Like the lady whom Bing Crosby sang about in 1931, Manuela Sáenz came along from “Out of Nowhere.” Crosby, as a smitten troubadour, fears that his lady will return to her nowhere and disappear. This, alas, is how it has been with Manuela. A vast majority of male observers wanted her, expected her, to return to nowhere after the sort of brief interlude that Andy Warhol would refer to, in a different context, as her “fifteen minutes of fame.”

There was never any real likelihood that Manuela would disappear totally, but she did recede into some of the dark corners...

MANUELA SÁENZ (1797-1856)—FRIEND, lover, and ally of Spanish American independence hero Simón Bolívar and, today, an icon of nationalists and feminists throughout the region—has been largely ignored by professional historians. In the United States, she remains unknown among most scholars of Latin America. My own introduction to her was by accident. It happened decades ago when, as a graduate student browsing the book stacks of Tulane University’s Latin American Library (preparing for the requisite Ph.D. prelim examinations), I came uponThe Four Seasons of Manuela: The Love Story of Manuela Sáenz and Simón Bolívar(1952) by popular author...

ALTHOUGH LITTLE IS known of Manuela Sáenz’s childhood, available sources offer a glimpse of the world that shaped it. They shed light on circumstances that affected her girlhood. These circumstances included her illegitimate origin and official, baptismal, status as a foundling, orhijaexpósita—that is, a child of “unknown parents,” a designation meant to disguise the fact of her parents’ illicit union.¹ They also included an upper-class social background. Sáenz’s December 1797 birth to parents of elite status (a status based on wealth, access to public office, and noble or “pure” Spanish lineage) helped mitigate the dishonor that usually haunted...

AROUND THE MIDDLE of April 1822, Manuela Sáenz embarked on a return trip to Quito. She sailed northward from Callao to Guayaquil—gateway to the Quito Audiencia and, for travelers from Lima, still the quickest, most direct route to the Audiencia’s remote capital. She likely was accompanied by her husband, who probably had business to attend to in the northern port city. Sáenz went on to Quito without him. She no doubt took the old Spanish road by horse and mule, traveling with her servants and perhaps a friend or acquaintance as well as the usual armed escort for safety.¹...

STILL SMARTING FROM the treatment she had received at the hands of Lima’s authorities, Manuela Sáenz landed in Guayaquil toward the end of April 1827. From there, she made her way back to Quito.¹ She also waited impatiently for news of Bolívar. The Liberator had hardly written her since his arrival in Bogotá the previous November and subsequent emergency trip to Venezuela. Sáenz was hurt by his silence. In a brief note to her lover, she complained of being ill in bed with a “headache” and “very angry.” “Does it cost you so much to write me?” she then asked...

NEWS OF BOLÍVAR’S death—on December 17, 1830, at a friend’s house just outside the small Caribbean city of Santa Marta—traveled slowly. It likely did not reach Sáenz in Guaduas until just after the start of the new year, 1831. Sáenz had been waiting for some word of her lover and no doubt had been expecting to hear from friends who had gone to see him. At least one of these was a member of the special government commission that, in early December, had been appointed to visit Bolívar and personally invite him to return to power.¹

On January...

THE ECUADORIAN GOVERNMENT’S refusal to rescind its order left Manuela Sáenz with no alternative. She retraced her steps to Guayaquil and, toward the middle of November 1835, boarded a ship for Peru and exile. Although she probably had Lima in mind as her ultimate destination, she disembarked at the ship’s first main stop: the northern Peruvian port of Paita. The sight of Paita at first must have been less than inspiring. While set against a dramatic backdrop—at the edge of a bay bordered by a 150-foot-high bluff and beyond it a desert plain—the town itself was small and...

With the triumph of Ecuador’s March 1845 revolution and the fall of Juan José Flores, Manuela Sáenz turned away from the world of politics, a world that, until then, had been dominated by men she knew personally. She had grown tired and disillusioned. One sign of this was her reaction the previous year to news of Vivanco’s defeat by his rivals. “You must know [by now] that the Vivanco affair has ended, miserably,” she wrote Flores, going on to characterize Peru’s seemingly endless cycle of civil war and caudillo conflict as little more than “a [ridiculous] farce or madman’s contra...

AFTER HER DEATH, Manuela Sáenz’s remains slipped anonymously into the dry earth on the outskirts of Paita.¹ Local tradition has it that, along with other victims of the 1856 diphtheria epidemic, the Libertadora was buried in a common grave south of town instead of in the parish cemetery, the normal burial ground for town residents. Despite a Peruvian government-sponsored investigation into the matter in the late 1980s, her exact resting place—the site of her bones—remains uncertain.²

Public interest in where she is buried, however, is telling. Reflected in the pilgrimages made to Paita in the many years since...