Defiance in Life, Resistance in Record: A Tale from the Mexican Inquisition

In 1598 in Seville, Esperanza Rodríguez, a fourteen-year-old enslaved woman, appeared on a Spanish registry as one of many objects owned by Catalina Enríquez. The document—an inventory of Catalina’s dowry—labeled Esperanza a “mulata,” a term marking her multiracial status. Esperanza’s mother was an enslaved West African woman, and her father was a converso, or a crypto-Jew: a Jewish person forcibly converted to Catholicism by the Spanish or Portuguese empires who continued to secretly practice Jewish traditions. Catalina was herself a Spanish crypto-Jew, born into a slave-owning household and married off at a young age to a converso merchant.  

Forty-four years later, Esperanza was living as a free woman in Mexico City. In 1642, the objects she owned were recorded by the Mexican Inquisition, whose officers had arrested her for her own covert Jewish observance. At the time of her arrest, Esperanza was living as a matriarchal figure in Mexico City’s conversa community, a business owner, a world traveler, a mother, and a widow. 

How did Esperanza shift from an item on someone’s inventory to the owner of her own set of objects? How did her life remain entangled with Catalina’s, and how did both women end up in the same tribunal’s prison, facing the same charges of crypto-Judaism? Finally, how did their stories survive the centuries, in remarkable and uneven symmetries—landing, finally, in the Mexican Inquisition Papers within The Huntington’s Hispanic History and Culture collection?  

In archival holdings, it is often easier to find stories of the privileged, the wealthy, and the powerful. As both a Black woman and a poor crypto-Jew, Esperanza exceeded the colonial archive’s expectations of her. During my research as a scholar of Latin American and Jewish history, I found primary materials of Esperanza’s childhood and adolescence, her conversion and conviction—much of it in her own voice.  Through her testimonies before the Inquisition tribunal, I heard Esperanza’s tenacity as she built sewing businesses in cities across the Spanish empire and created a free life for herself and her daughters in Mexico City. Esperanza’s defiance in life translated to her resistance in record.   
 

After a brutal massacre of Jews in 1391, communities of conversos emerged on the Iberian Peninsula, some converting whole-heartedly to Catholicism and others covertly preserving and following Jewish rituals. Because crypto-Judaism was a secret practice, usually contained within the walls of the home, the responsibility of transmission often fell to women.  

Some Spanish and Portuguese conversos managed to quietly flee the peninsula and venture to the Americas, often as part of conquistador parties. But as the Spanish empire expanded across the ocean, the Mexican Inquisition, a branch of the Spanish Inquisition, soon followed, and trials began in Mexico City in 1571. The Huntington holds records of ninety-three of this tribunal office’s cases, including trials alleging blasphemy, bigamy, “witchcraft,” and crypto-Judaism.  

In the 1640s, post-Portuguese independence, conversos were deemed particularly suspicious, and a new wave of Inquisition trials swept across the Spanish Empire. During these same years, the importation of African enslaved people to New Spain steadily grew, as did the number of free Africans and Afro-descendants living in Mexico City. Esperanza’s life story maps uneasily onto these intertwined histories. 
 

Details of Esperanza’s life survive in three instances. Her earliest archival appearance is on Catalina’s 1598 object inventory, part of Catalina’s petition for the return of her dowry after her husband’s death. Esperanza’s story appears again in 1607, when Catalina petitioned for a license to travel to the Americas with her children and her servants, Esperanza included.  

Esperanza converted to Judaism somewhere along her journey across the Atlantic, encouraged by Catalina, her mother, and her aunt to convert in exchange for her freedom—according to Jewish law, a Jew could not enslave another Jew. Shortly after arriving in Havana, Esperanza married a German foreigner. The following decades were filled with travel, child-rearing, widowhood, and her eventual settling in Mexico City, where she established her final sewing business and joined the city’s conversa community.  

Esperanza’s third archival appearance is from 1642, when she and her three daughters were arrested by the Inquisition. Until then, Esperanza had lived with her family in Mexico City as a free woman. 

Colonial archives reveal again and again the inextricability of conversas’ and enslaved women’s daily lives. While converso men were crucial figures in the transatlantic trade of goods and people, conversa women were bringing the slave trade into their kitchens. Like Esperanza’s appearance on Catalina’s dowry, almost every inventory of conversa women’s objects across the Spanish empire in the seventeenth century mentions one, or several, enslaved people. African and Afro-descendant women’s petitions for manumission from conversa owners appear in Inquisition inventory documents of conversas’ belongings, and enslaved women appear on conversas’ petitions to travel as they fled religious persecution (as Esperanza did on Catalina’s petition). Conversos were implicated in the transatlantic slave trade and Indigenous servitude in New Spain, attempting to assimilate while actively participating in making and upholding the colonial system. 

While it is not uncommon for my research to lead me to conversas’ testimonies, voices, and even handwriting, I often struggle to find enslaved women’s last names, lost to the archive’s tomb, as historian Saidiya Hartman would say. Conversas were tried, tortured, and sometimes killed by agents of the Inquisition; but as freed citizens, their stories merited, according to the empire, careful record. Conversas’ most intimate material records—the objects in their kitchens, living rooms, and bedrooms—tell a global story of violence, transmission, and adaptation. 

I first found Esperanza as a free, crypto-Jewish woman in her 1640s Mexico City Inquisition trial, and I first found Catalina as a young, recently widowed woman in Seville. I thought I would never find the ending of Catalina’s life or the beginning of Esperanza’s, and yet each woman continually led me to the other.  

Esperanza’s archival footprint followed me across continents as I enacted her migration backward. In the Seville papers, I had left Catalina as a note scrawled in the margin of a document. Her loud presence in that archive—her self-advocacy in 1598 for the return of her dowry after her husband’s death in Havana and her transatlantic voyage with her family and enslaved people—faded abruptly into parched ink relegated to the edge of the page. I was telling Esperanza’s story, with Catalina as a character, and so I let Catalina fade into the silences of the archive. 

A couple of years later, I was paging through Mexican Inquisition trials in The Huntington Library, only to find one marked “Catalina Enríquez,” a very common name. With low expectations, I scanned the page until my eyes halted on the testifier’s signature. 

It was an identical signature to that of Catalina in Seville, forty-five years earlier, across an ocean and a woman’s lifetime. The handwriting had become a bit shakier. 

Catalina, now in her seventies and close to death, had been dragged from her home to Mexico City’s Inquisition prison to be tried for Judaizing. Esperanza and her daughters sat in a jail cell nearby. As Catalina recounted her life to the Inquisitors, Esperanza not only played a central role in her narrative but also testified against Catalina as a witness to her Jewish practice—a common, and devastating, result of kinship networks turned into surveillance instruments by the Inquisition’s bureaucracy. 

According to their Inquisitorial narratives, the pair were friends and confidantes. Esperanza had visited Catalina at her home in Veracruz a few years earlier and told her about her daughters’ marriages. The two women narrated the same memories of conversion, intimacy, and loss as they testified to the Inquisition just days apart. 

Catalina would die in her prison cell during her trial. Esperanza would be banished from New Spain (though, based on similar case histories, it is likely Esperanza managed to evade her sentence—a final act of defiance).  

Continents and decades apart, I found the (nearly) full lives of both Esperanza and Catalina. Amid different power structures and identity labels, they had nonetheless traveled in parallel for decades. Their journeys as girls, women, wives, widows, teachers, and mothers rang in striking harmony.  

Rachel Kaufman is a former Research Fellow at The Huntington and a poet, teacher, and doctoral candidate in Latin American and Jewish history at UCLA. Author of the poetry collection Many to Remember (2021), her poetry and prose can be found at rachel-kaufman.com.