This chapter tells the story of two mulata women in the 1560s. Bárbola de Zamora was born in Seville and migrated to Mexico where she worked as a midwife in the mining region of Zacatecas. Inquisitional courts condemned her in 1565 and 1569 for sorcery, love magic, and for being an alcahueta. She introduced the hallucinogenic peyote into her life by paying Native men to eat it to find her escaped slaves. Her case also shows the extent to which a Spanish mulata midwife may have learned from the Nahua tradition of temixihuiliztli, or obstetrics. Beatriz de León was accused of being a sorceress in Mexico City in 1571. She used patles (herbal medicine, potion) in her spells. She faced trial before the royal magistrate and a wealthy Spanish notary (possibly her lover) came to her rescue and paid for her bail. These mulatas defied stereotypes of helpless social pariahs. Zamora’s domestic possessions revealed a woman of means who had copper cookware and Spanish soap. She also had a metate, written as such in a Spanish document. These cases reveal the earliest use of three Nahuatl loanwords in Spanish: peyote, patle, and metate.

This chapter presents a close reading of two witchcraft trials, one against the Spanish midwife Isabel de Morales in 1537, and the second against two women in Mexico City in 1566, doña María de Anuncibay and María de Lugo. The chapter analyzes peculiarities of these cases. Morales was a low-status Spanish woman who worked as a midwife in Mexico City. The Inquisition focused on multiple suspicious behaviors. She cured the evil eye; made suspicious incantations that nobody understood; and worked as a kind of gynecologist and performed surgeries (possibly on vaginas or uteruses) with a black-handled knife. She was a hybrid tiçitl-curandera. Her curing of the evil eye caught attention because such cures were considered superstitious. Midwives were always at risk from claims that they caused the evil eye or death of infants. The other case concerned a wealthy Basque woman, Anuncibay, and a lower-status Andalucian, who was an illegitimate daughter of the adelantado of the Canaries. These women were accused of keeping a familiar (spirit) in a glass jar and of getting tattoos on their legs – of some demon or possibly of a Mesoamerican god-like Quetzalcoatl.