ABSTRACT
On her deathbed in 1678, Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, a former African slave, secured the privilege of professing as a nun in the Discalced Carmelite convent of San José in Puebla, Mexico. Although permitted to become a nun and celebrated in a posthumous spiritual biography, Esperanza, as Joan Bristol argues below, did not serve as an example to New Spain’s population of the social or spiritual redemption normally associated with participation in convent life. Esperanza lived in a society obsessed with both racial hierarchy and the potential for revolt that existed among its ‘lower orders’.1 Her biographer’s continued emphasis on the exceptional nature of Esperanza’s virtue – his reminder that ‘although [she was] black, [she was] beautiful’ – served to reinforce the belief in mid-colonial New Spain that virtue could not be associated with blackness.
