Moments in Time: Stories of New Mexico’s History; In Her Own Voice: Doña Teresa Aguilera y Roche and the Intrigue at the Palace of the Governors

The trial shows us that this is a fabulous story. It's full of human drama, it's full of poignant details, and it's full of probably unexpected insights into what New Mexico was like in the colonial period. By the time they reached New Mexico, the governor and the Franciscan friars have already had a deep falling out, and Dona Teresa is swept up into this controversy. She becomes a target of the Inquisition in part because she is the governor's wife, and in part because of her own outspoken ways. The rivalry between governors was certainly engineered because it was the way that the Spanish crown kept a check on the governors.

The new governor coming in would do his best to suppress the governor going out, and that way the crown could find the outgoing governor for not having carried out his duties and reduce the cost for bringing in the governors. Dona Teresa's arrest is a moment of probably enormous surprise for her, but great drama. The sheriff, in a priest, walked into her bedroom at four o'clock in the morning, and she sits up on the bed, and she doesn't understand really what's happening. She turns her face to the wall, she says prayer, she cries out, and says, why are you doing this? Why are you arresting me? After Dona Teresa was arrested, the process basically was you take the person, and while you're arresting them, you also begin an inventory of all the goods that they have. It was an incredible list.

There were gold items, there was perfume, there was even a cross that was made out of manatee hide, there was lots of chocolate, there were additions for making chocolate, the list went on and on and on, and all that was confiscated by the Inquisition because the Inquisition used the goods of the person who was arrested to pay for their incarceration. She's the only woman from New Mexico who's ever tried, and she's tried for the crime of being a Jew. There are 26 witnesses who speak against her, and they accuse her of being a Jew on the most incredible of grounds. And these are some of the things that they say mean that she must be Jewish because this is that variance with the way people live in Santa Fe.

When Dona Teresa was arrested, she was taken to a cell, she was held there for several days, and then did a six-month journey all the way down to the Inquisition headquarters in Mexico City. The cells themselves were small, they had barbed windows, a little bit of light, but not incredibly well lit. The cells were kept apart from each other, prisoners were not supposed to talk to each other, and it was part of the process, I think, of getting them to confess. Finally, after these months that she and her husband have stood trial, she asks for a pen and paper, and this is what's so dramatic and so unusual. She writes her own defense. In her defense, she talks about the maids who are stealing from her, and surely they must be people who brought charges against her, and she responds with the way in which

they stole chocolate by hiding it in bags under their skirts. She talks about the many enemies that she and her husband had, the sheriff who had an illegitimate child with someone else in town. She responds to the charges by leveling charges against everyone in Santa Fe. What Dona Teresa's defense document does also is open a picture of what day-to-day life was like in the palace at that time. We have the stories and the dalliances of the governors. We have stories of people stealing out of the storerooms in the palace. She talks about the illegitimacy, she talks about the illiteracy, she talks about the superstitions by which people live their lives here, and that's what makes their testimony so important and so interesting as a social history of Santa Fe. Dona Teresa spends about 20 months in jail, and the final resolution is that the Inquisition

doesn't so much drop the charges, they dismiss the charges. I think by this time, the idea of the Inquisition going after people for practicing crypto Judaism had begun to fade and the fact that this implicated high-level officials in New Mexico may have added to their decision that maybe we shouldn't carry this case too far. And from that trial record, we understand that these are people. These are people with motives, sometimes good, sometimes not so good. And to survive here, you had to have, like she did, a lot of gumption. In Spanish, there's an expression, poeble o pecanio, and fied no inaudible. And that pretty much describes Santa Fe, a small town, but an enormous hell.