Everything that is known about the life of Catarina de San Juan is from a handful of texts published in the 17th century. One is a transcript of the sermon preached at her funeral by Jesuit Francisco de Aguilera, and two others were written by her confessors: Alonso Ramos, who wrote a three-volume life of Catarina, and a parish priest, José del Castillo Grajeda, who wrote
hagiographies of her life at the request of
Diego Carrillo de Mendoza y Pimentel, Marquis of Gélves and
Viceroy of
New Spain. Ramos's three-volume life of Catarina is by one scholar's account the lengthiest Spanish text to have been published during the colonial era. These accounts of her life are likely exaggerated, however, and have been extensively studied by modern scholars not so much as texts narrating history but as an example of how colonial hagiographers constructed narratives of a holy person's life (
vida). Nonetheless, they remain the only available contemporary sources regarding Catarina's life. According to these sources, a young
Indian woman was brought from the
Philippines by
merchant ship to be the viceroy's personal servant. This girl, named Mirra, had been kidnapped by
Portuguese pirates and taken to
Cochin (modern-day Kochi) in the south of India. There, she escaped her kidnappers and took refuge in a
Jesuit mission, where she was
baptized with the name
Catarina de San Juan. Mirra was then delivered to
Manila, where she was purchased as a slave by a merchant who later took her to New Spain. But once they disembarked in the port of
Acapulco, instead of delivering her to the Marquis, the merchant sold her as a slave to a Pueblan man, Miguel de Sosa, for ten times the price that the viceroy had promised for her. A few years after her arrival in Mexico, Miguel de Sosa died, providing in his
will for the
manumission of his slave. Catarina was briefly married to a slave of the
chino caste named Domingo Juárez. After his death, she was taken in by a convent, where it is said she began to have visions of the
Virgin Mary and
Baby Jesus. Catarina de San Juan, or Mirra (or Mira/Meera), followed the style of dress of her birth country, India, completely wrapped in a
sari that covered her whole body. She may also have worn the
langa voni, which consists of a blouse and a petticoat. It is possible that this mode of dress influenced the
china dress, a traditional style of dress worn by Mexican women until the late 19th century, though there is no primary source evidence supporting this assertion. Catarina de San Juan died 5 January 1688, at the age of 82 years. In Puebla de los Ángeles she was venerated as a popular saint until 1691, when the
Holy Inquisition prohibited open devotion to her. Today, the former Jesuit church, the Templo de la Compañía, in Puebla, is known as
La Tumba de la China Poblana because in its sacristy purportedly lie the remains of Catarina de San Juan. == Notes ==