ABSTRACT
On 17 October 1678, a woman named Juana Esperanza de San Alberto was stricken with a grave illness in the Discalced Carmelite convent of San José in Puebla, Mexico. Born a member of the Bran ethnic group in what is now Guinea-Bissau over 80 years before, Esperanza had been enslaved and brought to Veracruz at the age of five or six. A Spanish couple purchased her and she moved to Puebla with them in 1601. When her owners died, they bequeathed Esperanza to the convent of San José where she lived and worked as a servant for 68 years. Esperanza’s health had been declining for several years before she became sick in 1678, and when the nuns realized that she had suffered a serious setback, they sent for physicians to treat her. She recovered initially, but when she relapsed two days later, the doctors recommended that Esperanza be given the sacraments to prepare her for death. Upon hearing this, she asked to profess as a nun, and the prioress requested a license from the bishop to allow Esperanza to take the habit. When the license was issued, two male clerics went to the convent to give her the Eucharist and Extreme Unction. One of the clerics asked her why she wanted to become a nun and Esperanza, her speech laboured, responded that ‘she did not have any other motive than to give more pleasure to God, Our Lord’ (Gómez de la Parra, 1992, p. 317). She received the habit and later professed before the prioress with the convent community in attendance. Esperanza lived for another year, bed-ridden and in terrible suffering. The nuns maintained a vigil by her bedside and the chaplain visited her daily to say mass and administer communion. Finally, in the early morning of 10 October 1679, Esperanza died.
