A colonial woman in a republican's Chilean history: Bejamin Vicuna Mackenna and La 'Quintrala'

In 1662, Catalina de Los Rios, a wealthy Creole of Santiago, Chile, was at the center of a judicial inquiry into the management of labor on her rural estate at La Ligua. Two centuries later, liberal historian Benjamin Vicuna Mackenna wrote a historical biography that exposed her as a sadistic murder er who wantonly tortured slave and servants. Dubbed La Quintrala, this "Luc retia Borgia of Chile" rose to new celebrity in the modern period. This art icle interrogates the case brought against Los Rios by Chile's foremost rep ublican historian and finds little evidence to support his conclusions. It shows that Vicuna Mackenna utilized the story of "La Quintrala" to promote a number of claims regarding gender and that the central aim of his work wa s to preserve the heritage of Chile's republican men by making women respon sible for the decadence of colonial society.