La Quintrala
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Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer | |
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| Born | October 1604 |
| Died | January 16, 1665 |
| Other names | "La Quintrala" |
| Conviction(s) | Murder |
| Details | |
| Victims | 40 |
| Country | Chile |
Catalina de los Ríos y Lisperguer, nicknamed La Quintrala because of her flaming red hair (1604 – 1665), was an aristocratic 17th-century Chilean landowner and murderer of the Colonial Era. Her persona is strongly mythified, and survives in Chilean culture as the epitome of the wicked and abusive woman.[1]
Life
Catalina was the daughter of the couple formed by the Spanish nobleman Gonzalo de los Ríos y Encío and Catalina Lisperguer y Flores, both members of the Chilean nobility.[2]
Paternal descent
Gonzalo de los Ríos was an exalted landowner of Santiago's colonial society, holding the rank of general in the Royal Army, a maestre de campo who served as mayor of Santiago in 1611, 1614 and 1619. He was also the owner of a prosperous farm in Longotoma, dedicated to the cultivation of sugar cane and work of black slaves. He also owned plantations in the valley of La Ligua dedicated to the cultivation of fruit trees and vineyards, and another hacienda in Cabildo called El Ingenio.
Maternal descent
Catalina Lisperguer y Flores and her brothers were latifundistas with fazendas in Santiago and its surroundings, sons of the German conqueror Pedro Lisperguer, who arrived in Chile as part of the retinue of Governor García Hurtado de Mendoza in 1577 and of Águeda Flores, daughter of another German conqueror, Bartolomé Flores, and Elvira de Talagante, of local Inca nobility.
The aforementioned sisters - who had been accused of poisoning Governor Alonso de Ribera in 1601, out of spite - had as a blood brother Juan Rodulfo de Lisperguer y Flores, killed in the battle of the fort of Boroa in 1626. María de Lisperguer, who had in turn been charged with murder, was expelled to Peru after attempting to poison the governor. Catalina Lisperguer remained in Chile and had two daughters with Gonzalo de los Ríos: Águeda - married to the judge of Lima, Blas de Torres Altamirano - and Catalina, called La Quintrala.
Childhood and youth
"La Quintrala" grew up in a family of rich landowners; both the De los Ríos and the Lisperguer were renowned families in the 17th century Santiago high society. Despite this, she did not receive a good education and was semi-literate until her death, being mainly cared for by her father and grandmother.
The nickname of "La Quintrala" is probably a deviation from the diminutive of her given name, Catrala or Catralita. However, another theory says that the nickname comes from the fact that she whipped her slaves with quintral branches (Tristerix corymbosus), an indigenous parasitic plant with red flowers. Catalina was a redhead. Magdalena Petit maintains in her book La Quintrala that her name comes from the quintral, making a comparison to the color of her hair.
Catalina was considered a beauty: white complexion, tall stature, red hair and intense green eyes, a genetic combination between Amerindian, Spanish and German blood, which had given her remarkable physical attributes "that made her very attractive to men", according to the chronicles of bishop Francisco González de Salcedo (1622-1634).
It is said that one of her aunts, along with her grandmother Águeda, had approached the young woman with the pagan practices of witchcraft.
One of the first accusations against her was that of her own father's murder,[1] as Gonzalo de los Ríos y Encío was apparently poisoned by dinner prepared by Catalina (apparently chicken, according to Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna). This must have happened when her father was ill in bed in 1622, when she was just 18 years old. Despite her aunt reporting the crime to the authorities, Catalina was never prosecuted, either because lack of evidence or because of her family's influences.
Personal life
Marriage
Her grandmother Águeda, who since her parents' death had become Catalina's tutor, as a way to change her granddaughters ways, began looking for a man with whom he would marry her, offering a generous dowry in return. She offered 45,349 pesos, a considerable amount at the time.
In September 1626, at the age of 22, Catalina married to a Spanish colonel with succession in Maule, Alonso Campofrio de Carvajal y Riberos, whose family descended from the Counts of Urgell and the House of Barcelona.
Alonso Campofrio immediately began to rise in public office, even replacing Catalina's relative, Rodolfo Lisperguer, as mayor. The priest who married them was Pedro de Figueroa; the legend says that Catalina never forgave him and tried to assassinate him, although according to another version she fell in love with the religious man, whom she harassed to the point of exhaustion to no avail.
The year after their marriage, Catalina gave birth to her first and only son, Gonzalo, who died when he was 8 or 10 years old. Approximately in 1628, her sister died in Peru, and Catalina became the owner of a large part of the land that belonged to Águeda in Chile.
According to the historian Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, the husband was aware of his wife's ruthless customs, but was still kind and loving towards his wife. She held him in great regard, but never came to love him.
Lovers
It is said that back in 1624, Catalina invited through a love letter a rich feudatory in Santiago to her house, although some data of this version is doubtful because according to what is recorded in Catalina's will, she did not know how to write. When she had him in her arms, Catalina killed him with knives and blamed a slave for the crime, who was subsequently executed in the Plaza de Armas.
It is also said that she beat and stabbed a former lover, Enrique Enríquez de Guzmán of the Order of Malta, on the grounds that he had played with her feelings (since he had refused to give her a cross, symbol of nobility, in exchange for a kiss). Enríquez supposedly boasted about his love affairs to the friar Pedro de Figueroa and boasted of taking advantage of a "light" woman, in reference to Catalina.
It is also said that she severed the left ear of Martin de Ensenada and she killed a knight of Santiago in the presence of another gentleman, after an appointed date.
Landowner
Catalina became a landowner, since she inherited a lot of land from her father in the coastal valley of Longotoma and the fazenda "El Ingenio", acquiring others of no lesser connotation (both in Cuyo, beyond the Andes and in Petorca); in addition to minor properties in the suburbs of Santiago (the current commune of La Reina). She settled her residence in that fazenda (where there would still be vines planted by her). Now a wealthy landowner and rancher, Catalina personally directed the activities of the properties, riding horses through valleys where she enjoyed her living, since the city was odious.
In 'El Ingenio', according to legend, horrible events began to occur, both during her husband's life span and after his death circa 1650. A black slave named Ñatucón-Jetón was killed, without any motive for the macabre homicide (La Quintrala then kept him unburied for two weeks). In 1633, she tried to kill Luis Vásquez, a cleric from La Ligua, who reproached Catalina for her dissipated life and cruelties.
Her cruelty reached such an extreme that in the same year her tenants rebelled and fled towards the mountains and neighboring districts. Catalina had them brought back by force by the Royal Hearing's provisions. In charge of the job she put the steward Ascencio Erazo, who took the slaves back to the fazenda where Catalina presided over the punishments for rebellion accompanied by her nephew, Jerónimo de Altamirano. In spite of continuous denunciations of abuses and cruelties, she did not receive any punishment, because having a lot of money, she paid off judges and lawyers, as well as having numerous relatives in political positions.
Intervention of justice
In 1660, the Real Audiencia, before the number and magnitude of the denunciations, initiated a secret official investigation, based on the accusations of the bishop Francisco Luis de Salcedo, relative of Luis Vásquez. The person in charge of the investigation was Justice Fransico de Millán.
Millán moved Catalina, her butler and her nephew away from 'El Ingenio' so that the victims could vent their feelings about the crimes committed by their patron. The commissioner of the Hearing found sufficient evidence of the veracity of the accusations, which were forwarded to the capital. The oidor Juan de la Pena Salazar moved as a sheriff to the fazenda, arrested La Quintrala and took her to Santiago to pursue a criminal trial.
Against Catalina, who had already been accused once of parricide and another of murder, a trial was begun for the slow and cruel slaughter of her servitude. The trial was carried out very slowly, because her relations and dirty money were spread throughout. The process, much publicized, was not exempt from the influences of her name and family relations with the hearers, who favored the defendant's case, with Catalina being attributed 40 murders, contributing to her mythical status. As a result of her influences, the trial was stalled and Catalina was released. From 1637 on she enjoyed, in addition to other things, the indigenous repartimientos of the cordilleran Eastern part of Codegua, which belonged to a congregation of Jesuits.
Three decades later, the justice insisted on knowing the veracity of the accusations, but La Quintrala had already passed away 9 years previously.
Widowhood and final years
In 1654 Catalina became a widow, with which she regained full control over the lands and businesses she shared with her husband Alonso. In January 1662, a new trial was instituted against her for various abuses and crimes committed against the slaves. That same year her nephew, Jerónimo, died, and she herself fell ill. From then on, her health deteriorated gradually until her death in 1665.
In her will and testament, dated 1665, Catalina ordered and paid for masses both for her soul and those of her loved ones, as well as those who had lived under her charge, in the Iglesia San Augustín, as well as establishing various chaplaincies, among which is the one established in favor of Cristo de Mayo - a sculpture that, according to legend, would have belonged to her and from which she would have been liberated because she looked at it with reproach - and thus maintained annual atonement on May 13. Another smaller sum was given to her relatives and friends, with the rest of her assets auctioned for the benefit of the Augustinians.[3]
She died on January 15, 1655 at the age of 61 (an advanced age for the time), feared and mythologized in life, alone and despised by all, in her Santiago property adjoining the temple of San Agustín. Her funeral was lavish and she was buried, as was tradition in the Lisperguer family, in the Iglesia San Augustín, but it is unknown where exactly her tomb is.
According to the chronicles of Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, many of the goods were auctioned and the properties abandoned for years, due to the fear that the superstitious people had from having any relation to La Quintrala.
Legacy
Her figure still lives in Chilean popular culture as the epitome of the perverse and abusive woman, as well as the oppression of Spanish rule.
Danish composer Lars Graugaard composed an opera based on her. Graugaard's opera La Quintrala for five singers and interactive computer was premiered September 2, 2004 in Copenhagen.
Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, wrote Los Lisperguer y La Quintrala (1877) about her.
Articles
Piedrabuena Ruiz-Tagle, Daniel. Los Lisperguer Wittemberg: Luces y sombras de una singular familia alemana presente en la historia de España y Chile. Atenea (Concepción), Dic 2015, no.512, p.171-187. ISSN 0718-0462
See also
References
- ^ a b Muñoz, Alicia. (2009). Reading killer women : narratives of twentieth century Latin America. OCLC 460472534.
- ^ "Sepiensa.net". www.sepiensa.net.
- ^ Hirsch-Weber, Wolfgang (1987). "Grundbesitz und Herrschaft Im Vorindustriellen Chile". Ibero-amerikanisches Archiv. 13 (4): 455–543. ISSN 0340-3068. JSTOR 43392503.
External links
- Biography (in Spanish)
- Biography (in Spanish)
- On the La Quintrala opera
- [1]
- El conquistador Pedro Lisperguer y la Quintrala: nueva investigación vital para la historia de Chile
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