Colonial society. Colonial Spanish America. Essay

Colonial Society
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Colonial Society
Colonial Spanish America comprised the regions of Brazil; the Viceroyalty of Peru; and New Spain, which consisted of the Caribbean, parts of Central America, and Mexico. It also included several parts of the current United States. In the colonial society, religious women such as nuns played an integral role (Williamson, 2009). This paper discusses how the study of cloistered nuns and convents is crucial for understanding the workings of colonial society as well as the nature of colonialism in Spanish America. In the discussion, the 1990 film Yo la peor de todas (I, the Worst of All) by Maria Luisa Bemberg and the 1990 book Colonial Habits by Katherine Burns are used. The differences and similarities in their arguments and focus are explained. The study of cloistered nuns and convents is important for understanding the workings of colonial society and the nature of colonialism in Spanish America more broadly since the study reveals how women were treated. The study also reveals the roles that religious women played in colonial society. Also, it reveals the notions of motherhood, family and marriage in colonial society. These are depicted in the 1990 film Yo la peor de todas and the 1990 book Colonial Habits.Cloistered nuns played an essential role in the colonial society in Spanish America. These religious women often raised orphans, educated elite women, and provided shelter to women who were abused (Restall & Lane, 2008). Convent education made these religious women the most highly educated group of women in the colonial society at the time and even produced the most prominent writer of the colonial era, namely Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1648-1695). It is notable that just like most facets of the colonial society in Spanish America, the convents expanded the options of women in certain areas but limited them in other areas. The convents at the time restricted women who deviated from the accepted models of family life and marriage, whilst at the same time it gave them away to escape the constraints of a patriarchal society. This is shown in both the film and the book hence a similarity in the focus of the two. The difference between them is that while the film focuses on a single nun, the book focuses on several nuns.In colonial Peru, a large number of nuns were at the center of city life. As Burns (1999) pointed out at the beginning of her text, these religious women played a very important role in both the production and reproduction of privilege and power in the Spanish America colonial society. The author takes the reader on a journey to witness the making of colonial society in Cuzco from within the world of cloistered nuns. Living in a convent did not imply that the women were isolated from the outside world. Convents and cloistered nuns were usually involved in an intricate weave of exchanges with the rest of the society involving inter-elite alliances, negotiations of loans, prayers, as well as the education of largely young elite ladies in a dense network dubbed spiritual economy by the author (Burns, 1999). The author uses gender as an analytical tool and examines the politics that was involved in the formation of Cuzco’s convents and the administration of their patrimony. Through the use of this approach, Burns (1999) can obtain some fascinating findings. The author’s quest to explicate the foundation of the first convent of Cuzco results in a revealing interpretation of mestizaje as well as the altering ways through which ethnic differences were recognized and constructed during the early years of colonialism in Latin America. The other major finding, as Burns (1999) has stated in her text, is that convents were not simply destination places for single elite women; actually, the profession of women amounted to a convenient marriage to the convent. Elite households utilized this alliance to their advantage that went further than the economic. Burns (1999) in her te...