As If She Were Free

Abstract

On July 15, 1594, officials in Puebla de los Ángeles arrested fifty-eightyear-old Margarita de Sossa (b. 1536) on charges of witchcraft (brujería) and hauled her from the city where she then resided, Puebla in New Spain, to the secret jails of the Holy Office of the Inquisition in the viceregal capital, México (present day Mexico City). As was typical in inquisitorial trials, Sossa did not know why she had been arrested. 1 However, she soon informed the prosecutors in her trial that she was innocent; her spiteful enemies in Puebla must have furnished any accusations levied against her. Sossa had harbored such enemies, she explained, because some years earlier she had testified against Bargas Machuca, a resident of Puebla, regarding his crime of incest against a young Indigenous Chichimeca girl to whom both Sossa and Machuca served as godparents. When inquisitors in Mexico City eventually heeded Sossa's calls to investigate the previous court case in Puebla where witnesses had supposedly provided false testimonies against her, inquisitors discovered a lengthy divorce