Fragile fortunes: Afrodescendant women, witchcraft, and the remaking of urban Cartagena

Abstract

On the evening of 6 September 1632, Inquisition officials arrested Teodora de Salcedo, a formerly enslaved woman, in Cartagena de Indias. That same night, they took a detailed inventory of her possessions: 'Firstly,' they wrote, 'a wooden house roofed with tiles' located in the neighborhood of Los Jagüeyes. Perhaps with Teodora de Salcedo still in the room, the officials continued to list all of her belongings. These included textiles, jewelry, religious objects, cooking and dining wares, furniture, paintings, personal care objects, foodstuffs, and 'some papers,' such as the title to her house. Some of the objects that Teodora de Salcedo had within her house at the time of her arrest reflected Cartagena's connections to Atlantic and Pacific trade networks. The officials noted wooden plates from Japan, two pieces of 'blue Guinea cloth,' a vicuña hat, a small box from Flanders, and several European textiles. 1 In the subsequent months, Inquisition officials drew similar inventories of the property of fifteen African and Afrodescendant women and seized it for the duration of the women's trial for suspected witchcraft. In addition to real estate, household objects, clothing, and jewelry, these inventories also include enslaved people and some of the women's own freedom papers. In 1634, the Holy Office declared the women guilty and imposed a range of punishments that included permanent confiscation of all their property. The tribunal then auctioned off the houses, the enslaved persons, and the remaining possessions to eager Cartagena residents of all ranks. 2 The majority of the original faith trial records from the Inquisition of Cartagena have not survived. Faced with the absence of such records, historians have worked with the annual summaries (relaciones de causa) that Cartagena inquisitors submitted to Madrid, and with the rare faith trial records that local inquisitors submitted to their superiors as copies. Nonetheless, the existing summaries have been a rich source for scholars of witchcraft, sorcery, knowledge production, gender, and sexuality in Cartagena. Nicole von Germeten (2013) has studied these women's expressions of sexuality through their 'confessions' to the Inquisition and through their self-fashioning as suggested by the existing faith trials, summaries, and some of the clothes and jewelry in the confiscation inventories. 3