Witchcraft In Colonial Latin America

and religion. These practices of healing through supernatural and religious rituals would become known as witchcraft, essentially what Spaniards considered any “unorthodox magical and religious practices ranging from folk medicine to cults”. The colonizers believed that these women who removed themselves from Spaniard governed places were removing themselves from civilization and “lacked religious instruction” which lead to lives of evil. This resistance and physical movement away from colonization allowed Indigenous women to develop their skillful use of herbs and “in the wilderness witchcraft and devils flourished.” Not all women were able to isolate themselves outside of colonial communities, some of these “women challenged authority

In Colonial Latin America women had lost their power, any power that they took or claimed was considered illegitimate, negative and disruptive. Traditional gender roles and religious roles had been adapted and colonial men had been the benefactor of this power shift. Women had lost their life partners, lifestyle and methods of commerce. It was not uncommon in Colonial Latin America for men to treat their wives as children, using physical force to display authority over their spouses and discipline them. The Colonial government had given men the legal right to beat their wives, force women into slavery and labour, this meant women had even lost control over their own

Initially the Inquisition was busy managing new converts from the Jewish and Islamic faiths whose conversion the Catholic Church considered insincere. The Church at first did not associate witchcraft as a threat, it didn’t believe in witchcraft and considered witchcraft a practice of the ignorant rather than the possessed. Those accused of witchcraft in early years were excused from the consequences because of what was considered inadequate intelligence, this included the Indigenous population who were excluded from the Inquisition all together. The Catholic Church’s exclusion of Indigenous people from the Inquisition prompted many women to establish their Indigenous ancestry in order to gain immunity from the church’s jurisdiction. Eventually, the population of colonial Latin America would diversify ethnically and commercial enterprise would expand, with it women’s illegal activity within society. This female movement away from the Church’s ideals would be considered a threat to society and women would begin to be investigated. Blacks, mulattos and mestizos would be particularly susceptible to investigation because of their known association with Indigenous women who were actually the ones