Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. She led a life that really in many ways shouldn't have been possible. So says historian Paul Gillingham on Suhwana in Estela Cruz. This 17th century polymath and none challenged conventions in so many ways, earning through her extraordinary books and poems a place in the pantheon of great Mexican literary figures. And directing more than a few barbs at the patriarchy along the way. Here in conversation with Spencer Misen, Paul discusses the life of a woman he describes as the Spanish Shakespeare. So Paul, we're here today to talk about the life of Suhwana in Estela Cruz, a Mexican poet, dramatist, scholar, and nun who lived in the second half of the 17th century. Now my guess is that a lot of our listeners won't know a lot about her. So I wonder if you could begin by giving us a quick introduction to this remarkable woman. Who was Suhwana in Estela Cruz in a nutshell? So she was born in central Mexico, just underneath the volcano, Bobo Catebitl, next to Mexico City. In either 1648 or 1651, we're not sure. Her mother was the owner or the family of Anacienba, so a larger state. Her father depends which variant you take was a Spanish rogue who got Donyes O'Belle, her mother pregnant, not once but three times, but then disappeared each time. And so you have in Suhwana a child of privilege, but she's Spanish born in Mexico, which makes her a Creole, a second-class citizen, and she's illegitimate. And you might think that this would be a totally disabling socially in a culture of honour, a culture that's formally structured along the lines of race, but it's not at all. And it's not at all for three reasons. First of all, she's extremely intelligent and driven. Secondly, she's a beauty. And third, she's well-enough connected to where, as a teenager, she can be sent from this very small village. It's still a couple of thousand people into the heart of the world's greatest metropolis, Mexico City. And there she joins the court. She becomes part of the entourage of the vice-rain and lives there for the rest of her life. But aged 16 or 17, she decides that being an ornament of the court isn't all it's cracked up to be, and decides that not ever wanting to marry and not wanting to be fluttering around an endless cocktail party, which is what the vice-regal court is. She takes vows as a nun. And she goes first of all to a rather austere monastery, called the monastery of Santa Paula, where she leaves one of her many really snarkier sides to extent of the Abysses wisdom and commitment to learning and religion. She's not impressed. And so after a few months, six months maybe, she opts for clustered life as a nun in the Concentre Saint-Gironomo. And the Concentre Saint-Gironomo is a much, much more interesting place in the Nacronistic terms. It's much more liberal. And it lies her to have an apartment to build a large library to gather scientific instruments, telescopes, astrolabes. And to form what really is, as literary salon, Avon Alettre, in this apartment, in this Convent where she holds court, as the main intellectual of her time until 1695 when she dies. So she has a 20 plus year career, as Beleding Intellectual of New Spain. And people would argue Spain itself. So tell us, and if you would pour a little bit about the world, she lived in. What was New Spain like in the second half of the 17th century? Especially for a woman, especially for a woman with her intellectual capabilities? Well, it's traditionally seen as quite authoritarian, segregated very strongly into men and women's spheres of power, what they couldn't, couldn't do. And that is quite true, but we can't trace very convincingly how much power every day women had. Because we just see once in a while they come into the record. And sometimes they come into the record for really interesting reasons, like female bandits. And there's several great examples of those. And sometimes they come in in the law records because they've been spectacularly publicly rude to a bureaucrat. Or in sohwanese case, she comes in because she is an exceptional writer. And an exceptional writer with the contacts, every writer needs to get published, to hold forth, and to be respected, digested, listen to. So women's role in the new world is formerly one where an old culture of honor keeps them very controlled, very submissive, even that's confined to their houses, but at the same time there's wiggle room. And there's wiggle room for two classes. And one is the poor, because the poor you get, there isn't a house to be confined to. And the family needs you to go out and make some money. So the poor women have actually ironically more freedom than the richer. But then among the richer, there are these occasional quite exceptional characters, whether they be noble women or whether they be in sohwanese case, a woman from really next to nowhere who becomes the foremost intellectual and the most visible woman really of a rage. So as you said earlier, sohwanese was born out of wedlock to a family of modest means. What was her early life like? Can you tell us a little bit about that please? Well, there's lots of really good reasons to enjoy studying sohwanese, which I hope will have time to get into. One of them is I just said that women don't crop up in the historical record. Sohwanese, a major exception, not just because of whom she becomes, but because she leaves behind an autobiography. And so we actually know far more about her early life than the huge majority of women in the Spanish-speaking world, the 17th century. So we know that from the start she is absolutely obsessed with books and learning. And so she's very early on says I decided not to eat cheese because I was told that cheese made one stupid. With time her grip of science means she does go back to cheese because she sees that it actually doesn't. But she starts off very young, aged three. And she's extremely lucky because her mother believes in education. Her grandfather has a significant library. And there is actually once again challenging our preconceptions of what the Vice-Regal world was. There was a primary school for girls nearby. And so age three she can read. She follows her elder sister to school, plays hooky but from home not school and starts learning there. And she's quick enough between that, her mother, her library. To her age six she says I found out there was a university in Mexico City. And I said to my mom, look if I cut my hair short and dress up as a boy, can I go to school and then university and my mother says no sorry that's that. That option's not on the table. She does though cut her hair but she doesn't cut her hair so that she can pass as a boy. She cuts her hair as this fantastic incentive to actually learn her Latin because she's already moving beyond the confines of Spanish to Latin, Greek and the indigenous language now at the for area. And so to learn Latin she says every time I get a grammar lesson wrong I will cut off a chunk of my hair. And the reason I will do this is it's a great incentive to actually get your grammar right. And it is better to be ornamented inside the outside your head. What kind of person was she? What did people who crossed her path sort of rise about her? What impression did she make on them? Oh she was utterly captivating. And she was captivating because she was using the word carefully a polymath. She knew as close as anybody could time everything. Obviously this has been impossible for several hundred years but in the 1680s and 70s you could come pretty close. If you read voraciously had the library, had the memory and the drive and the intelligence. And so her intelligence captivated people. Her looks captivated people. There's a wonderful painting of her in her library which really captures so much. So you have to imagine there's this very self-possessed looking woman in the robes of a nun looking directly at the painter and she's got a globe, she's got I think a telescope, she's got they called a scientific instrument foreground. And then background there is just a wall of books. It's like when a professor tries to look seriously professurally, you know, you've got your leatherbound terms. She's got that and there's this wonderful calm look of somebody who is utterly self-possessed. And the final thing which is beautiful about that picture is not how much it tells us about her life and her charisma but also a gun about her society because it's painted by the greatest painter of her day, a man called Miguel Cabrera and Miguel Cabrera happens to be pure Zapotec Indigenous. And so you have this coming together of what on on cheap preconceptions should never have happened, an incredibly powerful woman and an incredibly powerful Indigenous painter. And can you tell us a little bit more about her life between leaving home and becoming a nun? Well she attained social mobility by becoming very close to three vice-renes and this is the absolute social and political center of vice-regal Mexico. The name would indicate the vice-royer is the vice king. He has the divine and temporal power that a king would have. He is the king's doppelganger. And it's so far away, it's sort of six months away to get to and back from Spain, they have extraordinary independence until the end when they get audited. It's wonderful. They can do what they want for five years. Then in the sixth year of their term they get audited and life gets interesting for almost all of them. Meanwhile they are absolutely central to the social life of new Spain and their wives of course are aristocrats and they range greatly. Their courts are the social center and many of them are clearly quite bored by it and you can read very much between the lines. They sort of board wealthy intellect and Sorjuana has the luck to come across three of these all of whom take her to heart and she starts off in the 1660 with the Marquis de Mancerra who is actually Italian. And so again you've got this different world and then the last one is the incredibly important Maria Luisa Gonzaga who is the Marquesa de Laguna and she turns up in 1680. Sorjuana is 30, real peak for power and Sorjuana writes an ode for the arrival of the vice-rois and the arrival of the vice-rois is a week long parade up the mountain from the main port Veracruz through the mountains stopping it city after city until they get to Mexico City and it's unbelievably choreographed things like the parade through even medium-sized towns they're carefully organized this sort of following group of weretes by their order of social importance. And so you have these and you have a specially made book and you have triumphal arches which they go under and it really makes sense of how Sorjuana captivated this key figure in her life, the Marquesa de Laguna when you see that her designed arch was the second that this new vice-roi came to and her verse about it was the first in the ceremonial book and so the greatest Mexican intellectual of his age was a man wrote a preface this book saying you know what I would have loved to have been top of this book but actually there's this woman she's a non Sorjuana and she really should go first because she is the brightest light we have and so there's this entire extraordinary sort of CV acted out before Marquesa arrives and then she's left there as I say you keep imagining board to tears I don't think it's projecting too much from our time and so she joins this literary salon of Sorjuana and this is the final sort of consecration and she has Sorjuana's works published in Madrid some of them stay in print for 30 years which is a record which you know my peers and I would aspire to but we ain't going to get it and so that's the final step from merit cratically one fame to this backing by an extremely powerful patroness and this means across the 1680s and particular it's the peak for writing she can't do whatever she wants but she can come very close to it they're growing up won't be long before the thought of a family holiday is just but with Hilton's staycations all over the UK we don't need to go far to feel close and with connecting rooms confirmed when we book we'll have plenty of space to make the most of every moment everyone in the photo when time away means time together it matters where you stay booknowathilton.com Hilton for this day so tell us a bit about our decision to become a nun what drove that and how did being a nun impact on her literary hyper she decided to become a nun and she says in this wonderful autobiography because I had no intention of marrying and as a nun I would be able to study and think and write and of course this might sound slightly extraordinary that a nun would have such freedom but nuns for centuries millennia even going back to the sixth century at least as far as I know nuns are actually really quite powerful and can be independent depending of which institution they're in and in new Spain a lot of them they become nuns either because their parents don't have the money for a suitable dowry or because they take one look at the alternatives of married life and think well no thanks that looks extremely tedious and so you get these quite I hesitate to use the word fun but I don't at all you get these quite fun convents non-served among other things with theatre and so they love putting on armdram they read a lot as they say they can have quite strong contacts with the outer world depending on which nunnery they're in and so it's nothing like our preconception of this very cloistered life and for a nun her writer could be quite baudian ride board couldn't it can you tell us a little bit about that please yeah certainly first of all she wrote more or less every genre you can imagine and so she wrote an activity plays she wrote theological essays she wrote what we might call proto nationalist even plays there's this fantastic one called the divine Narcissus where we're in the 1680s and you have three characters one represents America one religion and one zeal then there's poetry and then as you say you go through love sonnets and sort of with increasing eyebrow raising levels of insinuation thematics of precision through a series of love sonnets we're in the same sort of register as Shakespearean sonnets and these are very very straightforward declarations of art and love and then as you point out there's a poem which well there's five which it almost sounds as though she wrote for a bat and which are straightforwardly baudian so quickly to quote because I thought you might possibly ask this there's one which ends up and it's so I say in this to one thing I aspire that your love and my good wine will draw you hither and to tumble you to bed I can conspire okay not quite living up to my preconception of a nun and this is where you get part of the strong fascination with her is the prerent one this is very sathic and so one of the questions has always been you know is this courtly love and they're directed towards her patrons and especially her patroness the marquis de la guna is this courtly love or is this straightforwardly sathic and when you look at the contents of this you think good grief but there is first of all her background in that she was a member of a fairly not loose living but it's an aristocratic court and you know these places can at times be quite you know it's actually explicit etc and so having gone from that background into church it's a bit like anybody's ever looked at the anguish sacks and his listening there's St. Cuthbert of the seventh century and St. Cuthbert is great he's known for his asceticism but he lived as a sort of aristocrat warrior beforehand and with this in mind reading between the lines you see that he sort of haunted his entire life by fears that sort of love of of money and women will come back to him so Juan is not quite like that so Juan we can recognize I think in this trope from the last century whereby a woman who is independent avoids men and is intelligent and feminist clearly they're gay absolutely so there's this trope which you can't really know and what you can know though is the real fascination of her feminist or proto feminist writing which are absolutely revolutionary and even if as I've just argued the context for women is far broader than what we traditionally thought there is this culture of honour there is this control of the upper classes but then there's so much more even in that Sarjuana stands out she is choosing words carefully revolutionary and she's revolutionary because over and over again she treats three themes and one is men's domination of women and not just the fact that it's unjust but she used her erudition to prove that it's illogical it's coldly irrational and this is gripping and then secondly she says and women they're not just victims of this or on the other hand saints they are absolutely capable of just being thinkers functioning at the same level as very educated men and she gives these extraordinary catalogues of extraordinary women across the ages and then last to all at the centre of this the women have the ability to read learn right and debate and there is illogical not respect that but surely these writers must have earned her some powerful enemies and can you tell us a bit about the people who disapproved of her writings and their opposition impacted on her later life absolutely so what she writes is always controversial but at her peak when the intellectual establishment is clearly calling her things like the 10th muse the Mexican Phoenix and she's very publicly the greatest intellectual of her time she can get away with it and she can get away with it also because she is backed by this all-powerful in the arts patroness and the patroness leaves and Sorjuanan in 1890 writes a private letter one of her theological essays to the conservative bishop of poebla Manuel Menendez as Antagross and it's of not for publication and it's hard discussing the way we might name an email to a colleague her thoughts on a 40 year old sermon by a Portuguese Jesuit Fran dono de Vieira as to whether women should just be quiet about religion or not now this is something she feels quite strongly about she writes what's supposed to be a private letter and the bishop betrays her because he takes it and he publishes it and he publishes it along with his commentary which summed up into one sentence says you should stop thinking, reading and talking about anything apart from religion this then is a catalyst for her autobiography and her greatest feminist work because she writes a public reply called a rapista sorcilapia one of the strange things about this is that the bishop releases his criticism of her in the guise of another none so there's all sorts of really interesting things to do with gender going on here and everybody knows the story so she writes back this lengthy defense of women's rights to read, think, learn, publish, debate called the answer to sister fill out there and it's an exceptional piece of work that doesn't work because the next two years she spends fighting a rareguide action and then in the end she sort of abdures her life's an intellectual her library is sold she returns the everyday life of a none of a sort of a non literary none the regular prayers the many many chores and during one of them there's an epidemic of the plague in 1695 and she is nursing some of the victims and gets herself and dies aged 44 so this is a really sad end to what was like a glittering literary career? yes it is made for tragedy and in fact it's been made into a soap opera it's been made into a sadly fairly mediocre film with a great Spanish actress Asuntas Serrana which is really playing up the sapphic angle she's the subject of Nobel prize winner Octavio Bazis by far greatest essay at least to my mind which is all about her her meaning who she was the person so it is the final piece in the tragedy of a life that really in many ways should not have been possible the fact that it was tells us an awful lot about Mexico and how is she remembered in Mexico today? in Mexico she's on the 100-page or banknote she's I say the subject of Octavio Bazis greatest essay she's in popular culture very revealingly for the phrase it runs more or less mothers to daughters watch your tongue because you don't want to end up like Serrana and so it runs the entire gamut and I think really echoing her time from acknowledgement of women's need to struggle to be heard and straightforward admiration of her many qualities and what would you say is her greatest legacy today? I was having lunch with a novelist last Monday and said oh it's great I'm going to have maybe half an hour talk about Sotuama and he said oh it's fantastic there's these jokes there's this sophistication he said she is at one end of a bridge in Spanish literature she's beginning of it in Mexican literature Latin American and at the other end you've got this Ruben Darío great 19th century intellectual so there's not much underneath that bridge and so she is seen as the last great writer of the Spanish Siglo de Oro the golden age and she is seen as in her own right a great poet and then finally she really squires with the need of our time which is to think very carefully and critically about women's roles and look back to a nun in the 1680s who is writing very straightforward criticisms of men defenses of women all wrapped in a prose or poetry which in itself demonstrates her point and finally Paul if our listeners were to engage with say three of Sochuanas works which would you recommend oh that's such a good question first of all the good news is that this is Baroque Spanish it's extremely difficult to translate and so you've had her thought coming through for decades and decades but the real power of a poetry is difficult to get because you can either sort of straight jacked into the rhyming structure which is so key but then it sounds really forced like the bit I quoted earlier or you can have the abilities of a genuinely great translator and a decade ago Edith Grossman who translated all of Garcia Marquez who has a feeling for this which is just exceptional she translated it so the three things to look for one is more or less any of the loves on it this is really a Spanish Shakespeare secondly is her main feminist poem which is called directed to foolish or muleish men and this is just so straightforward to give you just one of the points her argument is the women are criticized from the sins that men are praised for and initiate i.e. womanizing and so it's very well written it's very clear it's got things like who sins most the man who pays or the woman who is paid and you really get the idea there then the final thing is this autobiography contained in her desperate defence for life the response to Sorfield there the first 30 pages of that particularly here you have what her life is about in her own words and you really can't get better than that for either men or women from 350 years ago Paul thank you so much for that I was absolutely fascinating that was Paul Gillingham speaking to Spencer Mism Paul is professor of history at Northwestern University Illinois his new book which features Sajuana in Eze de la Cruz is Mexico a history if you'd like to learn more about the people who have shaped Mexico over the past 500 years then why not listen to Spencer in conversation with Paul on the history of Mexico from the conquisites doors to the cartels you can find a link to that in the description of this episode
