Las Amparadas de la Purisima Concepcion: the house of recogidas of Lima
A viceroy of Peru spent close to fifty thousand pesos on a house for women in Lima, put it under royal patronage, and left it with no income at all. His successor's relacion prints both halves: the chapel and the jewels, then the two royal alms of which only one was ever paid, the coarse sackcloth, the enclosure without communication, and the sentence that the women who enter are Spanish. A bishop of Quito shows the other face of the word, applying recogimiento to indigenous noblewomen.
Why this wins its question: The casas de recogidas of Spanish America are told today in one of two registers: as pious shelters for fallen women, or as carceral institutions for women men wanted out of the way. Neither retelling quotes a document, and the Amparadas of Lima — the best-endowed of them, founded by a viceroy under royal patronage — is usually a line in a list. This entry goes to the outgoing viceroy's own relacion de gobierno and prints what is actually there, on facing pages: the fifty thousand pesos, the chapel and the jewels; the two kinds of woman received and the sentence "las mujeres que entran en ella son Españolas"; the enclosure "sin comunicacion de persona alguna" and the sayal tosco; and the fact that the house had no income, that of two royal alms only one was ever paid, and that it lived on street charity that barely fed it. It then sets beside the building the other meaning of the word, from a bishop's manual for the parish priests of Indians printed in the same decade, where recogimiento is a condition ascribed to indigenous noblewomen and the confessor is told to compel restitution from the man of means who assaulted one — which puts both the reach of the framework and its limit, a private penance rather than a court, on the record in the same object. And it states in its own last claim the thing neither source can supply: no register, no numbers, and no woman's voice.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The foundation, its patron, its name and its cost are one sentence in an outgoing viceroy's report. Melchor de Liñan y Cisneros, writing his relacion de gobierno for his successor, records that "El mismo señor Conde de Lemos, siendo Virey, llevado del ardiente celo del servicio de Dios Nuestro Señor, fundo la casa de las Recogidas de esta ciudad, con el nombre de las Amparadas de la Purisima Concepcion de Nuestra Señora, debajo de la tutela y Patronato Real, gastando en esta piadosa obra, cerca de 50,000 pesos, asi en la casa que compro para el efecto, como en la Capilla, Sacristia y demas oficinas que se labraron, ornamentos y alhajas que dio". The founder is the viceroy in person and the money is his outlay, not a grant of the treasury; the royal patronage is the crown's tutelage over a house someone else paid for.
Who was admitted is stated in the same passage and carries a restriction that the modern retelling of such houses usually drops: "las mujeres que entran en ella son Españolas, y aquellas que desengañadas de los tropiezos mundanos, deseando mejorar la vida, se introducen por el saludable camino de la penitencia, de donde les previno la denominacion de Recogidas." The house is described as entered rather than as filled by sentence — the verb is "se introducen" — and the name is explained from penitence. On the sheets read here the door is open to Spanish women; nothing on these pages admits an Indian, black or mulata woman to this foundation, and the entry makes no claim either way about what happened in practice.
A second class of entrant turns the house from a penitential retreat into poor relief, and the regime is described in the same breath as the reason for it: "Tambien se reciben algunas que por muy pobres y desamparadas, podia peligrar su honestidad, viven en la clausura sin comunicacion de persona alguna, si no es en cosa muy precisa y con asistencia de una mujer anciana, de virtud y ejemplo que la gobierna con titulo de Abadesa; el traje que usan es un sayal tosco." Destitution is the qualifying risk and enclosure is the remedy: a woman too poor to be safe is protected by being shut in, dressed in coarse sackcloth and cut off from communication with anyone except in what is strictly necessary, under an old woman styled abbess. Both readings of the institution are on the page and neither is the whole of it.
The endowment failed, and the report says so in figures. "No posee esta casa ninguna renta", and of the two alms with which the king had succoured it — one of two thousand ducados on the sisa de la carne, the other of four thousand pesos in third parts of the vacancies of the bishoprics of the kingdom — "solo se ha pagado la primera, porque la segunda no ha tenido cabimento en los efectos en que vino destinada". The sustenance of the house therefore depended on the alms of the citizens of Lima, "que por ser tan cortas, apenas son suficientes para mantenerse, de que experimentan muchas necesidades". The viceroy states that he has informed the king to settle on them three thousand pesos a year, half on the sisa and half on the novenos, "que es la mas proporcionada asistencia que se les puede señalar". A royal foundation of the 1670s was being kept alive by street alms because one of its two assigned revenues had nothing in it to draw on.
The house stands in a network the same page enumerates, and the network is organised by estate and colour. Besides the two hospitals of the royal patronage, the relacion lists "el de Señor San Pedro, para los Sacerdotes; Nuestra Señora de Atocha para los niños expositos; San Bartolome para los Negros y Mulatos libres, y otras casas de convalecencia, que don Antonio Davila, Presbitero, ha fabricado para Sacerdotes, Negros, Mulatos y mujeres, por no haber antes mas que la de San Diego (que esta a cargo de los religiosos de San Juan de Dios) para hombres Españoles, y las de los hermanos Beletmitas para Indios"; none of these belonged to the Real Patronato, and the government assisted them "por la piedad de su ereccion", as it did the Hermandad del Refugio, "que cuida de llevar los enfermos a los hospitales". The same page that records a hospital endowed for free blacks and mulattoes and convalescent houses built for them by a private priest records a women's foundation whose entrants are Spanish. Both facts belong in any account of this charity.
"Recogimiento" in the Indies was a condition of upbringing as well as a building, and it was applied to indigenous women by the clergy who administered them. Alonso de la Peña Montenegro, bishop of Quito, in the manual for parish priests of Indians printed at Lyon in 1678, writes: "algunas Indias principales, criadas en recogimiento, estiman, y hazen aprecio de su entereza, y quando con tales personas se cometio el estupro, y el agressor tiene caudal, y possible, le deve el Confessor obligar a alguna restitucion, como tambien lo deve hazer aquel que hizo fuerça a la muger viuda, por quanto uso de su cuerpo, ipsa renuente"; and he generalises that "forçar a una muger soltera, es pecado que pide satisfacion, aunque no aya perdido con la fuerça su entereza". Two things are on that page at once. Indigenous noblewomen are inside the same honour framework as Spanish women and a remedy is owed to them by men of means; and the remedy named is a confessor's obligation in the internal forum of penance, not a prosecution — the passage exists because such assaults were routine enough to need a rule.
What these two witnesses cannot do should be said plainly, because it is most of what a reader wants to know. Neither gives a register, a number of women, a term of residence, a rule of the house, an account of who decided admission or release, or any statement about whether a woman was ever placed in the Amparadas by a husband, a father or a court rather than entering of her own motion — so this entry makes no finding on compulsory confinement in either direction. Neither prints a word from any woman inside. Both are men in authority writing about institutions they governed or commended: an outgoing viceroy recommending a foundation to the successor he wants to continue it, in a genre that exists to present a governor's own record, and a bishop instructing the confessors of his diocese. What they establish is that the house existed under royal patronage, what it cost, how it was meant to work, that its funding did not arrive, and how the word recogimiento was used by the men who ran the system.