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Catalina Andrango-Walker
The inhabitants of the Andean region in the seventeenth century took great joy and pride in the beatification and later canonization of Rosa de Lima (1586-1617), their first American-born saint. While Saint Rosa's fame was quickly expanding, people in the city of Quito were also fascinated with their own exemplary case: the remarkable story of Mariana de Jesús (1618-1645), the young penitent beata who offered her life to God in order to free the city from earthquakes and epidemics. These two local women, whom the Catholic Church put forward as paradigms of piety provided the Andean people with models of spirituality that had previously been found only in European saints and mystics. At the same time, they were a reflection of the advanced spiritual development of the region. Quito also produced other lesser-known models of religious perfection, including two such women who lived in the Convent of Santa Clara around the same time: the accomplished black veil nun, poet and musician Getrudes de San Yldefonso (1652-1709) and the beata profesa Juana de Jesús (1662-1703). Although they held different stations within a very hierarchical nunnery, both acquired power and fought to reform the relaxed rules of their convent. Through the biographies of both women I argue that the Carmelite Friar Martín de la Cruz, who wrote the biography of Getrudes, and the Franciscan priests Antonio Fernández Sierra and Francisco Xavier Antonio de Santa Maria, the authors of Juana's biography, took advantage of the extreme piety exhibited by both women, along with their marginal existence in terms of gender and geography, in order to promote them as exemplary women and to build criollo identity. In this study I establish a dialogue between Getrudes's and Juana's biographies to focus on the masculine writing strategies that position them as exemplary pious women. My analysis pays special attention to the way in which the male authors construct the authority of their spiritual daughters by emphasizing their humility and extreme piety, but also by erasing the communal efforts in the reform of the relaxed rules of their convent and by presenting each of them as the only protagonist in these efforts.
