The people of the portuguese and spanish colonies

The People of the Portuguese and Spanish Colonies in America

Catarina de Monte Sinay

1680-1758 Bahia, Brazil Portuguese Female Nun and entrepreneur -Catarina grew up in a weathy family who had raised her to become

a nun. When she was a child, they emigrated to Brazil. When she became a nun she began making many business endeavors. She sold sweets and sold houses without the permission of the arch bishop.

Catarina De Monte Sinay

In 1696 Catarina had become Madre Catarina de Monte Sinay. The town threw a big celebration. Following the festivities Catarina vowed to God that she would forever honor her sacred promise to live in poverty, chastity, and obedience.

To Catarina the occasion signified her spiritual wedding on entering the cloister, she symbollically dedicated her life to being a “bride of Christ.” She rejoiced inwardly of the hard-fought battle to become a nun that she had won.

Antonio de Gouveia 1505-1566  Archipelago of the Azores Portuguese Male Adventurer and Priest

He knew astrology and alchemy, read fortunes, fortold happenings, practiced medicine having sometime success of the amateur, and believed that he had the key to invisibility.

Antonio de Gouveia

He spent his youth in Azores, the nine islands of archipelago. A man of Gouveia’s curiosity and wanderlust found himself at the optimum junction of time and place. Chronicles of colonial Brazil refer to him fleetingly and with disgust.

He managed very well on his wits and he spent his life, however punctured by mishap, that tells how broad the parameters were of thinking and feeling during that period of transition of looser humanism of the early sixteenth century and the stricter ethic of Tridentine renewal.

Micaela Angela Carrillo

1700’s Amazoc, Mexico Spanish Female Widow and Pulque dealer

Story of a woman who rose from near destitution on the death of her husband to become an important landowner in the town in which she dwelt.

Micaela Angela Carrillo

She and her daughter Maria Antonia, performed some of the tasks usually reserved for men such as laboring in the fields, they manufactured pulque, and intoxicating drink which they also retailed, rode horseback, and traded in the city.

Micaela lived all her life in Nuestra Senora de Asuncion Amozoque a predominantly Indian village. The two women in the Carrillo family learned to use the new opportunities created by the expansion of the pulque trade to become one of the wealthiest families in their community.

Beatriz de Padilla

1650 Lagos, Spain Spanish Female Mistress and Mother

Beatriz was accused of having caused mysterious and dreadful things to happen to two of her lovers. According to the charges, she had poisoned the first of them and then several weeks later she had driven the lord mayor of Juchipila crazy through an exercise of magic.

Beatriz de Padilla

On the prisoner’s dock in Mexico City, Beatriz told the inquisitors in a spirited language that she was not a mulatta, but a lighter skinned morisca, the daugher of a white man and a mulatta. Beatriz had begun her life as a slave, inheriting her mother’s status, but both she and Cecilia had at length been granted their freedom thanks to the benevolence of their employer and presumably their own satisfactory service in the priest’s household.

At the same time of her arrest and removal to Mexico City, Beatriz had been a housekeeper and mistress in the service of don Diego de las Marinas, the lord mayor of Juchipila. The mulatta mistress as a social type has always attracted the attention of the students of colonial society. There is still suspicion that perhaps they did make use of love potions or other magic that turned their white owner-keepers into sexual slaves.

Diego Vasicuio

1580-1670’s Peru Spanish Male Native Priest

He was a quiet, cautious man and he had managed to survive to an advanced age by avoiding direct contact with the Spanish Imperial systems whenever possible, confronting it only when necessary.

Deigo Vasicuio

Diego would direct Father Bernardino de Prado, the parish priest, toward investigating a rival cult and its clandestine ceremonies rather than his own. He was an influential member of Indian communities and worked through individual, informal contacts with their neighbors to hand down gods and gospels from one generation of believers to another.

Diego’s parents and grandparents had entrusted him with the stone image of the god Sorimana, and had taught him to recite the proper prayers and perform he specific ceremonies of his cult. Diego Vasicuio’s achievements may seem to have been insignificant, but survival through adaptation was the best that most Native Americans living under European domination could hope for.

Isabel Moctezuma

1509-1551 New Spain Spanish Female Pioneer of Mestizaje

She was the daugher of Aztec ruler Moctezuma II. After the Spanish Conquest Isabel was recognized as Moctezuma’s legitamate heir and became one of the Mexican Indians granted as encomienda.

Isabel Moctezuma

Hernan Cortes and his Spanish army entered Tenochtitlan on November 8, 1519 and quickly took Moctezuma as a hostage. Donna Isabel died in 1550 or 1551. her estate was large consisting of personal possessions she had acquired during her marriage with the Spaniards. Previous to those marriages she had been an Aztec princess who owned nothing except her distinguished name.

Isabel proved to be more than pawn in the hands of Aztec royalty and Spanish conquerors. She was a decisive and strong woman who was generous and thoughtful. Isabel was the first great success of assimilation of Spanish and Indian.