glaurung-quena submitted to medievalpoc:

Thanks to a mention in Charles Mann’s 1493, I learned about Catarina de San Juan (1606-1688), an early Mexican mystic. She was born Mirra, of a noble Muslim family in India. Around age 10, she was taken captive by pirates who eventually took her to Spain’s trading post at Manila (where about half of the silver mined in Peru ended up, traded for silk, porcelain, etc), and sold her into slavery to the Spanish. Somewhere along the way she was baptized and converted to Christianity. By 1621, at age 15, she found herself in Acapulco. Her visions and piety probably helped raise her from slavery, and she lived out the rest of her long life in Puebla as a holy woman of some renown. After her death, there was a concerted but unsuccessful effort to canonize her.

The fullest writeup of her life seems to be in “A Mughal Princess in Baroque New Spain” by Gauvin Alexander Bailey (full PDF available online), which spends a few pages on her life story before delving into a detailed art-historical look at her visions.