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This chapter tells the story of two mulata women in the 1560s. Bárbola de Zamora was born in Seville and migrated to Mexico where she worked as a midwife in the mining region of Zacatecas. Inquisitional courts condemned her in 1565 and 1569 for sorcery, love magic, and for being an alcahueta. She introduced the hallucinogenic peyote into her life by paying Native men to eat it to find her escaped slaves. Her case also shows the extent to which a Spanish mulata midwife may have learned from the Nahua tradition of temixihuiliztli, or obstetrics. Beatriz de León was accused of being a sorceress in Mexico City in 1571. She used patles (herbal medicine, potion) in her spells. She faced trial before the royal magistrate and a wealthy Spanish notary (possibly her lover) came to her rescue and paid for her bail. These mulatas defied stereotypes of helpless social pariahs. Zamora’s domestic possessions revealed a woman of means who had copper cookware and Spanish soap. She also had a metate, written as such in a Spanish document. These cases reveal the earliest use of three Nahuatl loanwords in Spanish: peyote, patle, and metate.
Catalina de Peraza exemplifies the women found in this book. She was an illegitimate daughter of the Count of Peraza. An Andalucian from the Canaries, she represented the stereotype of oversexed and exotic Iberian woman. She migrated to Mexico around 1565, and was implicated for homicide but released because of her high status and ended up in Guanajuato, where she had designs on the royal magistrate, who seems to have rejected her, accusing her of being a prostitute and witch. Witnesses described a wealthy woman (she owned two domestic slaves), who mixed her vaginal bathwater with her paramour’s mustard supply. Most profoundly, she also ate peyote to divine the intent of this man. Peraza was the first documented case of a Spaniard eating peyote. Peyote use had originally been a sacred collective event for entire communities. Peraza was the first Spaniard to experiment with the creolization of hallucinogen use in Mexico.
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