By CHLOE FOOR
IT HAD BEEN OVER A DECADE since she was found guilty of witchcraft by the Inquisition, and Paula de Eguiluz was on her way to heal the Bishop of Cartagena de Indias, Cristóbal Pérez de Lazarraga. Born into enslavement on the Caribbean island of Santo Domingo, Paula spent her early years in Puerto Rico and Cuba. In Cuba, while enslaved by Juan de Eguiluz, Paula was accused of witchcraft, colluding with the devil to kill a baby, shapeshifting into a goat, and selling love spells. In 1624, she arrived in Cartagena to stand trial for this heretical crime before the Holy Office of the Inquisition.
For eight months, Paula was held in the Inquisition’s secret cells, occasionally brought before Inquisitors for audiences where they would attempt to get her to confess to her alleged crimes. Finally, on November 30, 1624, she was found guilty of witchcraft and sentenced to 200 lashes, a two-year penance period working in Cartagena’s hospital, and perpetual exile from Cuba. In 1630, her enslaver granted her freedom, but Paula was once again brought before the authorities in 1632, and in the six years following, was tried twice more for the crime of witchcraft.1 Her final sentence was perpetual imprisonment in the Inquisitorial jail. Despite this, she frequently found ways to temporarily escape this sentence by acting as a healer. In fact, by 1652, it was said that she had healed hundreds of cartageneros outside the walls of her cell.2 During the opening of the 2025 Lozano Long Conference, “Urban Entanglements,” organizers Juana Salcedo and Santiago Muñoz Arbeláez quoted philosopher Karen Barad, saying “To be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. Existence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating.”3 To be classified as a witch in colonial Cartagena was to live a life full of entanglements between both people and nature, constantly negotiating and overturning the stratifications and interpersonal dynamics that came with living in colonial society. This short article will attempt to demonstrate such entanglements at play in Paula’s life before, during, and after her famous Inquisitorial trials.
What Made a Witch?
A Holy Office of the Inquisition was first established in the Americas in 1570 with a tribunal in Lima. A year later, a branch was established in New Spain. However, the Inquisition did not have a dedicated office in the Kingdom of New Granada until 1610. It was established there due to the large number of accused heretics in the Kingdom and in the Caribbean, over which it was given jurisdiction. All three offices functioned until the early nineteenth century, when they were removed along with Spanish colonial rule. The offices theoretically policed the same scope of heresies, although different “crimes” were prosecuted more frequently by each tribunal. For example, the Peruvian Inquisition directed much of its attention toward practitioners of other religions, such as Judaism and Islam. Likewise, a large percentage of the heresies prosecuted by the Cartagena office were those related to magic—especially in the early seventeenth century.
During this time, “witchcraft” meant something different than what people might think of today. To the Inquisitors, a witch was someone who had made an explicit pact with the devil, usually for the purpose of gaining riches or a man’s love. The crime of witchcraft was gendered, with most of the accused being women. However, the category of “witch” was also related to race: among the 56 individuals tried for witchcraft by the Cartagena Inquisition in its first 50 years, 52 were of African descent. While this was somewhat indicative of the general demographics of the city—70 percent of Cartagena’s population was of African descent—it was still a classification that disproportionately affected Afrodescendants, especially in comparison to a similar crime, sorcery, which was mostly associated with Spanish women. Many of the actions considered witchcraft—herbal healing practices and the use of magical objects—were closely linked to ancestral African medicinal and spiritual practices, which were often one and the same. For that reason, I will refer to Paula as a healer rather than a witch, as “witch” was a category imposed by the Inquisition, and Paula identified her own occupation as curandera, or “healer.”
In the time between her trials by the Inquisition, Paula built up a loyal client base of individuals in the city of Cartagena who hired her for her healing talent. These clients might have met her while she was serving her punishment at the San Sebastián Hospital during the two years after her first trial. Social networks also helped to proliferate Paula’s notoriety: many individuals claimed in testimony that they sought out Paula by recommendation of a friend or another healer. Paula was even a person fellow healers turned to in times of need: accused witch Luisa Domínguez claimed that Paula treated her for an ailment similar to leprosy. Even while serving her final sentence of perpetual imprisonment, Paula remained a renowned healer, with clients as prominent as the bishop of Cartagena. These kinds of interactions complicated colonial hierarchies: Paula was an imprisoned Black woman whose skill and knowledge placed her, if only briefly, in a position of power over even the bishop himself.
While we might associate healing with the treatment of physical ailments, Paula and her contemporaries also offered spells to treat emotions. Often, the subject of these sorts of concoctions was a man whose love was desired by a client. At other times, Paula offered solutions for existing lovers to help sustain their love lives. Many of her customers were of a similar social standing to her own, including other healers. Such was the case of a mixed-race woman named Francisca García, who confessed that Paula had taught her spells to bring a lover back to her.
Paula’s clients from elite society included Doña Ana de Fuentes, a Spanish woman who was also brought before the Inquisition, but under accusations of sorcery. Paula claimed that Doña Ana had sought her out to fix her relationship with her husband, Don Francisco. She confessed to offering multiple spells but emphasized that it was Doña Ana who initiated the contact. In this way, Paula’s expertise helped her navigate various relationships in society, but when on trial, she made sure to incriminate herself as little as possible. In order to follow the recipes for “spells,” Paula would have had to be familiar with a large number of ingredients. Many of these, such as oranges, beans, and even water, were easily found inside the city walls. The ease of access to such materials would surely have frightened the Inquisitors. Other ingredients, however, were not as easy to come by. Recipes confessed in trial testimonies reference specific herbs—tilo and erect boerhavia—that could only be found outside the city, on the other side of the thick walls meant to protect Cartagena. Paula and other healers would have had to cross an integral part of the city’s defense every time they gathered the herb, nonchalantly bringing this power-ridden material back into the city. The boundary between the supervised interior and the wild and rugged hinterlands blurred further after every journey.
Creating Entangled Networks
The activities associated with “witchcraft” often led to the formation of knowledge networks and intellectual spheres among healers. Time and time again, those questioned by the Inquisition referred to being trained by a godmother figure called a madrina. Madrinas were reported to have taught younger or newer healers their special techniques. The lives of madrinas were inseparably entangled with those of the healers they trained, and Paula de Eguiluz was named as a madrina of at least five accused witches. This system of apprenticeship and initiation was also essential in the creation of an intellectual sphere among the healers in the city, with each learning from and teaching the others.
The action most synonymous with the crime of witchcraft—the nighttime gathering—was reported to happen outside the city walls. Most accounts of these gatherings are eerily similar: the madrina and the initiate would leave the city, sometimes by flying, to go to a secluded place in the hinterlands. Once she arrived, the initiate would kneel before the devil, rejecting God, Jesus, and the saints to accept the devil as her master. After the rejection, the people in attendance would feast, dance, and copulate with a demon companion before returning home for the night. Due to the central nature of this gathering in defining a witch, the crime of witchcraft was cast as an especially social one. The Inquisitors took advantage of this, ensnaring prisoners to name fellow alleged witches during their trials, which resulted in a network of accusations and retractions among the accused. Time and time again, Paula was mentioned as one of the ringleaders of this community. While she enjoyed a degree of power and status for her connections with high-level clients, not all of Paula’s entanglements were positive. Her primary rival in Cartagena was a healer named Diego López, who was also accused of witchcraft. His accusations against Paula led to her third trial by the Inquisition in 1634. In his testimonies, Diego repeatedly framed Paula as a meddler and as master of all the witches in Cartagena. Paula also denounced Diego, claiming that he was her utmost enemy in the city and that everything he accused her of was a lie and born out of their rivalry. The documented relationship between Paula and Diego survives as testimony to the rich and entangled personal lives of these historical actors, lives filled with both love and hatred, driven by complex motivations.
Learning from Paula, 400 Years Later
Paula’s case is extraordinary because we have a full record of her Inquisitorial trial, an uncommon phenomenon among trials of the Cartagena Inquisition.4 Most of the full testimonies have been lost due to one of the many raids on the city or the humid environment proving destructive to the fragile paper records. Paula is also one of the most frequently mentioned individuals in other people’s trial summaries, indicating the range of her presence in the city.
However, in many other ways, Paula’s story is indicative of the experiences of other healers accused of witchcraft. When accused, women were often made to confess to crimes that twisted the meaning of their actual healing practices, or were even forced to confess to acts they did not commit. Such confessions were a survival mechanism: individuals accused by the Inquisition were subject to torture if judged to be withholding confession.
The framing of the crime of witchcraft in colonial society in terms of gender and race is essential to understanding how accused healers navigated colonial society before, during, and after their trials, and how their relationships with people and nature challenged colonial hierarchies to a degree. Healers took advantage of their surroundings, creating concoctions from plants and other household objects in order to cater to their clients’ needs. While these recipes were maligned as witches’ spells, they were often tied to ancestral African healing traditions, allowing Afrodescendant knowledge to survive across the Atlantic. Some healers were able to reframe their own notoriety after their trials, creating a vast client network that—at least in Paula’s case—they were able to access even while imprisoned.
Recalling Barad, the lives of these healers were not individual affairs; rather, they were informed by fellow healers, clients, would-be persecutors, and above all, hierarchies of class, race, and gender. These hierarchies were ever-present, and we must remember the relative lack of power and standing that these Afrodescendant women held in society. Yet, we can still catch glimpses of times when these women skillfully maneuvered their boundary-crossing entanglements to upend such roles, placing themselves at center stage among the most influential people in seventeenth-century Cartagena de Indias. ✹
Chloe Foor is a PhD student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin, where she researches the intersections of ethnic, gendered, and religious identities with physical spaces in colonial New Granada. She holds bachelor’s degrees in history, computer science, and information science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison. During the fall 2025 semester, she will be collaborating with the History Games Initiative and JapanLab to turn Paula’s story into a video game.
Notes
1. The third trial was a review of her second trial, as petitioned by prosecutor Damian Velásquez de Contreras in 1634. See Kathryn Joy McKnight, “Performing Double-Edged Stories: The Three Trials of Paula de Eguiluz,” Colonial Latin American Review 25, no. 2 (2016): 167.
2. Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 170.
3. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), ix.
4. Today, a full record of Paula’s trial can be found in Madrid at the Archivo Histórico Nacional. For more, see Procesos de fe de Paula de Eguiluz, AHN, INQUISICIÓN, 1620, Exp. 10.