Mounting the Poyto: An Image of Afro-Catholic Submission in the Mystical Visions of Colonial Peru's Úrsula de Jesús

Abstract

This essay considers how Africans and their descendants may have expressed their socioreligious identities within the early modern Iberian Catholic world. The author argues that the seventeenth-century Afro-Peruvian mystic Úrsula de Jesús situates herself within both Catholic and Yorùbá orishá religious practice. In a close reading of Úrsula's spiritual diary entries, the author speculates that Úrsula intentionally inflects the meanings of the words poyto to signify a Poitou mule and pollino to refer to a little donkey. In doing so, Úrsula reframes an image of mounting that may be read concurrently as a transformed representation of Catholic submission and as an image of Yorùbá ritual spirit possession. Within the transculturated religious space of colonial Lima, the author suggests that Úrsula rearticulates Catholic rhetoric to reframe her Afro-religious practice and perform the role of a spiritual authority. The essay explores how Úrsula de Jesús would have transposed an African past into her religious expression in her Catholic convent to encounter both mystic visions and orishá spiritual possession in a unified religious experience.

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