The legal and theological distinction between hechicería and brujería had consequences that were anything but abstract. Hechicería pertained to the use of spells and remedies for both negative and positive purposes, often involving natural materials, and was leveled at individuals. And yet, brujería stigmatized a socially defined group that gathered to practice diabolical idolatry that was compared to the ritual orgy and infanticide in the tradition of the European witches' sabbath (McKnight 2003, 67). In the Cartagena tribunal's records between 1610 and 1650, every single one of the thirty-three cases of brujería involved individuals categorized as negro, mulato, mestizo, or zamba. There were no white Europeans prosecuted under this charge (McKnight 2003, 78). This points to an unjust judiciary system designed to permit racialized prosecution. 

This racialized pattern meant that Afrodescendant women faced a fundamentally different legal and social reality than the Spanish and Creole women who also participated in love magic and sorcery. The same practices that warranted mild reprimand or quiet penance for a white woman could mean public flogging, imprisonment, property confiscation, and permanent banishment for a Black woman.

｡ﾟ･✧･ﾟ: . ｡ﾟ❀ The Witch Craze of the 1630s ❀･･. ° . ✿ ｡ﾟ･

On the evening of September 6, 1632, Inquisition officials arrested Teodora de Salcedo, a formerly enslaved woman, in the Cartagena neighborhood of Los Jagüeyes. That same night, they took a detailed inventory of everything she owned: a tiled wooden house, textiles, jewelry, religious objects, cooking wares, furniture, and papers including the title to her home (Silva Campo 2021, 205-206). Within the following months, fifteen other African and Afrodescendant women were arrested on charges of witchcraft (Silva Campo 2021, 207). Their property was auctioned to Cartagena residents which almost seemed like an intentional avenue to strip any and all communitty they had built.

The arrests were propelled largely by the denunciations of Paula de Eguiluz, a formerly enslaved Black woman who had already survived one Inquisition trial and was now navigating her second with the strategic intelligence that had become her primary instrument of survival (Von Germeten 2013, 125). Paula's testimony directed the inquisitors toward a tight-knit community of free and formerly enslaved Afrodescendant women living and working in Los Jagüeyes. This was a neighborhood that had grown into a thriving community of Black property owners, healers, midwives, and ritual specialists (Silva Campo 2021, 199).

The confessions that emerged from the 1632 trials followed a consistent template where each woman described a pact with the devil that was consummated through orgiastic gatherings, dancing around a he-goat, and the renunciation of the Christian God. Nearly every detail adhered to a European demonological model that had been in circulation since the late fifteenth century (Von Germeten 2013, 156). The accused women learned what the inquisitors needed to hear and shaped their testimonies accordingly, often coached by other prisoners in adjacent cells (Von Germeten 2013, 160).

What these women did within their confessions is not the focal point here. The key detail to pull out of these records is to understand the narratice of women navigating an institution that had already decided what they were, and surviving within it however they could. What the tripartite body framework makes visible here is the specific violence of that navigation. At the conscious level, the confession was a demand that these women inhabit a version of themselves that the Inquisition had authored. The template bore no meaningful relationship to the actual practices in their live, yet they spoke it because the alternative was torture or death. To confess was to perform the colonial body politic's account of a Black woman's body as diabolical and  sexually deviant. Their bodies were sites of ritual power, but were being overwritten in real time by the social body the institution required her to be. At the social body level, the confession operated as a symbolic production. Each woman who stood up in an auto de fe and recited her pact with the devil was being made to participate in the colonial order's account of itself: that it was rational, Christian, and civilized, and that what it was prosecuting was its opposite. The bodies of these women were being used as the raw material for that story. Their conscious selves,the actual people who had built lives and communities, were being converted into social symbols of everything the colonial body politic defined itself against. Constrained agency here reaches one of its most painful limits as the women who shaped their testimonies strategically were exercising the only form of power available to them inside an institution whose entire apparatus existed to ensure that no other form remained.

｡ﾟ･✧･ﾟ: . ｡ﾟ❀ What Women Actually Did and Why ❀･･. ° . ✿ ｡ﾟ･

The women of Los Jagüeyes were active members within their communities. This involved taking on roles of healers, midwives, market vendors, seamstresses, and ritual specialists who operated within a vibrant and competitive economy of care and knowledge that served clients across racial and class lines (Silva Campo 2021, 199). Paula de Eguiluz was not the exception but the most documented example of a pattern: Afrodescendant women in Cartagena built livelihoods from healing and love magic, and those livelihoods were sufficiently lucrative and sufficiently threatening to colonial order that the Inquisition moved to destroy them.

For women like Luisa Domínguez, who made bollos and empanadas and washed and starched clothes while also practicing ritual work, the connection between sorcery and survival was direct and material. She declared before the Inquisition that she had been persuaded to become a witch because she believed it would make her free (Von Germeten 2013, 145) before she purchased her freedom from her enslaver, Diego López (Silva Campoz 2021, 202). Ritual labor was not a supplement to survival, but instead a mechanism through which they purchased their own liberation, physically or metaphorically.

This is constrained agency operating in its most materially legible form. These women were not practicing brujería as resistance in some abstractly symbolic sense. They were doing so because the colonial economy offered them almost no other avenue to accumulate the resources that could buy legal recognition of their personhood. That the Church prosecuted this avenue while offering no alternative is not a neutral institutional fact. It is a decision about which kinds of freedom were permissible and whose bodies were allowed to move toward them. At the register of the conscious body, Luisa inhabited a body that operated within the domestic sphere and obligations that came with it. Her body's labor was legible to the colonial economy only as forms of service and a site of profit. Ritual work converted that same body into a source of knowledge, akin to a site of power, as it was now a  value that she controlled. This is what constrained agency looks like in the flesh. It is a person deploying the only thing the colonial order could not fully take from them, the body itself and what it knew. At the social body level, the brujería charge named what her body symbolized within the colonial order, the threatening permeability of a Black woman's knowledg. She had been a servant whose body exceeded the function it had been assigned. She was a symbolic problem. She represented an inversion of the order the colonial body politic required as a women accumulating autonomous power through channels that were not supposed to be available to her.

Juana Zamba declared she made her living by washing clothes, practicing midwifery, and treating complications related to childbirth. Elena de Biloria listed midwifery as her sole income and hosted weekly gatherings at her home on Plaza Los Jagüeyes that many of the later-accused women attended regularly (Von Germeten 2013, 147). These women were the center of a knowledge economy that the colonial state experienced as a threat precisely because it was independent. What strikes me the most about Juana and Elena is not that they were prosecuted, but that they had built something worth prosecuting. At the phenomenological level, their bodies were the site of an entire lifetime of accumulated knowledge that addressed vulnerabilities official medicine would not or could not. That knowledge lived in their hands and memory and was transmitted through their independent networks. It was quite literally embodied knowledge as it inseparable from the bodies that held it and passed it on.

At the social body level, what Juana and Elena represented symbolically was perhaps even more threatening than what they did practically. A sixty-year-old Black woman whose midwifery practice was established enough to constitute her sole income was not legible within the colonial symbolic order as a professional or a community leader. She was legible as a focal point of disorder, a body around which other dangerous bodies organized themselves, a center of gravity that pulled people outside the Church's social and spiritual authority and into something that answered to a different order entirely. The body politic could not permit that symbolic alternative to exist visibly and independently.

Perhaps the most analytically clarifying detail in the Cartagena records is not the confessions themselves, but what happened after the verdicts with their confiscation inventories. These possessions were catalogued with extraordinary care through extensive descriptions of a gold necklace of twenty-eight melon-shaped beads, a vicuña hat, a damask pillow, and two pieces of blue Guinea cloth before they were auctioned off (Silva Campo 2021, 205-206). The buyers of all the confiscated houses were men, many of them members of the Cartagena elite which reflected the body politic operating at its most concrete. The Inquisition did not simply punish these women for brujería, but used the charge to transfer the modest wealth they had accumulated through years of labor and ritual practice right back into the greedy hands of the colonial elite which completely reshaped property ownership in Los Jagüeyes in the process. In this breath, the prosecution was the mechanism of the dispossession.

What the inventories reveal about how colonial institutions suppressed and co-opted the power of women of color is that suppression was a transfer. The brujería charge was the legal instrument, but the economic logic was the point. These women had accumulated modest wealth and property through ritual labor, and community networks that operated outside colonial sanction, and the Inquisition's prosecution was the mechanism by which that wealth was extracted from them and redistributed to the men who already held power in Cartagena.

｡ﾟ･✧･ﾟ: . ｡ﾟ❀ Paula de Eguiluz and the Limits of Survival ❀･･. ° . ✿ ｡ﾟ･

Paula de Eguiluz is the most extensively documented figure in the Cartagena witch craze, and her three trials before the Inquisition between 1624 and 1636 constitute one of the most remarkable archives of constrained agency in the colonial record. Born into slavery in Santo Domingo in the early 1590s, she arrived in Cartagena in 1624 after her enslaver freed her in Cuba, and spent the following decades building a reputation as the city's most sought-after curandera and love magic specialist alongside her own community of healers (Von Germeten 2013, 123). Paula's primary defensive tactic across all three trials was to accuse other women in her peer group of sorcery and then attempt to manage their testimonies from her prison cell by coaching those in adjacent cells about what the inquisitors expected to hear (Von Germeten 2013, 124). This is not a simple story of betrayal, though it also cannot be simplified into one of straightforward solidarity. Paula operated within an institution that gave her almost no legitimate tools for self-defense, and she used the tools available with extraordinary precision and at significant cost to the women around her. Her agency was real and it was severely constrained, and both of those things can be true at the same time.

What Paula consistently refused, across dozens of interrogations and three separate trials, was to confess to sex with a demon in her own case. She admitted to love magic, to having a demonic familiar named Mantelillos, to the juntas being sexually charged, but she held a firm line on what she would claim about her own body and her own desires (Von Germeten 2013, 124). Within an institution whose entire system was designed to produce confessions that fit a predetermined template, Paula's insistence on shaping her own narrative on maintaining a personal sense of integrity represents an assertion of conscious selfhood that the Inquisition's categories could not fully contain. Her body, as she presented it, was hers to define.

Paula's case reveals something about the limits of institutional power that the Inquisition's own records inadvertently document. The body politic is supposed to be total as its jurisdiction is supposed to be complete. Yet a formerly enslaved Black woman, imprisoned across three separate trials, subjected to public lashing and years of confinement, managed to outwit the institution that held her. She continued practicing after her trials, even treating the bishop of Cartagena until his death. An Inquisition supervisor from Madrid wrote with evident frustration that he expected little to change regarding Paula because she was old and had no other way of life except this one, which had given her fortune and fame (Von Germeten 2013, 139). That sentence, written by a colonial official about a formerly enslaved woman the institution had spent decades trying to contain, is its own kind of answer to my research question. The body politic did not win. Not completely. Not with Paula. Her constrained agency was real, and it was real enough to matter, and the archive that was supposed to document her destruction ended up documenting her persistence instead.

｡ﾟ･✧･ﾟ: . ｡ﾟ❀ What the Brujería Cases Tell Us ❀･･. ° . ✿ ｡ﾟ･

These cases are an archive of constrained agency operating at its most materially legible and its most brutally limited. These were women who built their own lives that were subversive to colonial order all while navigating one of the most coercive institutions in the colonial Americas with extraordinary strategic intelligence. What Silverblatt (2004) makes impossible to ignore is that this dismantling was the colonial project executing itself through the specific mechanism of race-thinking bureaucracy. To identify bodies that had organized outside its authority and target them was not incidental at all. They often converted women's accumulated wealth and independence back into colonial capital, into hands of European or Creole men.

Scheper-Hughes and Lock's (1987) tripartite framework offers an extensive understanding between the relationship of the body to power and the structural demands of the state. What made the Cartagena cases distinct from the Guatemala chocolate cases is precisely collectivity as in Guatemala, the Inquisition prosecuted individual women for individual acts, while in Cartagena, it prosecuted a community for existing. The scale of the response tells us everything about the scale of the threat. At the social body level, a collective of Afrodescendant women operating an independent knowledge economy was a symbolic crisis. The social body is the register at which societies organize meaning, and a community of formerly enslaved Black women who owned property, attracted masses of clients, and operated in these networks of spellwork knowlegde, was producing a narrative that these bodies were, in fact, authoritative. The brujería charge was the colonial symbolic order's correction of that meaning, converting community into conspiracy and authority into deviance.

Every document Von Germeten (2013), Silva Campo (2021), and McKnight (2003) analyze was produced by an institution whose purpose was to surveil, extract, and control, and reading those documents as transparent accounts of what these women believed or practiced is to accept the Inquisition's racialized and biased narratives that were distorted. It understood enough to be threatened and it responded with legal violence, but the knowledge really circulated through community. It was never captured in an authentic light by confessions or confiscation inventories as the archive demonstrated the attempts to destroy it.