Gender and the Work of Missionary Translation: Black Women Interpreters among the Jesuits in Seventeenth-Century Cartagena de Indias

Seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries in Cartagena de Indias relied on Black women interpreters to evangelize newly arrived Africans, employing them as part of a broader missionary strategy more typical in Asia than in Iberian America. Analysis of missionary texts reveals that the Jesuits justified this practice by framing these women as analogous to Jesus's female followers in the New Testament, which allowed their roles to be acknowledged but also obscured deeper insights into their significance for both the interpreters and the African communities they served. This study reconstructs the context of these portrayals, uncovering ideological effects embedded in missionary writings and highlighting patterns of gendered language used across Iberian missionary projects during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Brewer-Garc�a, L. (2021). Gender and the Work of Missionary Translation: Black Women Interpreters among the Jesuits in Seventeenth-Century Cartagena de Indias. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 21(4), 63–100. https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2021.a899633