By Anne Holler
Back in 1840, a group of 31 women in San Miguel de Allende got together with an idea: Why not start a lay organization—una cofradía—that was popular with the king of Spain?
In the late 18th century, King Carlos IV and his wife, Luisa, discovered spiritual comfort sitting vigil in front of the Blessed Sacrament placed on the altar of Madrid’s royal chapel. Out of this experience, an elite cofradía was founded: the Real Congregación del Alumbrado y Vela Continua del Santísimo Sacramento—or the Royal Congregation of the Illumination and Continuous Vigil of the Blessed Sacrament.
The savvy San Miguel ladies borrowed the vigil idea from the Spanish court and began writing up a proposal to start their own vigil cofradía, La Vela Perpetua (The Perpetual Vigil). The lay organization had to be approved by the church hierarchy, so they naturally began their formal request by name dropping the king of Spain and his own devotional organization.
It seemed like a good idea at the time. And it was. It was a brilliant idea. In the early to mid-19th century, the Catholic Church in Spain and New Spain was moving away from loud, showy, fireworks-and-all public religious processions, and leaning towards a more sedate culture of private devotion. The church wanted to de-emphasize the cults of saints and images, and focus attention on the inside-the-church Blessed Sacrament.
In writing up their request for the Vela Perpetua, however, the San Miguel ladies pushed the envelope. One detail diverged from the Spanish model: their Vela Perpetua—the recruiting, administration, fundraising, collection of dues, and allocation of funds—would be run entirely by women. Men were permitted to join, but their duties as vigil sitters were to be dictated by the female officers of the Vela Perpetua. It was the women of San Miguel who would run the show.
“The revolution in gender relations began in San Miguel de Allende,” wrote Margaret Chowning, Sonne Chair in Latin American History at the University of California, Berkeley. “Gender-role-upending” is what she called it. Chowning’s research on the Vela Perpetua appears in her book, Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750-1940, published this year by Princeton University Press.
Chowning writes that San Miguel’s Vela Perpetua “did not just tolerate women officers—it required them. And it continued with more innovations: the men who wanted to join were obligated to pay a fee, sit vigil on Holy Thursday, and also sit vigil ‘on any other day that they are told by the cabezas (female leaders) to do so.’… Even if women telling men what they must participate in in the vigil seems a small thing in substance, in principle it was gender-role-upending.”
In reading the request for this new cofradía, church officials, from the local parish priest right up to the bishop of Morelia must have felt a certain anxiety in approving such a radical idea. After much foot dragging and buck-passing, however, the Church hierarchy eventually green lighted the foundation of the Vela Perpetua in San Miguel de Allende. It wasn’t long before word got out in nearby towns. Dozens of Velas sprang up around San Miguel and throughout Central Mexico between 1840 and 1860.
Chowning’s 20-year-plus research in Mexican archives gives us a sense of just how “upending” the new cofradía was in the early 19th century. Up to the San Miguel founding of the Vela Perpetua, men dominated all respects of Mexican lay organizations. Men elected men to offices. Men controlled the resources—often quite substantial—of the cofradías. Paintings show only men in the public processions holding up the images of saints. Patriarchal power was displayed in proximity to the cult images. All this, Chowning says, despite the concrete archival evidence that Mexican women outnumbered men as dues-paying members in cofradías.
San Miguel’s Vela Perpetua was an opening into a world where 19th century women were finally able to express their convictions and utilize their organizational skills. Chowning’s book traces these early beginnings in San Miguel de Allende to the wider, more ambitious roles that women played in shaping Mexican education, charity work, and politics.
Margaret Chowning is a familiar face to the attendees of The Rebellious Nuns Conference that was sponsored by the San Miguel Literary Sala in October 2019. Chowning’s previous book, Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent, 1752-1863, recounted the revolt of Conceptionist nuns in San Miguel’s La Purissima (today known as the Centro Cultural Ignacio Ramirez El Nigromante). It was her original research of these events that inspired a two-day conference in the very convent where the subversive sisters lived.
In both Rebellious Nuns and her latest book, Chowning explores how women found both a place and a voice for themselves within the male-dominated church hierarchy. In Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, we get an insight into the enormous appeal of the Vela for Mexican lay women.
Membership in the Vela Perpetua gave women a quiet, personal, and intimate space within the church itself. “Vigil sitters, unlike participants in the Mass, could think of themselves as “visiting” Jesus, keeping him company when the church … might otherwise be empty, thinking of him as a friend,” writes Chowning. On a broader scale, the Vela was a steppingstone to Mexican female independence. For the first time in Mexico, women became leaders in the church on their own terms. They created their own opportunities for decision-making and organization outside of the domestic world and into the public sphere. In modern terms, these ladies from San Miguel de Allende were game changers.
