Genero, raza y genero literario en los conventos para mujeres indigenas en el Mexico colonial (Spanish text)

Scholars know little about indigenous women in colonial Mexico because few sources reveal their private lives. Material written in convents, however, presents new possibilities for developing a history of indigenous Mexican women. This dissertation analyzes the texts produced in the only three convents for indigenous women that existed in colonial Mexico. The genres that I examine are biographies and letters written by indigenous nuns, as well as biographies, sermons, and letters written by priests about the nuns. Written genres became deeply implicated in the social organization of colonial Mexico and accrued social power. The use of a certain genre within religious settings bore out the definitions and limitations of gender and race. I demonstrate that when indigenous nuns expressed themselves in the genres available to them, they challenged the ways in which male writers portrayed them and demonstrated the agency of indigenous women during the colonial period.; I devote a chapter to study the formal characteristics of each of the genres used by the priests and nuns and show that the use of a genre had gendered and racial implications. Sermons, for example, were restricted to clergy. By delivering a sermon in a public arena about an exemplary nun, priests called for spiritual and ideological conformity and enforced the dominance of a learned male elite. Biographies and letters were accessible to both men and women, although access was markedly different for each. With the endorsement of priests, nuns wrote about the lives of other nuns in the convent, and then priests altered the biographical accounts written by the nuns and transformed them into hagio-biographies, published for circulation in colonial society. Through letters, nuns communicated privately and personally with church authorities. I conclude that both men and women exercised power through their writings. Even though women were subjugated to men in the religious sphere, nuns challenged notions of gender and race.