Ten Notable Women of Colonial Latin America

Review\nThis book is an excellent teaching tool due to its breadth of coverage of Latin America, its informed description of the women’s roles in each era, and its accessible narrative. I assigned the earlier version of this book in my survey classes for years, and students inevitably cited it as their favorite book. In a field remarkably bereft of readable textbooks, Ten Notable Women of Colonial Latin America is a rare gem—a volume guaranteed to engage the attention and enthusiasm of undergraduates. -- Jane M. Rausch, emerita, University of Massachusetts Amherst\nA useful collection of important biographies that offers an introduction to a history of enormous complexity and, at the same time, provides a highly usable entree into the rapidly expanding historiography of women in Latin America. -- Louis A. Pérez Jr., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill\nThis lively volume is much more than just a biographical sketch of the lives of women in colonial Latin America. Rather, the text places ten highly influential women of differing ethnic, racial, and social backgrounds into their rightful place in space and time. Each chapter exquisitely studies how these women maintained agency over their lives while contextualizing them in the often harsh realities of the colonial world. Beautifully narrated and highly readable, the book moves swiftly and will quickly engage high school and undergraduate students. -- Bridget María Chesterton, SUNY Buffalo State\nIn the seventeenth century, Catalina de Erauso, at age sixteen a renegade Basque nun, escaped from her convent and traveled to the New World, eventually reaching Peru. She became an outlaw and a crossdresser with a price on her head. Yet she ended her days absolved by both the King of Spain and the Pope, the latter of whom granted her permission to dress as a man for the remainder of her life. The Nun Ensign passed her final years guarding silver shipments on the Mexico City-Veracruz highway. The life of the Nun Ensign highlights not just her extraordinary life but also the opportunities seized by women in colonial Latin America.
This book profiles the Nun Ensign and nine other women of colonial Latin America, offering an alternate method for understanding the region and its history. The ten figures span different ethnic, geographic, occupational, and class backgrounds. Through their stories, the reader comes away with an enriched understanding of colonial Latin American history.