“For lack of more time I shall only add what is the most noteworthy of all, namely this: While we were at the Tejas Hasinai village, after we had distributed clothing to the Indians and to the governor of the Tejas, that governor asked me for a piece of blue baize in which to bury his mother when she died; I told him that cloth would be more suitable, and he answered that he did not want any other color than blue. I then asked him what mysterious reason he had for preferring the blue color, and in reply he said they were very fond of that color, particularly for burial clothes, because in times past they had been visited frequently by a beautiful woman, who used to come down from the hills, dressed in blue garments, and that they wished to do as that woman had done. On my asking whether that had been long since, the governor said that it had been before his time, but his mother, who was aged, had seen that woman, as had also other old people. From this it is easily to be seen that they referred to the Madre Maria de Jesus de Agreda, who was frequently in those regions, as she herself acknowledged to the Father Custodian of New Mexico, her last visit being in 1631, the last fact being evident from her own statement, made to the Father Custodian of New Mexico.”[3]
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It appears, therefore, that after the publication of his Memorial in 1630, Benavides visited Maria de Jesus de Agreda. She was already famous because of the publication of her La Mistica de Dios Historia Divina de la Virgin, Madre de Dios in 1627,[4] in which she recounts, among other preposterous things, what happened to the Virgin while she was in the womb. The mind of this woman, therefore, filled with the most extravagant fancies, was fertile for the story of Benavides. She immediately assumed the identity of the unknown female missionary; and, in the course of the visit, which lasted probably two weeks, elaborated fully the exact method of the holy visitations. Benavides with his charming medieval mind readily accepted her story. Because of the prominence of the two, and because of the universal interest in the New World, it obtained rapid and wide circulation and credence.
The story must have reached America quickly. Manzanet, in the above quotations, speaks of it as being in general circulation thirty years later. That it spread is also indicated by the fact that De Leon in a letter, May, 1689, accounts for the religious knowledge of the Texas (or Tejas) Indians through the ministration of a woman. The following extract from his letter reveals the fact that he was not so well acquainted with the Benavides account as Manzanet had been:
“They [the Texas] are very familiar with the fact that there is only one true God, that he is in Heaven, and that he was born of the Holy Virgin. They perform many Christian rites, and the Indian Governor asked me for missionaries to instruct them, saying that many years ago a woman went inland to instruct them, but that she has not been there for a long time; and certainly it is a pity that people so rational, who plant crops and know there is a God, should have no one to teach them the Gospel, especially when the province of Texas is so large and so fertile and has so fine a climate.”[5]
And Shea asserts that “the Franciscan writers all from this time [when Benavides published his account] speak of this marvelous conversion of the Xumanos by her instrumentality as a settled [[135]]fact.”[6] The legend must have had wide acceptance in the Southwest in the last half of the seventeenth century. Among the important historians who take account of it are Bolton, Chapman, and Hodge. Bolton calls the story a “classic in the lore of the Southwest”;[7] Chapman refers to Maria Agreda as “the celebrated ‘Blue Lady’ of the American Southwest”;[8] and Hodge as editor of the translation of the Benavides Memorial gives a full account of the story in his excellent notes.[9]
So far as I know, the identity of the Blue Lady has been accounted for by no one except Benavides. What is the real basis of the story? Could there actually have been a female missionary who labored in the wilds of New Mexico and Texas before the coming of the Fathers? Or was there some young priest whom zeal led into that romantic region ahead of the most daring, and whom the natives mistook for a beautiful woman because of his youthful face and priestly robes? I wish I could answer.
[1] Benavides, Alonso de: The Memorial of Fray Alonso de Benavides, 1630, translated by Mrs. Edward A. Ayer; annotated by F. W. Hodge and Charles F. Lummis, R. R. Donnelley and Sons, Chicago, 1916, pp. 58–59. [↑]
[2] Casis, Lilia M.: “Letter of Fray Damian Manzanet to Don Carlos de Sigüenza Relative to the Discovery of the Bay of Espíritu Santo,” Texas State Historical Association Quarterly, II, pp. 282–283. [↑]