Isabel de Guevara () was one of the few European women to accept the offer from the Spanish crown to join colonizing missions to the New World during the first wave of conquest and settlement. Guevara sailed in 1534 the first voyage of

Pedro de Mendoza Pedro de Mendoza () (c. 1499 – June 23, 1537) was a Spanish ''conquistador'', soldier and explorer, and the first ''adelantado'' of New Andalusia. Setting sail Pedro de Mendoza was born in Guadix, Grenada, part of a large noble family that ...

and with a group of 1,500 colonists, including twenty women, bound for the

Río de la Plata The Río de la Plata (, "river of silver"), also called the River Plate or La Plata River in English, is the estuary formed by the confluence of the Uruguay River and the Paraná River at Punta Gorda. It empties into the Atlantic Ocean and fo ...

region of what is now

Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...

. According to Spanish archives, she “suffered all the discomforts and dangers of the conquest.” De Guevara's correspondences paint one of the most elaborate, enduring portraits of the hazards of colonial life. Within three months of arrival, because of hostile

indigenous people Indigenous peoples are culturally distinct ethnic groups whose members are directly descended from the earliest known inhabitants of a particular geographic region and, to some extent, maintain the language and culture of those original people ...

, starvation, and hardship, Isabel de Guevara estimated that a thousand of the settlers who had arrived with her in the

New World The term ''New World'' is often used to mean the majority of Earth's Western Hemisphere, specifically the Americas."America." ''The Oxford Companion to the English Language'' (). McArthur, Tom, ed., 1992. New York: Oxford University Press, p. ...

had died of hunger. Estimates by other colonists at the time went as high as 10,000.

Colonial conquests

In one of her earliest letters, de Guevara described leaving 160 colonists behind as a defensive force while "400 men and some horses” went ahead to the new fort of Corpus Christi. Nearly half of these men died on the mission. De Guevara survived and described her companions as “very withered, their teeth and lips black, look more like dead men than live ones.” By 1556, de Guevara had been in America for 22 years. She had lost her brother or her father (the records are unclear) and was without family. She left

Buenos Aires Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...

, when the fort there was deserted, to make the perilous trip up the Parana River to Asuncion, the capital of

Paraguay Paraguay (; ), officially the Republic of Paraguay ( es, República del Paraguay, links=no; gn, Tavakuairetã Paraguái, links=si), is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the south and southwest, Brazil to th ...

. In 1542, she entered an arranged marriage with Pedro de Esquivel, a Castillan who was later executed during the internecine political wars. In a letter she wrote in 1556 to Princess Juana of Spain, who was the head of the Council on the Indies, Isabel de Guevara argued that her labors entitled her to a partition of land and indigenous slaves. She wrote that because hunger had caused the male colonists to “fade into weakness,” “all of the work was left to the women,” including civilian and military functions.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Isabel de Guevara People of colonial Argentina Year of birth unknown 16th-century deaths 16th-century women 16th century in the Viceroyalty of Peru 16th-century South American people Governorate of the Río de la Plata