The Dubious Parentage of Isabel Olguín

In the Origins of New Mexico Families, Fray Angélico Chávez stated that Isabel Olguín was the daughter of Juan López Olguín and Catalina de Villanueva. He appears to have made this assumption based on testimony before the Spanish Inquisition in 1626, in which María de Abendaño, María de Villafuerte and Juana López accused her of possessing and using various herbs and roots as “love potions.” In the testimony, she is identified as the wife of Juan de Vitoria Carvajal and the aunt of María de Abendaño. María de Abendaño’s mother was María López Villasana (aka María Ortiz) so Isabel Olguín would have to be her sister or half-sister. Given her last name was Olguín, it is reasonable to deduce that she was the daughter of Juan López Olguín. But who was her mother?  Some evidence suggests her mother was not Catalina de Villanueva.

Unfortunately, the primary documents that name Isabel Olguín are scarce, and I have not yet found any that provide her age, place of birth, or the names of her parents. Juan López Olguín and Catalina de Villanueva were married in Mexico City circa 1592. We know this because Juan requested payment of her dowry on 4 May 1592 (when Catalina would have been about 16 years old) from the Colegio de las Doncellas de Nuestra Señora de Caridad, where she had been living as an orphan. In this document, he is named as Juan López de Villasana, the name he appears to have used while living in Mexico City. In the baptism record for María, his daughter with Catalina, dated 2 April 1594, he is also recorded as Juan López Villasana.

On 28 August 1600, Juan López Olguín, son of Juan López Villasana, appeared on the Gordejuela Inspection muster list in the valley of San Bartolomé, province of Santa Bárbara along with the rest of the soldier reinforcements bound for New Mexico. The Gordejuela Inspection also recorded the names of all women, married and single, who were part of the group. Unfortunately, no family members are listed for Juan López Olguín. Either they were not recorded on the list (unlikely), or they arrived sometime later in New Mexico.

The only other clue we have about Isabel Olguín is that she was married to Juan de Vitoria Carvajal, who was one of the colonists who arrived in New Mexico with Juan de Oñate in 1598. There are two indirect references to his wife, which would appear to be Isabel. The first is the poem written by Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá about the history of New Mexico. In Canto 27, he describes how the soldiers’ wives were left to defend the town while their husbands went to attack the pueblo of Acoma, which occurred in 1599. He names the women by calling out the names of their husbands, and Carvajal is on this list.

The second indirect reference is a letter to the viceroy of New Spain from the longest-standing residents of New Mexico, dated 26 August 1685—when they were living in exile in El Paso after the Pueblo Revolt. The purpose of the letter was to show that the area of El Paso was under the jurisdiction of New Mexico and not New Biscay (Nueva Viscaya), the neighboring province. As proof, the letter described a well-known story from the time when the Oñate colonists first entered New Mexico in 1598. It stated:

It is a very ancient tradition, Most Excellent Lord, that when the adelantado Don Juan de Oñate, who was governor of this kingdom of New Mexico more than a hundred years ago, was entering upon his discovery and arrived at the river they call the Sacramento, because the sacrament of holy matrimony was celebrated there with a Juan de Carvajal, the said adelantado gave it this name of Sacramento and raising the royal standard, he took possession for New Mexico.

This story appears to show that Juan de Carvajal and Isabel Olguín married in April 1598, when the Oñate colonists first arrived in New Mexico. Given that Juan López Olguín and Catalina de Villanueva were married in 1592, it’s therefore impossible for Catalina to be Isabel’s biological mother.

A plausible explanation is that Isabel Olguín was Juan López’s daughter with another woman prior to his marriage to Catalina de Villanueva. However, it is surprising that Isabel would have been allowed to leave her family as a single woman in 1598 to join the Oñate colonists and marry without her father’s consent. Or perhaps Carvajal and Olguín were engaged prior to the departure of the Oñate expedition and circumstances prompted the two to get married while en route to the new colony.

The other possibility is that the woman referenced by Villagrá and the letter to the viceroy was Juan de Vitoria Carvajal’s first wife, and Isabel Olguín came with the rest of her family sometime after 1600 and married Carvajal in San Juan de los Caballeros or Santa Fe. Assuming Isabel was at least 13 years old when she married, she could have been born as early as circa 1595 and then married to Carvajal around 1608. But Carvajal was already 45 years old in 1608. Such large age gaps were fairly rare for marriages of the time and we don’t know of any extenuating circumstances that would have prompted such a pairing (for example, if she was an orphan or a widow). Isabel’s father was still alive in 1626 so there would have been no reason for her to marry a much older man. This would not appear to be the most likely scenario.

The third piece of evidence, though perhaps less convincing, is that Isabel was accused of practicing “witchcraft” in 1626, as stated above. Although María de Villafuerte stated that Isabel had learned of some of these practices from her Tewa servants, perhaps she was mestiza and therefore more suspect than the Spanish women who confessed to using the herbs and powders for various purposes. Doña Ines, a Tano Indian woman, and Beatriz de los Ángeles, a Mexica native, were also accused of witchcraft but never called before the Inquisition because the Father Commissary Alonso de Benavides feared this would alert them to his investigation. Was Isabel similarly not called to testify because she was considered to be more mestiza than Spanish? Or did Benavides have enough evidence without her testimony?

Until we have further evidence, I’m inclined to believe the first scenario—that Isabel Olguín was the daughter of Juan López Olguín and another woman and that she might have been of mixed heritage.

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Sources:

Fray Angélico Chávez, Origins of New Mexico Families: A Genealogy of the Spanish Colonial Period, revised edition (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1992), p. 14

Viridiana Rivera Álvarez and Jerry R. Craddock, “Cross vs. Crown in New Mexico, 1626” UC Berkeley Research Center for Romance Studies, Cibola Project, 2019. Available at: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0xq1g5b3  

Catálogo de Protocolos del Archivo General de Notarias de la Ciudad de México, Notaria Vol. 375, ff.55r-55v, Juan Bautista Moreno, Escribano real, Dote, 1592-05-04. Available online at: https://cpagncmxvi.historicas.unam.mx/ficha.jsp?idFicha=375-MOJ-2483-63

Baptism of María López Villasana, 2 April 1594, “México, Distrito Federal, registros parroquiales y diocesanos, 1514-1970,” database with images, FamilySearch (https://familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:S3HY-6RC9-SKS?cc=1615259&wc=3PXD-W38%3A122652201%2C124313401 : 14 December 2021), Santa Veracruz (Guerrero Sureste) > Bautismos de españoles 1568-1615 > image 263 of 708; parroquias Católicas, Distrito Federal (Catholic Church parishes, Distrito Federal).

George P. Hammond (ed.), Don Juan de Oñate, Colonizer of New Mexico 1595-1623, vol. 5 of Coronado Cuarto Centennial Publications 1540-1940, Gordejuela Inspection list (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1953), p. 554

Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá, Historia de la Nueva México (Alcalá: Luis Martínez Grande, 1610). Available online at: https://archive.org/details/historiadelanueu00vill/page/n7/mode/2up

Barbara De Marco and Jerry R. Craddock, “Dossier Concerning the Administration of Domingo Gironza Petris de Cruzate, Governor of New Mexico 1684-1685,” UC Berkeley Research Center for Romance Studies, Cibola Project, 2017, p. 159. Available at: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2k39t8q6