In Process: Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara with Margaret Chowning

Join us for a works-in-progress seminar of Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara's "Apocalypse Now: Maya Marianism, Female Prophecy, and Rebellion" with invited interloutor Magaret Chowning. Advanced registration required to receive the draft for discussion 1 week before the event. Space is limited.

Apocalypse Now: Maya Marianism, Female Prophecy, and Rebellion

In the summer of 1712, María López, a teenage Maya girl in the Chiapas highlands, proclaimed to have spoken with an apparition of the Virgin Mary who told her that Spanish colonialism would soon end. By early August, thousands of Maya “soldiers of the Virgin,” rose up in the Tzeltal Revolt, one of the largest and most radical Indigenous revolts in Spanish America before 1750. Throughout the rebellion, María López continued to relay the Virgin’s directives, dressed in priestly vestments, and presided alongside newly ordained Maya Catholic priests. Lopez could neither read nor write, but I argue she acted as an Indigenous intellectual, navigating gender restrictions and establishing her prophetic authority through a keen awareness of the sociopolitical context of Chiapas’ Maya highlands and creative intellectual engagement with European and Maya Christian prophetic traditions.

Brianna Leavitt-Alcántara is a 2024–25 Taft Center Fellow. She teaches Latin American History, specializing in the colonial period and nineteenth century. Her research focuses on gender and religion in colonial and nineteenth-century Central America. Her book, Alone at the Altar: Single Women and Devotion in Guatemala, 1670-1870 (Stanford University Press, 2018), considers how non-elite single women forged complex alliances with the Catholic Church in Guatemala's colonial capital, and how those alliances significantly shaped local religion and the spiritual economy, late colonial reform efforts, and post-Independence politics. Her new book project, The Virgin's Wrath, examines gender relations, Mayan Catholicism, and violence in eighteenth-century Chiapas. She teaches survey courses on colonial Latin America as well as upper division courses on topics such as gender, religion, the Spanish Inquisition, and Afro-Latin America.

Margaret Chowning is the Muriel McKevitt Sonne Chair Professor of Latin American History (emerita) at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Wealth and Power in Provincial Mexico from the Late Colony to the Revolution (Stanford, 1999), Rebellious Nuns: The Troubled History of a Mexican Convent (Oxford, 2006), and Catholic Women and Mexican Politics, 1750-1940 (Princeton, 2023). She is working on a book of urban history in Mexico, with special attention to the impact that liberal policies and liberal “values” exerted on urban life in the nineteenth century.

Host or Publisher Taft Research Center