The Woman in Blue

Juliana Barr will discuss findings from a book manuscript she is now finishing up – La Dama Azul: How to Tell Colonial History in a Supernatural Idiom – that explores the Indigenous side to a seventeenth-century Spanish miracle tale that spread across the far northern provinces of New Spain (what later became Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona).  The Spanish story told of a nun in Spain who was carried to the Americas by angels and, with their aid, miraculously appeared in the sky to Native people, told them of Christianity, and encouraged them to seek out conversion.  As a result, when Spanish expeditions moved northward out of Mexico, Franciscans and Jesuits fanned out in all directions seeking confirmation of the nun's spiritual travels, asking everywhere they went, "have you seen a woman in blue in the sky?"  As they recorded Native responses, they repeatedly declared the miracle proven true.  

Yet, once we situate the Native responses within the rhythms and cadences of Native historical traditions, the Spanish woman in blue dissolves and then reforms into something entirely of Native creation.  Such exchanges framed many of the earliest Native-Spanish encounters – and created moments for Native people to tell the Spaniards a story in response to the question asked, each offering their own unique statement or view of Spanish colonialism.  To understand the meaning of these exchanges, we must see the longue durée of Indigenous history, so that we can understand how Spaniards became caught up in the tide of Native events and processes, the currents of Native history.  What we find is that Native storytellers described in allegorical form a moment wrought by the beginnings of colonialism, yet they contained that moment within their own sense of history and their own sense of the world's order.

Sponsored by the Center for the Study of the Southwest and the History Department Speaker's Fund.

Co-Sponsors: College of Liberal Arts, Department of Anthropology, Department of English, the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Center for International Studies, Department of Political Science, Department of Sociology, Department of World Languages and Literatures, and the University of Texas-Austin John E. Green Regents Professorship. 

Juliana Barr is a leading scholar of women and gender in the Spanish borderlands and early Southwest. Currently an Associate Professor of History at Duke University, she received her M.A. and Ph.D. (1999) in American women’s history from the University of Wisconsin Madison and her B.A. (1988) from the University of Texas at Austin. She has previously taught at Rutgers University and the University of Florida.  

Barr’s first book, Peace Came in the Form of a Woman: Indians and Spaniards on the Texas Borderlands, was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2007. Peace Came in the Form of a Woman received numerous prizes, including the William P. Clements Prize for the Best Book on Southwestern America and the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians First Book Prize. Barr is also co-editor of Contested Spaces of Early America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) and the author of articles in journals including the William and Mary Quarterly and the Journal of American History. She is currently finishing her second book, La Dama Azul: How to Tell Colonial History in a Supernatural Idiom.