The legendary "poblana Chinese" was an historical personage who lived at the colonial time and whose life loses between the reality and the fantasy of a time in where the miracles and the visions were at your service of the day.
The Mirra slave
The history of the "poblana Chinese" begins when towards 1621, the virrey Marquess of Gélves expressed its desire to have to its service a young chinita that was so exotic in palace as papagayo in its garden. A merchant who trajinaba between Acapulco and Manila, aware this whim brought in the Nao from China a Hindu girl of about twelve or fourteen years. Nevertheless the merchant did not give the young person to the virrey but that sold like slave to the rich captain Miguel de Sosa, who lived in Puebla of the Angels married with Daisy of Chávez, and who paid ten times more than what the Marquess of Gélves would pay. Thanks to the Insipid pair got to know themselves the girl the past.
The princess is born
The "chinita" was called Mirra and had been born princess in remote earth of the Great Mogol or Mogor, that is India. So although all said "to Chinese" affectionately, because therefore it was used then to say to him to the feminine and young servitude, Mirra to him was not Chinese but indostana or India. In their native earth, when Mirra had ten years of age, their parents had to leave their city and they went away to live to a port near the Portuguese. A day they arrived the pirates and the girl raptada and was undressed of her rich dresses and jewels and locked up in a warehouse. Thus, of princess she happened to be enslaved.
Kidnapping and travels
When arriving at Cochín, a state to the south of the India, evangelizado by Francisco Javier, Mirra managed to escape and to take refuge in a mission of jesuitas parents who cristianizaron it and baptized with the name of Catarina of San Juan. Years later, returned the pirates to the Hindustani subcontinent and, when recognizing it, they returned to capture it and they sold it in Manila like slave where they gave it to the merchant who took it Spain to the New.
Mirra in Puebla
The poblano marriage did not have children and bought to the chinita to adopt it like daughter, although it continued being enslaved. Thus, it was in house of Insipid between goddaughter and the servant. Mirra (or Catarina) was gorgeous, learned with its adoptive parents to speak the Spanish, to cook and to make primorosas workings of needle, but it refused to learn to read and to write. Catarina was made very popular by its beauty and very peculiar way dress, to usanza Hindu. When it went out always wore a mantle that covered the head and part to him with the face and doubling it with thousand different forms, like sari of the women in India. From this time, Catarina enjoyed the pious estimation of good part of the poblana society and counted on the support of the sanctioned Company of Jesus as well as on the one of other clergymen.
The visions of Catarina
Insipid Don Miguel died in December of 1624 and in his testament it gave the freedom to Catarina that remained, properly, in the street. It gathered the clergyman Pedro Suárez and it lived in the poverty doing ascética life and always dressed in his indumentaria of saya, mantle and touches. From that moment, a new facet of the "Chinese" Catarina began to reveal itself, began to have mystical visions. He said that Jesus played the hiding place with the boy, who saw angels and the Virgin, whom a sculpture of Jesus Nazareno spoke to him long and who the demons harassed it. If they considered crazy person in the beginning, with time he was respected and until he arrived to be venerated. Hundreds, thousands of people saw in Catarina a prophetess and between those thousands they were counted from the bishop of Puebla to the sacristans of the Company of Jesus, happening through all the jesuitas of the time.
It dies in scent to sanctity
Beau lived 82 years and died the 5 of January of 1688. The crowd that went to his velorio kissed it and took pieces of their shroud to conserve them like relic. So it was the veneration that inspired Catarina, that from 1691 the court of Santa Inquisición had to prohibit the reprducción of his pictures so that he was not adored to him like santa. The tomb of Catarina of San Juan is conserved in sacristía of the church of the Company of Jesus in Puebla under a tile tablet. |