After leaving Panama she travels with her master to the Port of Paita where she finds herself in a quarrel. Catalina often finds herself running back to churches though. She never forms close attachments while she travels, so the church is all she has. She grew up in the church, so she feels like that is the only community she has. In the introduction, it is discussed that after killing her brother she finds solace in the church.

She felt as if it was too restraining always being questioned.

She was in the process of training to become a nun but left mid process. Growing up in Spain, she spent most of her young life in the church. Yet all these readings are allegorical-that is to say, they are readings of her story as a story about something else-as indeed saints' and others' lives have been offered in the literary annals of her time and ours-as exempla, as indications of deeper or higher truths.Catalina has a very complex relationship with the church. When Catalina flirts with two young women, 'frolicking' and 'teasing,' it might seem intriguing to read this as lesbianism avant la lettre, an instance of female homosexuality or, at the very least, love play between women. When Catalina de Erauso fights duels, steals money, leads soldiers into battle, rescues a woman in distress, evades the marriage plans of hopeful widows and their daughters, and marches across league upon league of uncharted Peruvian terrain, it is tempting to see in her tale an allegory of early modern woman's emergent subjectivity. 'The short answer, of course, is that we can't.” 'How can we assess the erotic, social, and political effects of cross-dressing at a remove of almost four centuries, in the context of a culture very different from our own, and as described in a Spanish-language text?' asks Garber. In her introduction to the volume, gender theorist Marjorie Garber focuses the attention of the reader on difficulties of addressing questions of gender and identity in Catalina de Erauso's autobiography. Catalina de Erauso first came to my attention in 1996, when Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite Nun in the New World, translated by Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto, was published.

Catalina de erauso autobiography