n she arrives at La Playa, colonists expecting humble piety — eyes down, soft-spoken — are surprised. Lorenzana takes charge. The woman, in her early 40s, orders families living in the area to feed the sick with mission food brought on two-wheeled, twisted-wooden carretas. She builds a central kitchen at Huisache. She tells servants to cart the dead to Mission San Diego, give them last rites, bury them, and burn every speck of their clothing.
“She came and helped them all,” said Doña Juana Machado years later. “The men, women, and children who were well continued their travels northward; the sick, as soon as they recovered, also followed.” Many must have wondered who the woman was who moved among them like a whirlwind with a purpose.
From La Cuña to La Beata. Abandoned in Mexico City at birth, seven-year-old Apolinaria Lorenzana had sailed to Alta California in 1800. She arrived with 19 other orphans ordered to help colonize the new territory. The boys were required to learn useful skills, the girls, “young healthy maids,” to marry, and remarry if widowed. All must raise large, Christian families and never violate their contract. In 1802, Lorenzana’s adopted mother fell in love with a soldier, married him, and sailed back to Mexico, leaving the nine-year-old girl behind.
Young Lorenzana moved in with the Carrillos in Santa Barbara, more as a nurse and servant than a daughter. In 1807 Raymundo Carrillo became comandante of San Diego Presidio, bemoaned by its inhabitants as the windiest hill on earth.
While living with the Carrillos, and later the Mercados, Lorenzana began teaching young girls to read, write, and recite their catechism. “She shared her knowledge with other women,” says Genaro M. Padilla, “in a society that generally discouraged women’s intellectual development.” It helped that both Sergeant Mercado and his wife Josefa were teachers. Lorenzana instructed “children of either sex to read, at the request of their parents.”
She had only been with the Mercados a short while when her left hand wouldn’t move. She couldn’t shake it back to life. Finally the hand became so paralyzed “it looked like it was dead.” She stopped teaching. She loved to sew, loved working with her hands, but couldn’t. Frontier society demanded that everyone live traditional lives and carry their load. Unmarried, and in her late teens, Lorenzana had become useless.
Father José Sánchez brought her to San Diego Mission. “He took me in,” she says. “I could not move my hand at all for about two years and eight months. Then, over a period of about four months my hand began to recover very slowly.”
During those three years, she began nursing the sick in the mission hospital, her left arm in a sling. Also at this time, if not sooner, Lorenzana made a choice. Given the turmoil of being uprooted, shipped from a major city to a forlorn frontier, losing her mother, and leaving the Carrillos and Mercados, Lorenzana fully embraced the one family that would never abandon her: the Church.
When she began nursing, Father Sánchez ordered her not to practice medicine, just “teach servants how to and supervise them.” But without official sanction, Lorenzana “always, as best I could, attended the sick.”
This was often done without medical supplies. After 1810, cargo ships from Mexico became fewer and fewer. Of necessity, Lorenzana learned native healing techniques: herbal remedies for headaches and fevers, potions for snakebite, salves for wounds. She doesn’t mention it, but a curandera also used prayer and ritual, like a shaman, to exorcise spiritual illnesses — among them “shock,” “fright,” and the “evil eye” — caused, it was said, by curses, demons, or lost, malevolent spirits.
When Lorenzana regained use of her hand, she returned to the home of Josefa Sal, whose husband, Sergeant Mercado, died in 1811. Josefa opened a school for girls at the Presidio, but since she also owned a garden and an orchard down the hill, she turned teaching duties over to Lorenzana. Over 40 years later, when she dictated her memoirs to Thomas Savage, Lorenzana recalled her student