Single Women and Spiritual Capital: Sexuality and Devotion in Colonial Guatemala

This study considers how laboring and mixed-race single women in the colonial Guatemalan capital navigated sexual, gender, and racial ideologies in their daily lives and in the documentary record. The distinctive context of sexuality and empire in colonial Latin America has led several scholars to move away from a Foucauldian emphasis on power and domination and towards an exploration of lived experiences, including significant gaps between ideals and realities. While many studies have productively mined the meaty testimonies of court records, criminal cases, and Inquisition trials, I approach this topic from the distinct vantage point of wills, an admittedly unlikely source for accessing sexuality. But a surprising number of laboring single women left wills in Guatemala’s colonial capital and these documents uniquely highlight how non-elite unmarried women reworked official discourses of gender, sexual mores, and religiosity and constructed pious personas for themselves. Much as scholars recognize that race in colonial Latin America was a flexible category and individuals might claim multiple racial identities simultaneously, this study considers how gender and sexual ideals were malleable and multifaceted and poor single women could sometimes claim more than one moral status.