The Lady in Blue: the Jumano delegation at Isleta and Sor María de Ágreda

In the 1620s, New Mexico was the far northern edge of Spain's missions. Fray Alonso de Benavides was Franciscan custodian there from 1626 to 1629. Fray Juan de Salas had worked at Isleta since 1622. To the east, Jumano trade routes "covered most of Texas and New Mexico," said Jumano-Apache tribal historian Enrique Madrid. Jumano groups repeatedly came to Isleta asking Salas to visit their country, but Benavides waited for more friars.

Then came summer 1629. About fifty Jumano arrived at the friary of San Antonio de Isleta. They asked for missionaries and for baptism.

Benavides asked who had instructed them. The answer was "the Woman in Blue," a woman in a religious habit who had appeared among them. She had taught them the rudiments of Christianity and urged them to seek the friars. Benavides recorded that "a woman used to preach to each one of them in his own tongue." She had also taught them to receive the friars in procession and helped them decorate crosses.

The friars showed the visitors a painting of a nun, Mother Luisa de Carrión. The Jumano said the woman looked like that. But younger. "A beautiful young girl."

Salas and Fray Diego López set out with three soldiers as escort. The Jumano homeland lay more than 112 leagues east of Santa Fe. They reported a people who already had a good understanding of Christian teachings, and who put it down to the Lady in Blue. About 200 sick people were gathered, blessed with the cross and read the Gospel of St Luke. They were reported healed. Baptism figures vary widely, from about 2,000 in one week to all ten thousand members of the tribe.

Benavides took the story to Philip IV in his printed Memorial of 1630, under the chapter title "Conversión milagrosa de la nación Xumana." In 1631 he interviewed Sor María de Jesús, abbess of the Conceptionist convent at Ágreda, in Spain. Her order wore white habits with blue cloaks.

She said she had been "transported by the aid of the angels" to the Jumano. Benavides wrote: "The first time she went was in the year 1620. She has continued [these visits] ever since until 1631." She described the one-eyed leader Captain Tuerto as someone she knew "very well." Benavides was convinced. She was the woman.

The Inquisition examined her in 1635 and 1650. She was never charged. In 1650, writing to Pedro Manero, she said some details in Benavides' account were exaggerated rather than false. The Handbook of Texas describes her more than 500 visits as experiences in which "she thought she visited a distant, unknown land."

Nancy Parrott Hickerson, in The Jumanos (1994), suggests the Jumano wanted Spanish protection, especially against the Apache, and may have known about Christianity beforehand. Carlos E. Castañeda treated the account as documented religious history. Tilly Chandler, of the San Angelo diocese's Lady in Blue committee, put it simply: "You can't explain it, but you can't explain it away."

Her canonization cause opened on 28 January 1673. She is Venerable, and the cause was renewed after 2002. San Angelo credits her with founding Texas missions, and in 2018 bronze statues of the Lady in Blue and a Jumano by Vic Payne were installed along the Concho River. Folklore says bluebonnets bloomed when she gave her last sermon. Javier Sierra retold the story in The Lady in Blue, and The Needle and the Thread was partly filmed in San Angelo.