The Lady in Blue had no name in 1630

When the friars of New Mexico asked the Jumano why they kept begging for baptism, the answer, as Fray Alonso de Benavides printed it in 1630, was a comparison with a painting.¹ A woman had preached to each of them in their own language, they said. She was dressed exactly like the woman in the portrait the friars had there, a portrait of Mother Luisa de Carrión, but her face was young and beautiful.¹⁷

The Memorial does not say who she was.² The nun now known as the Lady in Blue, María de Jesús de Ágreda,⁸ does not appear in that chapter, and neither does the colour blue.² She enters Benavides’s writing in a letter of 1631, written after he visited her, and in a revised Memorial of 1634.⁹¹⁰ Blue appears in the letter, as the colour of her cloak.¹¹

The portrait in 1630

The Memorial was printed at Madrid by the Imprenta Real in 1630. Benavides, who had been custodian of the New Mexico missions, made it, and it was presented to Philip IV in the name of Fray Juan de Santander, commissary general of the Indies.¹²

The Jumano chapter opens with Salas. One reaches the Xumana, as Benavides spells the name, by going east from Santa Fe for more than 112 leagues across the Apache Vaquero country.¹³ Salas worked among the Tompira and Salinero Indians, whose land borders theirs.¹³ After a war between the two peoples the Xumana took to him, because he had stood up for the Salineros, and they asked him every year to live among them; for lack of friars he put them off.¹³ Thirty friars arrived in 1629 under Fray Esteban de Perea, and Salas and Fray Diego López were sent at once, with the Xumana as guides.¹⁴

Before they left, the Memorial says, the friars asked the Indians why they wanted baptism so badly.¹ The answer was the woman, set against the portrait. Indians newly arrived from those nations, it adds, said the same when they looked at the painting.⁷

The chapter then turns to the camp. The sorcerers have told the captains the friars will not come, since in six years they have not, and the tents are to be struck.¹⁵ At daybreak “the Saint” speaks to each captain and tells him not to go; twelve captains go to see, and meet the friars on the third day.¹⁵ They ask to see the portrait of the woman who preached to them.¹⁶ The Father shows them one of Mother Luisa de Carrión, and they say she was dressed like that but was more beautiful and young.¹⁶

“La Santa” is the only name the visitor gets.² Luisa de Carrión turns up once more in the Memorial, at Moqui, where a friar carries a cross that had belonged to her.¹⁷ A Latin version printed at Salzburg in 1634 tells the Jumano passage the same way, with the portrait and without Ágreda.¹⁸ That printing is not the 1634 text below.

In 1630, then, the story is about a painted nun and a young woman dressed like her, and the Memorial leaves the second one unnamed.⁷²

The 1634 text puts a name to her

Benavides’s revised Memorial is dated 12 February 1634 and runs to 58 pages in his own hand.¹⁹ It was written at Pope Urban VIII’s request, and the copy the editors used came from the Propaganda Fide archive in Rome.¹⁹ We read it in the English edition of 1945.

In it, the thirty friars of 1629 arrive with an account given them by the archbishop of Mexico.¹⁰ In Spain, it says, it was common news that a nun named María de Jesús de la Concepción, of Ágreda, was miraculously carried to New Mexico; the archbishop’s order to look into it is dated 18 May 1628.¹⁰

The Jumano then answer at the convent, looking at a portrait of Mother Luisa.³ A woman in similar garb wanders among them, always preaching, but her face is young, not old like the portrait’s.³ Asked why they had not said so before, they answer that the friars had not asked.³ The friars never see the nun among the Jumano, but, Benavides writes, they are all convinced she is the María de Jesús of the archbishop’s report.²⁰

He adds that on reaching Spain in 1630 the order’s general, Fray Bernardino de Siena, told him he had looked into the matter eight years before and gave him a permit to visit her at Ágreda.²¹ She convinced him, he says, by describing New Mexico as he had seen it.²¹

The two texts can only be set against each other. Neither can be checked against a third account of the same meeting.

What Ágreda told Benavides

In his letter of 1631 to the New Mexico friars, Benavides gives the nun a blue cloak.¹¹ He reached Ágreda on the last day of April 1631,⁹ and his description of the abbess is plain and physical.

Under it, he says, the habit was grey-brown sackcloth with white over it.¹¹ She told him her first journey to New Mexico was in 1620 and that the visits went on until 1631, sometimes three or four in under a day.²³ She described the journeys of Salas and López among the Jumanas, he reports, and said she had urged the Indians to call the friars.²⁴ Asked why she showed herself to the Indians and not to the friars, she answered that they needed it and the friars did not.²⁵

Benavides copied into the letter an account signed “Sor María de Jesús”, at Ágreda on 15 May 1631. In it she says angels carried her to New Mexico, Quivira and the Jumanas, that these were not the first kingdoms where she was taken, and that it happened from 1620 to 1631.²⁶

That account is the only statement of hers about the journeys that we read. The letter itself first reached print at Mexico in 1730, from the original kept in the archive of the New Mexico custody.²⁷ In September 1649 the Inquisition ordered her examined, and it suspended its case by a decree of 1650.²⁸ Francisco Silvela, who edited her letters to Philip IV in 1885, prints one of her answers at length.²⁸ It concerns whether she had seen God, and he quotes nothing in it about New Mexico.²⁸

Where the blue comes from

None of the four texts we read from these years, the Memorial, the letter, the 1634 text and Manzanet’s letter below, calls the visitor the Lady in Blue.⁶

A blue woman appears in 1690, among the Tejas, in a letter by Damián Manzanet.⁵ The governor asked him one evening for a piece of blue baize to bury his mother in.⁵ He said the people were fond of blue, particularly for burial clothes, because in times past they had often been visited by a very beautiful woman dressed in blue who came down from the heights, and that his mother, who was aged, had seen her.⁵ Manzanet concluded that they meant Madre María de Jesús de Ágreda.⁵

Father Casañas, writing in 1691 at the Nabedache village, gave another reason. According to Bolton, he said the Indians prize woollen cloth, “especially if it is blue”, only because the sky is that colour, and Bolton thinks he meant to answer Manzanet’s opinion.²⁹ The 1945 editors set the governor’s request beside Benavides’s description of the abbess: a grey habit, under a cloak of heavy blue sackcloth.³⁰

The Handbook of Texas has the Jumano of 1629 call her the Woman in Blue.⁸ We found no such phrase in any text from 1630 to 1690.⁶ Bolton, in 1912, wrote that the Jumanos told “the story, now a classic in the lore of the Southwest”, of a beautiful woman in a nun’s garb, later identified as Ágreda.³¹

Who the Jumano were

“Jumano” is a Spanish name that covered more than one people. The Handbook of Texas says that between 1500 and 1700 it referred to at least three distinct peoples.³² Scholes, quoted by the 1945 editors, says it was used as a general term for Indians who used a form of body decoration.³² The Memorial places the Xumana by a direction and a distance from Santa Fe.¹³

The 1916 edition of the Memorial notes that the portrait of Luisa de Carrión was kept by Fray García de San Francisco, who founded the Socorro mission, according to Vetancurt, and that the young and beautiful nun “was afterward asserted to be” María de Jesús.³³