Crowned Nun Portraits Summary

as one her monograph’s greatest strengths. Diaz avoids an over-reliance on single piece evidence and mentions an array of women in the three convents. Her first several chapters study the debate occurring in Mexico and abroad over the creation of indigenous convents. Diaz then moves into examining the genres of sources written by indigenous women and their confessors to demonstrates the methods in which native women utilized their ethnic identity to position themselves in their religious space.
On one hand, native women prided their ethnicity, while on the other, they utilized colonial tropes to support their autonomy in the convent. When some authorities prohibited Indian women from serving as abbess of their convent, contention grew between
Cordova examines seventeenth and eighteenth-century profession portraits to explore the colonial practice and its connection to the indigenous past and whether this serves as an example of preserving one’s ethnic identity. Crowned nun portraits trace their history to old-world traditions, but featured deceased abbesses and notable nuns. In comparison to new world portraits which featured professing nuns of varying statuses, these portraits were unique to colonial Mexican convents. Despite the tradition of flower-crowned nuns in old-world cloisters, Cordova finds correlations between the unique flower-crowned professing portraits in colonial Mexico and indigenous usage of flower crowns. Cordova argues, “The distinctive New Spanish production of the crowned-nun image argues for the combination of traditional indigenous and Euro-Christian practices and knowledge in its construction. This combination is evident in the iconic image of the New Spanish nun as it appears in colonial profession portraits of both Euro-American and Amerindian nuns.” Although some noble Indian nuns participated in the practice of profession portraits, Cordova’s article sheds lights onto the native servants who probably constructed the flower crown. Cordova argues, “I suspect that Sor Maria's floral trappings were constructed by the convent's native servants, perhaps with the assistance of the nuns