Catalina de Erauso was an intrepid Basque woman who traveled around the world disguised as a man and actively participated in the conquest of the Americas. One of the main "disguised" women of the Renaissance, she crossed all sorts of sexual, social, religious, and territorial borders. Her adventures have always intrigued historians. An air of legendary mystery surrounds her. Some critics today even question her actual existence, which could explain the various versions of her "autobiography." For example, a play by Juan Pérez de Montalbán, titled The Nun Ensign, was published in 1626 and possibly even read by Catalina herself. Two centuries later, it would be translated into French and German, and into English by Thomas de Quincey. All this interest in the story of a woman who transgressed laws and borders might indicate a permanent, though not always lineal, literary appetite for this type of subversive topics.

Rebellious, aggressive, temperamental, and yet brave, patriotic, and loyal—these characteristics are rarely used to describe a woman of the seventeenth century. To earn such "honors," Catalina begins her endeavor by first committing an act of transgression that will liberate her: her escape from the convent where she had lived since childhood. She dares to trick her own aunt, also a nun, from whom she literally takes the keys to her freedom and runs to the woods, where she hides.

Once beyond the convent's walls, she immediately decides to radically change her appearance: "There . . . my nun's habit was useless and I threw it away, and I cut my hair and threw it away" (4). This statement reveals, in my opinion, certain traits of her personality. Discarding her habit, and not knowing what to do with it, indicates her separation from the Catholic Church, which she finds repressive and useless. Also, in abandoning her hair, she rejects something traditionally associated with femininity and the notion of beauty.

For a woman to adopt a masculine identity in a patriarchal society is to enter a privileged world, inaccessible in any other way. Initially, she may not know whether her transvestism will be temporary or permanent, or if her altered appearance reflects her changed sexual identification, but she knows she must create a visual illusion of a complete and balanced being. As feminist philosopher Judith Butler argues in Gender Trouble, it is important that "acts and gestures, articulated and enacted desires create the illusion of an interior and organizing gender core, an illusion discursively maintained for the purposes of the regulation of sexuality within the obligatory frame of reproductive heterosexuality" (136). Cohesion between Catalina's interior and external appearance is essential in this process of adaptation. Until she reaches that cohesion, her body has lacked a "sex," and it now becomes important to her self-identification.

Catalina's second most important step toward conversion is to create a name that will identify, even temporarily, her new being. In Bodies that Matter, Butler underlines the importance of self-identification as an essential tool in the power discourse: "The naming is at once the setting of a boundary, and also the repeated inculcation of a norm" (8). Catalina is fully aware of the limitations that surrounded her female being, the convent's walls, her superiors' strict orders, the beatings, and she knows she must do something radical to fight the passive role generally expected of women. She realizes she is not involved in the power discourse, simply because she belongs to the wrong gender.

After she decides to travel the world in search of adventures, Catalina realizes that her masculine appearance will be of great use. In fact, if she had not taken on the masculine role, she would have stayed out of the power play. She would not have actively participated in the colonization of the Americas. Latinoamericanist Beatriz González Stephan considers this colonization "phallocentric" because it "rests on the shoulders of the citizen, the senator, the teacher, the judge and the father." I might add to this list the conqueror, the colonizer, and the priest. In this colonial context, the law "does not legislate the feminine subject; it excludes it from public life; that is, it is a non-citizen" (Nuevas identidades 31). Similarly, the Chilean critic Raquel Olea points out that "the national project depends on a masculine, heterosexual body to organize memory and history" (Massiello 220). Only by becoming a masculinized being is Catalina able to take part in the history being written before her eyes.

Passing as a member of the ruling sex, Catalina can afford to complement "his" personality with a natural attraction toward the opposite sex. The implications of her love of women are enormous, though. Not only is Catalina a woman made into a man, but she is also a lesbian. Again and again in her autobiography, she tells us about her various relations with women. Early on, masters and superiors try to unite her with desirable ladies of the new colonies. In Saña, Peru, Catalina, known as Antonio, is under the orders of Juan de Urquiza, who attempts to arrange a marriage between Catalina and his own mistress. Interestingly, the lady does not seem to mind this arrangement. As Catalina tells us: "I used to sneak out at night to the lady's house, and there she would caress me, and implore me . . . to stay with her. Finally, one night, she locked me in and declared that come hell or high water I was going to sleep with her—pushing and pleading so much that I had to smack her one and slip out of there" (13). Once again, Catalina has to flee from danger.

But her contacts with women continue, and, some time later, another lady tries to decide her love life for her. After a torturous trip from Concepción, Chile, to Tucumán, Argentina, in which she almost died of starvation, Catalina is welcome in the house of a "mestiza" woman, "a widow and a good woman" (28). Grateful for her care, Catalina offers to "serve her to the best of [her] abilities" (28), and this promise, as expected, brings new love problems. In fact, she writes, "a couple of days later, she let me know it would be fine by her if I married her daughter—a girl as black and ugly as the devil himself, quite the opposite of my taste, which has always run to pretty faces" (28). Racism will be an impediment to this union. Failing to succeed in her masculine role and fearing discovery, Catalina's only solution is to escape, leaving no trace behind: "that was the last they ever saw of me" (28).

Catalina's passion for women complements her stereotypical masculine personality with its military courage. She confesses that she is naturally inclined to "wander about and see the world" (25) and, if she must become a mercenary to do so, such is the price to pay in such a complex world. She thus actively participates in an exterminatory process where men were expected "to conquer and take the gold" (33), overdoing her duties by "carving [an Indian] boy in ten thousand pieces" (34) or hanging an "indigenous captain, already a Christian" (28).

However, there are also times when Catalina is fully aware of her marginalized status as a woman. Colonialist Ann Laura Stoler has pointed out the ambiguities surrounding European women in the colonies. On the one hand, they are subjected to masculine authority, while participating in the colonizing project as mothers, daughters, servants, and lovers. On the other hand, at the decisive moment when Catalina's feminine sexuality is publicly exhibited, she comes out as a woman. Thus, in Guamanga, Peru, seeing her life in danger, she seeks an audience with the bishop and "seeing that he was such as saintly man . . . in the presence of God," (68) she decides to reveal the truth: "that I am a woman . . . [that] I was placed in a certain convent . . . [that] I left the convent for . . . such a reason . . . undressed myself and dressed myself up again . . . traveled here and there, embarked . . . hustled, killed, maimed, wreaked havoc, and roamed about, until coming to a stop in this very instant, at the feet of Your Eminence" (64).

In spite of her outrageous confession, the bishop's reaction is surprisingly sympathetic toward Catalina because she is still a virgin. After reckoning on her extraordinary case, he calls for her again and speaks to her with great kindness, "urging me to thank God for His mercy in showing me that I had been traveling the road of the lost . . . that leads straight to eternal punishment. He told me to make a true confession, which shouldn't be too hard, since I had already confessed, more or less" (65). Catalina shifts easily from a criminal to an almost repented Christian.

Once her identity is discovered and she is redeemed, Catalina has to reenter the religious community she left twenty years before. The feminine rehabilitation is, therefore, to go return to one of the traditional roles. There is a strong need to keep women tamed, domesticated. As Beatriz González Stephan points out, most believed that women in the colonies must be controlled and their instincts repressed. Luckily, thanks to her connections in the high places, Catalina gets a better deal. After spending two years at a convent, she is able to head back to Spain, where she intends to do something about her salvation.

That is easier said than done. Once her identity is discovered, Catalina is constantly scorned and ridiculed. In the colonies and in Spain, she is both admired and rejected. Seeing the reaction of those around her, she decides to remain anonymous, incognito. Her transvestism places her among a group of "abnormal" people in society. Catalina belongs to what French critic Michel Foucault calls a "sub-race," which includes all sorts of marginal beings. These individuals "circulated through the pores of society; they were always hounded, but not always by laws; were often locked up, but not always in prisons; were sick, perhaps, but scandalous, dangerous victims, prey to a strange evil that also bore the name of vice and sometimes crime" (History of Sexuality 40). I do not believe that Catalina was an unbalanced criminal, but others in the seventeenth century would have likely been considered her dangerously perverse.

Catalina's search for forgiveness leads her to confront the trinity of power that, until the end of the eighteenth century, governed life in general: the canonical, the Christian pastoral, and the civil law that determined the division between what Foucault calls the licit and the illicit (37). Curiously, Catalina has shown no intention of repenting until that moment. It is only when she sees her life in danger that she literally seeks shelter in the sacred temple and becomes anxious to relate her experiences. Catalina's repentance may be a truly authentic redeeming act or simply a strategy to get some money from the king that she for so long served. He actually grants her a pension, which she complains is too "little."

Not financially satisfied with the deal, she decides to take her case to the Pope and heads to Rome. As she promised the archbishop of New Granada, she also wants to do something about her salvation. Since it is the holy year of the great Jubilee, she hopes that the Pope himself will forgive her. She feels the need to seek the ecclesiastic confirmation so that she can return to a conventional lifestyle. Her personality takes her to Urban the VIIIth, whom she tells "the story of my life . . . that I was a woman, and . . . had kept my virginity. His Holiness seemed amazed . . . and graciously [allowed] me to pursue my life in men's clothing, all the while reminding me it was my duty to lead an honest existence from that day forward" (78).

At this point, her security restored and the papal blessing in hand, the biography of this complex woman essentially comes to an end. Having dared to appropriate the phallocentric voice and having colonized, destroyed, robbed, killed, seduced and loved, Catalina is able to assume the privileged form of a man. The originality of her behavior is that both as a woman and as a man she transgresses all sorts of barriers. Even after coming out as a woman and receiving the papal pardon, she continues her adventures, dueling, gambling, and falling in love with women.

However, we cannot forget that she suffered, sometimes justly, sometimes not, mostly because her fame preceded her. She was prosecuted, imprisoned, robbed, assaulted, and her farce was discovered and mocked. Miraculously, nonetheless, her salvation lies in her precious virginity. Although she has disobeyed practically all Ten Commandments, her virginal state absolves her of any doubt about her virtue. Her ambiguous voice, together with some comments on the female condition, is heard. Catalina, whether she is a subaltern or a selfish aggressor, is a very attractive character, even to the most traditional critics. Her autobiography surprises, confuses, and subverts traditional feminine narrative.