Few figures have captured popular Mexican imagination so completely as the woman known today as China Poblana, yet so few are as poorly understood. A 17th-century Indian noblewoman who was sold into slavery, and a slave who became a spiritual icon — Catarina de San Juan's life encapsulates Spanish colonialism and the often-overlooked history of the Pacific slave trade.

Some believe she was a princess from the ancient kingdom of 'Gran Mogol'; others say she was a native of the city of Puebla in Central Mexico. Although her origins are shrouded in mystery, the woman known as 'China Poblana' today, was once a symbol of pride for the free and sovereign state of Puebla who went on to represent the Republican spirit during the second French invasion of Mexico between 1862 to 1867, and eventually embodied the very essence of Mexico itself. So, who was she, really?

The Princess Who Became A Slave

Her name was Mirra. Born into a Muslim noble family in Mughal India in the early 17th century — around 1606 in Agra, India, or Lahore, Pakistan, according to American author and art historian Gauvin Alexander Bailey — she was captured by Portuguese pirates at a very young age and taken to the Portuguese enclave in Cochin (modern-day Kochi), on the Malabar coast, where she was baptised by Jesuit missionaries and received the Christian name: Catarina de San Juan.

From Cochin, she was taken to the Spanish colony in Manila, Philippines, on the same ship and sold into slavery. She only ended up on a galleon — a type of sailing ship popular in Spain between the 15th and 18th centuries — headed for the Viceroyalty of New Spain (present-day Mexico) because the captain, Miguel de Sosa, desired the company of a "chinita", or young Asian woman, and bought her, supposedly, for ten times the price that the viceroy of New Spain, the marquis of Galves, was willing to pay for her. She arrived in Acapulco with de Sosa in 1621, and was confirmed to have reached Puebla the same year by Bishop Alonso de la Mota y Escobar.

The Slave-Woman Who Became A Saint

One of the first Asians to arrive in the Americas, Catarina was freed a few years later when Miguel de Sosa died, setting her free in his will. Although she was married to a Diego or Domingo Juarez — like her, a converted Asian immigrant and a freed slave — the marriage ended when he died in 1644. Soon, Catarina found herself in the convent of Inmaculada Concepción (the convent of Immaculate Conception) where she began to have visions of Jesus Christ and the Virgin Mary. For the next several decades, she was increasingly visited by these visions, and lived the life of an anchorite — a religious recluse in Christian traditions — in a cell attached to the convent.

She never left Puebla again (except for a pilgrimage to a local shrine), rejected all material pleasures, and led a life of social isolation, abstinence, and humility. According her biographer, the Jesuit priest Alonso Ramos, she lived entirely on the charitable offerings of those who came to visit her and wore only a "dark, wool dress" with the "crudest, the coarsest" cloak. During this latter part of her life in Puebla, she gained a reputation as a prophet, and foretold the deaths of several important people, like the viceroy and vicereine of New Spain, in 1673 and 1674 respectively.

And she prayed, according to Professor Diego Javier Luis, assistant professor of history at Tufts University and the author of 'The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History' (Harvard University Press, 2024). "She prayed for water in drought, for indigenous people dying of famine and disease, for ships lost at sea, for travellers braving the roads. She prayed for those who needed help the most."

While some Spaniards questioned the sincerity of her faith and devotion and called her a "trickster", "a witch", "untamed", and "unknowable", her admirers saw her as an icon of holy Catholic suffering. After Catarina died in 1688, Alonso Ramos wrote an enormous three-volume hagiography of her life, and turned his unlikely subject — a former slave-woman of South Asian origin — into a Christian spiritual icon of colonial Mexico. Catarina's image, which appeared on the first volume of Ramos' opus, became a popular relic, and the cult of her devotees in Puebla converted her cell into an altar where Christians could pray for her divine favours.

From Catarina De San Juan To China Poblana — 17th-Century Slave-Woman-Turned-Saint To 19th-Century Mexican Nationalist Icon

During her life in Puebla, Catarina went from being a slave to a freed servant to an anchorite — to eventually being venerated as a spiritual icon after her death in 1688. Her early biographers, Francisco de Aguilera, a Jesuit priest who delivered the eulogy at her funeral and published it later that year; her confessor Alonso Ramos, who wrote a three-volume hagiography retelling her life in meticulous, much-embellished, and much-exaggerated details the same year; and the cleric José del Castillo, who wrote another hagiography about her life in 1692, all contributed to her legacy as a colonial-era Christian spiritual icon with their colourful accounts of her visions which ranged from pious and devotional to borderline erotic.

Of course, these Jesuit missionaries had their own motives for doing so. To these men, Catarina represented an unlikely success story of the Christian colonial "mission to civilise" Europe's "savage" colonial subjects, and her conversion and devotion to Christ became to them the proof of the possibility that the entire world could indeed be converted to Christianity.

To make her transformation story even more miraculous, these men altered and embellished the details of her life and ascribed to her powers reserved only for God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Ramos described her as announcing prophecies, performing miracles, astral projecting to Asia on her deathbed, and regularly conversing with Jesus, whom she considered her husband, to help promote Jesuit missionary enterprises in Asia.

All of this amounted to blasphemy in the eyes of the Spanish Inquisition. As early as 1691, only three years after her death, the Inquisition prohibited all engravings of Catarina on the charges that her image was treated with more respect than those of real saints. And in 1696, Ramos' tome — and by extension all other biographies of her — was condemned as witchery, an accusation which caused the elderly Jesuit to lose his mind and spend his last days in an asylum.

Over time, the memory of the real Catarina morphed into something entirely different, and the mythology surrounding her was eventually merged with the 19th-century Republican legend of China Poblana — an icon of Mexican nationalist spirit against the French invasion.

A Life In The Nideaquínideallá — The Valley Of "Neither-Here-Nor-There"

As one of the first Asians in the Americas, Catarina lived a life in-between two very different continents and cultures. In the words of Diego Javier Luis, "In colonial Mexico, she lived in the nideaquínideallá, the “neither-from-here-nor-from-there”: a valley between acceptance and foreignness, an in-between state familiar to many migrants today."

Luis is one of the recent cohort of historians and researchers who have focused on the often-overlooked Pacific slave trade and the history of early Asians who settled in the Americas as slaves, sailors, migrants, mercenaries, and tradespeople. According to Luis, her presence in colonial Mexico pushes back the traditionally accepted timeline and geography of Asian-American history by several centuries.

Near the end of her life, Catarina was frequently visited by visions and apparitions of her parents. She once told Ramos, her confessor and later biographer, that she frequently saw her parents in purgatory, where Catholics believe their souls are purified before they can enter heaven. However, she most often envisioned them coming “in the company of the ship from the Philippines to the port of Acapulco, from where, on their knees, they came into my presence.”

We will never know whether she was a mad woman who was driven to insanity by her traumatic experiences and found solace in these visions or a genius who used her brilliant intellect and imagination to exploit the desires of her captors, masters, and confessors to find some modicum of decency in her otherwise harsh life. One thing, however, is undeniable: her story encapsulates the history of European colonialism from Spain to Portugal, from Mughal India to Spanish Mexico, as well as the history of the Pacific slave trade, and the lived realities of Asian diasporas in the Americas.

Almost 500 years have passed since she lived, breathed, and walked these lands. How much has changed? How much has remained the same?

If you enjoyed reading this, here's more from Homegrown:

India Was Once The Only Place Where African ‘Slaves’ Could Become Kings

From Slavery To Kingship; How An African Man Fought The Mughals In 16th Century India

Exploring India's African Diaspora With Luke Duggleby's 'Siddi Project'