SOR TERESA CHICABA—the African nun of Salamanca who spent several years in a sequestered monastery after her enslavement—represents the embodiment of the Black Diaspora. Born around 1676 presumably somewhere off the coast of Mina in West Africa (the part that comprises present-day Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria), captured and enslaved at the age of nine, transported somehow to Spain, and purchased by the Marchioness of Mancera (wife of the Marquis), Chicaba’s story weaves together a series of narratives—about the racial, religious, and national identities of Africans and Europeans in the eighteenth-century—that are difficult to unravel.

Professor Sue Houchins, however, works diligently to disentangle these narratives. Working with her colleague Balthasar Fra-Molinero at Bates College, Houchins is publishing an annotated translation—along with a 150-page critical and historical introduction—of the eighteenth-century Spanish hagiography of Chicaba (whose baptized name is Sor Teresa de Santa Domingo). Chicaba’s spiritual narrative is titled Compendio de la Vida Ejemplar de la Venerable Madre Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo. On November 15th, Houchins came to UCLA to discuss the details of her project in an event sponsored by the Center for the Study of Women and the Ralph J. Bunche Center of African-American Studies.

In her talk, “Between Hagiography and Slave Narrative: Teresa Chicaba an African Nun in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” Houchins examined the discursive construction of African-ness, race, gender, and sexuality in eighteenth-century Spain and discussed how Chicaba’s story belongs both to the genre of hagiography and to what is called an “as-told-to-slave narrative.” According to Houchins, understanding the implications of genre is key to understanding almost everything that is significant about the construction of Chicaba’s life. Hagiography, for instance, refers literally to the writings on the subject of a holy person; it is a biographical account of a person who lives an exemplary life and it is generally considered to be a prerequisite for sainthood. But unlike some slave or spiritual narratives, which rely heavily on the first-person singular, the hagiography must be written in the third person. “It is an unseemly act,” Houchins insists, “to write one’s own hagiography. You can write your autobiography, but someone else must write your hagiography.” The reason such an act would be unseemly is because no saint would ever have to write his/her own biography. The miracles they perform would speak for themselves.

The authorial ambiguity of the third-person narrative, undoubtedly, brings up issues of authenticity and veracity—not least because hagiographies are often written by people who have no intimate knowledge of their subject. In Chicaba’s case, it was Father Juan Carlos Miguel Paniagua who produced an as-told-to slave narrative about her life in Spain while in the service of the Marchioness of Mancera in Madrid and at the La Penitencia convent in Salamanca. Although he did not know Chicaba, he wrote with conviction about her religious and domestic practices, her survival from slavery, her plans for escape, and her treatment in the monastery. When Paniagua wrote this story, he intended for it to be disseminated among blacks in the New World.

Because of her topic, Houchins admits that it was a difficult to find a press that would publish the translation. “For most publishers,” said Houchins, “a book about hagiography and miracles is one step away from talking about fairy tales.” The idea was simply too abstract for them. Other publishers insisted that Houchins focus only on the genre of hagiography and eliminate any discussion of race, the Middle Passage, the Black Atlantic, or African-American culture—a request that would prove almost impossible given the intellectual aims of the project. Fortunately, Houchins and Fra-Molinero secured a publisher who understood that their project could not be so easily compartmentalized. Simply put, the issue of genre could not be separated from the issue of race; the two issues, for Chicaba, were not mutually exclusive.

In addition to grappling with concerns about genre and race, Houchins also discussed the difficulty of situating a figure like Chicaba, whose vexing historical and geographical background is hard to unpack. On the one hand, Chicaba’s personal biography and the content and language of her writing could easily align her with a figure like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the seventeenth-century poetess and nun of Mexico City who also had a relationship with the Marquis of Mancera. On the other hand, the manner in which Chicaba revolutionizes conceptions of religious experience, Christianity, and the spirituality of politics and history also figures her as an intellectual precursor to such nineteenth-century African-American writing as the political manifesto of David Walker (1829) and the spiritual narratives of Maria W. Stewart (1835), Jarena Lee (1836), Zilpha Elaw (1846), and Julia A.J. Foote (1879).

One might also speculate about how to situate Chicaba in relation to a literary figure like Phyllis Wheatley. Wheatley, like Chicaba, endured intense scrutiny before her Poems of Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) could be published—so much so that Wheatley’s collection of poetry is introduced with a four-paragraph preface, presumably from her publisher; a three-paragraph biographical letter from her master, John Wheatley; and a signed two-paragraph “Attestation” by some of Boston’s most notable citizens ensuring the authenticity of her writing. But perhaps the most powerful connection between Wheatley and Chicaba is the manner in which they both transcended their slave status and managed, against all odds, to secure some autonomy by having their work published and disseminated in America and abroad.

To be sure, Professor Houchins will have her hands full as she continues to wrestle with all the various ways of tackling the life of Sor Teresa Chicaba. But her fascinating project will be an important contribution to women’s Afro-Hispanic and African-American Studies and will prove valuable to scholars constructing a history and analysis of Christian spirituality and the Black Diaspora for years to come.