Join scholar and ethnohistorian Frances Levine for a special lecture in honor of her new book, Doña Teresa Confronts the Spanish Inquisition: A Seventeenth-Century New Mexican Drama (University of Oklahoma Press). Levine speaks at 2 pm on Sunday, July 24, in the History Museum auditorium. Her talk is free with admission; NM residents are free on Sundays.
The lecture is in conjunction with the exhibit, Fractured Faiths: Spanish Judaism, The Inquisition, and New World Identities. Doña Teresa Aguilera y Roche’s story has its roots in 1492, a year of enormous significance for the emergence of Spanish Empire and the fate of Muslims and Jews then living in Spain. Following a golden age in which the blend of Moorish, Jewish and Iberian cultures flourished, Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, a fate that befell Muslims in 1502. It took another century for the full impact of those events to be felt globally, but the power of the Spanish Inquisition extended its reach to the viceroyalties of the New World.
The censures of the church impacted the remote colony of New Mexico, where the search for deviants from the Catholic faith and culture ensnared even the most powerful. In the summer of 1662, New Mexico Governor Bernardo López de Mendizábal and his wife, Doña Teresa, were among a small group of citizens arrested by local officials of the Mexican Holy Office of the Inquisition on charges of practicing Jewish rituals in secret. They were accused by the Santa Fe clergy and neighbors as well as their household staff of being crypto-Jews (Christians who secretly practiced Judaism) or conversos (Jews who converted to Christianity but were sometimes regarded as less faithful). Doña Teresa, a rare literate woman of her time, took on her own defense, creating a written record that today sheds light on the conformity, social control and powerful mix of politics and religious intolerance in the 17th century.
In 2014, Dr. Frances Levine became president of the Missouri Historical Society and CEO of the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis. Previously, she served as director of the Palace of the Governors beginning in 2002 and shepherded the development and creation of the New Mexico History Museum, which opened to national acclaim in 2009. She holds a doctorate in anthropology from Southern Methodist University and has been researching Doña Teresa for years.
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