Honors Theses
Date of Award
Summer 7-30-2026
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
History
First Advisor
Douglass Sullivan-Gonzalez
Second Advisor
Frances Kneupper
Third Advisor
Timothy Yenter
Relational Format
Thesis/Dissertation
Abstract
This thesis examines the disproportionate prosecution of mulatta and Black women by the Mexican Inquisition in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and argues that this pattern was not incidental to Spanish colonialism but central to it. Drawing primarily on inquisitorial trial records from the Huntington Library’s Mexican Inquisition Papers and the Archivo General de la Nación’s Ramo Inquisición, alongside period treatises and secondary scholarship on witchcraft, caste, and Afro-Mexican history, the study traces how limpieza de sangre, Christian demonology, and colonial racial hierarchy combined to position African-descended women as embodiments of the disorder colonial elites feared most. The first chapter establishes the ideological and socioeconomic conditions that made prosecution possible, contrasting the treatment of Juana Gutiérrez Jalapa and Isabel Morales to illustrate a racialized double standard in inquisitorial justice. The second chapter analyzes love magic, freedom magic, and healing magic as distinct forms of agency through which mulatta and African-descended women navigated, and were simultaneously criminalized within, colonial households. The third chapter extends this logic beyond the Inquisition itself, arguing that the erasure of Afro-Mexican women from national memory under twentieth-century mestizaje ideology continued rather than merely followed the same colonial logic that had once prosecuted them. The thesis concludes that the archive documenting these women is inseparable from the institution that criminalized them, and that the recent, still incomplete, recovery of Afro-Mexican identity in Mexican law and scholarship reflects a centuries-long struggle over who is permitted to count as properly Mexican.
Recommended Citation
Arechavala, Siobhan K., "Maleficia's Magic: Witchcraft, Race, and the Legacy of Afro-Mexican Women and Identity in Colonial New Spain" (2026). Honors Theses. 3612.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/3612
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