last time.

Other such words are Spanish neologisms. One famous product of Mesoamerican origin is chocolate. Yet the word itself may very well be a Spanish neologism – one of the early examples of acculturation. The Nahuas used the word cacahuatl (cacaoand atl, water) to refer to the drink we know as chocolate. But the word chocolate may be a post-contact word. Its use may potentially be ascribed to royal physician Francisco Hernández, who proposed the neologism chocolatl, which derives from xococ, bitter, and atl, water, producing xococ-atl, or xocoatl, or chocolate.Footnote ¹⁰ Xocoatl originally referred to a corn-based drink, whereas cacauatl (cacaoatl, cacahuatl) was the standard Nahuatl word for “chocolate.”Footnote ¹¹

Language use, loanwords, and quotidian Spanish with Nahuatl admixtures point to the vocalization of cultural mixture. Such linguistic syncretism acts as a synecdoche for this book’s broader concerns. James Lockhart proposed a three-phase process of Nahuatl language change after contact; the three-phase process stood in for cultural change broadly speaking.Footnote ¹² This book takes a cue from that analytical device to suggest that Nahuatl loanword adoption in the Spanish lexicon mimics the obverse process. For example, we can understand the cultural and linguistic processes of the period between 1521 and 1571 as belonging to phases one and two of Iberian acculturation to Mesoamerican language and custom – preliminary but with clear evidence for the process and of Nahuatl loanwords. Persistence of Spanish words for Nahuatl concepts falls within phase one. Here one sees use of terms like “pan de la tierra” or “bread from these lands [Mexico]” as a stand-in for tlaxcalli, the Nahuatl word for tortilla. Adoption of singular Spanish loanwords characterized Lockhart’s phase two of Nahuatl and Nahua acculturation under Spanish rule. Likewise, in this book’s discussion, adoption of Nahuatl loanwords in the Spanish lexicon mimics phase two. John Schwaller has observed similar patterns in Christianization and the missionary programs in Mexico, with the initial, first phase of Christianization occurring between the 1520s and the 1570s.Footnote ¹³

This book examines the first two phases of Iberian acculturation to Mesoamerica. As with Lockhart’s Nahuatl phase two, the Spanish language of Mexico adopted Nahuatl loanwords, beginning much earlier, in the 1520s, than the Nahuatl phase two. Such loanwords are Nahuatl words that appear in Spanish documentation intended for Spanish readers. These loanwords appear without translation or explanation. The first such loanword appears to be cacao, in Cortés’ letters to the Crown, published beginning in 1522. The next such loanword was tianguis, which appears in Spanish documentation in 1524. Other (sometimes) Castilianized loanwords like petaca (crate) (1537), mitote (ritual festival) (1557), jícara (gourd vessel) (1562), peyote (1566), picietl (tobacco) (1568), patle (cure, medicine, potion) (1569), and metate (grinding stone) (1570) became part of the Spanish lexicon in this early period.Footnote ¹⁴

This phase of acculturation applies to magic, sorcery, medicine, and ritual as well. For example, Iberian women maintained their connections to Iberian forms of religion and spellcasting. Iberian forms like Catholic prayers and orations to the saints continued. Traditional spellcasting methods like throwing salt and using cilantro continued in Mexico. Belief in the evil eye (mal de ojo) was present among Iberian women in Mexico. But Mesoamerican plant materials started to appear. At first, in the 1520s and 1530s, only words like powders (polvos) and roots (raíces) describe these materials. By the 1560s, some such material is named – peyote and picietl, for example. Methodology acculturated. Iberian women quickly adopted corn hurling as a form of divination (tlaolchayahualiztli), as early as the 1530s. Nahua ideas about sweeping as a bulwark against cosmic chaos influenced Iberian women as early as 1528.

This early period thus experienced the incorporation of Mesoamerican ritual in Iberian, mestiza, and mulata cultural practice. Mesoamerican materials also found their way into this non-Native world. But the language used to describe this process was probably immediate on the ground. Its registration in documentation took time. But not that much time. Within five decades, multiple Nahuatl words had clearly entered the Mexican variation of the Spanish language. Such a process also suggests that an epistemological change occurred, whereby criolla, Morisca, mestiza, and mulata women began to understand their world as linguistically and ethnically plural and variable.

Mexico-Tenochtitlan

Tenochtitlan fell to the Spanish invaders on August 13, 1521, the Catholic festival day for San Hipólito. Catholic ritual immediately became part of public culture in Mexico-Tenochtitlan. The celebration of the Spanish victory and Mexica defeat of August 13 absorbed, or vice versa, the saint day of San Hipólito. The African conquistador Juan Garrido, a member of Cortés’ invasion force, founded a hermitage church around 1522 on the spot where a later and much larger church and monastery were founded for the saint.Footnote ¹⁵ It is uncertain when the celebration for San Hipólito began, but on July 31, 1528, the Mexico City council (cabildo) ordered it celebrated that year.Footnote ¹⁶ The cabildo mandated this Catholic feast day, along with those of Saints John and Santiago and Our Lady of August (either Our Lady of the Angels on August 2 or the Assumption of August 15). The cabildo ordered these saints days to be celebrated with great fanfare, bullfights, and staged games. Moreover, the cabildo required anyone who owned a horse to ride it through the city streets under pain of a substantial fine of 10 pesos.

The celebration of August 13, San Hipólito, was not cheap. In the first record of its celebration in 1528, the cabildo tabulated at least 50 pesos in costs – a substantial outlay. The city spent some 40 pesos on the battle standard (pendón) – presumably in its fabrication and in the associated costs of its parading.Footnote ¹⁷ The city also paid for professional trumpeters for the event.Footnote ¹⁸ For the 1529 celebration, the city paid a confectioner 30 pesos for the breakfast served for the day’s festivities.Footnote ¹⁹

San Hipólito became an important part of Spanish public culture of Mexico-Tenochtitlan. Indeed, the August 13 ceremony for the saint “became indissolubly associated with the identity of Mexico City.”Footnote ²⁰ The cabildo asserted its right to name the standard-bearer (alférez) who would carry the battle standard in the San Hipólito procession in 1529.Footnote ²¹ Such an assertion rejected claims by the king to make this appointment. Accordingly, the celebration on August 13 became a part of conquistador mentality as central to civic life.Footnote ²² In the 1560s, the Spanish cleric Fray Bernardino Álvarez Herrera founded a monastery and church named for San Hipólito in the center of the city, on or near the location of the hermitage church founded by Garrido.Footnote ²³ One can imagine the impact such a building had in the middle of a city that had been a Mesoamerican architectural marvel prior to the arrival of the Spaniards (Figures I.1 and I.2).Footnote ²⁴

Figure I.1 San Hipólito convent (c. 1900). From Scenic Marvels of the New World, edited by Prof. Geo. R. Cromwell (C. N. Greig & Co., c. 1900). Artist unknown.

Photo: The Print Collector / Getty Images.

Figure I.2 Panoramic view of Tenochtitlan and the Valley of Mexico before 1519.

Photo: DeAgostini/Getty Images.

Despite Spanish political domination, Tenochtitlan remained a non-European city for most of the sixteenth century. Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco, the two main city-states (altepetl, pl. altepeque) of the Mexica (or Aztec) Empire, were located on an island surrounded by lakes in the basin of Mexico. Estimates of the precontact population of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco vary, with some being as high as 400,000, though a more reasonable number might be closer to 60,000 for the island city. The basin of Mexico, including Coyoacán, Xochimilco, Azcapatzalco, and Texcoco, made for a conurban population above 100,000.Footnote ²⁵ For example, to the south, the alteptl Xochimilco alone had a population of some 30,000 in 1519. Xochimilco’s famed gardens, chinampas, produced enough crops to support a population of 150,000 – a number that included Xochimilco itself as well as Tenochtitlan and the wider basin of Mexico.Footnote ²⁶ Yet the Spanish population was small, reaching perhaps 8,000 by 1550.Footnote ²⁷

Mexico-Tenochtitlan rapidly became multiethnic after 1521. The overall population of central Mexico, like Mexico City, remained overwhelmingly Native. Mexico City had a higher share of Spanish and Afro-descended peoples than the rest of New Spain. The city also had the largest share of Black peoples, both free and enslaved.Footnote ²⁸ Afro-descended peoples “probably outnumbered Spaniards in New Spain by the 1540s.”Footnote ²⁹ A recent survey of mulato community formation in Mexico City summarizes the state of the data: “scholars put the total Mexican population in 1570 as somewhere between 7,000 and 15,000 Europeans and around 20,000 Africans and Mexican-born Blacks, 3.5 million Natives, 2,500 mestizos, and 2,500 mixed-race Afro-Mexicans.”Footnote ³⁰ Population data for Africans and Afro-descended peoples for the earlier sixteenth century is vague but nevertheless reveals a Mexico City that by the end of the century had increasing African presence. Estimates place the Afro-descended population of Mexico City in 1570 between 8,000 and 12,000.Footnote ³¹ Of these, the mulato population ranged between 1,000 and 6,000.Footnote ³²

One should therefore not be surprised that the Spaniards’ acculturation to their predominantly Nahua and increasingly mixed-African ethnic world in Mexico-Tenochtitlan was rapid. Spanish immigration to Mexico City was particularly high in 1535 and 1536, and in the period between 1520 and 1539 approximately 4,000 Iberians migrated to New Spain, perhaps 250 of them women. Of these, perhaps 1,000 migrated to Mexico City; 914 men and an uncertain number of women and children. Women represented about 6 percent of the Iberian migrants to the Americas between 1520 and 1539, or 845 in total of more than 12,000 men. Most of these Iberian women migrated to Santo Domingo (on the island of Hispaniola) and Mexico City.Footnote ³³ More than half of the women who migrated to the Americas were married. We do not know how many of the 845 Iberian women migrants settled in Mexico City. These women lived in a city of some 50,000 Native peoples in the 1530s. Declining Native population after the 1545–8 epidemics changed this ethnic balance but Spanish women remained a small minority in the capital city. Outside of Mexico City, Spanish women were yet scarcer.

Spanish women, and men, had no practical option but to rely on Natives for their everyday social interaction, purchasing of food and household materials, and domestic activities. Such a group integrated multiple aspects of the majority population. The debate concerns the extent to which such acculturation took place.

There is actually more evidence for the rapid acculturation than most historians to date have explored. Early concrete evidence we have for this are Nahuatl loanwords appearing in sorcery investigations and the two earliest extant cases occurred in July 1528. Before the inquisitor fray of Vicente de Santa María in Mexico City on July 1, 1528, two Spanish witnesses testified that a Spanish notary was the relative of Jews executed in Sevilla and that this notary had allowed Native servants to paint an image of a dog, probably Xolotl.Footnote ³⁴ The very first words at the top of the two formal hearings are the following: “in the great city of Tenochtitlan of this New Spain.”Footnote ³⁵ The brief case file also tells us that Nahua cosmology quickly entered the Spanish collective mentality in Mexico-Tenochtitlan and that even Spanish officials referred to the city in its original Nahuatl name.

Historiographical Landscape

This book offers a new approach to questions of acculturation in colonial Mexico. I acknowledge a considerable debt to ethnohistorical scholarship that has paved the way for decades of reconfiguring studies of Native peoples in colonial Mexico. Methodologically, I draw on the work of ethnohistorians who have emphasized reading colonial documentation to glean cultural information, even when the documentation is slight. Epistemologically, I benefit from the exposition of Native societies and cultures in Mesoamerica provided by this ethnohistorical scholarship.

The ethnohistorical scholarship is much too extensive to give exegesis here. Suffice it to say that I count various strands of scholarship among those influencing my thinking. These multiple types of ethnohistory tend to focus either on Native peoples or their responses to colonialism. But there is increasing attention being given to the multiplicity of ethnic identity and of ethnic interaction in colonial Mexico. In the first group, one finds traditional ethnohistory of Native peoples. Bibliographies of this scholarship could easily run to hundreds of pages.

The school of historiography known as the New Philology is associated explicitly with James Lockhart, his students at UCLA, and various scholars working in the general field of history using Native language sources.Footnote ³⁶ But ethnohistory based on Nahuatl sources predates the New Philology of the 1980s and beyond and began in Mexico. The best example of this early development of serious Nahuatl study and its use in historical analysis began with Ángel María Garibay. Trained as a classical philologist, Garibay turned his scholarly attention to Nahuatl poetry in the 1930s and 1940s, producing the seminal works.Footnote ³⁷

Miguel León-Portilla, a student of Garibay, is the best known and most accomplished of the scholars of Nahuatl. He completed his doctoral thesis in 1956 at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM), La filosofía Náhuatl estudiada en sus fuentes, and then published a remarkable corpus of scholarship in a career that spanned six decades. Along with his mentor Garibay, León-Portilla founded the important journal Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl in 1959. The journal continues to publish (volume 67 appeared in 2024) innovative scholarship about and based on Nahuatl language sources.

Mexican Nahuatl scholarship is both important and influential in its own right but also demonstrates the immense debt that the new philological historiography of the US owes it. Taken as a whole, the Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl and the New Philology both emphasize the importance of relying on Native-language sources for interpreting Native history. In the process, these schools of historiography have changed how historians of the colonial era think about its history in general. Once relegated to subsumed analytical status, Native history exploded on the historiographic scene in the 1980s and 1990s.

This new scholarship began with studies of social history. Histories of Native cabildos and of the altepetl as a sociopolitical unit then quickly appeared.Footnote ³⁸ Later studies from the early twenty-first century have included important work on wills and everyday life, on broad social histories of Native regions outside of central Mexico, such as Oaxaca, Michoacán.Footnote ³⁹ In more recent years, large synthetic and highly readable histories of precontact Nahua societies have appeared. Susan Schroeder’s Tlacaelel and Camilla Townsend’s Fifth Sun stand out as magisterial studies of the Mexica from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries.Footnote ⁴⁰

Other strands of ethnohistory have focused on power, war, and law. Long a dramatic subject, the so-called conquest of Mexico has undergone considerable interpretive revision. Mexican scholars, such as Edmundo O’Gorman, had long questioned the usefulness of the language of “discovery.”Footnote ⁴¹ León-Portilla had, at least in his earlier career, spoken of the “vision of the vanquished” – the ways that Nahuas viewed the Spanish invasion and destruction of Tenochtitlan.Footnote ⁴² But in the last two decades, an interpretive scheme called the “new conquest history” has emerged among North American scholars. This strain of thought emphasizes the incomplete nature of Spanish domination, the Spanish use of Native allies (such as Tlaxcalans) in wars of conquest, and of the multidirectional nature of war and conquest in central Mexico.Footnote ⁴³ Legal history has also changed according to a greater emphasis on Native peoples’ adaptation to Iberian legal systems. While the field of derecho indiano (Indies Law) – Spanish law adapted for the Indies – had long considered these issues in abstract, a newer ethnohistory of law has emerged, in no small degree due to the influence of the Argentine scholar of customary law, Víctor Tau Anzoátegui.Footnote ⁴⁴

Negotiation of imperial rule has proven a fruitful area of both cultural and political analysis of late. Some, like Ethelia Ruiz Medrano and María Castañeda de la Paz, have trained their sights on everyday peoples who have contested viceregal authority in the early colonial period.Footnote ⁴⁵ Native elite responses to the colonial system have also offered fertile material for studies of both rural caciques as well as commoners.Footnote ⁴⁶ A veritable cottage industry has sprung up that examines elite Native responses to rule in Mexico-Tenochtitlan.Footnote ⁴⁷

Even this cursory treatment of the scholarship demonstrates the extent to which the emphasis of ethnohistory has been focused on Native responses to imperial rule. Other strands of ethnohistory have emphasized hybridity and ethnic cultural synthesis. Studies of nahuatlatos (interpreters) and ladinos (Natives acculturated to Spanish custom and language) reveal the extent to which being in-between was fraught with challenges.Footnote ⁴⁸ For example, Yanna Yannakakis and Nancy Farriss have shown how these in-between cultural intermediaries bore distrust from both Native and Spanish communities.Footnote ⁴⁹ And, of course, there is an extensive literature about mestizaje (ethnic mixing). Such work analyzes ethnic mixture at a sexual-procreative level as well as a cultural phenomenon.Footnote ⁵⁰ For example, recent work by Adrian Masters shows how the petition system in imperial rule helped to bring about the reordering of royal legislative ethnic categories, especially of mestizo.Footnote ⁵¹ The influence of Africans and Afro-descended peoples has, of late, become more fully integrated into social history, decades after Gonzalo Aguirre Beltrán introduced the analytical emphasis.Footnote ⁵²

There have been many fruitful avenues of religious history among scholars of Native peoples and of hybrid religious systems which help to inform my work here. The idea of Mexican Catholicism as Nahuatlized or as a theological “slippery earth” are especially fruitful.Footnote ⁵³ Thematically, the work of Mark Christensen probably represents the scholarship closest to this book. His work examines how Nahuas and Mayans adapted Catholicism to their own traditional religious ideas and narratives.Footnote ⁵⁴ My book basically does the opposite by analyzing how putatively Catholic women adapted Mesoamerican religion to Spanish Catholic expectations. An earlier historiography had emphasized ideas of a spiritual conquest which, like the military–political conquest, have been largely debunked as oversimplified.Footnote ⁵⁵ For example, David Tavárez shows that amidst extirpation campaigns (attempts to destroy Native religion) even as late as the eighteenth century, Iberian Catholicism failed to eliminate robust Native cosmological and ritual traditions. One observes similar phenomena in Peru.Footnote ⁵⁶ My book once again flips the focus; while Tavárez provides sophisticated analysis of ecclesiastical court prosecution and suppression of Native religion, this book examines inquisitional attacks on sorcery as practiced by non-Native peoples.

Most directly influential for this book as a study of women, sorcery, and acculturation are the historiographies of “discovery,” women, witchcraft, the Inquisition, and social history of Spanish settler-colonists. In the context of Franciscan inquisitors, work like that by George Baudot has proven helpful in understanding how contemporaneous sixteenth-century historians conceptualized their craft.Footnote ⁵⁷ Clearly, the extensive literature on sorcery, witches, and Native magic offer the closest approximation of this book. The work of Noemí Quezada, while published some time ago, remains the best comprehensive discussion of magic and sorcery in colonial Mexico by women.Footnote ⁵⁸ There are some excellent studies but none of them examine the sixteenth century in Mexico. Accordingly, studies of sixteenth-century sorcery analyze European cases (Spain, Italy, Germany, Sicily) or Mesoamerica.Footnote ⁵⁹ Studies of sorcery or women and heterodoxy in Mexico or Latin America tend to examine the eighteenth century and do not treat the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁶⁰

Some works concerning the epistemology of gender and sexuality have been particularly important to my thinking. Camilla Townsend’s Malintzin’s Choices recounts the life of Cortés’ interpreter and onetime lover, Malintzin.Footnote ⁶¹ Her creative reconstruction of a woman’s biography comes via analysis of mentality and choices of a Nahua woman with scarce documentary sources; it brings to mind works like Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie’s Montaillou, the classic microhistory of a French village in the Pyrenees using a medieval inquisitional register.Footnote ⁶² Lisa Sousa’s work on women, shape-shifting, and gender fluidity offers perspective on everyday Native women and their conception of their lives as dynamic and not static.Footnote ⁶³ Recently, Anderson Hagler’s work on nahuallis, homosexuality, and criminalized sex have added nuance to two interrelated areas of analysis – Native religious ritual and sexual categories – both of which Zeb Tortorici and Pete Sigal have studied to excellent effect.Footnote ⁶⁴

Social history of the Inquisition was considered new in the 1980s but has now come to dominate inquisitional historiography. In the case of Mexico, the role of Richard Greenleaf is difficult to overstate. His two studies, Zumárraga and the Mexican Inquisition and The Mexican Inquisition in the Sixteenth Century, were foundational.Footnote ⁶⁵ He anticipated the turn toward social history (of the Inquisition) some two decades in advance. These works showed historians what was possible. Possibilities included the deeply personal nature of inquisitional sources – repositories of information for historians of everyday life, cultural mentalities, and social networks. The use of inquisitional sources for cultural information dominates this book, which has taken cues from a substantial corpus using inquisitional sources for social historical purposes.Footnote ⁶⁶

While this book is not about the history of sexuality per se, the rich history of gender and sexuality in colonial Mexico has informed my thinking. Joan Cameron Bristol’s study of Afro-Mexicans and magic represents an excellent discussion.Footnote ⁶⁷ Nicole von Germeten’s conceptualization of women’s sexual agency has told a compelling story of women and magic and sex work – both in her analysis of Afro-Colombian women accused of sorcery as well as colonial Mexican sex-workers.Footnote ⁶⁸

Social histories of women in colonial Latin America have also helped me a good deal in thinking about the broader implications of a social history of sorcery.Footnote ⁶⁹ Ida Altman has spent an impressive career producing a corpus of exceptionally well-researched histories of Spanish society in sixteenth-century Mexico, and in the 2010s and 2020s turned her analytical attention to the early Spanish presence in the Caribbean. Both on a factual as well as thematic level, Altman’s scholarship has been a model for investigation into the earliest Spanish social networks of Mexico in the 1520s through the 1560s.Footnote ⁷⁰ Work by Pilar Gonzalbo offers a very broad treatment of women, family, and educación in the sense of the Spanish word – educación not only as formal schooling but as social learning and manners.Footnote ⁷¹ Often considered the doyenne of women’s history in colonial Latin America, Asunción Lavrin has shown the way in demonstrating women not to be simple stereotypes of the oppressed and downtrodden in a machista world.Footnote ⁷² Josefina Muriel’s work on punishment of “wayward women” lays bare the very real consequences of violating that machista order.Footnote ⁷³ Sonya Lipsett-Rivera has produced nuanced studies of expectations about gender roles in everyday circumstances; I find inspiration in her attention to subtle cultural detail.Footnote ⁷⁴

These various women historians have given me perspective about a nuanced balance of power of women in colonial societies. Status, ethnicity, economic class, and marriage inform those complex networks of power. To be certain, social disobedience had its costs but the stereotypical image of submissive or hapless victims of machismo is not particularly illuminating. I strive to understand the behaviors of women accused of sorcery with this complexity in mind.

While discussions of women and sorcery tend to focus on the later colonial period, there is some work on the earlier period. Of particular importance is the work of Jacqueline Holler. As far as I know, she is one of the few scholars to take on the challenge of reading and analyzing the extremely long case file concerning the young doña María de Ocampo of Guatemala in 1558. Ocampo was a sixteen-year-old girl who had an affair with the bishop’s brother and was, in turn, accused of making a pact with the devil. Holler offers a superb reading of this difficult case file and of the complex metaphysical and cultural trappings of the people involved in the case (and which I briefly discuss in Chapter 9).Footnote ⁷⁵ Holler’s article “Mixing/Medicines: Healing Exchanges among Women in Early Colonial New Spain (1530–1650)” is subtle and sophisticated. She examines three cases studies, two of which this book discusses – the Black slave Marta of Mexico City in 1536–7 and Isabel or Beatriz de Vera of Michoacán in 1562. Holler focuses on the plebeian women who operated at the fluid nexus of Native and Iberian medical practice. In turn, these women inhabited a world where Spanish control was real but not absolute and where Native remedies began to intermingle in the multiethnic world of women’s healing practices. Moreover, Holler shows that these women lived and operated in networks of knowledge, language, and cultural interchange. Her work is as close to the approach this book takes as any of the scholarship treating the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁶

Finally, there is a small body of work about the early development of Spanish society in sixteenth-century Mexico. Such scholarship is not particularly extensive.Footnote ⁷⁷ But it demonstrates that places like sixteenth-century Mexico-Tenochtitlan were home to a small Spanish population that tried to make sense of its predominantly Native cultural context. Not all such Iberians were wealthy conquistadors or members of the governing elite. My hope is that this book will offer some details about the ways that these non-elite Iberians – in this book, women – navigated their lives in a world where the predominant spoken language of the street was Nahuatl and where ethnic Spaniards represented a small numerical minority.Footnote ⁷⁸ Other areas of inquiry into environmental and food histories tell us that colonial societies did not so much submit to Spanish rule or presence but created new, hybrid ecologies and gastronomies.Footnote ⁷⁹

Book Outline

This book contains three parts. I have designed the book’s structure so that readers can choose to go directly to the section they find most interesting. Part I examines underlying legal, theological, and cosmological ideas about magic and sorcery in both Spain and Mexico. As such, the three chapters in Part I focus on the ideological and structural histories of the suppression of witchcraft. Chapter 1 offers a general overview of how Spanish officials – priests, jurists, inquisitors, theologians – understood sorcery. Chapter 2 outlines in broad strokes the categories of magic as conceived in Mesoamerica, especially among the Nahua of central Mexico. While Chapter 1 examines the apparatus of suppression, Chapter 2 focuses on the conceptualization of magic and the ways that Spaniards tried to make sense of it. Even though Nahuatl word-concepts like tiçitl and nahualli have unique meanings for Nahua peoples, Spanish missionaries and clerics tried to understand how such Nahua ideas approximated Spanish and Basque concepts of magic. Chapter 3 provides a sociology of the inquisitional apparatus in Mexico between the 1520s and the 1560s. Stereotypes of witch crazes do not fit into the Mexican or Spanish context. This chapter aims to show the relative skepticism about witchcraft among the multiple local inquisitions operating in central Mexico, Michoacán, Oaxaca, and Zacatecas.

Part II of this book offers a series of stories about women accused of sorcery, primarily in Mexico City. Spanning the 1520s and 1530s, Part II tries to make sense of the rapid and immediate acculturation of Iberian, African, and Canarian women in Mexico City. The capital city was a multiethnic cosmopolis, where Nahuas were the ethnic majority and Nahuatl the everyday language. Non-Native women immediately adapted to this cultural environment. Chapter 4 tells the stories of Iberian women who performed Nahua rituals and practices of divination and spellcasting as early as 1528. Chapter 5 showcases the intricate networks of cultural exchange between Spanish, Nahua, and African women and Nahua men in 1530s Mexico City. These networks facilitated the exchange of ideas and practice about love magic, spellcasting, and Nahua folk medicine primarily via the Nahuatl language. Chapter 6 examines the African women of an omnibus case of Mexico City in 1536–7 involving Spanish women clients and African women spellcasters. An intriguing category of such spellcasting was a form of freedom magic intended to obtain liberation from chattel slavery. Chapter 7 analyzes the unique experiences of Morisca, Andalucian, and Canarian women, considered oversexed and prone to suspicious forms of love magic.

Part III of this book expands the focus beyond Mexico City and into the 1560s. Accordingly, this section demonstrates a more complex and detailed phase in acculturation. Mexico City in the 1520s and 1530s was ethnically complex and there was clear evidence of rapid adaptation of Iberian and African women to their cosmopolitan home. But by the 1560s, the evidence is much more explicit. One sees more Nahuatl words, such as patle or peyote, employed to describe spells cast. Chapter 8 analyzes the idea of the evil eye (an Iberian idea) and the use of tattooing among Spanish women in Mexico City. Chapter 9 examines the practices of curanderismo (Iberian) and tiçiyotl (Mesoamerican) among mestiza and Spanish women in rural Mexico. Chapter 10 scrutinizes two mulatas accused of being witches. They practiced love magic and midwifery, and one of them, in Zacatecas, included peyote in her magic-medicine. Chapter 11 tells the story of a Canarian woman, Catalina de Peraza, whose behavior – free sexual expression, Canarian sex magic, and Mesoamerican peyote consumption – encapsulates the various themes of this book about cultural syncretism.

There were no witch hunts or witch crazes in Mexico. Even less so did such witch hunts take place before 1571 – the epochal focus of this book – when the Holy Office of the Inquisition was established in Mexico City. Popular imagination and even scholarly assumptions portray the Inquisition as a uniquely sadistic institution of the medieval and early modern Catholic world.Footnote ⁸⁰ Gretchen Starr-Lebeau offers a welcome debunking of the Black Legend of the Spanish Inquisition in a recent book.Footnote ⁸¹ But the witch hunts that people think about largely took place in German or French lands. The witch hunts of Spain were limited to Navarre in the 1520s and 1609–10. Mexico, however, had few such experiences. Indeed, this book draws on evidence from a relatively small grouping of sorcery investigations and prosecutions. In Mexico, the various inquisitions were focused on other perceived crimes: Native men practicing Mesoamerican religious ritual; Judaizing; heresy; Lutheranism; and blasphemy.

The women in this book relied on magic to assert some agency and power in a man’s political world. Men controlled the apparatus of public power – officeholding, the clergy, the Church, royal courts, and the spoils of war. But women were not powerless. They operated in the more intimate worlds of private life, the home, and the countryside. They often cast spells specific to love magic – binding, divination, and protection. But these women were also medical practitioners – tı̄tı̄cih or curanderas (folk healers). They cured the evil eye, delivered babies, and cured people according to Nahua metaphysical concepts of disease.

While the overall number is small – less than thirty – the women accused of sorcery in Mexico in these first five decades of Spanish–Mesoamerican contact tended to be women stereotypically suspected of illicit behavior. Virtually all of the women accused of sorcery in this period were Andalucian, Basque, Canarian, Morisca/Maghrebi, mulata, or Senegambian. All of those women were seen as particularly prone to sexual excess, sorcery, or rebellion on some level. Yet, Canarian, Basque, and Morisca women represented a small fraction of the Iberian migrants in Mexico. They were clearly targeted as more prone to sorcery. La Celestina (1499) and the Retrato de la loçana andaluza (1528) were bestselling books about two stock characters. The woman Celestina came to be a synonym for alcahueta (procuress or pimp) and Lozana represented the idea of oversexed women of southern Spain. Both offered prototypes of Andalucian women or others who worked as both sorceresses and alcahuetas, to the extent that the roles of alcahueta and hechicera were often conflated in both popular culture and inquisitional investigations. Moreover, Andalucian, Canarian, and Morisca women all were associated with sexual libertinage and exotic allure. Mulata women, by definition, were the products of socially illicit unions, in many cases between Spanish men and African slaves. Enslaved African women were viewed as by definition troublesome. Basque women had a reputation as witches, associated with the witch hunts of Navarre in the 1520s, in which Mexico’s first bishop and inquisitor, Juan de Zumárraga, had participated. It is hardly accidental that of all the women accused of sorcery in Mexico in this period, most of them belonged to these ethno-regional categories.

With these considerations in mind, let us turn to the myriad ways that Iberians constructed categories of sorcery, magic, and folk medicine. Such social, theological, and juridical creations informed the actions Spanish Catholic judges took to root out such mentalities and behaviors in Mexico.

In telling these stories, there is a lot of uncertainty. You will find little positivist epistemology in this book. Rather, I try to reconstruct the lives and mentalities of these women as best as possible with the sources available. Much like historians of medieval sects targeted by the Inquisition, my study offers glimpses into a shadow world. Most of the cases discussed here have only received cursory analysis. Many cases have never seen any modern-day appreciation. I have tried to excavate the cultural milieux of these women and to give their stories new life. But there are limits to how much we can know. These were women living in the very earliest stages of a monumental culture encounter. They were only just starting to develop a language for their hybrid social world and trying to make sense of it. By reconstructing as much as possible of these lives, I point to little moments that light up a corner of this otherwise unknown world.