Contemplating a model of female religiosity in the realms of Spain and New Spain in the late 17th to early 18th centuries could return us to an archetypical Marianite representation, whose image of purity and perfection is traditionally white, possibly brown, but rarely black. What happens when this construction of sanctity is based on something extraordinary and inserted in its deep-rooted orthodoxy? What happens when the destiny of two marginalized women, in this case two African slaves who took religious orders on either side of the Atlantic, becomes the object of exemplary religious discourse? This investigation presents the exemplary lives (vidas ejemplares) of Sister Juana Esperanza de San Alberto and Sister Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo that, in spite of their appearance and condition, ceased to be slaves and became instead models of virtue.

The basic bibliography for this investigation are the texts of Jose Gomez de la Parra and Juan Carlos Pan y Agua, written during the 18 th century and relating to significant events in the religious orders to which they belonged. The chronicle of the Carmelite convent Fundacion, y primero siglo del muy religioso convento del senor San Jose de religiosas carmelitas descalzas, in which is found the "life" of Sister Juana Esperanza de San Alberto, was written by Jose Gomez de la Parra in 1732 in honor of the centennial of the establishment of the Carmelite order in Puebla. Juan Carlos Pan y Agua wrote the Compendio de la vida ejemplar de Sor Teresa Juliana de Santo Domingo in 1752, basing the exemplary life on the funeral sermon he had delivered for the Dominican nun.

In addition to containing the vidas ejemplares of these African nuns, the richness of the texts themselves as well as the circumstances in which they were produced, give these writings an importance of their own. Compilations of the vidas ejemplares and the confessional autobiographies of the Carmelite nuns of Puebla are found in the chronicle of Gomez de la Parra. Pan y Aguas' compendium, based on the funeral speech of Teresa Juliana and written by the same author, contains discourse conventions which raise it above its genre and approach that of hagiography.

The fundamental importance of the examination of these African nuns' lives lies not only in the revelation of the discourse strategies their writers used to avoid, emphasize or modify the color of the nuns' skin, but also in the analysis of the unusual phenomenon represented by the characters who surrounded the nuns, permitting Sister Juana Esperanza and Sister Teresa Juliana entry to cloistered institutions and, thereby, aiding them to become the subject of documentation in spite of their race.