The girls' school of Ana de Jesus at Guadalajara: a school for the poor that its own chronicler insisted must not become a convent
A poor woman of Guadalajara took in girls whose parents could not keep them, taught them to read, write and sew, and paid for it by contracting out their needlework. A donated mill, a bishop, a canon who spent his rents on them for twenty-six years and a 12,000-peso legacy turned the house into an endowed college. Writing in 1742, a lawyer of the audiencia argued it must never be turned into a nunnery: the girls need no dowries and are trained for any state they choose.
Why this wins its question: Girls' education in colonial Spanish America reaches English-language readers, when it reaches them at all, through the great endowed colleges of Mexico City and through the convent, and the standard framing is that schooling for women meant enclosure. This object supplies a documented counter-case from a provincial city, told from its founding household forward: a named poor woman, her curriculum, the contract-sewing that paid for it, a donated mill she ran herself, the bishop who enclosed the school and endowed it by converting the see's saved house rent into a standing payment, a canon who fed the pupils out of his own rents from 1712 to 1738 and left the church unfinished to do it, and a twelve-thousand-peso legacy. Its centre is a sentence that modern surveys would predict does not exist: an explicit 1742 argument that this college must not be allowed to become a convent, because its pupils need no dowries and are being educated to be fit for whatever state they choose. It also prints what makes the case honest — the class remark about needlework, the founder's loss of governance at the moment of endowment, and the exorcism reported as fact in the same chapter.
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 founder is named and her situation is stated without softening. She was "una pobre mujer, natural de la ciudad de Guadalaxara, hija de padres nobles, aunque pobres", called Ana de Jesus, who took charge of educating girls "que por la pobreza de sus padres no podian, sin peligro de su honestidad, mantenerse". She gathered them in her own house and taught them "á leer, escribir y otras labores de mano y aguja". The school begins as one poor woman's household, and the danger it is answering is named on the page: not ignorance but the economic vulnerability of girls whose families cannot keep them.
The curriculum carries a sentence about class that a summary would drop. Needlework, the chronicle says, is what "por lo comun se ejercitan todas las mujeres de calidad en Guadalaxara, las de posible por diversion y las pobres para sufragar su necesidad". The same skill is an amusement for those who can afford it and a livelihood for those who cannot; the school is teaching the second use of it. The source states this as an observation about his own city rather than as a criticism, and this entry reports it as he wrote it.
The financing model is the school's own labour, contracted out, and it is described as a going concern. Ana de Jesus "hacíase cargo ... de recibir obras de costuras, ya de las sacristias de las iglesias, ya de casas particulares, con lo que adquiria para el preciso sustento de dichas niñas, entre las que se distribuian las obras, con tal proporcion, que les quedaba tiempo para practicar el oficio de María". A workshop that takes commissions from churches and households, distributes them among the pupils, and is rationed so that devotion and instruction are not crowded out. Nothing in the pages read gives the number of girls, the value of the work or the terms on which it was taken.
The first endowment was a working asset, not a rent, and it created a management problem the chronicle records. Juan de Urbina, "sugeto de mayor piedad que caudal", seeing the good result, donated a mill he owned on the city's canals; with it the mistress "comenzó ... á necesitar de mas fuerzas para atender á sus maquilas, sin hacer falta á la educacion de sus niñas", and was given a companion of equal spirit, Doña Juana de Alcorta, whereupon Ana de Jesus attended to the wheat trade "saliendo todos los dias con su sombrero y bordon para su molino, dejando á sus ovejas en su rebaño". A charity school run by two women, one of whom walked out daily to operate the mill that paid for it.
Institutionalisation is described in the source as protection and was also a transfer of governance, and both halves are on the same page. A prelate, "viendo una grey tan tierna y que necesitaba de casa mas amplia y fuerte, para asegurar sus cordilleras del asalto de los lobos que podian asecharlas, las quitó de la vista y las enclaustró en casa competente", with spiritual provision, a chaplain and confessors, and temporal maintenance, "de cuya suerte esta escuela tuvo ya el nombre de colegio y comenzó á gobernarse por su prelado". The house gained a building, clergy and an income; the woman who founded it ceased to govern it. The chronicle states the gain and the change of authority in one sentence and celebrates only the first; this entry prints both.
The endowment device is specific and, as printed, ingenious. The prelate was Diego Camacho y Avila, colegial mayor of Cuenca at Salamanca, magistral of Badajoz, archbishop of Manila, promoted to Guadalajara in 1707, who named the house the colegio de San Diego. Seeing it needed rents, and noting that there were no episcopal houses of the see's own so that the bishops had always paid rent for the ones they lived in, he built a palace next to the cathedral and judged it fitting that the bishops should thereafter pay "seiscientos pesos, que diesen dichos señores obispos en cada un año á dicho colegio". The rent the see would no longer have to pay became a standing charge in favour of the girls' school. The same sentence adds that this was to join "tres que producia el molino" as a dote — the printed word is "tres", with no denomination and no hundreds, and this entry does not emend it.
The school survived its patron's death on one man's income for twenty-six years. Camacho died in October 1712, five years into his government. Ana de Jesus is reported to have answered the loss with "ménos fundamentos tuve para emprender el fomento de mis niñas, que los que hoy tengo para proseguir; extenderémos los piés hasta donde alcancen las sábanas". The canonigo magistral Juan de Cara Amo y Figueroa, seeing the girls orphaned, "se dedicó á emplear todas sus rentas, deducidos los gastos de su precisa manutencion", bought a site, began the fabric of a proper college and moved the girls into it, and began its church but could not continue it "porque le parecia mas preciso ministrar el sustento á las colegialas, como lo hizo desde el año de 12 hasta el de 38" — the last seven of those years from a sickbed, the chronicle noting he was struck down in 1731. From 1727 bishop Nicolas Carlos Gomez de Cervantes helped with large alms and at his death in 1734 left the college twelve thousand pesos "que se fincasen para perpetua congrua". Feeding the pupils was chosen over finishing the church, and the source says so.
By 1742 the college was a building programme with an agricultural endowment attached. Bishop Juan Gomez de Parada took it under his tutelage, supplied its maintenance, personally attended the fabric of its offices "que á todo costo las ha hecho", and planted the girls an olive orchard "así para que les sirva de vergel y recreo, como para que en lo venidero les sufrague copiosos frutos"; the chronicle adds that in that year some of the trees had borne their first fruit, that only four of the plantings were still cuttings, and that Guadalajara may become abundant in olives, oil having already been made that year from the two olivares of Antonio de Echazo, the first to plant them, and of Juan de Ubiarco. A church on which more than twelve thousand pesos had been spent was building, with as much again expected for the garden walls, whose circuit is given as nearly five hundred varas.
The argument the chapter ends on is the reason this object exists, and it is unusual for its date. The work, the chronicle says, will be most useful to the whole kingdom "por las muchas niñas que en él se educan", and in the bishop's judgement no work seems more necessary; all ought therefore to esteem and foster it, "sin permitir se convierta en monasterio de monjas, porque siéndolo, faltará el alivio que hoy experimentamos de pobres niñas, que sin necesitar de dotes, se educan para verse aptas para el estado que quisieren elegir". A defence, in 1742, of a non-conventual, dowry-free girls' school on the express ground that its purpose is to make poor girls fit for whichever state of life they themselves choose — and an argument that converting it to a nunnery would destroy exactly that. The chapter then closes by proposing that its example encourage the founding of "la hospitalidad de mujeres, que es tan necesaria".
What the chapter also contains is the measure of what the source is. The same five pages report, as fact, that bishop Camacho ended deaths from scorpion stings in Compostela and Tepic by having the insects brought before him and exorcising them, so that since then "aunque hay alacranes, se burlan de ellos"; that at Monterrey he blessed a spring that had dried up "en castigo" and the water returned more abundant than before; and that at his funeral the hats of his predecessor bishops moved of themselves. A chapter that carries an exorcism, a restored spring and moving hats is not thereby wrong about a school in the author's own city, but it fixes how much weight any single unsupported statement in it can bear, and this entry sets its confidences accordingly.
The limits of this entry. Everything above is read from pages 444 to 448 of the 1870 Mexico printing of a manuscript finished in 1742, by a lawyer of the audiencia of Guadalajara writing in praise of the bishops of his own city. No foundation deed, will, account or visita record was seen. Nothing here gives Ana de Jesus's dates, her surname, when the school opened, how many girls it held at any point, what became of the mill, whether the six hundred pesos a year were ever actually paid by the bishops, or whether the twelve thousand pesos of 1734 were in fact invested. Her own reported words reach us through a man who did not claim to have heard them. The last paragraph is the opinion of the sitting bishop as relayed by an admirer, not a constitution of the college; whether the house stayed out of the cloister is not established here.