Context
Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World is
Catalina de Erauso's memoir about her experiences during the early 1600s in Spain
and South America. Catalina was born in 1585 into a wealthy Basque family. Her
parents, María Pérez de Galarraga y Arce and Captain don Miguel de Erauso, were
native-born residents of San Sebastian, Spain, a city located in the Spanish Basque
province of Guipúzcoa. Though the Basque people are technically Spanish citizens,
they are thought to be the oldest ethnic group in Europe and have their own distinct
language. Solidarity among the Basque people runs high, although they are still
loyal to the Spanish crown.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas on a voyage sponsored by
the Spanish crown, opening the door to colonization in the area. During the
sixteenth century, Spain dedicated enormous amounts of money and manpower to
exploration and colonization. The heart of the Spanish-American empire was called
New Spain and was located in present-day Mexico. However, the Spanish also laid
claim to much of South America, conquering the indigenous peoples and killing any
who resisted Spanish rule.
In approximately 1589, when de Erauso was four years old, her parents placed
her in a Dominican convent. We know from other historical accounts that they did the
same with three of her sisters and that consigning female children to become future
nuns was a not uncommon way of displaying loyalty to the Catholic Church. In 1600,
de Erauso, at the age of fifteen, ran away from the convent, disguised herself as a
man, and took a number of jobs as a page before she left for South America. During
her time in the New World, de Erauso, still disguised as a man, served as a soldier
in Peru and Chile, fighting for the Spanish cause.
De Erauso came of age during Spain's golden age and the Catholic
Counter-Reformation. During this time, the role of women was extremely limited.
Spanish society was heavily male-dominated and intensely religious, which meant that
freedoms for women, both civil and religious, were rare. Even men themselves faced a
great deal of constraint, and they had very few opportunities to break out of their
rigid society's confines. One of the few means of escape for men was leaving for the
New World, either to assist in the military conquest of the indigenous peoples or to
become a missionary and help convert them to Catholicism. Leaving for the New World
allowed men to escape their pasts and gave them vastly expanded chances to shape
their futures in ways that were unavailable to them in Spain. By dressing as a man,
de Erauso allowed herself the same opportunities, which must have appeared
considerably more attractive than spending the rest of her life in the convent where
she had resided since age four—the fate of her three sisters.
Once de Erauso returned to Europe, she revealed herself as a woman and became
a celebrity due to the reputation she created for herself in South America. In 1625,
she presented herself to the king and was granted a military pension in honor of her
service to Spain. She later met with the Pope in Rome, who granted her permission to
continue dressing as a man, which was especially significant considering Spain's
history of outlawing female cross-dressing.
De Erauso wrote her autobiography sometime between 1626, the year the memoir
ends, and 1630. She was likely influenced by the Spanish literary convention that
would later become known as the picaresque novel, which was
introduced in Spain in the sixteenth century but became more popular in the early
1600s—the time that Catalina was writing her memoir. A picaresque novel is a work of
fiction that details the exploits of an adventurous or troublemaking protagonist.
Although her work is nonfiction and features a female protagonist, it is still
firmly planted in the picaresque tradition.
Little is conclusively known about de Erauso's life after the close of her
memoir. Some critics have suggested that she herself did not write her memoir and
that it may have been penned by someone who was acquainted with her fame and deeds,
someone who may have been working under de Erauso's own supervision. In 1629, de
Erauso signed over her portion of the family estate to her sister Mariana. The next
year, she left again for the New World, where she remained for the rest of her life,
under the name Antonio de Erauso. In the centuries since then, many books, plays,
and films have been made based on de Erauso's exploits and her astonishing
secret.
