Colonial Latin American Review

ISSN: (Print) (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ccla20

Fragile fortunes: Afrodescendant women,

witchcraft, and the remaking of urban Cartagena

Ana María Silva Campo

To cite this article: Ana María Silva Campo (2021) Fragile fortunes: Afrodescendant women,
witchcraft, and the remaking of urban Cartagena, Colonial Latin American Review, 30:2,
197-213, DOI: 10.1080/10609164.2021.1912481

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2021.1912481

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa

UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis
Group

Published online: 29 Jun 2021.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 2592

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Citing articles: 2 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ccla20
COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW
2021, VOL. 30, NO. 2, 197–213
https://doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2021.1912481

Fragile fortunes: Afrodescendant women, witchcraft, and the

remaking of urban Cartagena
Ana María Silva Campo
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill

On the evening of 6 September 1632, Inquisition officials arrested Teodora de Salcedo, a

formerly enslaved woman, in Cartagena de Indias. That same night, they took a detailed
inventory of her possessions: ‘Firstly,’ they wrote, ‘a wooden house roofed with tiles’
located in the neighborhood of Los Jagüeyes. Perhaps with Teodora de Salcedo still in
the room, the officials continued to list all of her belongings. These included textiles,
jewelry, religious objects, cooking and dining wares, furniture, paintings, personal care
objects, foodstuffs, and ‘some papers,’ such as the title to her house. Some of the
objects that Teodora de Salcedo had within her house at the time of her arrest
reflected Cartagena’s connections to Atlantic and Pacific trade networks. The officials
noted wooden plates from Japan, two pieces of ‘blue Guinea cloth,’ a vicuña hat, a
small box from Flanders, and several European textiles.1
In the subsequent months, Inquisition officials drew similar inventories of the prop-
erty of fifteen African and Afrodescendant women and seized it for the duration of the
women’s trial for suspected witchcraft. In addition to real estate, household objects,
clothing, and jewelry, these inventories also include enslaved people and some of the
women’s own freedom papers. In 1634, the Holy Office declared the women guilty
and imposed a range of punishments that included permanent confiscation of all their
property. The tribunal then auctioned off the houses, the enslaved persons, and the
remaining possessions to eager Cartagena residents of all ranks.2
The majority of the original faith trial records from the Inquisition of Cartagena have
not survived. Faced with the absence of such records, historians have worked with the
annual summaries (relaciones de causa) that Cartagena inquisitors submitted to
Madrid, and with the rare faith trial records that local inquisitors submitted to their
superiors as copies. Nonetheless, the existing summaries have been a rich source for
scholars of witchcraft, sorcery, knowledge production, gender, and sexuality in Carta-
gena. Nicole von Germeten (2013) has studied these women’s expressions of sexuality
through their ‘confessions’ to the Inquisition and through their self-fashioning as
suggested by the existing faith trials, summaries, and some of the clothes and jewelry
in the confiscation inventories.3

CONTACT Ana María Silva Campo anasilva@email.unc.edu

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
198 A. M. SILVA CAMPO

Building on this scholarship, this article uses the confiscation records to study urban
dynamics of property ownership and to reveal the ways in which formerly enslaved
women shaped local micro-economies. Cartagena was a crucial port city for the trade
in African captives and a seat of the Spanish Inquisition. Yet, in contrast to cities like
Lima, Potosí, Quito, or Havana, few notarial or ecclesiastical archives survive from
early colonial Cartagena. Challenging climatic conditions and fires caused during
pirate attacks made archival preservation difficult in Cartagena. Some of the remaining
archives were burned or destroyed as royalist and patriot troops disputed the control
of the city during the Wars of Independence (Corrales 1883). As a result, scholars
seeking to write social histories of the colonial city have long been forced to rely on
the records that reached the colonial capital of Santafé or the Peninsular administrative
centers of Madrid and Seville.4
The records pertaining to the property of the women accused of witchcraft are
bundled together in one 600-folio unit at the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid.
This bundle is independent from the relaciones de causa. Rather than offering a static
account of possessions at a given moment, these financial records reflect different
stages of Inquisition procedure that were grounded in material and social relations,
from the initial arrest of the suspect and the seizure of her property through the confi-
scation of the property and the final sale at auction. The women’s confiscation records
thus offer a new starting point for writing the local history of urban Cartagena during
this period, since removing each woman for trial meant not only apprehending her
body but also upending and refashioning her connections to the social and material
worlds that she inhabited.
The transfer of material possessions and real estate from women of African descent to
other Cartagena residents triggered by the Inquisition reshaped real estate ownership in
the neighborhood of Los Jagüeyes, where Teodora de Salcedo lived. Some of its residents
expanded their property holdings by purchasing their accused neighbors’ houses at
auction. Most notably, the buyers of all the confiscated houses were men, some of
them members of the Cartagena elite. By mapping the women’s houses onto Cartagena’s
urban space this article shows that the Inquisition’s prosecution and confiscation of the
property dispossessed the individual women and disrupted a tight-knit community of
free people of African descent living in an increasingly desirable area of the city. It
follows some of the movable goods in these inventories as they re-entered the local
economy when they were auctioned by the Inquisition, showing the ways in which
luxury and everyday goods fed a variety of micro-economies, including supplies that
buyers would transform and integrate again into local markets.

‘Witchcraft’ and the denunciations made by Paula de Eguiluz

The Inquisitors of Cartagena first referred to a ‘conspiracy of witches’ (complicidad de
brujas) after they arrested Paula de Eguiluz, a freed Black woman, on 20 September
1632.5 According to her testimony, she was born into slavery in Santo Domingo
around 1591. By 1624 she lived in a copper-mining town near Santiago de Cuba,
where a colonial official held her as a slave.6 That same year, Inquisition officials
brought her from Cuba to Cartagena, where she then faced the first of three trials
under the charge of witchcraft. After serving her sentence, Paula de Eguiluz remained
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 199

in Cartagena as a negra horra, a term that referred to freedom by self-purchase, and was
said to support herself by practicing a range of economic activities that included healing
and love magic.7 Paula de Eguiluz’s continued involvement in Cartagena’s vibrant
healing and ritual economy gave rise to competition and rivalries. Her second trial, in
1632, was propelled by the denunciations of another Cartagena healer. Paula de
Eguiluz in turn denounced other local ritual practitioners of African descent whom
she described as ‘witches,’ generating a wave of arrests.8
The behaviors that the inquisitors described as brujería, or witchcraft, in Cartagena
resembled narrow definitions of witchcraft in the Iberian Peninsula (Redden 2013; Hen-
ningsen 1980). These definitions pertained to groups of individuals suspected of enga-
ging in pacts with the devil during nocturnal ceremonies that included dancing
around a he-goat, engaging in sexual activities perceived as perverse, and renouncing
Jesus, Mary, and the saints. Hechicería, or ‘sorcery,’ on the other hand, included an
array of beliefs and behaviors that inquisitors described as superstitious prayers
employed for magical purposes, unorthodox healing practices, divination, and invoca-
tions of the devil. The prosecutions in Cartagena followed a racialized pattern in
which inquisitors generally charged Africans and Afrodescendants with witchcraft
rather than the less consequential sorcery.9
Paula de Eguiluz’s denunciations directed the inquisitors’ attention to a group of Afro-
descendant women and to a particular area of the city: the neighborhood of Los Jagüeyes
(San Diego in present-day Cartagena), known for its water wells, which likely attracted
local healers to the area. Paula de Eguiluz herself and one of her fiercest competitors,
the Black surgeon Diego López, also frequented the neighborhood. In his own denuncia-
tion of Paula de Eguiluz, López described at least one encounter they both had on the
plaza of Los Jagüeyes in which they exchanged words about a patient they both knew
(Gómez 2017). According to the Inquisition record of Paula de Eguiluz’s second faith
trial, she accused several people who lived in the area of Los Jagüeyes.10
One of them was Dorotea de Palma, ‘negra horra.’ When Inquisition officials appre-
hended her on 9 November 1632, she was wearing an eye-catching necklace (gargantilla)
made of twenty-eight melon-shaped beads of gold, with an image of the Immaculate
Conception, three pearls, and a green cross on the back of the image. Similar jewelry
items were present in the inventories of the belongings of some of the other women
(von Germeten 2013). A different Inquisition court case from the 1640s suggests that
gold necklaces were particularly significant among the community of freedwomen in
Cartagena. In his testimony in a civil lawsuit about the legal status of a Black woman
named María de Villalobos, a witness declared that Villalobos behaved as a free
woman ‘by wearing a gold necklace.’11
According to the arrest and inventory records, an Inquisition secretary removed the
choker from Dorotea de Palma’s neck and gave it to another official, setting it alongside
a black taffeta skirt and the matching bodice. Both officials had discerning eyes, choosing
the skirt over a box that contained ‘two or three shirts,’ which they considered ‘of little
value.’12 The last item they recorded was the house of wooden boards and tiles where
Dorotea de Palma lived, located on the Calle de la Cruz in Los Jagüeyes. Once the inven-
tory was complete and the seizure of property recorded, the officials gave the box with the
rest of her possessions to her husband. He would keep her belongings in his custody until
the inquisitors had pronounced their verdict on Dorotea de Palma’s faith trial.13
200 A. M. SILVA CAMPO

Los Jagüeyes: from ‘empty space’ to desirable neighborhood

The neighborhood of Los Jagüeyes where many of the women lived in the early 1630s had
been a slowly growing area of Cartagena. The Franciscan friars had chosen this location
for building a monastery, which they dedicated to San Diego in 1608. When the first
inquisitors arrived to establish the tribunal in Cartagena in 1610, the area surrounding
the monastery was considered remote in relation to the city center. A map from 1610
(Figure 1) shows the city as an assemblage of mostly rectangular figures, carefully
traced to convey the organized environment of the Spanish-style urbs. To the left of
the urban grid, the map offers an empty space to the viewer, in which the cartographer
chose to insert a colorful compass rose with North pointing to the left margin of the page.
In fact, this seemingly vacant space was the area known as Los Jagüeyes.
In 1611, one of the friars of San Diego described the area as ‘a remote part of this city,
[a] neighborhood known as de los Jagüeyes.’ He added that it was ‘very far’ and that its
inhabitants were poor people who ‘did not have cloaks to go to Mass, and they go [to
Mass] with any patch of clothing.’14 In 1618, the Governor of Cartagena echoed those
descriptions of the inhabitants of Los Jagüeyes, adding that the San Diego monastery
benefited poor residents in the area by feeding them and giving them alms.15
In the absence of known descriptions of the physical space around Los Jagüeyes, we
can imagine that the people who lived in the area in 1610 probably resided in spaces

Figure 1 The urban area of Cartagena represented as a grid and Los Jagüeyes represented as empty
space with a compass rose. Source: ‘Plano de Cartagena de Indias y sus fortificaciones, 1610.’ AGI, MP-
Panama, 20
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 201

that did not resemble the gridded fabric of the city center. Perhaps during the first decade
of the seventeenth century the people described above lived in wooden huts, roofed with
palm leaves, arranged in non-linear patterns.
Census data for Cartagena in general or Los Jagüeyes during this period have not sur-
vived. Antonino Vidal Ortega (2002) maintains that during the first four decades of the
seventeenth century, the area near San Diego was populated by artisans and specialized
laborers. At least four private houses where captains of slave ships lodged African cap-
tives after they entered the city were located near the plaza of Los Jagüeyes (Newson
and Minchin 2007). While the numbers are by no means definitive, there is consensus
that by the beginning of the seventeenth century, Africans and their descendants out-
numbered the European population. By 1615, around 1,500 Spanish vecinos lived in
the city. This number remained stable for the following two decades, and by 1634
included households headed by Afrodescendants. The same year, a military report
drawn by the governor in the wake of war against maroon communities recorded the
presence of at least 12,000 Black people capable of bearing arms in the province of
Cartagena.16
While census data for the area near Los Jagüeyes are unavailable, the confiscation
records produced by the Inquisition in the aftermath of the denunciations made by
Paula de Eguiluz show that a community of free people of African descent, including for-
merly enslaved women, lived and worked in that neighborhood. In addition to the walls
that, by the 1630s, surrounded the city center and Los Jagüeyes, the nunnery of Santa
Clara further expanded Cartagena’s religious boundaries towards that area, and streets
that survive to this day, such as Calle de la Cruz, began to appear in the written
records. The auction and sale records suggest that by the 1630s Los Jagüeyes had a
mixed population and a gridded layout. The denomination of some of the components
of this area as ‘calle’ and ‘plaza,’ in addition to the Santa Clara and San Diego monas-
teries, evokes the linear layout anchored around a Spanish-style square that mapmakers
would convey in later maps (Figure 2).
Los Jagüeyes had also become a home for a community of free people of African
descent that included freeborn and formerly enslaved persons. Many of them owned
houses while others lived in the area in rented spaces. Inquisition officials arrested at
least ten women in Los Jagüeyes following Paula de Eguiluz’s denunciations in 1632.
Some of those denounced lived in the neighborhood in rooms which they likely
rented. María Quelembe, whom Paula de Eguiluz denounced but whose property was
not confiscated, lived in a house owned by an African-born man who had been formerly
enslaved.17 Juan Bran, negro horro, was another formerly enslaved resident of Los
Jagüeyes. Many of the accused women attended his funeral on Calle de la Cruz.18
Eight of the apprehended women, like Teodora de Salcedo, owned the houses in which
they lived. Four of those houses were located on Calle de la Cruz and the remaining four
one block away, on the Plaza de los Jagüeyes (Figure 2).19 Some of the women had pur-
chased their houses from other formerly enslaved people. Catalina de Otavio purchased a
house and plot of land from Agustín Martín, ‘moreno horro.’ The scribe who notarized
the sale described the owners of two adjacent plots as morenos horros.20
Multiple bids for the women’s houses during the Inquisition-sponsored auctions show
that Los Jagüeyes was also becoming a desirable space for members of the Spanish elites
to own real estate. Some of the women lived in close proximity to Spanish officials and
202 A. M. SILVA CAMPO

Figure 2 Cartagena and the area of Los Jagüeyes represented as a grid. Four of the women’s houses
were located on Calle de la Cruz and four nearby, on Plaza Los Jagüeyes. Source: Plano de la Ciudad de
Cartagena de las Indias/ Cs. Bargas delineavit; Cs. Casanova Cxt, 1735. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Map by Author.

their descendants. For instance, Pedro de Quintanilla, an Inquisition official and attorney
for the Santa Clara nuns, lived in a house located on the Plaza de los Jagüeyes, the same
plaza where Teodora de Salcedo and three other women owned houses.21 While Pedro de
Quintanilla did not acquire any of the women’s confiscated land or houses, other neigh-
bors in Los Jagüeyes expanded their holdings by purchasing these properties at auction.22
A similar pattern occurred with the properties located on Calle de la Cruz, whose buyers
were members of the city council, clergymen, and bankers.23
Next-door neighbors may have testified against some of the women accused of witch-
craft. However, the existing relaciones de causa only include the number of witnesses
who declared against each individual suspect, omitting the witnesses’ names and the
content of their declarations. It is in the records of Paula de Eguiluz’s Segundo proceso
that we get a glimpse of a resident of Calle de la Cruz offering a declaration to the Inqui-
sition. Marta de San Antón, a free woman of African descent, said that Paula de Eguiluz
had come to her house to recite a prayer that would allow Marta de San Antón to regain
the attention of an estranged lover.24 While Marta de San Antón was not among those
who bought the accused women’s houses at auction, her declaration does suggest that
residents of Los Jagüeyes were familiar with the services that Paula de Eguiluz and the
others offered to the local clientele.
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 203

‘To become free and to have goods in this life’: obtaining income from
ritual labor
The records that the Inquisition produced regarding these women present their econ-
omic lives from two angles. On one hand, the faith trial summaries for alleged witchcraft
focus explicitly on these women’s path from poverty to relative wealth through a pact
with the devil, as we will see. On the other, the confiscation and auction records indirectly
present the women at the center of local economies that Inquisitors strived to maintain
while the women were incarcerated awaiting trial and after the Inquisition sentenced
them to confiscation of their property. Together both sets of records reveal how some
of the women amassed modest financial resources and achieved legal freedom by per-
forming ritual labor in exchange for payment in addition to their everyday work in
the local urban economy.
In the faith trial summaries, access to wealth was a common denominator in the inqui-
sitors’ narratives about the women’s motivations to become witches (von Germeten
2013). According to the inquisitors, each woman confessed to having participated in
an initiation ceremony in which the devil had promised to ‘save her and to give her
glory and possessions in this life’ in exchange for her loyalty.25 The women’s descriptions
of the initiation ceremonies follow the format of European stories of the witches’ sabbath.
During their time in jail, the women learned that this was the story that inquisitors
wanted to hear from remorseful prisoners and which would most likely allow them to
avoid the death penalty (McKnight 2016).26 Following this template, the women con-
fessed to having become witches through an initiated friend. Teodora de Salcedo, for
instance, said that a certain person had persuaded her to become a witch, because by
doing so she would have ‘a lot of money and rest.’27
The accused women envisioned the work of witchcraft as a way to obtain income that
would far exceed the smaller sums that they made as cooks, seamstresses, laundry
women, and other urban laborers.28 The practices in which Teodora de Salcedo and
the others were initiated encompassed healing and ritual services. These services were
in high demand in Cartagena, as people of all ranks sought the women’s expertise to
treat ailments and to repair broken relationships. In some cases, the patronage of elite
members of Cartagena’s society provided practitioners with such significant wealth
that it drew the attention of colonial officials. In 1648, a decade after her third trial,
Paula de Eguiluz continued to be one of the most renowned healing and ritual specialists
in the city. She treated the bishop of Cartagena until his death that same year (Gómez
2017). In 1649, an Inquisition supervisor from Madrid wrote with dismay that he
expected little to change regarding Paula de Eguiluz, ‘because she is old and has no
other way of life except this one, which has given her fortune and fame.’29
Health specialists were in constant demand in Cartagena, where ships arrived bringing
ill passengers, crews, African captives, and soldiers. In addition to ordinary health con-
cerns, Cartagena residents were also exposed to multiple pathogens that caused epidemic
diseases including smallpox, yellow fever, measles, and typhus (Vidal Ortega 2002).
Many of the patients received treatment in the city’s three hospitals: San Sebastián, Espír-
itu Santo, and the San Lázaro leprosarium (Lux Martelo 2006; Newson and Minchin
2007). While the hospitals functioned under the leadership of university-trained phys-
icians, practitioners from a broad range of healing traditions shared these spaces to
204 A. M. SILVA CAMPO

treat the sick. For instance, Paula de Eguiluz served a two-year sentence at the Espíritu
Santo hospital after her first trial (McKnight 2016). Healing and ritual practices,
however, took place all around the city and beyond. Many of those who were ill received
treatment in their places of lodging or in their homes. Juan Méndez Nieto, a Spanish-
trained physician, complained about Afrodescendant women who rented out rooms to
people in transit. According to Méndez Nieto, these women often arranged for local
healers to visit any ailing tenants in exchange for a portion of the payment, thus reducing
his clientele (Lux Martelo 2006; Solano Alonso 2007).
Traders in African captives invested funds to treat survivors of the Middle Passage in
one of several barracoons that existed in Cartagena for this purpose (Newson and
Minchin 2007). In 1643, the Superior of the Jesuit house in Cartagena reported to
Rome that there were over twenty-four ‘casas de armazones de negros’ in the city
(Fajardo and Gutiérrez 2015). At least four of these barracoons were located in Los
Jagüeyes, including one owned by a free Black woman.30 It is possible that some of the
accused women found work in the barracoons. Diego López, the Black health prac-
titioner, did work in those places, while Blas de Paz Pinto, a Portuguese surgeon,
made a fortune by purchasing ill captives and restoring them to health (Gómez 2017).
Two of the accused women declared before the Inquisition that they made their prin-
cipal living as midwives and women’s health practitioners.31 Both of them, as well as
Paula de Eguiluz, were older than most of the women charged with witchcraft. Those
who declared themselves to be healing specialists were established figures within a com-
munity that included mentors and apprentices. Juana Zamba, age 48, said that she made a
living by washing clothes, by working as a midwife, and by treating issues related with
childbirth.32 Elena de Biloria, 60, declared midwifery as her only source of income,
which suggests that she was established enough to make a living from this sole occu-
pation. Her prominent position within the community of ritual specialists is further
evinced by the fact that she hosted a weekly gathering and dance at her house, located
in Plaza Los Jagüeyes. Many of the women who were later suspected of witchcraft
attended these gatherings on a regular basis.33
Many of the younger women combined their work as ritual practitioners with other
economic activities, as they had not yet built sufficient reputations to attract high
demand for their services. Luisa Domínguez, another of the women sentenced to confi-
scation of all her property, testified in Paula de Eguiluz’s second trial. During one of the
interrogations, the inquisitors asked her to state her place of origin, her age, and her
occupation. She responded that she was from Santo Domingo and that Diego López,
the health practitioner, had previously held her as a slave. Luisa Domínguez declared
that she was 26 or 27 years old and that she made a living by washing and starching
clothes, and by making filled buns (bollos) and empanadas.34 While baked goods do
not appear to be part of the witchcraft denunciations against Luisa Domínguez,
Teodora de Salcedo was said to have killed two Black women by giving them chocolate
bread because she was jealous of them.35
The inquisitors’ summary of Luisa Domínguez’s faith trial highlights the connection
between ritual work and economic gains by referring to her ability to purchase her own
freedom. During her faith trial, Luisa Domínguez declared that someone had persuaded
her to become a witch so that ‘she would become free, because at the time she was a
captive, and [by doing so] she would have a lot of goods in this life.’ Work as a ritual
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 205

specialist seems to have paid off. Luisa Domínguez purchased her freedom from Diego
López for 250 pesos in 1630, which was approximately equivalent to three and a half
years of rent on a house in Los Jagüeyes neighborhood.36

Inquisition auctions: redistributing wealth and preserving economic

networks
Ritual and healing work allowed some women of African descent to obtain legal freedom
and to participate in a dynamic community of specialists in Los Jagüeyes. The confisca-
tion and auction records show that this work also placed the women at the center of
active micro-economies before their arrests. A close reading of the transfers of property
that occurred throughout and after the women’s trials further reveals the economic net-
works in which the women were embedded. In particular, the stages of deposit and
auction of both real estate and movable goods uncovers the Inquisition’s efforts to pre-
serve and maintain both the value of the property and the existing economic networks.
The acts of recording and describing in detail the objects and goods belonging to each
person arrested by the Inquisition fulfilled two main purposes. On the one hand, it sus-
pended the prisoner’s possession of specific property throughout the trial period: the
formal act of seizure. On the other, inventories allowed the Inquisition to keep track
of the goods as they were physically transferred from the person’s dwelling into the
hands of a depositario, or custodian, who stored everything until the end of the trial
period. If the tribunal subsequently declared the person innocent, the custodian was to
return the property to its owner. If the person was found guilty, inquisitors had the dis-
cretionary power to decide whether partial or total confiscation of the property might be
a component of the sentence (Aguilera Barchet 1993).
The stages of taking inventory and placing the person’s property in deposit were
crucial to the Inquisition’s interest in safeguarding the value of goods, whether it be to
return them to the suspect in the case of an acquittal or to maximize the potential
income the possessions would yield if the suspect was declared guilty and her sentence
included confiscation (Fernández Carrasco 2013). Even though the property was phys-
ically in the hands of depositarios rather than the Inquisition’s, tribunals exerted meticu-
lous control over it by requiring certain conditions pertaining to its storage and usage
throughout the duration of trial. Inquisition manuals established that perishable goods
such as foodstuffs, for instance, should be sold at auction soon after seizure, so that
their value could be effectively realized. Real estate, including rooms and houses, was
to be rented out and carefully maintained (Aguilera Barchet 1993). Joan de Ayala, the
depositario for Teodora de Salcedo, reported an income of ninety pesos from rentals
of her house between her arrest in October 1632 and her conviction in March 1634,
when the Inquisition definitively confiscated her property. The Tribunal collected the
rental income as part of the confiscation process.37
The reports depositarios produced before Inquisition scribes offer a glimpse into the
ways in which local life and commerce, far from ceasing with an arrest and seizure of
property by the Inquisition, were carefully maintained. Joan de Ayala, for example,
reported that he had invested funds in order to make Teodora Salcedo’s house suitable
for rental. These improvements included the addition of a new front door and repairs
to the roof, the kitchen fence, and a barrier wall that surrounded the plot of land.
206 A. M. SILVA CAMPO

Although repairs of this kind were modest, these additions to real estate were beneficial to
local and regional economies, as the depositario’s report suggests.38
The process of auctioning confiscated real estate and movable goods allowed the
Inquisition to transform these properties into liquid capital by re-integrating them
into the local economy as commodities, shaping multiple tiers of economic activity in
Cartagena. While the Inquisition dispossessed people whom it accused and convicted,
it also benefited residents of all ranks by offering (and re-distributing) an array of
goods at accessible prices and generating income for the Tribunal.
Real estate auctions enabled the Inquisition to reconfigure property ownership in Los
Jagüeyes and to establish long-term credit relations with other Cartagena residents. The
Inquisition sold most of the women’s houses at auction by offering the buyers credit in
the form of mortgages. Some of these credit lines remained unpaid almost twenty years
later. For instance, a priest named Simón Antonio de Aday bought ‘a plot of land and
what is built on it […] which belonged to Juana de Ortensio, negra horra, [who was]
reconciled by this Holy Office […] in the auto de fe of 26 March 1634.’ The debt remained
unpaid in 1652.39 The houses inquisitors did not sell still generated income through
rental. A house in the island of Getsemaní that they confiscated from one of the
women, for instance, became the first of ten houses the Inquisition of Cartagena acquired
and rented to artisans until at least the 1670s.40
The Holy Office also received income and benefited a range of Cartagena resi-
dents when a suspect owned only movable property. This was the case of Juana Fer-
nández Gramajo, ‘negra horra,’ a native of Cartagena. Juana Fernández Gramajo
lived across the street from the convent of Santa Clara in Los Jagüeyes, in a
room or aposento in a house that she did not own.41 As was often the case in Car-
tagena, Juana may have adopted her former enslaver’s surnames. She may have been
enslaved in the household of the prominent trader in African captives, Jorge Fernán-
dez Gramajo.42
When asked to declare the property she owned at the time of her arrest, she named
only a few specific possessions, perhaps those that were most obvious to the men
taking inventory: ‘a box with her clothes, the bed in which she sleeps, and everything
else that is in her aposento.’ The domestic space that she inhabited may have been
arranged around the most voluminous item listed in the inventory: an old bed made
of cedar wood, with a mattress made of, or wrapped in, the fabric of the fiber cañamazo
(canvas). To dress her bed, she had one sheet, a cotton blanket, and a damask pillow.43
Lying somewhere in the room, perhaps on one of the wooden boxes that she owned, or
over one of her two chairs, she had a linen (lienzo) or canvas bodice, a sash or girdle
( faxa) made of cotton, a vicuña hat, and a dark yellow skirt, adorned with a small
snail-shaped accessory made of gold.44
Further clothes and textiles are listed in this inventory, suggesting that Juana Fernán-
dez Gramajo made an income by selling fabric, or more probably by doing piecework or
mending items of clothing. The Inquisition officials noted the presence of unfinished
sleeves, scraps of cut textiles (retazos), a bundle of buttons, and rolls of fabric such as
taffeta, the fine and colorful ruán (a cotton fabric made in the city of Rouen, France),
and a type of linen from Brittany known as bretaña. She also had a gourd that contained
what the officials described as ‘small stuff of little value,’ perhaps referring to Juana’s
sewing tools.45
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 207

Textiles allowed the women to participate in the local economy beyond their work as
seamstresses. Some of them may have obtained an income by buying and selling
imported fabrics, which were significant commodities in Cartagena’s Atlantic trade.46
Textiles themselves were used as currency and as a means to accumulate wealth in the
trade in African captives to Spanish South America (Newson 2013).47 In addition to
taffeta, ruán, and perpetuán, Teodora de Salcedo, for instance, also owned two pieces
of blue ‘Guinea cloth,’ presumably the European or Indian fabric used in the trade on
the West African coast.48 Angelina de Nava, another of the women sentenced to confi-
scation, owned a skein of blue Guinea thread. A prominent Cartagena resident bought
the skein at auction for nine reales. He also bought a small scapular with a silver adorn-
ment for less than half that price.49
Local buyers were eager to bargain at the Inquisition’s periodic auctions for textiles
and items of clothing. People of high social status such as one Don Luis de Cussia, for
instance, bought an unfinished skirt, while the town crier, a man referred to as ‘Joseph
negro,’ purchased a purple skirt. Inquisition officials and public notaries were among
the people who benefited from the periodic auctions. Notary Francisco López Nieto,
for instance, purchased ‘four shirts and three bed sheets, and four pillows.’ Auctioning
Juana Fernández Gramajo’s property may have also benefited her erstwhile competitors
in the local economy: Juan de Mesa, moreno, for example, acquired a small, unfinished
shirt, a scrap of taffeta, two sleeves that were halfway finished, two more sleeves ready
to be made, and a small bag containing relics.50
Even old and ragged pieces of clothing and textiles found their way back into different
filaments of Cartagena’s local economy through the auction process. A man bought ‘an
old and ragged cloak,’ for instance, and someone else bought a pair of ‘very old’ calzones
(underpants).51 In one rare instance, the auction record offers a glimpse of how a buyer
intended to use the ragged bedsheets he purchased at auction. As recorded by the scribe,
a man bought ‘two bedsheets ragged and torn to pieces, for threads.’52 In a port city
dependent on seasonal markets, repeated shortages meant that very few items were
worthless in Cartagena.
In addition to confiscating the women’s property, the Inquisitors sentenced Juana Fer-
nández Gramajo and the others to punishments that included wearing a penitential
garment, time in prison, and lashes. Finally, the women were sentenced to several
years’ temporary banishment from Cartagena and any other locations where they
could have had the support of family or friends. As the surviving Inquisition records
do not include information about whether or not this part of the sentence was executed,
it is impossible to know where the women went, and if they ever returned to Cartagena.

Conclusion
The records that Inquisition authorities created as they confiscated the property of the
Afrodescendant women accused of witchcraft illuminate fragments of the social and
material spaces that the women inhabited before their arrests. While the few faith
trials and relaciones de causa that exist present the women as moral and religious devi-
ants, the confiscation and auction records show how deeply connected the women were
to Cartagena’s local economy. In particular, mapping the women’s houses onto the city’s
urban space reveals Los Jagüeyes as the home of what had been a thriving community of
208 A. M. SILVA CAMPO

free people of African descent and as a site of local competition for wealth and real estate
ownership. By applying a prescribed procedure of seizure, confiscation, and auction of
these houses, the Inquisition of Cartagena redistributed the modest wealth that
members of the community of Black healers and ritual specialists in Los Jagüeyes had
accumulated, transforming them into outcasts on the grounds of moral and religious
deviance.53 In the process, the inquisitors benefited people of all ranks by offering
luxury goods and everyday items at reduced prices, and by creating opportunities for
wealthy buyers to expand their real estate holdings in the city.
Although the faith trials and relaciones de causa indicate that ritual and healing work
allowed some enslaved women to obtain sufficient income to purchase legal recognition
of their freedom, the confiscation records cast uncertainty over the women’s legal status
after their trials. Crucially, the Inquisition seized the freedom papers that had been in the
possession of some of the women at the time of their arrest. Luisa Domínguez, the
woman from Santo Domingo who made buns and empanadas and who purchased
proof of her legal freedom from healer Diego López, had two cartas de libertad
(freedom papers) in her possession when she was arrested. The first one recorded
Luisa Domínguez’s purchase of her own freedom in 1630. The second one was a carta
de libertad that Diego López had granted to one Ana Bañol (a West-African ethnonym)
‘for her good services and love’ in 1629.54 Unlike the houses, plots of land, furniture,
jewelry and textiles, the freedom papers disappear from the Inquisition’s record in the
stages subsequent to the inventory and seizure of the property. Any conclusions about
the women’s ability to maintain their legal freedom as they faced banishment are necess-
arily speculative. Did the inquisitors return the freedom papers to the women at one stage
or another? Were they allowed to carry the fragile but indispensable proof of their legal
freedom as they faced life away from the communities in Los Jagüeyes in which they had
been rooted?

Notes
1. Inventario y almoneda de los bienes secuestrados a varias reas del tribunal de la Inquisición de
Cartagena de Indias, 1632–1634, Archivo Histórico Nacional, Madrid [AHN], Inquisición,
4822, Exp. 2, f. 10v (Inventarios hereafter).
2. Confiscation by the Inquisition was contingent upon the outcome of faith trials. The most
common legal mechanism for initiating a faith trial was denunciation (delación). On this
occasion, the Inquisition confiscated the property of Teodora de Salcedo, Juana Fernández
Gramajo, Bárbula de Albornoz, Ana María de Robles, Juana de Mora, Angelina de Nava,
Rafaela de Nava, Dorotea de Palma, Juana de Ortensio, Justa, Catalina de Otavio, Ana
María Gedexa, Ana Suárez de Zaragoza, Rufina, and Luisa Domínguez. For a partial trans-
lation of the inventories see von Germeten 2011. For slave-owning Afrodescendant women
in colonial Mexico, see Terrazas Williams 2018.
3. The relaciones de causa that Cartagena Inquisitors submitted to Madrid between 1610 and
1660 have been published by Splendiani et al. (1997, vol. 2). The inventories are not included
in these faith trial summaries. For the scholarship on witchcraft, see for instance Ceballos
Gómez 1995 and Maya Restrepo 2005; on sorcery, see Díaz Burgos 2013 and 2020; on
knowledge and knowledge production see Gómez 2017, and Díaz Burgos 2020; McKnight
(2016) has studied some of the existing faith trials from the perspective of performance
studies.
4. For general histories of Cartagena during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see
Borrego Plá 1983; Castillo Mathieu 1998; Marco Dorta 1960; Vidal Ortega 2002; on
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 209

women in particular, see Lux Martelo 2006. For the pirate attacks in the sixteenth century,
see Lane 2007.
5. AHN, Inquisición, L. 1011, f. 174v.
6. For the life and work of the community of enslaved and free people of color who settled El
Cobre, see Díaz 2000.
7. Proceso de fe de Paula de Eguiluz, AHN, Inquisición, 1620, Exp. 10, Bloque 1, f. 2 (Primer
proceso hereafter). Paula de Eguiluz’s three trials by the Inquisition (1624, 1632, 1636)
have received attention from historians, in part because the trial records have survived as
copies sent from the Cartagena tribunal to the Suprema in Madrid. Von Germeten
(2013) has explored Paula de Eguiluz’s love life, her clientele in the local market for love
magic and healing, and the intense rivalry and competition that emerged between her
and other local healers. Gómez (2017) examines the epistemological challenges that Black
ritual and healing practitioners in the Caribbean posed to European constructions of the
world and situates Paula de Eguiluz as a key participant in Cartagena’s cultural economy
of healing. McKnight (2016) has shown how Paula de Eguiluz exercised agency through
storytelling during her trials before the Inquisition. Maya Restrepo (2005) dedicates a
section of her book to Paula de Eguiluz as a representative of mulatas and criollas who prac-
ticed love magic.
8. Proceso de fe de Paula de Eguiluz, AHN, Inquisición, 1620, Bloque 2, ff. 33–35 (Segundo
proceso hereafter). As von Germeten notes, the entrepreneurial activities of healers
in Cartagena can be compared to the active and competitive small business and vending
markets of Potosí, which Mangan (2005) has described. For a study of similar communities
of women healers before the Inquisition in Mexico, see Gonzales 2013. For Guatemala, see
Few 2002. For broader ritual practice among Afro-Mexicans, see Bristol 2007. For an
account of the denunciations that Paula de Eguiluz orchestrated, see von Germeten 2013.
9. The historiography of race and witchcraft in Cartagena has emphasized the subversion of
racial and social hierarchies through female sexuality and power over male desire, as well
as witchcraft as a form of resistance (von Germeten 2013; McKnight 2016, Maya Restrepo
2005). For parallel arguments about the case of eighteenth-century Mexico, see Behar 1987.
Ceballos Gómez (1995) has highlighted the patterns of racialized prosecution in Cartagena.
For sorcery trials in Cartagena between 1610 and 1614, see Díaz Burgos 2020.
10. Segundo proceso, ff. 33, 95.
11. AHN, Inquisición, 1612, Exp. 7, f. 15v. For a study of self-fashioning, legal status, and gender
among free and enslaved people of African descent in eighteenth-century Lima, see Walker
2017. Gold necklaces were significant among the possessions confiscated from Candomblé
practitioners in Salvador de Bahia in the 1860s (Reis 2015).
12. Inventarios, f. 87r/v.
13. Inventarios, ff. 87v, 92.
14. Fundación de San Diego de Cartagena, 1611, Archivo General de la Nación de Colombia,
Bogotá [AGN], Miscelánea: SC.39, Leg. 3, Doc. 9, 154.
15. Archivo General de Indias, Seville [AGI], Santa Fe, 243, 13 August 1618.
16. While these sources must be approached with caution, they do provide a general outline of
the demographic composition of Cartagena during the first half of the seventeenth century.
AGI, Santa Fe, 228, N. 97, 10 August 1634; AGI, Patronato, 234, R. 7, Bloque 2, f. 361v.
Landers (2013) has argued that by 1640 the population of Cartagena and its hinterlands
resembled an ‘African landscape.’ During the last two decades of the sixteenth century,
African women who arrived by force in Cartagena vastly outnumbered women who
arrived from Spain in the same period (Wheat 2010).
17. Segundo proceso, f. 33v.
18. Paula de Eguiluz described Juan Bran as ‘un gran brujo,’ or great wizard. She also described a
lloro (funeral) that took place on Calle de la Cruz after his death. Proceso de fe de Paula de
Eguiluz, AHN, Inquisición, 1620, Exp. 10, Bloque 3 (hereafter Tercer proceso), f. 94. For ana-
lyses of the lloro, see McKnight 2016, and Gómez 2017.
210 A. M. SILVA CAMPO

19. The women who owned houses on Calle de la Cruz were Dorotea de Palma (Inventarios,
f. 87), Catalina de Otavio (f. 127v), Ana Suárez de Zaragoza (f. 250v), and Rufina (f. 255).
The properties of Teodora de Salcedo (f. 10v), Angelina de Nava (f. 68v), Juana de Ortensio
(f. 107), and Elena de Biloria were located on plaza de los Jagüeyes. For the location of Ana
Suárez de Zaragoza’s house, see Libro becerro del Tribunal de Cartagena, AHN, Inquisición,
L. 97, N. 11, f. 23. For the location of Elena de Biloria’s house, see AHN, Inquisición, L. 97,
N. 16, f. 33. Two of the ten houses that Inquisitors confiscated on this occasion were located
in other parts of the city: one in the city center and the other on the island of Getsemaní,
adjacent to Cartagena.
20. The previous owners of Catalia de Otavio’s plot of land were Pantaleón Mendoza and Mag-
dalena de Biloria, both described as horros. Catalina de Otavio borrowed 90 pesos from Sal-
vador de Bustos, ‘moreno horro,’ for the purchase (Inventarios, ff. 147v–50v). Moreno/a
usually denoted African ancestry.
21. Inventarios, ff. 107, 20, 68v. See also AGN, Fincas de Bolívar, 2, Doc. 6, ff. 402–529.
22. The almoneda, or auction, records show that next-door neighbors purchased the houses that
the Inquisition confiscated from Teodora de Salcedo, Ana María de Robles, Juana de Orten-
sio, and Angelina de Nava (Inventarios, ff. 20, 50, 113v).
23. A councilman (‘alcalde ordinario’) bought Rufina’s house; Gregorio de Banquésel, one of the
richest men in the city, bought Catalina de Otavio’s; the notary did not provide the occu-
pation of Juan Lozano, who bought the houses of Dorotea de Palma and Ana Suárez de
Zaragoza. A priest bought Juana de Ortensio’s house (Inventarios, ff. 255, 135, 95, 113v).
24. Segundo proceso, ff. 13v–14r.
25. Relaciones de causas de fe, 1610–1637, AHN, Inquisición, L. 1020 (hereafter Relaciones de
causa), ff. 322v–23, 324, 326, 328, 336v–37, 338v–39, 340, 342v, 344r/v, 348, 353v.
26. Paula de Eguiluz learned the script of the European witches sabbath over the course of thir-
teen hearings in which inquisitors asked her leading questions (McKnight 2016). Scholars of
other Inquisition tribunals have found similar patterns of defendants confessing to religious
deviance in ways that conformed to inquisitors’ cosmological categories (Ginzburg 1983;
Sweet 2011).
27. Relaciones de causa, ff. 316–17.
28. Few (2002) found that women combined sorcery with other moneymaking occupations that
included domestic service and market selling in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
Guatemala.
29. AHN, Inquisición, L. 1013, f. 360v.
30. Marcelina Gelis ‘negra libre’ owned the barracoon, which was located on the same street as
the Santa Clara convent (Splendiani and Aristizábal 2002).
31. Turner (2017) has shown how white settlers often condemned Black midwifery and healing
practices as witchcraft in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jamaica.
32. Segundo proceso, f. 19v.
33. Tercer proceso, f. 45v.
34. Tercer proceso, f. 58r/v. Washing, making, and sewing clothes were common occupations
among the women who declared against Paula de Eguiluz while they awaited their own
trials for witchcraft. See the declarations by Juana Zamba (Segundo proceso, f. 19v); Ana
Suárez de Zaragoza (Tercer proceso, f. 27v); Juana Fernández Gramajo (Tercer proceso,
f. 31v); Ana María de Robles (Tercer proceso, f. 34); Angelina de Nava/de Guinea (Tercer
proceso, f. 37v); and Juana de Ortensio (Tercer proceso, f. 54).
35. Tercer proceso, f. 95.
36. Inventarios, f. 285r/v. ‘con lo cual sería libre, porque entonces era cautiva, y tendría muchos
bienes en esta vida’ (Splendiani et al. 1997, vol. 2; Relaciones de causa, f. 347v). The rental
price of Teodora de Salcedo’s house in Los Jagüeyes was 6 pesos per month in 1633–1634
(Inventarios, f. 31).
37. Inventarios, ff. 30v–31. For other reports by custodians, see Inventarios, ff. 88v–92, 120v,
128–30v.
38. Inventarios, ff. 31v–32.
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 211

39. For the records of mortgages owed to the Inquisition between 1610 and 1652, see Libro
becerro del Tribunal de Cartagena. The mortgages operated in the form of censos (Fernández
Carrasco 2013).
40. For the Cartagena Inquisition rental records, see Juntas de Hacienda, AHN, Inquisición, 4821.
41. Segundo proceso, f. 33.
42. Relaciones de causa, f. 344. Von Germeten (2013) has analyzed some of the clothing and
jewelry in her inventory. On Jorge Fernández Gramajo, see AGN, Negros y Esclavos de
Bolívar, Leg. 14 Doc. 12; Vidal Ortega 2002.
43. Inventarios, f. 1v.
44. Inventarios, f. 2.
45. Inventarios, ff. 2v–3.
46. Rolls of cloth were the main goods that merchant Simón Rodríguez Bueno in Seville sold to
his business partner Juan Rodríguez Mesa in Cartagena in 1637. AHN, Inquisición, 1636,
Exp. 5, f. 10.
47. Edwards (2016) has shown that between the Revolution and the Civil War in the United
States, people who had limited claims to property rights (including women and enslaved
persons) could nonetheless sustain legal claims to textiles.
48. Inventarios, f. 11v.
49. Inventarios, f. 68v. ‘Dos paños de Guinea azules.’ African-made ‘pano azul’ (blue cloth) was
sold on the Upper Guinea coast between 1613 and 1618 (Newson and Minchin 2007).
‘Paños de Guinea azules’ also appear in the inventories of the property that the Inquisition
confiscated in Cartagena from traders in African captives accused of Judaizing: AHN, Inqui-
sición, 4822, Exp. 5, f. 9v.
50. Inventarios, ff. 7–8v, 26.
51. Inventarios, f. 68v.
52. Inventarios, f. 68v.
53. For a study of marginality in urban contexts through the lens of gender, see Perry 1990.
54. While the Inquisition record does not offer clues about the relationship between Luisa Do-
mínguez and Ana Bañol, the fact that Luisa Domínguez kept Ana Bañol’s freedom papers
does suggest close kinship or friendship ties between both women (Inventarios, f. 285).

Acknowledgments
This work was supported by research fellowships from the University of Michigan, the University
of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid. Heartfelt thanks go to Jean
Hébrard, Helen Melling, Kenneth Mills, Daniel Nemser, Cynthia Radding, Kathryn Santner,
Rebecca J. Scott, Andrew Walker, David Wheat, and the two anonymous readers for the Colonial
Latin American Review.

Biographical note
Ana María Silva Campo is a historian of race, gender, and property ownership in colonial Latin
American cities. She earned her PhD. in History at the University of Michigan in 2018 and holds
B.A. degrees from the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. She is currently a Carolina
Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. As a public scholar, she has
curated online and museum exhibits about slavery and its legacies in Colombia and Argentina and
written for leading Latin American newspapers (including Argentina’s Clarín).

ORCID
Ana María Silva Campo http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6352-0404
212 A. M. SILVA CAMPO

Works cited
Aguilera Barchet, Bruno. 1993. El procedimiento de la Inquisición española. In Historia de la
Inquisición en España y América, tomo II, edited by Joaquín Pérez Villanueva and Bartolomé
Escandell Bonet, 334–558. Madrid: Centro de Estudios Inquisitoriales.
Behar, Ruth. 1987. Sex and sin, witchcraft and the Devil in late-colonial Mexico. American
Ethnologist 14 (1): 34–54.
Borrego Plá, María del Carmen. 1983. Cartagena de Indias en el siglo XVI. Seville: Escuela de
Estudios Hispanoamericanos.
Bristol, Joan Cameron. 2007. Christians, blasphemers, and witches: Afro-Mexican ritual practice in
the seventeenth century. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Castillo Mathieu, Nicolás del. 1998. Los gobernadores de Cartagena de Indias (1504–1810). Bogotá:
Academia Colombiana de Historia.
Ceballos Gómez, Diana Luz. 1995. Hechicería, brujería e inquisición en el Nuevo Reino de Granada
(Un duelo de imaginarios). Medellín: Universidad Nacional de Colombia.
Corrales, Manuel Ezequiel. 1883. Documentos para la historia de la Provincia de Cartagena de
Indias, hoy Estado Soberano de Bolívar en la Unión Colombiana. Bogotá: Imprenta de
Medardo Rivas.
Díaz, María Elena. 2000. The virgin, the king, and the royal slaves of El Cobre: negotiating freedom
in colonial Cuba, 1670–1780. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Díaz Burgos, Ana. 2013. A cartography of sorcery: mapping the first auto de fe in Cartagena de
Indias, 1614. Colonial Latin American Review 1 (3): 243–72.
———. 2020. Tráfico de saberes. Agencia femenina, hechicería e inquisición en Cartagena de Indias
(1610–1614). Madrid and Frankfurt: Iberoamericana-Vervuert.
Edwards, Laura F. 2016. Textiles, popular culture, and the law. Buffalo Law Review 64 (1): 193–214.
Fajardo, José del Rey, and Alberto Gutiérrez, eds. 2015. Cartas anuas de la Provincia del Nuevo
Reino de Granada. Años 1604 a 1621. Bogotá: Pontificia Universidad Javeriana.
Fernández Carrasco, Eulogio. 2013. La confiscación como límite jurisdiccional de la Inquisición a
los señoríos. El caso del fisco de la Inquisición de Cuenca. Revista de Derecho UNED 12: 221–43.
Few, Martha. 2002. Women who live evil lives: gender, religion, and the politics of power in colonial
Guatemala. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Ginzburg, Carlo. 1983. The night battles: witchcraft and agrarian cults in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries. London: Routledge.
Gómez, Pablo F. 2017. The experiential Caribbean. Creating knowledge and healing in the early
modern Atlantic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Gonzales, Rhonda M. 2013. No friends in the Holy Office: Black and mulatta women healing com-
munities and answering to the Inquisition in seventeenth-century Mexico. The Journal of Pan
African Studies 6 (1): 1–19.
Henningsen, Gustav 1980. The witches’ advocate. Basque witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition
(1609–1614). Reno: University of Nevada Press.
Landers, Jane. 2013. The African landscape of seventeenth-century Cartagena and its hinterlands.
In The Black urban Atlantic in the age of the slave trade, edited by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra,
Matt Childs, and James Sidbury, 147–62. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lane, Kris E. 2007. Corsarios, piratas y la defensa de Cartagena de Indias en el siglo XVI. Boletín
Cultural y Bibliográfico 44 (75): 3–27.
Lux Martelo, Martha Elisa. 2006. Las mujeres en Cartagena de Indias en el siglo XVII: lo que hacían,
les hacían, y las curas que les prescribían. Bogotá: Universidad de los Andes.
Mangan, Jane E. 2005. Trading roles: gender, ethnicity, and the urban economy in colonial Potosí.
Durham: Duke University Press.
Marco Dorta, Enrique. 1960. Cartagena de Indias. Puerto y plaza fuerte. Cartagena: Alfonso
Amadó.
Maya Restrepo, Adriana. 2005. Brujería y reconstrucción de identidades entre los africanos y sus
descendientes en la Nueva Granada, siglo XVII. Bogotá: Ministerio de Cultura.
 COLONIAL LATIN AMERICAN REVIEW 213

McKnight, Kathryn J. 2016. Performing double-edged stories: the three trials of Paula de Eguiluz.
Colonial Latin American Review 25 (2): 154–74.
Newson, Linda. 2013. The slave-trading accounts of Manoel Batista Peres, 1613–1619: double-
entry bookkeeping in cloth money. Accounting History 18 (3): 343–65.
Newson, Linda, and Susie Minchin. 2007. From capture to sale. The Portuguese slave trade to
Spanish South America in the early seventeenth century. Leiden: Brill.
Perry, Mary Elizabeth. 1990. Gender and disorder in early modern Seville. Princeton: Princeton
University Press.
Redden, Andrew. 2013. The problem of witchcraft, slavery, and Jesuits in seventeenth-century
New Granada. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 90 (2): 223–50.
Reis, João José. 2015. Divining slavery and freedom. The story of Domingos Sodré, an African priest
in nineteenth-century Brazil. Translated by H. Sabrina Gledhill, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Solano Alonso, Jairo. 2007. Juan Méndez Nieto y Pedro López de León: el arte de curar en la
Cartagena del siglo XVII. In Cartagena de Indias en el siglo XVII, edited by Adolfo Meisel
Roca and Haroldo Caro Stevenson, 385–442. Cartagena: Banco de la República.
Splendiani, Anna María, José Enrique Sánchez, and Emma Luque. 1997. Cincuenta años de
Inquisición en el Tribunal de Cartagena de Indias, 1610–1660. 4 vols. Bogotá: Centro
Editorial Javeriano.
Splendiani, Anna María, and Tulio Aristizábal, translators. 2002. Proceso de beatificación y
canonización de san Pedro Claver. Bogotá: Centro Editorial Javeriano.
Sweet, James H. 2011. Domingos Álvares. African healing, and the intellectual history of the Atlantic
world. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Terrazas Williams, Danielle. 2018. ‘My conscience is free and clear’: African-descended women,
status, and slave owning in mid-colonial Mexico. The Americas 75 (3): 525–54.
Turner, Sasha. 2017. Contested bodies: pregnancy, childrearing, and slavery in Jamaica.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Vidal Ortega, Antonino. 2002. Cartagena de Indias y la región histórica del Caribe, 1580–1640.
Seville: CSIC; Universidad de Sevilla; Diputación de Sevilla.
Von Germeten, Nicole. 2011. African women’s possessions: Inquisition inventories in Cartagena
de Indias. In Documenting Latin America. Gender, race, and empire. Volume 1, edited by Erin
O’Connor and Leo Garoffalo, 103–10. Boston: Prentice Hall.
———. 2013. Violent delights, violent ends: sex, race, and honor in colonial Cartagena de Indias.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Walker, Tamara J. 2017. Exquisite slaves. Race, clothing and status in colonial Lima. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Wheat, David. 2010. Nharas and morenas horras: a Luso-African model for the social history of
the Spanish Caribbean, c. 1570–1640. Journal of Early Modern History 14: 119–50.