Margaret Chowning - Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent, 1752-1863

Rebellious Nuns:

Mexican Convent,

17521863

MARGARET CHOWNING

Rebellious Nuns

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Rebellious Nuns

The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent,

17521863

margaret chowning

2006

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chowning, Margaret.

Rebellious nuns : the troubled history of a Mexican convent, 17521863 / Margaret Chowning.

p.

cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13 978-0-19-518221-7

ISBN 0-19-518221-9

1. Purima Concepcio (Convent : San Miguel el Grande, Guanajuato, Mexico)History.

2. ConventsMexicoGuanajuatoHistory.

I. Title.

BX4220.M4C46

2005

271'.97dc22

2005040660

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

To Irv, Polly, and Sarah

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Acknowledgments

First, many thanks to Sister Mar Lilia of the present-day community of the Order of the Immaculate Conception of San Miguel, whose story gave this book a much better ending than I could have hoped for. Sister Mar of the San Jose monastery of Conceptionists in Guadalajara, Spain, has also shown a keen interest in this book and helped out with technical questions about the order.

In Morelia, the staff of the archepiscopal archive has been warm and welcoming for many years, but was especially helpful on this book. Emelia Hernadez Ramos, Sergio Monjara Martez, and Hugo Sandino Bautista were always friendly and are now friends. Pat and Ben Warren have also been wonderful friends and hosts over many summers in Morelia.

Guillermo G. Engelbrecht of the Instituto Allende, housed in the summer home of Mar Josepha Lina de la Canals family, went out of his way to photograph a lovely portrait of her that hangs in the chapel. Also in San Miguel, Helene Kahn made a valiant effort to track down artwork.

Andrew Paxman and Karen Melvin did legwork in Mexico City for me and willingly added my pile of photocopied documents to their own heavy paper burdens when they returned from field research. Karen also served as a research assistant in Morelia, culling the Santa Catarina documents for statistics on entrances and professions to that convent, and while the work that Nicole Von Germeten did during her research assistantship will mainly be used in another book, in a general way, it helped give shape to this one. Special

viii

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

thanks to Jessica Delgado, without whom this book would have had a blank space for a cover.

A number of colleagues, students, relatives, and friends have read all or part of the manuscript and have helped me to write a book that we all agreed should be accessible to general readers, but also adhere to high standards of scholarshipnot always an easy balance to strike. William Taylor and Tom Brady read the manuscript twice, with their customary care and insight. Tulio Halperin-Donghi, Gene Brucker, and Randy Starn were also among the first to give me feedback on how to proceed, once the basic outlines of the narrative were in place. Stephanie Ballenger and Kristin Huffine made a number of suggestions for reading and revision on the section in Chapter 3 on the mal,

the strange affliction from which the nuns in Phelipas faction suffered. Cyn-thia Read, my Oxford editor, helped me see ways to make the story of the mal, and other parts of the book as well, more compelling. Brian Connaughtons generous and close reading improved the manuscript and reinvigorated my enthusiasm for my original project on women, the church, and politics. At a later stage, Mark Healey, Yuri Slezkine, and Peggy Anderson offered suggestions, insights, and encouragement. My lay readers were my mother, Pat Chowning, who also helped tabulate some of the figures from the Santa Catarina convent, and Sue Kern, my college roommate and a better history major than I was. Martha Barber has always protected my best interests, and did so in the context of this book as well. Now that Sarah and Polly are in college and wading through many more books each week than they ever did in high school, they have been transformed into advocates for readability and brevity.

Most of all, though, my husband, Irv Scheiner, has been adviser, critic, and cheerleader from the very beginning. When I started coming back each evening from the archive with stories of what the rebellious nuns did today,

it was he, speaking as a fellow historian caught up in the excitement of the archival chase, who first said that I had a book (one that I hadnt intended to write). His good nature prevailed through spending our honeymoon in San Miguel, a town whose hills and cobblestones and narrow sidewalks give his knees fits, so that I could tie up a few last loose ends, and he kept his mouth mainly shut when I announced that I needed another trip back in the summer of 2004, to tie up the last of the last of the loose ends. Many thanks and much love.

Contents

x

c o n t e n t s

Rebellious Nuns

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This book came about accidentally. In 1999, in the early stages of researching a project on women, the church, and politics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mexico, I stumbled upon a bundle of letters, interviews, questionnaires, and commissioned reports in the archive of the bishopric of Michoaca, all concerning what the bishop called a rebellion in the convent of La Purima Concepcio in San Miguel el Grande, today San Miguel de Allende. The documents were misfiled with material from another convent also called La Purima Concepcio, a Capuchin convent in Salvatierra. It is not difficult to see how the filing error was made, but it meant that the unusually rich records on the San Miguel convent filed properly under Concepcionistas could not easily be married to the extraordinary documentation on the rebellion in the convent, mistakenly filed under Capuchinas. It quickly became clear to me that this marriage should take place, and I put my original book on the back burner to focus on this one.

Although the long period of the rebellion (17591772), with its dramatic intensity and its remarkable cast of characters, is the centerpiece of the story, I have chosen to construct the book as a narrative of La Purimas history during the whole period of its existence, from the decision in 1752 to found the convent to the forced eviction of the nuns in 1863. This organizational strategy was dictated in part by the abundance and importance of the material on the period after the rebelliona body of documents that yielded its own vivid glimpses of convent life, story lines, and memorable charactersbut mainly by my growing realization that what happened to