Conventual contracts: Power and property in Oaxaca, Mexico, 1700--1820

Financial interactions between convents and people in lay communities had many implications on the social and economic life in colonial Latin America. Nuns lived the contemplative life in a cloister, but at the same time they had enduring and evolving relations with the outside world. Little is understood, however, about the process of these interactions. This is a study of the impact of the Dominican convent of Santa Catalina de Siena on the economic development of Oaxaca during the eighteenth century. It is part of the growing body of literature on convent history that explores the convents' relationships with the world around them. Quantitative data obtained from hundreds of contracts pertaining to the convent of Santa Catalina, including censos, titles to properties and transfers of properties, bills of sale of slaves, in addition to qualitative sources such as nun's own writings and extensive correspondence between anticlerical reformers and the nuns' ecclesiastical representatives, found at multiple private, state and Church archives, broaden our understanding of the formal credit system, the slave experience, and the effects of the Enlightenment on religious life in New Spain. This research reveals that power and property defined relations between the Dominican convent and the lay community. In a specie-starved economy, the convent had access to bullion received in dowries and various investments, and regularly entered into financial contracts with people in Oaxaca. Nuns routinely lent money to people outside the elite group, and people in the middling group, including indigenous people and mulattoes, relied on the formal credit network to borrow money. This cooperation between convent and laity promoted social mobility and growth of the middling sector. In addition to urban properties, the convent invested in rural properties and relied on Afro-Mexican slave labour at their sugar plantation. Compared to other slave owners in the area, the convent promoted family formation and sold female slaves together with their young children. Wealth and economic prosperity of the convent became jeopardized however, when the nuns rejected the 1795 education reform. They interpreted it as an attack on their property and relative autonomy by anticlerical politicians and in defending their actions and ideas, the nuns misjudged Oaxacan laity. Propertied people desired lay education for their children, and a diminished political and economic role for the Church. When these objectives were not met, the convent was not able to secure new contracts, or to hold on to its existing properties and power. This dissertation shows the complexities of the connections between the convent and the lay world, and how the two were intertwined.