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1. And 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.
Many critics believe that this passage, from Chapter 7, offers
evidence of Catalina’s sexual preference for women. However, the phrase
This passage also reveals Catalina’s racism, but this, too, must be
understood within the context of her era. She describes the half-Indian
woman’s daughter as being “as black and ugly as the devil himself,” which
suggests that her skin color is as much an impediment to their marriage as
Catalina’s sex. Catalina’s descriptions of the Indians are no different from
her descriptions of her horses. She describes them in terms of whether they
serve her purposes or impede them, but she does not name them or give them
any human characteristics. Such attitudes were not unusually in
seventeenth-century Spain. The Spaniards who helped colonize South America
used a system of land distribution called
