July 10, 2017 • 30 mins
Despite growing up in a convent and coming very close to taking religious vows as a nun, Catalina de Erauso wound up living a life of danger and adventure. A lot of today's episode falls into the general category of "exploits."
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We're taking
a little trip today to both the time and a
place that have not gotten as much attention on our
(00:21):
show recently. That's largely my fault. My picks for the
show have have largely been like United States twentieth century
lately for reasons. Well, we'll break out of that right today.
We're going to talk about Spain and it's American colonies
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And we have to
tip our hats to Jason poor Atha rejected princesses for
(00:44):
this idea, because that is where we first heard about,
or at least I first heard about Catalina de Arouso,
who was nicknamed the Lieutenant Nunn in spite of being
left in the care of a convent at about age
four and coming very close to taking religious dows as
a nun Catalina, they are also wound up living a
(01:04):
life of danger and adventure, and a lot of today's
episode falls into the general category of exploits. There are
thefts and fights and stabbings and narrow escapes, along with
a range of kind of suggestive encounters. And she either
wrote or dictated an autobiography sometime between sixteen twenty six
and sixteen thirty and while a lot of the historical
(01:24):
details in that autobiography have been substantiated, there are other
parts they're almost certainly embellished. She has an unbelievable number
of surprise encounters with parents and brothers and uncles and
other relatives who none of them recognize her as she's
wearing men's clothes. Uh, and her employers are just astonishingly
(01:46):
forgiving of her habit of knifing people. At the same time,
her autobiography also raises a lot of very interesting questions
about how to think about her gender. But you're going
to talk about in this episode as well. You know,
my employers have always been very chill when my knife people. Yeah,
I know, when I was your boss, all those stabbings,
I was like the other way. I never knifed anyone.
(02:08):
This is not an admission of guilt. Um to be
careful what we say. But Catalina di Arouso lived during
the Golden Age of Spain, the Habsburg dynasty, came to
power in Spain following the deaths of Ferdinand and Isabella,
and after Christopher Columbus's famed voyage to the America's beginning
(02:29):
in fourteen two, the nation expanded its empire dramatically. Spain
claimed a huge part of the America's and started establishing
colonies there to increase the size of the empire, to
send wealth back to Spain, and to spread Christianity to
the indigenous population. The creation and maintenance of such a
vast colonial empire, especially one that was so often at
(02:52):
violent odds with the people already living in the America's,
meant that by the time Catalina was born, Spain had
a huge military. Her family was prominent and well off
thanks to inheritances and to the men's military careers. Her father, Miguel,
had been an officer and had served in the Spanish
colonies before she was born, and all four of her
(03:14):
brothers ultimately would serve in the Americas as well. Catalina,
the middle child, also had four sisters, and they all
had far fewer opportunities than their brothers did. Catalina and
her sisters, while still very young, were placed in the
Dominican Convent of San Sebastian the Elder, where their aunt
Ursula was the prioress, and this was relatively typical for
(03:35):
their position in society. At the end of their education
at the convent, they were expected to either marry or
become nuns. Those were the only real options for women
in the Golden Age of Spain. Yeah, there were very
few exceptions to that. San Sebastian was also the name
of the town where she was born. Today it's located
in the Basque Autonomous Community in northeastern Spain. The family
(03:59):
spoke both Spanish and Biscayan, which is a Basque language dialect.
The Basque ethnic identity as it exists today was still
sort of developing when Catalina lived. She refers to herself
and others from the region as Biscanoes, and she was
basically part of the community that was coalescing into the
Basque ethnic group as it exists today. According to Catalina's autobiography,
(04:23):
she was born in five but according to church records,
she was baptized on February tenth of making it far
more likely that she was born a lot closer to
that year, and it's not clear whether she deliberately fludged
her age to make herself seem older, or whether that
was simply an error made when the autobiography was being
written down or even just copied, but regardless, she was
(04:46):
sent to the convent when she was about four. We
know almost nothing about her years at the convent, but
when she was about fifteen and still a novice, she
got into an argument with one of the nuns. This
other nun was a widow who had entered the convent
after the death of her husband. According to Catalina's account,
the older nun beat her, and that is when she
(05:07):
decided to make her escape. She got her chance when
her aunt Ursula sent her on an errand to fetch
her bravery from her cell. So a bravery, in case
you did not know, is a book of prayers, psalms
and other religious texts and readings, and normally Ursula's cell
was locked, but she'd given Catalina the key. While she
was there, Catalina noticed the keys to the rest of
(05:29):
the convent hanging on the wall, so she left her
once door unlocked, delivered the bravery and the key to
the cell door, and not long after told her aunt
she was sick. And asked to be excused from prayer.
Her aunt let her go, but instead of going back
to her own room, she went back to that cell,
where she took scissors, a needle, thread, some pieces of eight,
(05:51):
and the keys to the convent. She then quietly made
her way out of the convent while all of the
other nuns were still at prayer, carefully closing all the
doors behind her until she got outside. From there, she
hid in a grove behind the convent for three days,
carefully figuring out how to cut apart her clothing and
then sew it back together to fashion men's attire. I
(06:12):
love this part of her story. Uh. She did a
good enough job that she was able to make it
to Vittoria, roughly a hundred kilometers about sixty miles away
to the southwest, without attracting any attention. She foraged and
scavenged for food along the way, and this was the
beginning of many years for her of living as a man.
A few days after she arrived in Victoria, she met
(06:34):
a professor who bought her some new clothes and was
impressed enough with her knowledge of Latin that he wanted
to tutor her, But Catalina did not want to be tutored,
and turned him down. When he became so insistent that
he put his hands on her, she decided again to leave,
stealing some coins to pay her way. She continued southwest
(06:55):
until she got to Vada Lead, where she became a
court page and started going by the name Cisco Loyola.
She did quite well in Viato Lead, working as a
page secured her an income, and the king's secretary kept
her fed and outfitted well. But one night her father,
who apparently knew her patron, showed up and he and
her patron had a conversation all about how upset he
(07:18):
was that his daughter had run away from the convent,
and Catalina decided at that point that the wisest move
would be to just leave. For the next couple of years,
she continued to drift around Spain, winding up in jail
at least once after a boy's haunted her and she
hit him with a rock, and working as a page
for a man named Carlos de Ariano. Roughly three years
(07:38):
after leaving the convent, Catalina, on a whim, went back
home to San Sebastian, attending mass at the convent, which
is where her mother went to mass as well, and
her mother was there that day, but no one, it seems,
recognized Catalina, although one of the nuns did call out
to her in some way at the end of the mass,
but Catalina pretended not to know her and left. It's
(08:00):
pretty unclear from her autobiography whether this nun was saying, hey,
I don't recognize you, Come introduce yourself, or whether the
nun did seem to be like, you look familiar, or
both of those things, hey I don't know you. Regardless, though,
this visit home was Catalina's last major stop before going
(08:22):
on to the America's, which we will talk about after
a quick sponsor break. After a little more wandering, Catalina
di Arouso went to Sevilla in southwestern Spain, where she
met Captain Miguel d'aturetta. He was an officer in a
Spanish galleon that was headed for the Caribbean, and the
(08:44):
galleon was, by coincidence captain by her uncle. Catalina signed
on as a cabin boy, and they eventually made their
way from port to Venezuela, where they collected a cargo
of silver to return to Spain. At this point. Before
she left, she had basically made her way from the
northeastern corner of Spain to the southwestern corner of Spain
(09:05):
over the course of a few years, and up until
this point, Catalina's property crimes had been relatively minor. She
would steal scissors or a few coins as she made
an escape, but that changed when the galleon was ready
to return to Spain. By that point, she had been
promoted to her uncle's personal servant, and while he was asleep,
she stole five hundred pesos, told the guards he had
(09:28):
sent her to shore on an errand, and left. She
used that most of her money while briefly working for
someone in Panama who didn't pay her very well. But
then she got another job aboard another ship, this time
working for a merchant named one day er Kisa. After
surviving a capsizing and finally arriving safely in port with
all the cargo, her job was to forward it onto
(09:50):
the people who had bought it, something he trusted her
to do on her own unsupervised while he went head
to another town. Once she caught up with them, he
was so pleased with her work that he gave of
her a job in his shop and provided her with
her own staff and household help, which included two enslaved people.
Similarly to how her petty crimes jumped up a notch
(10:10):
in Venezuela, her temper also got more violent. In Panama.
A man that she identified only as Rays blocked her
view at a theater and threatened to slash her face
when she tried to get him to move, and when
she saw him passing by the shop the next day,
she closed it up, grabbed a knife, and hunted him down,
slashing his face instead. She ran into a church to
(10:33):
take refuge, but she was pursued by the sheriff, shackled,
and taken to jail. This would be the first of
quite a lot of fights involving daggers, knives, swords or
other blades, followed by flights into church to take refuge,
followed by time in jail, and in spite of the
fact that she was pretty clearly the instigator most of
the time, her employers kept coming to her defense. Uh,
(10:56):
this is what happened this first time. It would continue
you to happen later on in her story. In this case,
her employer talked to the magistrate on her behalf and
finally got her released into the custody of a bishop
after about three months. But at that point Catalina was
afraid that she would constantly be looking over her shoulder
for Reis to come after her, so her employer proposed
(11:18):
a solution. She would marry Beatrice to Cardenas, who was
both raised his aunt and her boss's lover. And keep
in mind, even though she did not identify as a man,
she was still living as a man, so all of
these people believed that she would make a lovely bridegroom.
Catalina said that there was no way that she was
going to agree to this marriage, so Wanda or Kisa
offered to transfer her to a store in another town
(11:40):
doing the same work, but out of the path of
Rays or the local police. Of course, this did not work.
Ray's and two of his friends tracked her down, and
the ensuing sword fight, she killed one of them. She
then fled to Lima, Peru, bearing a letter of recommendation
from her former boss, who was still willing to recommend
her after all of this, which let her get a
(12:03):
job with another merchant there, but that job didn't last
long either. Her employer and Lima was married and his
wife had two sisters living with the family. Both young
women were very fond of Catalina, and her employer passed
by a window one day and saw Catalina cuddling together
with one of these sisters, who was combing Catalina's hair,
(12:23):
and overheard the sister tell Catalina that she should earn
enough money to allow them to get married, and her
employer confronted her and Catalina left. This would become part
of the overall pattern of Catalina's life. In addition to
having to leave town after fighting with or killing someone,
she also made several escapes after being caught alone in
(12:45):
a suggestive way with the wife's sister or a girlfriend
of whichever man was employing or sheltering her at the time.
As far as we know, all of these folks believed
her to be a man. And while her autobiography never
specifically says what she was up to with all of
these women and homosexuality was punishable by death, it's all
(13:08):
written with a lot of implied winking and innuendo, and
her autobiography it's like we should we should know what
she means when she says fooling around, but it's also
very embellished, so who knows, right, Like, there's there's that
patina of m ha about the whole thing where you
(13:30):
can't quite take any of it at face value. Yep,
it's tricky. And eventually though, Catalina left her merchant life
and she joined the military, and although she wasn't traveling
under her birth name, she did list her real place
of birth when she registered, and it turned out that
her brother, Captain Miguel de Arauso, was secretary to the
governor of the port of Concepcion, which was Catalina's first
(13:52):
destination during her time with the army, and she had
not seen her brother since she was too so of
course he didn't recognize her at all, but upon seeing
where she was from, he did ask for stories from
home and how his family was, and that included asking
after his sister, Catalina the nun. This is one of
those moments, many moments in the autobiography that raises some questions.
(14:16):
Catalina's family in San Sebastian knew that she had not
become a nun, and at this point years had passed
since she had left the convent, So if her brother
was in touch with any of the family at all.
Logically by now he would have heard about her disappearance,
so this could be an embellishment for the sake of drama,
or given that you know, it might take a really
(14:39):
long time for mail to get anywhere in the seventeenth century,
may he just genuinely could not have heard word of
his sister's whereabouts. Because Miguel was homesick, he asked for
the young recruit from his hometown to be assigned as
his personal aid, and Catalina actually served in that capacity
for three years until they had a falling out after
(15:00):
she went to visit Miguel's girlfriend without him. This led
to another fight, another refuge in a church, another banishment,
the end of her assignment as her brother's aid, and
finally a move into combat. Catalina was eventually promoted to
the rank of lieutenant, and she served for five years,
apparently undetected that she was a woman. There's not a
(15:22):
lot of detail about exactly where Catalina served and what
she did while serving, but at this point the Spanish
Empire had been at war with the Mapuche people in
Chile for decades. Catalina's autobiography rites of being prolific in
battle against quote Indians, including being put in command after
(15:42):
the death of her captain and being wounded, all without
being discovered to be a woman. At one point, she
hanged an indigenous leader who had surrendered to her, which
angered the governor who had wanted him captured alive. Afterward,
Catalina was effectively demoted and sent back to Concepsim, and
while there she got into a sword fight after dark,
(16:04):
and she killed a man who turned out to be
her brother. Heartbroken, she once again fled, falling in with
some renegade soldiers, working as a pack driver, and then
becoming sort of a frontier investigator tracking down people who
had committed crimes. While her autobiography does have a whole
lot of stabbings and fights and that sort of thing,
(16:28):
it wasn't all terrible. On the way to Laplata, Argentina,
she helped rescue and shelter a woman who was fleeing
a murderous husband, including dueling said husband in a church,
being rescued from being hauled off to jail once again
by two sympathetic Franciscan friars. Around sixty three, Catalina got
(16:48):
into a fight in Cuzco, Peru with a man calling
himself El Sid, and they were playing cards and he
kept stealing her money from her pile, and in the
ensuing fight she was seriously injured. When the surgeon arrived,
he was afraid she would die and refused to treat
her unless she confessed first. So she told Father Luis
(17:08):
Ferre de Valencia her entire story, and he absolved her
of her sins. At least according to her autobiography, this
is the first person she told after a very long time.
Elsid tracked her down once she had recovered, though, and
after a second fight with him, she tried to get
out of the Cusco authority's jurisdiction. She made it to Guamonga,
(17:28):
but the laws still caught up with her there. Bishop
Augustine to Carba Hall intervened in the middle of her
being arrested and gave her refuge once again in a church,
and she once again confessed her entire story, all twenty
years of it since running away from the convent. The
bishop not surprisingly found her story remarkable, but he also
(17:50):
had some doubts. Two midwives were summoned to examine her,
and afterward they both attested that she was a virgin.
In a somewhat odd turn of events, the bishop then
forgave all her past murdering and carousing and offered to
help and protect her. He placed her in the Convent
of the Holy Trinity in Lima, Peru, while he investigated
whether she had actually taken her vows as a nun
(18:13):
back in San Sebastian. As they waited for an answer,
Catalina became really famous as people started learning all these
stories about the quote lieutenant nun or sometimes none, lieutenant
who was being kept in the convent and who had
fought in the army for years dressed as a man.
Catalina spent more than two years in the convent, and
(18:34):
once it was determined that no, she had not officially
become a nun, she began making preparations to return to Spain.
By coincidence, she met two more of her brother's on
route home, and when she got back to Spain, it
turned out that her fame had preceded her. Huge crowds
gathered to see the lieutenant nun in her men's clothes.
(18:55):
She traveled around Europe before seeking an audience with the
King Philip. The fourth, seeking up pension for her services
rendered to Spain while in the army, and in sixty
five she was ultimately granted that pension, which was eight
hundred escudos. From there, her travels took her to Rome,
where she saw an audience with Pope Urban the eighth.
(19:15):
After he heard her story, he granted her permission to
continue living her life dressed as a man. There's some
debate about exactly what happened in this audience or whether
it's an embellishment. Yeah, I found a lot more historical
discussion about why he would have made that allowance, which
(19:35):
is we said earlier, was outlawed. It was also suspect
morally on different levels. Um. I found a lot more
discussion about what and why, and not whether it happened
at all. Catalina's autobiography ends not long after her audience
with the Pope, and there's not much about her in
(19:57):
the historical record beyond that point. As we said at
the top of the show, the autobiography was written down
somewhere between sixteen twenty six and sixteen thirty and either
she wrote it herself or dictated it to someone. It's
not quite clear. The autobiography itself combines several literary genres
that were quite popular at the time. It was part confessional,
(20:17):
part soldiers memoir, and part picuresque. Had it been widely
published at that time, it really might have become a
best seller, especially given how she became famous pretty much
immediately as soon as people heard her story. But apart
from a couple of copies, that was lost until the
nineteenth century, and it was published for the first time
in eighteen twenty nine, we do know from the historical
(20:40):
record that she went back to San Sebastian and signed
her portion of her family's estate over to her sister
on September twenty nine, sixteen twenty nine, and she returned
to the America's in sixteen thirty, where she lived the
rest of her life as Antonio di Arouso, a mule driver.
She died in sixteen fifty in Mexico. And prior episodes
(21:03):
of the show, when somebody's identity, especially their gender, has
been ambiguous in some way, we've generally used the same
pronoun that they did for themselves, along with the same
name that they actually used in their own life. And
we'll talk about why that wasn't exactly where we landed
with Catalina after another quick sponsor break. There are a
(21:28):
lot of ambiguities and contradictions about Catalina Dear Rouso's entire identity,
and they're complicated by Catalina's own writings, by the Spanish
language itself, and by how people understood gender in seventeenth
century Spain. So typically on our show, as we said,
we used the same name and pronouns that the person
(21:49):
we are discussing did in their own life, with the
only real exception being when it was very clear that
somebody was using a different name and pronoun temporarily as
part of a disguise, not as a reflection of their
own identity. But Callina really blurred a lot of those lines. Yea.
So during her lifetime she went by at least four
different names, and she also either wrote or dictated her
(22:13):
autobiography in Spanish, which is of course grammatically gendered in
a way that English is not, and that autobiography flips
back and forth between the use of masculine and feminine
inflections in a way that doesn't always match with how
Catalina was actually living at that point in the story. Also,
in seventeenth century Spain, the overall concept of women was
(22:35):
heavily influenced by the biblical story of Adam and Eve,
and although there were definitely writers and philosophers who were
expressing other views, overall, women weren't so much thought of
as a different sex from men, but as sort of
an inferior version of men, sometimes even being described as
an error or a mistake. Female anatomy was even framed
(22:58):
as an inverted or inward expression of male anatomy. And
this was such a different understanding of sex and gender,
but it makes it challenging for modern readers to even
imagine how someone living at the time might have conceived
of themselves. English language translations of Catalina's autobiography, of which
(23:19):
three were consulted for this episode, consistently used a pronoun
she in chapter titles, and they framed the work as
the writing of a woman who was cross dressing as
a man. This is the least anachronistic way to tell
Catalina's story. Cross dressing was definitely a phenomenon when and
where she lived, to the point that women dressing in
men's clothes was specifically outlawed repeatedly in the Spanish Empire.
(23:43):
During her lifetime, So what Catalina was doing was both
unlawful and taboo, regardless of whether you think of it
as a disguise or as an expression of gender, which
of course further complicates the matter of how she would
have presented it in her writing right. And there's a
lot more variety in how scholars writing about Catalina, rather
than translating the autobiography, use pronouns and interpret her life.
(24:07):
Most but not all of them use the pronoun she,
while also acknowledging all these layers of ambiguity in her story.
A few change pronouns and names over the course of
the work, sometimes in a way that winds up being confusing,
which is one of the reasons we did not do
that in this episode. Although some work is viewed through
(24:29):
a more modern reading of Catalina as a transgender man,
none at least that we have found, used the pronoun
he or one of her more masculine names from beginning
to end, and there are even contradictions in the historical
record from those last decades of her life spent as
a mule driver named Antonio de Arouso. There are two
(24:49):
eyewitness accounts from late in Catalina's life. One is the
testimony of Captain Juan Perez de Agierre, who testified in
a hearing about the Arouso estate Insta Steen forty and
in his testimony he said that all of the Arouso
brothers were dead except for one, who he named as
Don Antonia did Arouso alias Alfarez Mocha, and Alfarez Mocha
(25:13):
means lieutenant nune. The other is the testimony of a
friar who described at meeting with Catalina, which took place
in Vera Cruz to another friar, and he made that
description later on in their lives, and he talks about
seeing and speaking to La Moja Alpharez Dona Catalina, the
Arouso who went by the name of Antonio de Arouso.
(25:38):
So in these two statements, one man speaks about Don Antonio,
the lieutenant Nun, and the other talks about the lieutenant
nun Catalina. You'll sometimes also see it written as Katarina,
and we're not sure if that's a typo unique to
that particular text or not, or if she actually did
change up by one letter her name. In that case,
he refers to her, but then as someone who went
(26:01):
by the name of Antonio, so both statements blend names
and genders, and while one starts with don Antonio, the
other starts with Donia Catalina or Catalina. It's also possible
that one friar misspoke by letter, so long story short,
however you look at it, Catalina's identity is really fluid,
(26:23):
both in her own words and how other people saw her,
and in the end, although there is definitely room for
other interpretation here, we settled on using she and Catalina
rather than he and Antonio, because that's how Catalina framed
her own story. Her autobiography begins I Donia Catalina. There
also was born in the year in the village of
(26:43):
San Sebastian, and it ends with two girls calling her Catalina,
Although to be fair, after they do that, she threatens
both of them. It does seem like she was fond
of threatening people, regardless of their behavior in some cases,
so we can't presume that was as she thought they
were calling her. Something I would I would really love
at this point in my life. On on my wish
(27:05):
list of things I wish the universe would just grant
to me is a new translation of her autobiography by
somebody who is an expert in both the Spanish Golden
Age and also in uh, like gender and sexuality and
queer history, like that whole umbrella, to see what that
take on the autobiography would be, because the most recent translation,
(27:27):
at least that I know of, is from about ninety six,
and at this point in terms of like how various
historical conversations around gender and around sexual orientation and all
that stuff like that's kind of dated at this point.
So it's entirely possible if if we were recording this
podcast twenty years from now, we would have landed in
(27:50):
a totally different place on what to call Catalina there
also and what pronoun to use. Do you also have
some listener mail or do uh? This is from Rebecca
Uh and it is a little it's brief. We're gonna
talk about the Kiahoga River um and Rebecca's is a
(28:10):
long time listener, first time emailer. I love the episode
on the Cuyahoga River fires. And mom's family is from
the Cleveland area and I ended up going to school
in Cleveland for undergrad where I was briefly on the
rowing team. The river's still pretty gross. During the transition
between winter and spring, the fish and the river get
confused because the water has warmed up but not enough
(28:32):
for them to breathe closer to the surface. It wasn't
uncommon for dying desperate fish to jump into the boat
or to accidentally or accidentally in air quotes, fling a
dead fish at the cox with your ore. Uh. That
is simultaneously kind of funny and horrifying and sad um.
(28:53):
But I wanted to read it just to reiterate that, yes,
there is still a lot of pollution uh in Cuyahoga
River and the Great Lakes and many other waterways in
the United States and elsewhere. Also, we've had a number
of folks point out to us that when we said
the National Environmental Protection Act, that could should have been
(29:15):
the National Environmental Policy Act, because I typed the wrong
word beginning with P in my notes. So that's that correction.
Thank you Rebecca for writing in. If you would like
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Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We're taking
a little trip today to both the time and a
place that have not gotten as much attention on our
(00:21):
show recently. That's largely my fault. My picks for the
show have have largely been like United States twentieth century
lately for reasons. Well, we'll break out of that right today.
We're going to talk about Spain and it's American colonies
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. And we have to
tip our hats to Jason poor Atha rejected princesses for
(00:44):
this idea, because that is where we first heard about,
or at least I first heard about Catalina de Arouso,
who was nicknamed the Lieutenant Nunn in spite of being
left in the care of a convent at about age
four and coming very close to taking religious dows as
a nun Catalina, they are also wound up living a
(01:04):
life of danger and adventure, and a lot of today's
episode falls into the general category of exploits. There are
thefts and fights and stabbings and narrow escapes, along with
a range of kind of suggestive encounters. And she either
wrote or dictated an autobiography sometime between sixteen twenty six
and sixteen thirty and while a lot of the historical
(01:24):
details in that autobiography have been substantiated, there are other
parts they're almost certainly embellished. She has an unbelievable number
of surprise encounters with parents and brothers and uncles and
other relatives who none of them recognize her as she's
wearing men's clothes. Uh, and her employers are just astonishingly
(01:46):
forgiving of her habit of knifing people. At the same time,
her autobiography also raises a lot of very interesting questions
about how to think about her gender. But you're going
to talk about in this episode as well. You know,
my employers have always been very chill when my knife people. Yeah,
I know, when I was your boss, all those stabbings,
I was like the other way. I never knifed anyone.
(02:08):
This is not an admission of guilt. Um to be
careful what we say. But Catalina di Arouso lived during
the Golden Age of Spain, the Habsburg dynasty, came to
power in Spain following the deaths of Ferdinand and Isabella,
and after Christopher Columbus's famed voyage to the America's beginning
(02:29):
in fourteen two, the nation expanded its empire dramatically. Spain
claimed a huge part of the America's and started establishing
colonies there to increase the size of the empire, to
send wealth back to Spain, and to spread Christianity to
the indigenous population. The creation and maintenance of such a
vast colonial empire, especially one that was so often at
(02:52):
violent odds with the people already living in the America's,
meant that by the time Catalina was born, Spain had
a huge military. Her family was prominent and well off
thanks to inheritances and to the men's military careers. Her father, Miguel,
had been an officer and had served in the Spanish
colonies before she was born, and all four of her
(03:14):
brothers ultimately would serve in the Americas as well. Catalina,
the middle child, also had four sisters, and they all
had far fewer opportunities than their brothers did. Catalina and
her sisters, while still very young, were placed in the
Dominican Convent of San Sebastian the Elder, where their aunt
Ursula was the prioress, and this was relatively typical for
(03:35):
their position in society. At the end of their education
at the convent, they were expected to either marry or
become nuns. Those were the only real options for women
in the Golden Age of Spain. Yeah, there were very
few exceptions to that. San Sebastian was also the name
of the town where she was born. Today it's located
in the Basque Autonomous Community in northeastern Spain. The family
(03:59):
spoke both Spanish and Biscayan, which is a Basque language dialect.
The Basque ethnic identity as it exists today was still
sort of developing when Catalina lived. She refers to herself
and others from the region as Biscanoes, and she was
basically part of the community that was coalescing into the
Basque ethnic group as it exists today. According to Catalina's autobiography,
(04:23):
she was born in five but according to church records,
she was baptized on February tenth of making it far
more likely that she was born a lot closer to
that year, and it's not clear whether she deliberately fludged
her age to make herself seem older, or whether that
was simply an error made when the autobiography was being
written down or even just copied, but regardless, she was
(04:46):
sent to the convent when she was about four. We
know almost nothing about her years at the convent, but
when she was about fifteen and still a novice, she
got into an argument with one of the nuns. This
other nun was a widow who had entered the convent
after the death of her husband. According to Catalina's account,
the older nun beat her, and that is when she
(05:07):
decided to make her escape. She got her chance when
her aunt Ursula sent her on an errand to fetch
her bravery from her cell. So a bravery, in case
you did not know, is a book of prayers, psalms
and other religious texts and readings, and normally Ursula's cell
was locked, but she'd given Catalina the key. While she
was there, Catalina noticed the keys to the rest of
(05:29):
the convent hanging on the wall, so she left her
once door unlocked, delivered the bravery and the key to
the cell door, and not long after told her aunt
she was sick. And asked to be excused from prayer.
Her aunt let her go, but instead of going back
to her own room, she went back to that cell,
where she took scissors, a needle, thread, some pieces of eight,
(05:51):
and the keys to the convent. She then quietly made
her way out of the convent while all of the
other nuns were still at prayer, carefully closing all the
doors behind her until she got outside. From there, she
hid in a grove behind the convent for three days,
carefully figuring out how to cut apart her clothing and
then sew it back together to fashion men's attire. I
(06:12):
love this part of her story. Uh. She did a
good enough job that she was able to make it
to Vittoria, roughly a hundred kilometers about sixty miles away
to the southwest, without attracting any attention. She foraged and
scavenged for food along the way, and this was the
beginning of many years for her of living as a man.
A few days after she arrived in Victoria, she met
(06:34):
a professor who bought her some new clothes and was
impressed enough with her knowledge of Latin that he wanted
to tutor her, But Catalina did not want to be tutored,
and turned him down. When he became so insistent that
he put his hands on her, she decided again to leave,
stealing some coins to pay her way. She continued southwest
(06:55):
until she got to Vada Lead, where she became a
court page and started going by the name Cisco Loyola.
She did quite well in Viato Lead, working as a
page secured her an income, and the king's secretary kept
her fed and outfitted well. But one night her father,
who apparently knew her patron, showed up and he and
her patron had a conversation all about how upset he
(07:18):
was that his daughter had run away from the convent,
and Catalina decided at that point that the wisest move
would be to just leave. For the next couple of years,
she continued to drift around Spain, winding up in jail
at least once after a boy's haunted her and she
hit him with a rock, and working as a page
for a man named Carlos de Ariano. Roughly three years
(07:38):
after leaving the convent, Catalina, on a whim, went back
home to San Sebastian, attending mass at the convent, which
is where her mother went to mass as well, and
her mother was there that day, but no one, it seems,
recognized Catalina, although one of the nuns did call out
to her in some way at the end of the mass,
but Catalina pretended not to know her and left. It's
(08:00):
pretty unclear from her autobiography whether this nun was saying, hey,
I don't recognize you, Come introduce yourself, or whether the
nun did seem to be like, you look familiar, or
both of those things, hey I don't know you. Regardless, though,
this visit home was Catalina's last major stop before going
(08:22):
on to the America's, which we will talk about after
a quick sponsor break. After a little more wandering, Catalina
di Arouso went to Sevilla in southwestern Spain, where she
met Captain Miguel d'aturetta. He was an officer in a
Spanish galleon that was headed for the Caribbean, and the
(08:44):
galleon was, by coincidence captain by her uncle. Catalina signed
on as a cabin boy, and they eventually made their
way from port to Venezuela, where they collected a cargo
of silver to return to Spain. At this point. Before
she left, she had basically made her way from the
northeastern corner of Spain to the southwestern corner of Spain
(09:05):
over the course of a few years, and up until
this point, Catalina's property crimes had been relatively minor. She
would steal scissors or a few coins as she made
an escape, but that changed when the galleon was ready
to return to Spain. By that point, she had been
promoted to her uncle's personal servant, and while he was asleep,
she stole five hundred pesos, told the guards he had
(09:28):
sent her to shore on an errand, and left. She
used that most of her money while briefly working for
someone in Panama who didn't pay her very well. But
then she got another job aboard another ship, this time
working for a merchant named one day er Kisa. After
surviving a capsizing and finally arriving safely in port with
all the cargo, her job was to forward it onto
(09:50):
the people who had bought it, something he trusted her
to do on her own unsupervised while he went head
to another town. Once she caught up with them, he
was so pleased with her work that he gave of
her a job in his shop and provided her with
her own staff and household help, which included two enslaved people.
Similarly to how her petty crimes jumped up a notch
(10:10):
in Venezuela, her temper also got more violent. In Panama.
A man that she identified only as Rays blocked her
view at a theater and threatened to slash her face
when she tried to get him to move, and when
she saw him passing by the shop the next day,
she closed it up, grabbed a knife, and hunted him down,
slashing his face instead. She ran into a church to
(10:33):
take refuge, but she was pursued by the sheriff, shackled,
and taken to jail. This would be the first of
quite a lot of fights involving daggers, knives, swords or
other blades, followed by flights into church to take refuge,
followed by time in jail, and in spite of the
fact that she was pretty clearly the instigator most of
the time, her employers kept coming to her defense. Uh,
(10:56):
this is what happened this first time. It would continue
you to happen later on in her story. In this case,
her employer talked to the magistrate on her behalf and
finally got her released into the custody of a bishop
after about three months. But at that point Catalina was
afraid that she would constantly be looking over her shoulder
for Reis to come after her, so her employer proposed
(11:18):
a solution. She would marry Beatrice to Cardenas, who was
both raised his aunt and her boss's lover. And keep
in mind, even though she did not identify as a man,
she was still living as a man, so all of
these people believed that she would make a lovely bridegroom.
Catalina said that there was no way that she was
going to agree to this marriage, so Wanda or Kisa
offered to transfer her to a store in another town
(11:40):
doing the same work, but out of the path of
Rays or the local police. Of course, this did not work.
Ray's and two of his friends tracked her down, and
the ensuing sword fight, she killed one of them. She
then fled to Lima, Peru, bearing a letter of recommendation
from her former boss, who was still willing to recommend
her after all of this, which let her get a
(12:03):
job with another merchant there, but that job didn't last
long either. Her employer and Lima was married and his
wife had two sisters living with the family. Both young
women were very fond of Catalina, and her employer passed
by a window one day and saw Catalina cuddling together
with one of these sisters, who was combing Catalina's hair,
(12:23):
and overheard the sister tell Catalina that she should earn
enough money to allow them to get married, and her
employer confronted her and Catalina left. This would become part
of the overall pattern of Catalina's life. In addition to
having to leave town after fighting with or killing someone,
she also made several escapes after being caught alone in
(12:45):
a suggestive way with the wife's sister or a girlfriend
of whichever man was employing or sheltering her at the time.
As far as we know, all of these folks believed
her to be a man. And while her autobiography never
specifically says what she was up to with all of
these women and homosexuality was punishable by death, it's all
(13:08):
written with a lot of implied winking and innuendo, and
her autobiography it's like we should we should know what
she means when she says fooling around, but it's also
very embellished, so who knows, right, Like, there's there's that
patina of m ha about the whole thing where you
(13:30):
can't quite take any of it at face value. Yep,
it's tricky. And eventually though, Catalina left her merchant life
and she joined the military, and although she wasn't traveling
under her birth name, she did list her real place
of birth when she registered, and it turned out that
her brother, Captain Miguel de Arauso, was secretary to the
governor of the port of Concepcion, which was Catalina's first
(13:52):
destination during her time with the army, and she had
not seen her brother since she was too so of
course he didn't recognize her at all, but upon seeing
where she was from, he did ask for stories from
home and how his family was, and that included asking
after his sister, Catalina the nun. This is one of
those moments, many moments in the autobiography that raises some questions.
(14:16):
Catalina's family in San Sebastian knew that she had not
become a nun, and at this point years had passed
since she had left the convent, So if her brother
was in touch with any of the family at all.
Logically by now he would have heard about her disappearance,
so this could be an embellishment for the sake of drama,
or given that you know, it might take a really
(14:39):
long time for mail to get anywhere in the seventeenth century,
may he just genuinely could not have heard word of
his sister's whereabouts. Because Miguel was homesick, he asked for
the young recruit from his hometown to be assigned as
his personal aid, and Catalina actually served in that capacity
for three years until they had a falling out after
(15:00):
she went to visit Miguel's girlfriend without him. This led
to another fight, another refuge in a church, another banishment,
the end of her assignment as her brother's aid, and
finally a move into combat. Catalina was eventually promoted to
the rank of lieutenant, and she served for five years,
apparently undetected that she was a woman. There's not a
(15:22):
lot of detail about exactly where Catalina served and what
she did while serving, but at this point the Spanish
Empire had been at war with the Mapuche people in
Chile for decades. Catalina's autobiography rites of being prolific in
battle against quote Indians, including being put in command after
(15:42):
the death of her captain and being wounded, all without
being discovered to be a woman. At one point, she
hanged an indigenous leader who had surrendered to her, which
angered the governor who had wanted him captured alive. Afterward,
Catalina was effectively demoted and sent back to Concepsim, and
while there she got into a sword fight after dark,
(16:04):
and she killed a man who turned out to be
her brother. Heartbroken, she once again fled, falling in with
some renegade soldiers, working as a pack driver, and then
becoming sort of a frontier investigator tracking down people who
had committed crimes. While her autobiography does have a whole
lot of stabbings and fights and that sort of thing,
(16:28):
it wasn't all terrible. On the way to Laplata, Argentina,
she helped rescue and shelter a woman who was fleeing
a murderous husband, including dueling said husband in a church,
being rescued from being hauled off to jail once again
by two sympathetic Franciscan friars. Around sixty three, Catalina got
(16:48):
into a fight in Cuzco, Peru with a man calling
himself El Sid, and they were playing cards and he
kept stealing her money from her pile, and in the
ensuing fight she was seriously injured. When the surgeon arrived,
he was afraid she would die and refused to treat
her unless she confessed first. So she told Father Luis
(17:08):
Ferre de Valencia her entire story, and he absolved her
of her sins. At least according to her autobiography, this
is the first person she told after a very long time.
Elsid tracked her down once she had recovered, though, and
after a second fight with him, she tried to get
out of the Cusco authority's jurisdiction. She made it to Guamonga,
(17:28):
but the laws still caught up with her there. Bishop
Augustine to Carba Hall intervened in the middle of her
being arrested and gave her refuge once again in a church,
and she once again confessed her entire story, all twenty
years of it since running away from the convent. The
bishop not surprisingly found her story remarkable, but he also
(17:50):
had some doubts. Two midwives were summoned to examine her,
and afterward they both attested that she was a virgin.
In a somewhat odd turn of events, the bishop then
forgave all her past murdering and carousing and offered to
help and protect her. He placed her in the Convent
of the Holy Trinity in Lima, Peru, while he investigated
whether she had actually taken her vows as a nun
(18:13):
back in San Sebastian. As they waited for an answer,
Catalina became really famous as people started learning all these
stories about the quote lieutenant nun or sometimes none, lieutenant
who was being kept in the convent and who had
fought in the army for years dressed as a man.
Catalina spent more than two years in the convent, and
(18:34):
once it was determined that no, she had not officially
become a nun, she began making preparations to return to Spain.
By coincidence, she met two more of her brother's on
route home, and when she got back to Spain, it
turned out that her fame had preceded her. Huge crowds
gathered to see the lieutenant nun in her men's clothes.
(18:55):
She traveled around Europe before seeking an audience with the
King Philip. The fourth, seeking up pension for her services
rendered to Spain while in the army, and in sixty
five she was ultimately granted that pension, which was eight
hundred escudos. From there, her travels took her to Rome,
where she saw an audience with Pope Urban the eighth.
(19:15):
After he heard her story, he granted her permission to
continue living her life dressed as a man. There's some
debate about exactly what happened in this audience or whether
it's an embellishment. Yeah, I found a lot more historical
discussion about why he would have made that allowance, which
(19:35):
is we said earlier, was outlawed. It was also suspect
morally on different levels. Um. I found a lot more
discussion about what and why, and not whether it happened
at all. Catalina's autobiography ends not long after her audience
with the Pope, and there's not much about her in
(19:57):
the historical record beyond that point. As we said at
the top of the show, the autobiography was written down
somewhere between sixteen twenty six and sixteen thirty and either
she wrote it herself or dictated it to someone. It's
not quite clear. The autobiography itself combines several literary genres
that were quite popular at the time. It was part confessional,
(20:17):
part soldiers memoir, and part picuresque. Had it been widely
published at that time, it really might have become a
best seller, especially given how she became famous pretty much
immediately as soon as people heard her story. But apart
from a couple of copies, that was lost until the
nineteenth century, and it was published for the first time
in eighteen twenty nine, we do know from the historical
(20:40):
record that she went back to San Sebastian and signed
her portion of her family's estate over to her sister
on September twenty nine, sixteen twenty nine, and she returned
to the America's in sixteen thirty, where she lived the
rest of her life as Antonio di Arouso, a mule driver.
She died in sixteen fifty in Mexico. And prior episodes
(21:03):
of the show, when somebody's identity, especially their gender, has
been ambiguous in some way, we've generally used the same
pronoun that they did for themselves, along with the same
name that they actually used in their own life. And
we'll talk about why that wasn't exactly where we landed
with Catalina after another quick sponsor break. There are a
(21:28):
lot of ambiguities and contradictions about Catalina Dear Rouso's entire identity,
and they're complicated by Catalina's own writings, by the Spanish
language itself, and by how people understood gender in seventeenth
century Spain. So typically on our show, as we said,
we used the same name and pronouns that the person
(21:49):
we are discussing did in their own life, with the
only real exception being when it was very clear that
somebody was using a different name and pronoun temporarily as
part of a disguise, not as a reflection of their
own identity. But Callina really blurred a lot of those lines. Yea.
So during her lifetime she went by at least four
different names, and she also either wrote or dictated her
(22:13):
autobiography in Spanish, which is of course grammatically gendered in
a way that English is not, and that autobiography flips
back and forth between the use of masculine and feminine
inflections in a way that doesn't always match with how
Catalina was actually living at that point in the story. Also,
in seventeenth century Spain, the overall concept of women was
(22:35):
heavily influenced by the biblical story of Adam and Eve,
and although there were definitely writers and philosophers who were
expressing other views, overall, women weren't so much thought of
as a different sex from men, but as sort of
an inferior version of men, sometimes even being described as
an error or a mistake. Female anatomy was even framed
(22:58):
as an inverted or inward expression of male anatomy. And
this was such a different understanding of sex and gender,
but it makes it challenging for modern readers to even
imagine how someone living at the time might have conceived
of themselves. English language translations of Catalina's autobiography, of which
(23:19):
three were consulted for this episode, consistently used a pronoun
she in chapter titles, and they framed the work as
the writing of a woman who was cross dressing as
a man. This is the least anachronistic way to tell
Catalina's story. Cross dressing was definitely a phenomenon when and
where she lived, to the point that women dressing in
men's clothes was specifically outlawed repeatedly in the Spanish Empire.
(23:43):
During her lifetime, So what Catalina was doing was both
unlawful and taboo, regardless of whether you think of it
as a disguise or as an expression of gender, which
of course further complicates the matter of how she would
have presented it in her writing right. And there's a
lot more variety in how scholars writing about Catalina, rather
than translating the autobiography, use pronouns and interpret her life.
(24:07):
Most but not all of them use the pronoun she,
while also acknowledging all these layers of ambiguity in her story.
A few change pronouns and names over the course of
the work, sometimes in a way that winds up being confusing,
which is one of the reasons we did not do
that in this episode. Although some work is viewed through
(24:29):
a more modern reading of Catalina as a transgender man,
none at least that we have found, used the pronoun
he or one of her more masculine names from beginning
to end, and there are even contradictions in the historical
record from those last decades of her life spent as
a mule driver named Antonio de Arouso. There are two
(24:49):
eyewitness accounts from late in Catalina's life. One is the
testimony of Captain Juan Perez de Agierre, who testified in
a hearing about the Arouso estate Insta Steen forty and
in his testimony he said that all of the Arouso
brothers were dead except for one, who he named as
Don Antonia did Arouso alias Alfarez Mocha, and Alfarez Mocha
(25:13):
means lieutenant nune. The other is the testimony of a
friar who described at meeting with Catalina, which took place
in Vera Cruz to another friar, and he made that
description later on in their lives, and he talks about
seeing and speaking to La Moja Alpharez Dona Catalina, the
Arouso who went by the name of Antonio de Arouso.
(25:38):
So in these two statements, one man speaks about Don Antonio,
the lieutenant Nun, and the other talks about the lieutenant
nun Catalina. You'll sometimes also see it written as Katarina,
and we're not sure if that's a typo unique to
that particular text or not, or if she actually did
change up by one letter her name. In that case,
he refers to her, but then as someone who went
(26:01):
by the name of Antonio, so both statements blend names
and genders, and while one starts with don Antonio, the
other starts with Donia Catalina or Catalina. It's also possible
that one friar misspoke by letter, so long story short,
however you look at it, Catalina's identity is really fluid,
(26:23):
both in her own words and how other people saw her,
and in the end, although there is definitely room for
other interpretation here, we settled on using she and Catalina
rather than he and Antonio, because that's how Catalina framed
her own story. Her autobiography begins I Donia Catalina. There
also was born in the year in the village of
(26:43):
San Sebastian, and it ends with two girls calling her Catalina,
Although to be fair, after they do that, she threatens
both of them. It does seem like she was fond
of threatening people, regardless of their behavior in some cases,
so we can't presume that was as she thought they
were calling her. Something I would I would really love
at this point in my life. On on my wish
(27:05):
list of things I wish the universe would just grant
to me is a new translation of her autobiography by
somebody who is an expert in both the Spanish Golden
Age and also in uh, like gender and sexuality and
queer history, like that whole umbrella, to see what that
take on the autobiography would be, because the most recent translation,
(27:27):
at least that I know of, is from about ninety six,
and at this point in terms of like how various
historical conversations around gender and around sexual orientation and all
that stuff like that's kind of dated at this point.
So it's entirely possible if if we were recording this
podcast twenty years from now, we would have landed in
(27:50):
a totally different place on what to call Catalina there
also and what pronoun to use. Do you also have
some listener mail or do uh? This is from Rebecca
Uh and it is a little it's brief. We're gonna
talk about the Kiahoga River um and Rebecca's is a
(28:10):
long time listener, first time emailer. I love the episode
on the Cuyahoga River fires. And mom's family is from
the Cleveland area and I ended up going to school
in Cleveland for undergrad where I was briefly on the
rowing team. The river's still pretty gross. During the transition
between winter and spring, the fish and the river get
confused because the water has warmed up but not enough
(28:32):
for them to breathe closer to the surface. It wasn't
uncommon for dying desperate fish to jump into the boat
or to accidentally or accidentally in air quotes, fling a
dead fish at the cox with your ore. Uh. That
is simultaneously kind of funny and horrifying and sad um.
(28:53):
But I wanted to read it just to reiterate that, yes,
there is still a lot of pollution uh in Cuyahoga
River and the Great Lakes and many other waterways in
the United States and elsewhere. Also, we've had a number
of folks point out to us that when we said
the National Environmental Protection Act, that could should have been
(29:15):
the National Environmental Policy Act, because I typed the wrong
word beginning with P in my notes. So that's that correction.
Thank you Rebecca for writing in. If you would like
to write to us about this or any other podcast,
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(29:37):
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find show notes on every episode that Holly and I
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(30:00):
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(30:25):
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