Throughout the colonial period of Mexican history, cloistered nuns wrote spiritual journals at the request of their confessors. These documents were read and scrutinized, not only by the confessors, but also by others in the hierarchy of their Orders. They are important sources of study for historians in that they provide a window into the religious culture of the times and the spiritual mentality of their authors. This thesis will examine one such record, discovered in a collection of volumes at the Historical Franciscan Archive of Michoacán in Celaya, Mexico. The diary covers eleven months of 1751 in the life of a Franciscan nun -- believed to be María de Jesús Felipa who kept such records over a period of more than twenty years. María de Jesús Felipa was a visionary who experienced occasional ecstatic states. Through her contacts with the spiritual world, she pursued her own salvation and that of those most specifically in her charge: members of her own community -- the convent of San Juan de la Penitencia in Mexico City -- and the souls in purgatory. These encounters propelled her into different frames of time and space -- moving her into the past and the future, and transporting her to bucolic and horrific locations. Her diary ascribes meaning to these encounters by tying them to her life and her relationships within the convent. Her diary of 1751 also indicates that this spiritual activity and the records she kept brought her to the attention of the Inquisition. The thesis argues that, because of its cohesiveness of thought and consistency of focus, the diary effectively casts its record keeper as author of her own life story. A close reading reveals the inner thoughts and perceptions of a distinct personality. Her first-person account also reflects the character of Christianity, the impact of post-Tridentine reforms and difficulties in the governance of convents in eighteenth-century New Spain. Although always arduous and often unpleasant, writing provided Sor Maria with an opportunity to establish her integrity, exercise control, and justify her thoughts and actions as she pursued her vocation. Writing under the supervision of a confessor, María de Jesús Felipa was her own person. In its organization and focus, her diary resolutely records a struggle for self-determination within the limits imposed by the monastic vows of obedience, chastity, poverty and enclosure.

Fluid inclusion and mineralogical features indicative of boiling have been characterized in 855 samples from epithermal precious metals deposits along the Veta Madre at Guanajuato, Mexico. Features associated with boiling that have been identified at Guanajuato include colloform texture silica, plumose texture silica, moss texture silica, ghost-sphere texture silica, lattice-bladed calcite, lattice-bladed calcite replaced by quartz and pseudo-acicular quartz after calcite and coexisting liquid-rich and vapor-rich fluid inclusions. Most samples were assayed for Au, Ag, Cu, Pb, Zn, As and Sb, and were divided into high-grade and low-grade samples based on the gold and silver concentrations. For silver, the cutoff for high grade was 100 ppm Ag, and for gold the cutoff was 1 ppm Au. The feature that is most closely associated with high grades of both gold and silver is colloform texture silica, and this feature also shows the largest difference in grade between the presence or absence of that feature (178.8 ppm Ag versus 17.2 ppm Ag, and 1.1 ppm Au versus 0.2 ppm Au). For both Ag and Au, there is no significant difference in average grade as a function of whether or not coexisting liquid-rich and vapor-rich fluid inclusions are present. The textural and fluid inclusion data obtained in this study were analyzed using the binary classifier within SPSS Clementine. The models that correctly predicted high versus low grade samples most consistently (~70-75% of the tests) for both Ag and Au were the neural network, the C5 decision tree and Quest decision tree models. For both Au and Ag, the presence of colloform silica texture was the variable with the greatest importance, i.e., the variable that has the greatest predictive power. Boiling features are absent or rare in samples collected along a traverse perpendicular to the Veta Madre. This suggests that if an explorationist observes these features in samples collected during exploration that an environment favorable to precious metal mineralization is nearby. Similarly, good evidence for boiling is observed in the deepest levels of the Veta Madre that have been sampled in the mines and drill cores, suggesting that additional precious metal reserves are likely beneath the deepest levels sampled. / Master of Science