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Martin Austin Nesvig, "The Women Who Threw Corn: Witchcraft and Inquisition in Sixteenth-Century Mexico" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Martin Austin Nesvig about his book titled the Women who Threw Witchcraft and Inquisition in 16th Century Mexico, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. This book is really interesting for what we're going to be talking about. Yes, obviously witchcraft definitely a key piece here, but a lot of this is about the lives of women who are put in situations where there's a lot of different beliefs going on, a lot of different cultures, different languages, different ways of life are all mixed up together because of course, 16th century Mexico is pretty early on in the Spanish Empire. So we're talking about societies in what becomes Mexico very much still existing with belief systems and ways of life and ways of interacting, and then also a whole bunch of people coming from Spain with very different understandings of how everything works. And what does that actually mean for women who are now mixing with each other, trying to understand each other, learning different languages, learning different beliefs and practices makes for a really interesting bit of history among probably many other things. So Martin, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your Work.
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A
Sure. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here and I appreciate the invitation.
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C
I'm very pleased you said. Yes.
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A
Yes, of course. And thank you for that generous introduction. I should get you to be my publicist or something. But. So, yeah. So this is a book that I just finished, and it's exciting that it's out now. And I professor at the University of Miami. I've been in Miami for 20 years now, and I'm originally from San Diego, California. So I was born and raised in California and have lived a bunch of other places in the world. And yeah, I think, you know that this book. It's a lot of the research that I've did for this book has been going on off and on for a very long time because I had other books in between that had to finish in order to be promoted. So this was a book that was something that was percolating for a long time.
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C
So that's always, I think, a really interesting start to a project when you start with one thing and then other things happen, and that often develops one's thinking. So. So can you tell us more about how this project came to be, what questions you're asking specifically in it, and why do you focus on the 16th century to answer them?
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A
Sure, yeah. Those are great questions. The. It's a kind of. There's the short answer and the long answer. The short answer is that I'm interested in acculturation and the predominant method of analysis in the field of what's called the ethnohistory, the study of native peoples. And the predominant mode of analysis for people who study Mexico is to study the ways that native peoples responded to colonial rule of the Spaniards. And this project, which is part of a series of books that I'm working on, this project pretty much does the opposite. It asks how did Native culture influence non native culture in the colonial context? So it's a reversal of the standard ethno historical approach. But it's. It was part of a much longer and really convoluted project that didn't make any sense from a long time ago. And a long time ago, I don't know, this was like 12, 14 years ago I got this grant. And it's embarrassing now, but the title of my grant was Hucksters, Orgies, Peyote and the Devil. And. And for some reason they actually gave me the money. But when I think back to this, I think, you know, that really those are. That doesn't make any sense, those things. There's Too much going on. So after I finished my dissertation and I wrote my first book, I started working on Western Mexico. And this was partly because when I was working on my dissertation, I kept running across these crazy stories that nobody had written about. And I just thought, why is nobody. Why hasn't anybody written about these crazy stories? It's like they're so crazy you can't make them up. And it's been a long time now since I first started reading some of these. And I continue to be. I continue to read them. But I think the simplest explanation that I can come up with is they're really hard to read. This really difficult script to read, which we call paleography, which just is a fancy word for old writing. And I think people just. They look at it and they just go, oh, no, I'm not reading that. It's way too hard. I guess I'll just study the 18th century. So I think that's one of the reasons nobody has written about it. But the Hucksters, Orgies, Peyote and the Devil became, in essence, four different books. And the hucksters part, which was about kind of people who represent the crown officially but undermine the crown's interest, became my second book, Promiscuous Power, published by University of Texas. And then the orgies book is the book I'm writing right now, which is retitled the show or the Xolot Rite. So it's about ritual ceremonies as adapted by Spanish men. The peyote book is a book that I'm also writing, and I've published a couple articles from that project, which is about peyote and shrooms, hallucinogenic mushrooms which are autochthonous to Mexico. And it's again about how non native people took shrooms and they ate peyote, but they did it for all the wrong reasons. And the devil portion of that project is this book. So what happened was I realized that this original, ridiculously incoherent project really was about four different books. This is the second in that original project.
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C
The one that's on was originally titled the Devil. Does make it pretty exciting, though. Please. That this is the one we get to talk about today. Is there anything further we need to understand about kind of the questions within the Devil and the sources? Honestly, the idea of there's some weird stories here. Let me figure out what's going on. Seems like a pretty good question to bring to a book. So, I mean, that could be the answer. But was there anything else you wanted to tell us about questions?
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Honestly, the Devil doesn't really show up that much. But I just, I guess I was just drawn to the stories. I think people like stories. I like stories, I like to read stories. I love reading novels. And I think that, you know, storytelling is just something that really appeals to most people, and it appeals to me. And that's what drew me to these sources, was just the stories are so insane. And I remember one of the first stories of these, of the crazy ones that I read. I'm just like going through the documents. This was in the Mexico National Archive in an old prison, Lake Umberi. And this was back in the day when they would give you the actual volumes. They're. They won't do this anymore. And I'm reading this, I'm reading this file and I just come across this kind of throwaway line about this monastery being burned to the ground. I was like, wait, what? It was like a monastery got burned to the ground. And then I started looking in the secondary scholarship and I found out that in fact there was this big feud between the bishop and the friars in Michoacan in western Mexico. And the bishops thugs burned down a monastery when the friars were inside of it. So it was just like these kinds of crazy things. So, like the last chapter in this book, the Women who Threw Corn, which is about a short version of the story about this woman named Catalina de Paraso, who was from the Gomera in the Canary Island. She was an ethnic Spaniard. When I first I saw this, and I was like, why is nobody. This should be like a telenovela or something. She's like the first woman on record to eat peyote in Mexico who's not an indigenous person. And she was accused of being a witch. And, and, and I first saw that case, it's probably been more. It's probably been at least 20 years since I first, when I first came across that. So it just percolated over all these years. And then I got a job and I had to teach and I had to get tenure and I had to write these other books. And so there are a bunch of other things getting in the way of me writing this book.
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C
I'm glad you've come back to it so that the rest of us can hear about all these crazy stories. And we're definitely going to talk more about some of them in detail. And obviously, to some extent, these stories are pretty wild, regardless of the cultural context we're operating in. As you said, you're sitting in an archive hundreds of years later and still finding your jaw Dropping, even though we obviously don't have the same sorts of laws or religious beliefs as Spanish colonial officials did in Mexico in the 16th century. But I do want to talk a little bit about what they would have been thinking coming into these sorts of situations. So if we're talking about these Spanish officials in Mexico, pretty early on in the Spanish conquest, what were their sort of conceptual and legal tools that they would apply to. Something comes up that says it's witchcraft, what did canon law say? What did royal law say about what witchcraft was and how you were supposed to investigate or punish it?
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Right. Those are really good questions. And the answers are complicated because most people think that just there's a witch and let's burn her and then they carry her off to the bonfire and that's the end of her. And that doesn't really, it doesn't really work like that. There is very complicated there. The witchcraft itself was, at least in the Spanish world, mostly considered something that the royal courts were supposed to take care of. And then what happened in the 16th century was that the inquisitional officials wrested jurisdiction away from the royal courts and made it into an inquisitional sort of crime. But the people who discuss this, the theorists, the people who write these in, there's Inquisition manuals, there's actual books that are basically like how to be an Inquisitor. And they mostly, most of these people say, the officials kind of jurists, theologians, they say, for the most part, they say a witchcraft isn't really real, it's just a bunch of superstitious nonsense. But they also say that if people start mixing in the devil, or if they mix in invocation of the saints with some other superstitious behavior, then it's really bad and then it becomes an inquisitional crime. So the distinction is whether or not they're really violating the Catholic law or tradition. So they basically say folk magic and herbal healing and stuff like that. They basically mostly say, eh, whatever, we're not really that concerned. But if they chant things to the devil or then you're busted. So that's the main distinction there. And in the case of Spain, obviously, there's two well known kind of witch crazes. There's one in 1526 and then there's one in 1609-1611. And these both take place in the very northern part of Spain in the Basque region. And they're made famous by Goya, who has a couple paintings of these witches, Sabbaths, and there's always a goat involved. And the big one, which is the One that took place centered in Zugara Mundi, which is up in the very northern corner of Spain, right along the border of France. There were hundreds of people pulled in. Lots of people were. Actually many people died during torture and a lot of people were executed. But with the exception of those two cases in Spain, there aren't really any witch crazes. The big witch crazes all take place in Germany and France and to an extent in England. In Mexico there aren't any witch crazes really. Not to the extent that there's hundreds of people being pulled in and questioned, tortured and executed. In the case of Mexico, nobody was ever executed by the Inquisition for being a witch. So it's a much different situation in the Spanish world. And the Spanish law applies to the case of Mexico.
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C
Okay, that is helpful to understand, as you said, because we do have these kind of assumptions that turns out when you go look at the archives and the sources, that's not so much the case. So very useful myth busting early on in our conversation. Thank you. And when we then think about applying these things on the books to real life, you're saying there's not a lot of trials going on. Was this even high on the list of priorities for officials in Mexico or was this sort of. Eh, if it comes up, we'll open the book and figure out what we're meant to do. But this isn't something kind of day to day we're actively worried about.
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A
Didn't seem to be a particularly high priority that I focused exclusive in this book. It's. I'm focused almost exclusively on the period before 1571. And the reason for that is that in 1571 there's a central office of the Inquisition gets established and it. And everything changes it. Once the central office, the Holy Office of the Inquisition is established in Mexico In November of 1571, there's a central apparatus and then there's a whole network of deputies that are put into action throughout what is today Mexico, as well as Guatemala and Central America. And they end up hearing a lot more cases. In general, the caseload is much larger, but generally speaking, they don't really prosecute that many cases of witchcraft. There's a little bit of a spike in the 1570s and there's another little spike in the 1590s. But by spike I mean a couple dozen cases, not hundreds. But the book itself is, is the sources come from the Inquisition, but the book isn't really specifically about the Inquisition. I use the Inquisition as the way to understand these women and their stories. And there's. It's. This is, you know, what a lot of people call micro history. You take these individual cases and you have a lot of really good GC detail. And then you try to expand on it using what we know about the context of these cases. But yeah, witchcraft's not really a high priority. The big. Their main priority in Mexico as well as Spain. The main thing that they. The main people they're looking for are people who are Jewish, who are pretending not to be Jewish because that's illegal. And Lutherans. So Lutherans and Jews, that's what like, they get these cases that people denounce their neighbors or whatever because they don't like them. And the deputies write up the testimonies. This is post 1571. And they send them off to the Inquisition. The Inquisition's like, yeah, whatever, we don't really care. Find us some Jews, find us some Lutherans. Pre 1571. What you have is every individual diocese that's overseen by a bishop has its own inquisitional authority. So there's a bunch of these different Inquisitions operating. So there's the one in central Mexico that operates under the aegis of the Diocese of Mexico, which then became an archdiocese. But there's also all these other dioceses out around in Mexico. And so the book has cases from primarily the Diocese of Mexico, which is central Mexico and Mexico City, because that's where more people live. But there's also cases from Zacatecas, which is a mining center in the north, from Guanajuato, which is another mining center just a little bit in between Zacatecas and Mexico City. There's cases from Michoacan to the west and also from Oaxaca in the south. And each of those has a particular cultural context which is unique, but they're. These are people that are being prosecuted by different authorities.
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C
Okay, that's definitely helpful to understand. Besides the sort of administrative and cultural divisions, there's also, of course, the fact that these Spanish colonial officials are not operating in an environment where theirs are the only ideas running around. So are these things you've been telling us about in terms of how big a deal witchcraft is or not, and how one is meant to identify it or go about punishing it. Do they have any overlap with indigenous concepts that these officials were also living in the culture of, or are we looking at a completely different system?
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It's hard to know really, because we don't, because the Nahuatl language sources are all post contact. There are certain concepts, though, that exist in the world of the Nahua culture that we know out there. One is called the nawali, which is this kind of a shape shifting sorcerer. The other is something called the tc. TC is a kind of a healer, magician, almost type of person. It's a non gender specific word. The nawat nouns don't have genders. So the tissit is something. And a lot of these women, the tissit is the equivalent in Spanish as a curandera, which is a kind of a healer. So they have that concept. There's also a lot of other concepts which I. And the title of the book, the Women who Threw Corn, comes from the process of throwing corn kernels as a way of divining, of accessing information. And it. There's a bunch of different words in Nahuatl for this. The tlapo walitsli, which is the act of numbering or counting something or an act of. Or casting lots. There's also tlalcha yahwalitsli, which is the act of corn hurling as a form of magic. And they're all related to counting. And the picture on the COVID of the book, which comes from this, the Codex Borbonicus represents a kind of primordial pair, Oxamuco and Cipactona. These are kind of primordial man and woman, and they are throwing corn, which is a very. Is an ancient kind of idea in Mesoamerica. And so that's why I gave the book the title. Although their very first Amazon review just came out and the book just came out in the United States. And one of the things that the person said. Whoever wrote the review complained that I didn't really talk that much about this Tlapo Walitzli. And I just. Whatever. You can't please everyone. But I never claimed that the book was gonna be principally about that. It's just like a way of getting people to pay attention by giving it the title. So there's stuff like that and a lot of the. There's a lot of words in Nahuatl which refer to trickery or ways of tricking people. So at its core, I think in both the Spanish case and the Mesoamerican case, magic or sorcery or witchcraft, it's always about a person who has some kind of special knowledge and who is able to manipulate people's perceptions of the material universe in such a way that they can cast spells on them. So it's just like when you think about magicians who do magic tricks, it's the same basic idea. It's like trickery it's like it's tricking people into things that they don't realize are happening behind the screen of reality. So those are common in in both cultures. They just happen to have different words for it because they have different languages. The principal language of central Mexico being Nahuat, and obviously in Spain the main language being Spanish. And but even Sorghuin or Sorguin or Sorguignia, which is a Basque word, which is a composite from soars, which is Latin for cast, for lots, and gin or guinea, which is to do or so a so or is a caster of lots. So there's a lot of associations between casting of lots, which in in Spanish is sortilejo, and trickery and divination seem to be the kind of the main things in particular that women get involved in because the book that I'm writing now, which is about men, they they are involved in other forms of sorcery.
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Mexico, we can learn a few things that obviously the very earliest cases which date to 1527 and 1528, although there is a case of a woman, Ines de las Casas, who was a Spanish woman, we don't really know that much about her. She seems to have been probably from. She was not an elite woman, but she was also not extremely poor. So she's probably middling or lower middling kind of socioeconomic status, but she's Spanish and she's in Mexico. And we know that she was prosecuted in an earlier case, but the case file itself doesn't exist. It's referenced though, in a later case when the Inquisition comes to town in 1536 in Mexico City, the Central Inquisition of Sumatraga, who's the bishop. So some very early cases, 1527, 1528. And nobody's really studied these. And I think again, it's because it's really hard to read the guy who's probably one of the most famous historians of the Mexican Inquisition, Richard Greenleaf, who was a professor at Tulane for a million years. He wrote some foundational books about the Mexican inquisition in the 16th century that were published long time ago, 60 years ago. And he has these little notes saying, oh, this case, the paleography was almost impossible. He also clearly has some. He clearly made some mistakes in reading some of these files. I think just. People just were like, no, this is too hard. So I just forced myself. I have a lot of experience reading early 16th century script, so it was still hard for me, but I did it. But we can learn some things. We know that torture was sometimes used, although torture. The only case that I found of a woman being tortured was actually the woman Ines de las Casas, who was tortured not by the Inquisition, but by the royal magistrate. So torture was something that inquisitors were allowed to use, but they didn't use it very much. She was actually. She was waterboarded. Waterboarding was actually invented by the Inquisition. And so we can load that sometimes women were tortured. We also know that women were, from a very early moment, were adapting to native forms of magic or native forms of. Of sorcery. But the language in the 1520s is vague to describe this, so it's difficult to piece together. But we know, for example, a woman named Elvira Herrera, who was a wife of a wealthy conquistador. So this is a woman with high status and who also probably had money. And she had native servants or slaves. We don't really know because sometimes in these cases, the way that they describe the. The servant or the person who's serving this is just described as her Indians. And so we can't really know necessarily. We don't really know if these are slaves or if these were servants. Anyway, her, one of her servants or slaves, Anna, we only know her name, Anna was accused of being a T seed or a healer. And. But this woman, Elvira Herrera, was pulled in and questioned about this woman's activities. And she describes all the things that the woman did that she pulled paper out of the person's skin, that it was tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror, which is a principal God that was the primary cause of these diseases. And so what we can know from that is that this woman who was the wife of a conquistador, or at least was the very wealthy woman, she. She clearly understood what was going on. And the indigenous women that were brought in this case didn't speak Spanish. So this woman obviously spoke and understood Spanish on a very, very detailed level. So we know that Spanish women are adapting to their native environments very quickly, obviously as early as the 50, 1520s, even before 1530. And they clearly understand Nahuatl. And the reason for that is because they don't really have any choice because there's all these non Spanish speaking indigenous peoples. The Spanish women in the 1520s in Mexico City are an extremely small ethnic minority, constituting very small percentage, probably 1% of the population. So they clearly are adapting. Another woman named Catalina de Vergara was denounced by some other Spanish women. The Catalina de Vergara was a. Another one of these women who was married to a wealthy Spanish man. And they denounced her because they, she was. And they very clearly say she learned this from the natives. So they, this woman, Catalina de Vergara, in 1528 gets denounced. I should add, I'm sorry, that the Herrera case is a little bit later, it's 1536, but the Catalina de Vergara case is 1528. And so this is very early. And they, the witnesses all say that she specifically learned these behaviors from native women. And what she learned was that she was sweeping, sweeping and sweeping at midnight, or at least very late at night or early in the early hours of the late night. Midnight, two in the morning, we don't really know, but late. And she's naked. She's described as being in cuetos, which means like completely buck naked. So she's naked, which is already suspicious. And she's sweeping and she's got like crazy lady hair. Like, they basically say her hair is like all crazy and she's sweeping and she's looking up into the heavens and she's making these incantations. That the Spanish women said they couldn't understand, which sort of suggests that these were maybe incantations in the Nahuatl language. And the sweeping part is interesting because, first of all, a Spanish woman wouldn't sweep in her own home. If she was from the upper classes, she would have a domestic person doing that chore. So it would be unthinkable that she would actually do the domestic task of sweeping. Also, she wouldn't be naked when she was sweeping, and she wouldn't be doing it at midnight, and she wouldn't have crazy lady hair, and she wouldn't be making incantations to the sky. So we don't really know exactly. All we know is that she learned something from the native women. There's. There's a tradition in the Mesoamerican world of sweeping is associated with cleansing, with clearing the house of bad spirits, or of clearing the way for the rain gods. There's a bunch of different associations in the Mesoamerican world between sweeping and kind of sacred cleanliness. So she learned this. She probably learned a lot of these things from native women. But, you know, there's certainly traditions in the Spanish world associated with brooms that, you know, kind of the infamous witch on a broomstick image is actually contained in some of the Inquisition manuals from the later 16th century. So should. But, you know, these very early cases like the one that I mentioned, Eldira Herrera, 1530s, and then Catalina Vergada, 1528, is obvious that these Spanish women are learning things from native women. They clearly understand the Nahuat language, but the language, the Spanish language, you know, the transcripts of these testimonies is a little bit vague because the. The concepts and the words haven't fully assimilated themselves into the kind of the male Spanish world, at least as far as I can tell.
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C
Yeah. This is really interesting to see these interactions and kind of enmeshments of something going on. Right. Beliefs, practices. And when you talk about learning from native women, is it a sort of one off in this particular case? Maybe this one Spanish woman happened to know a Nahua woman who knew these sorts of things? Or do we have evidence of kind of a broader network of people, women who sort of were involved in what we might call magic and how it worked?
- [30:57]
A
It's a really good question. And this is always one of the big. It's one of the central critiques of microhistory. People say, oh, micro history is just bullshit because you just have these, you know, these individual cases. You don't really Have a broad quantitative sample and that sort of true, but also sort of not true. I mean, I'm not making any quantitative claims in the book and I don't really know of any micro historians, you know, the famous ones like Carl Ginsburg or Natalie Zema Davis or lots of people who have done this. You know, lots of Spanish scholars and Mexican scholars have done this. I don't know any of those people ever really making any claims about a quantitative trend. I guess what I've. What I'm trying to do is I take these cases and I, and I show who these people knew, what they say they knew, how they seem to know it. By the 1530s though, you start getting cases where there's a lot of different people involved. And there's two chapters in the book which discuss these. There's a kind of an omnibus case that takes place. The investigation actually starts in the fall of 1537 and it culminates in June of 1537. And there were several people that were involved in clearly in a sort of a, a network of, of, of mostly women, although there was one Nahua man involved in this that knew each other and exchanged knowledge about magic and, and sorcery. And so this I think is, is pretty good evidence of at least one particular network. And there's six people that were specifically prosecuted and then there's a bunch of women who are peripherally involved, some of whom were prosecuted in other cases at the same time. And then there were some high status Spanish women who were basically left off the hook because they were high Spanish, high status Spanish women. So there are, there are these networks and so I have a couple chat. There's actually between 1536 and 1538 there's a lot of these people overlap and, and seem to know each other. And the, the ones that I talk about. There was one particular case that had to, that that ended up on the cutting room floor as they say. That's not in the book and which actually had a lot of really juicy detail, but it didn't really say very much about acculturation. So I left it out. So there, there are these networks involved and I can talk more about that network if you, if you'd like.
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C
Yes, please. Who's in it? Where, who, where are they getting from? Like what are they doing?
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A
There's a network that, because we know this, because they were all bound up into this kind of omnibus trial and involved in this omnibus trial were two African women who are described as being black. So we know that they're almost Certainly from senegambia. This is 1536, and before the 1550s, almost all the. Almost all the Africans who were forcibly, you know, who were forced into slavery and sent to the Americas were from the Senegambia region in this time period. So they're almost certainly from Santa Gambia. They could have been from Guinea. Guinea is another possibility, but they're almost certainly from that part of West Africa. So there's two women, Martha and Maria. They don't have surnames, which is common. There's also a couple Spanish women involved who are. The one is a midwife. She's of kind of middling to lower status woman. There's also a woman who is peripherally involved because she gets pulled in as a witness in this omnibus case named Maria de Barcena, who is the wife of a tailor. So she's of kind of middle middling status. There's also these women who are called Morisca. Morisca is a. Is a kind of a. It's a word that in some ways doesn't mean anything, but it does have a certain meaning that people probably understood at the time. And it could have my understanding of it and the way I think that it probably would have been used by say a Spanish notary or Spanish judge is to mean basically a woman who's not a sub Saharan African and who is vaguely kind of sort of darker skinned or has maybe some North African ethnicity or who is a former Muslim or who is kind of from the south of Spain and looks like she might have some kind of mixture of Spanish Catholic and North African Muslim ethnicity, something along those lines. There's a whole huge historiography about this. It talks about the term Morisco meaning specifically a Muslim who converted to Catholicism. And I. That, I mean, that is a. A category, but I don't think it's the only meaning of that word. I think it also has kind of an ethnic connotation and there's plenty of evidence for that in other cases. So there's these Morisco women who are. One in one was a slave and one had been freed by her owner. And Morisco women who were slaves. Slaves were frequently women that were captured in Spanish naval raids on Tunis in Morocco in the 16th century, or they were sold in the slave markets in Seville. And it seems like they were always. They were often. They were usually domestic servants, but a lot of times they were purchased as for their sort of physical attractiveness. So they were sort of sex slaves. I guess it sounds sort of sexually kinky, but it's. It's sort of not, you know, in a non fun way. But. So there were some Morisca women involved in this case, and then there were some kind of middle lower status Spanish women. There were also a few upper status Spanish women who have the honorific term dona, which just kind of is like an honorific term for upper, higher status person and like her ladyship or whatever. And. But these women are given a free pass. Like they don't. They. They're clearly involved, they clearly understand what's going on, but they don't actually get arrested, they don't get put in jail, they don't get prosecuted, and they don't get punished. And then finally, at the center of this, it seems that there's a Nahua man who does not speak Spanish. And we know that he doesn't speak Spanish because after he was arrested and imprisoned, when he faces. When he faces questioning, they have to bring in an interpreter to translate between Nahuat and Spanish. So. And yet all these women knew. Most of these women knew him. And they were able to communicate with them in what appears to be very, very specific details. So these are women who clearly understood the Nahuatl language and were able to communicate with this man named Antoine, Anton or Anthony. And we don't really know. You know, it's a little bit unclear on what the word means. It seems to be probably related to the word for eagle in Nahuatl, but it could also be related to the word kwath, which is snake. But I think it's probably more likely it's related to the word. The root kwao, which is eagle. We don't really know because the Spanish, they had a hard time translating diphthongs from Nahuatl into Spanish. But he was the guy that supplied the herbs to these women. So a lot of this and most of these women, it's. They're involved in some, in different kinds of love, magic or magic to get them freed from slavery. So there's this big network of, you know, I mean, well, big in the sense of there's at least 10 people that know about these various sorceresses and spell casting women. There's, I'm sure, many, many, many other people who knew about them who just didn't get brought in before the inquisitional court.
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- [40:58]
C
Yeah, this is really interesting to kind of get a glimpse into what's probably a wider world. But we do get a decent number of glimpses in these very hard to read sources that. Thank you for putting in the legwork to make it possible for the rest of us to get an understanding of these stories. Can you tell us more of them? I mean, were the women that are being accused of witchcraft that we can see from these sources, Were they always sort of of this like, not super high status sort of background? Was it more common for women who were perceived as being racialized to be more likely to be accused? Like, do we have any similarities between these stories that you found?
- [41:42]
A
Well, if we're, if we're, if we're talking specifically about this case in this kind of group network in the 1530s, there's a few things I can say. I can also potentially expand to talk about some of the other cases, but there's a few things that, that I think are, are clear. First of all, justice is racialized. So apparently some things never change. The, the, the black women and the Nahua native man are given very severe sentences of public lashing. You know, they're paraded through the streets on a donkey and there's a Public crier who announces their crimes as they're being whipped in public, which is a pretty terrible punishment. The high status Spanish women don't even get arrested or even charged with any crimes, even though they're clearly involved. They, I mean everybody who gets brought in pretty much says, no, I didn't do those things. But the, but the sub Saharan African women get punished very severely. The Morisco women sometimes get punished severely and sometimes they don't. And the sort of lower status Spanish women are punished, but they usually don't get the public whipping part. They get fined or they are sent to some kind of form of reclusion. So it sort of depends. But, but clearly there's. But one thing is clear is that the higher status Spanish women do not, generally speaking, at least before 1571, don't really get charged with crimes. That changes after 1571. In fact, in the 1570s, this is in kind of the epilogue to the book or whatever it is. I called it Epilogues or the Afterword. There's some cases in the 1570s against Spanish women for casting corn. And as a result they get accused of being source, you know, of, of being involved in sorcery. And in that case, some of the women are high status Spanish or Portuguese women. So it changes after 1570. But generally speaking, there is a kind of a racialized angle. In other words, the darker you are, the, the worse you get treated. And also status plays a role. There's a kind of, there's status. There's also this thing called kalidad, which is quality. So it's kind of refers to kind of a, it's kind of a generic sense of your overall social status. So the women from southern Spain, Andalusian women, Andalusian women in general in the 16th century were kind of stereo, kind of. There was kind of a stereotype of Andalusian women as being overly sexed and also as being very attractive. So there's a kind of this, you know, kind of two pronged or double edged or whatever. I don't know what the right metaphor is. But the, you know, Andalusian women and Morisca women and a Morisca and an Andalusian woman could be the same thing because obviously from a kind of genetic standpoint, you know, the women in southern Spain and Andalusia people there are more likely to have some kind of North African background because the, the kingdom of Granada, for example, was under Muslim rule until 1492 and much of Andalusia was under Muslim rule until the 12 middle of the 1200s. So for many centuries these are areas that were, were politically dominated by North African Muslims. So the women from southern Spain and Andalusia are frequently kind of stereotyped as either being, you know, kind of prostitutes or witches. Same goes for women from the Canary Islands. Canary island women's Canaryan women who are mostly. In this particular case, we're talking about women who are pretty much ethnic Spaniards. Most of the original Guanche people were, were largely wiped out by wars of conquest in the 1480s and 1490s. The. So Canarian women and also Basque women are also targeted in Mexico. And you know, the Canarian and Basque women in Mexico in the, in this time period are, are very small percentage of the women in, in Mexico. Most of the women in Mexico are from Extremadura and Andalusia and some from Castile in the center, but not very, very few of them are actually from the Canary Islands. And yet there's this preponderance of women from the Canaries being accused of being witches in this, in this period. So they, Canarian women seem to have been targeted as being especially dangerous or, you know, like one of the chapters, I, I just call it Bad Girls Club because the Morisco women and Canary women are kind of viewed as being kind of like these bad girls. You know, they're, they're over sex. They're so sorceresses. They seem relatively unapologetic about their sexual behavior, which seems to be a little bit different from your average run of the mill Spanish woman.
- [46:52]
C
That's really interesting to see that kind of pattern. What if we expand it further across the time period? You look at any other notable things that jumped out at you?
- [47:01]
A
You mean in terms of ethnicity or.
- [47:05]
C
Or kind of do we see this sort of network and ethnicity trends only in the earlier period, or do we see later on that kind of, this sort of network and practices continue and become embedded even as the Spanish conquest is less new?
- [47:20]
A
Sure. I mean, as the years go by and there's a kind of a relative lack of cases from the 1540s and 1550s for reasons that are unclear to me and unclear to other historians, but they kind of pick up again in the 1560s. There's, you know, usually when the, the cases that I looked at, these are sometimes these are investigations where no one has ever actually punished, and sometimes they are prosecuted and punished. But in every case, these are people that, you know, the, the witnesses that are called are usually of a variety of ethnicities and backgrounds. So these did seem to be people that a Lot of different people know them and, or are known by a lot of different people. And so there's clearly some very, very intricate networks involved here. There's a case in the 15 and 1560s where there's a Basque woman who's very wealthy, Dona Maria de Annuncibay. And a woman, Maria de Lugo, who is actually she, even though she came from the Lugos, which was a, a wealthy conquistador family from the Canaries, she was a, she was very poor. She was, she had descended from a non marital sexual union. So she was considered illegitimate. And she didn't really have any money. And the witnesses describe her as being kind of old and toothless. And the Basque woman who was involved in this case was a very high status and very wealthy and she was much younger, she was probably about 25 years old. And she was basically let off with a very minor punishment. But they were accused of having tattoos, which is kind of interesting because people, you know, I think a lot of people just think like, oh, tattoos, that's like a modern thing. And we know that the, the word tattoo comes from the Samoan language and the. Obviously in the South Pacific and Hawaii, tattooing has been around for a long time. But there's other cultures that engaged in tattooing. But in this case, it's a little bit unclear what was going on. They, the witnesses described them as having their leg or their foot paint painted or marked with the, and they said that it was like a red devil. So it's a little bit unclear what that's supposed to mean, whether it was like a devil and whether this was like a permanent tattoo or if this was like a temporary tattoo that was put on there with some kind of paint or henna, we don't really know. But something weird was going on and people thought this is really, these women are up to no good. We gotta, you know, tell the authorities. They were also accused of having kind of like a genie in a, in a bottle, like actually in a bottle, like with a stopper. So they had this like genie in a bottle that did stuff for them and they, they, they, they kind of painted their body with kind of a, kind of a soot based ointment of some sort. So they covered themselves and they take soot and mix it up. I don't know, probably some kind of oil and they'd kind of anoint themselves. So obviously the pe. And a bunch of people denounce them like, this is not good. So this is stuff that like, you know, people know about this and they you know, people say, hey, this is weird, you know, that, you know, because especially in places like Mexico City, it's very densely populated. Everybody kind of knows everybody's business. But also, like in small towns, even today, I've never really spent that much time living in small towns, but I've lived in kind of small, very small cities, you know, like a hundred thousand people. And even in a small city of a hundred thousand people, everybody knows everybody's business. And so imagine like, these small towns in the 16th century, and there's like, no electricity or Internet or TV. There's nothing else to do. So people gossip all the time. There's, you know, there's other cases, obviously, there's a, you know, where a lot of people know what's going on. So the. There's two different midwives in the book. And, you know, being a midwife is. It's an important position in this world because they didn't have obs. You know, there weren't any obstetricians per se. You know, medical doctors didn't. That's not. They didn't do that. They didn't deliver babies. So the way that people. People had babies delivered was with midwives. So midwives were obviously important members of society because, you know, childbirth is dangerous, especially when there's no antibiotics. And they're, you know, midwives seem to be people that were trusted. So there's a. There's a midwife in this big omnibus case in 1536, 1537. And she's. She clearly had learned a lot of different stuff from indigenous women. There's all these. There's all this discussion about. She made these incantations that nobody could understand. But she also engaged in things that were clearly Spanish. Like she would seek out specific herbs, according to. That had to be at nighttime, which was. Seemed to be probably a more of a Spanish sort of thing. She used rosemary. She also smoked coriander seeds and in oil, which was very specifically Spanish, you know, kind of thing, because coriander and cilantro are kind of broadly Mediterranean, Western Asian plant that was introduced by Spaniards into. Into the Americas. So they use. And coriander is just the seed of the cilantro plant. And so she was using Spanish techniques. But every, you know, a lot of people knew this woman, and they trusted her and said that she was very reliable. And. But then they, you know, were suspicious about these things that she did. The other thing was that the midwives, and this seemed to be fairly common, were also associated with not only delivering babies, but midwives apparently were, were the person you went to if you or someone you knew had. Was infected by the evil eye, the mal de ojo. And the evil eye is not like, it's not an affection of the eye. It's like the evil eye is something that makes you sick because someone cast it at you from their ev eye. And you know, there's a lot of different according to what people thought that if you. Someone cast the evil eye on you could kind of. It's just kind of made you unwell. I mean, I guess in theory it could kill you, but you know, just kind of any kind of general illness, nausea, vomiting, feeling terrible fevers, you know, weakness. People often attributed this to the evil eye. And children were considered particularly susceptible to the evil eye. And midwives were the people you went to to cure the evil eye. And it doesn't really seem to be an equivalent idea of the evil eye in the Nahua culture. But what you see for example in this case of a woman who was from Seville, who lived mostly in mining areas. Barbola is just kind of like a variant word for Barbara. She was described as a mulatto, which in theory is a someone of mixed European and African descent. But we don't really know what the story was. She was born to a very high status man in Seville. She clearly had a lot of money. And for reasons unknown, she migrated to Mexico at a time young age, probably when she was a teenager, and had been married to a man who was probably a miner. And then at some point he died. And she was kind of itinerant. She was in Taxco, which is a silver mining center. And then she moved to Zacatecas, which was the. What became the major silver producing mine of Mexico. And she was a midwife. And you know, she got in trouble for a bunch of different things. She, she got in trouble for supposedly being a witch. Basically. They. People accused her of being a sorceress, they accused her of being a procuress, which was very common to accuse midwives or other women of being a procuress or kind of a female version of a pimp. And. But in her case, she started mixing in. This is the 1560s. This woman, Barbola de Samora was. She got prosecuted three different times by inquisition authorities in the. In the north, up in the Zacatecas region. And in her case, she clearly had begun to incorporate indigenous, you know, things practices into her midwife repertoire. So there's all kinds of mentions that she, you know, made these incantations during the birth process and made incantations to the baby, which in the Spanish tradition was not really normal. It was normal for midwives to maybe make the sign of the cross, say in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit. But these were like full on incantations. And all the Spanish witnesses said that we didn't understand what she was saying. This is very common in the TC tradition of, of healer women. In the Nawa tradition, when they, the midwives, which, who are also called TC would, you know, would say these. They had special words that they would say to the woman and to the baby. And they often compared the babies as being born to warrior women because, you know, the birth process is, is bloody and violent and dangerous. And so she may have learned these various incantations and sort of incorporated it. We also know that she was fluent in Nahuatl and that she was conversant with a lot of the local native people. And the other thing that we know about her is that she also was involved with peyote use. It doesn't appear that she actually took peyote. What she did was she got some local native men who are, they call them Chichimek, which is a kind of the generic term for people in the north. They're probably Wachiche or Pames. And she got them to take peyote in order to find out where her two indigenous girl slaves. So this is a woman who was a mulatta, who was very wealthy, who owned indigenous slaves. And the slave girls ran away. And so this woman went and found these indigenous men and said, hey, take peyote. And then the peyote will tell you where these girls are. It's a little bit unclear on whether the, the whole thing worked. So, and, and you know, there's lots of witnesses that come forward in the, in that case. And they all say, they all kind of say the same thing, you know, that she was very trustworthy in terms of being a midwife. She was very clean, her practice was very clean. She was very reliable. A couple different women said, oh, she cured my son of the evil eye. But also there were other people that said, you know, besides her practice as a midwife, they said, well, but, you know, she was a sorceress or she was an ava, which is a procuress. And so they accused her of all the kind of standard things that they accused these kind of mixed race women from the south of Spain, which is very kind of stereotypical, either that they were either prostitutes or they were the procurers of women for men, or that she cast love Magic on men or that is very common accusation. But everyone seemed to know this woman. These are, you know, Zacatecas had a small Spanish community at the time. And then she fled after her first trial and went to Sombrerete, which is way up north. It's today. It's just tiny little town. It was a tiny little town then. It's a kind of a smaller mining town, you know, way, way up in the kind of center north of Mexico. It's like literally, it's like in the middle of nowhere. Nothing there. It's just a bunch of scrub, you know, it's like high, high plains scrub, you know, desert scrub. And so, but everybody seemed to know her, you know, so these people are, are well known in their communities and they're clearly linked into, kind of, into these kind of multi ethnic networks.
- [60:01]
C
Which definitely isn't the idea of sort of one lone woman off by herself doing something once. Right. Which is a much more interesting story to have you uncover all of this by themselves.
- [60:12]
A
Right. But they, but they're not like these, you know, lone women out in the, you know, I mean, these are women that live within the communities. Everybody knows them and in many cases they're, they're trusted and valued members of society until they aren't and someone decides they don't like them and then they're screwed.
- [60:31]
C
Well, we end up with some really interesting stories from that and kind of get a window into a whole culture and combination of cultures. So thank you for helping us better understand what was happening in 16th century Mexico. You mentioned earlier on in our conversation that this is part of a larger project. So before I let you go, as a final question, is there anything about the next bit of the project that you want to give us a brief sneak preview of?
- [60:54]
A
Sure, sure. So this is in my projection as long as I, you know, stay alive and healthy. The, the idea is that this will be the first book in a projected trilogy of books. All of, in each of the books is about a particular form of acculturation. So the first book is about women. That's why it's only about women. The next book is about men. And so that's the book I'm working on right now. I'm just actually just about to send off the proposal and kind of a sample of the manuscript to my editor at Cambridge. And this book that I'm working on, I've probably got about a third of the book written right now. I'm hoping to have it finished within another eight months or so. It's called The Xolot, right? X, O L O T L. It's pronounced Sholot. The Sholot, right. And, and it's a maybe, I'm not really sure. But the subtitle, at least so far is How Spanish men became nahuatalized in 16th century Mexico. So again the focus is the very earliest period of acculturation. And it's about, it's kind of, it's kind of like the men version of this book that I just wrote that the difference is that the men and the way they acculturate is different. They get involved in more it's very gender specific. The women, they do things like love magic, they are, become healers, they are midwives, they cure the evil eye. They are accused of being kind of sexually, you know, involved in sex magic. The men on the other hand become involved in nawalism, which is shape shifting sorcery. They become, and they also become involved in kind of priest like roles in the men. There are Spanish men who are not priests who, who become sort of like native religion priests. And but the book is really about epistemology. It's about how Spanish men came to know about religious rights of you know, the, the, and in particular the worship of this God Xolot, which is kind of like a dog like trickster God. And this is, you know, these are Spanish men who are the, became like the ringleaders of these, these Mesoamerican rituals. So that's the second book. The third book is about hallucinogens and I've already published a couple of pieces on. This one's in a kind of an encyclopedia, the Oxford Handbook of Global Drug History. And there's a couple of anthologies that I published, some chapters already about peyote and shroom use. So this is a book length project which kind of follows up on these first two. And that book will actually go into the 17th century and it talks about kind of the original use of shrooms and peyote as well as some other things like Oakley or Pulque, which is a mildly alcoholic drink, fermented cactus juice basically. And, and then I kind of. And so that book is also about acculturation, like what happens when Spanish and mixed race people start taking peyote in shrooms. And of course they do it for all the wrong reasons. You know, they don't do it as a religious ritual. They do it for strictly practical reasons. But the shrooms and the peyote became get mixed in with Spanish Catholic belief and practice. And in fact there's at least some evidence that people started associating peyote with the version of Guadalupe. So that's the third book in the kind of the projected trilogy. So hopefully I'll get around to that peoy book sometime because that's the one everybody wants to read. They're like, oh, let's hear about the shrooms, you know.
- [64:40]
C
Well, while you are working on writing that, of course listeners can read the first part of what hopefully will be a trilogy, the book we've been discussing titled the Women who Threw Witchcraft and Inquisition in 16th Century Mexico, published by Cambridge University Press in in 2025. Martin, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [64:59]
A
My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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