From the introduction to Lieutenant Nun by translator Michele Stepto: "She gives 1585 as the year of her birth, though records in San Sebastian indicate she was baptized in 1592. * * * Sometime between 1626 and 1630 -- that is, between the visit to Naples, which concludes her memoir, and her return to the Americas--she wrote down in manuscript or dictated to an amanuensis an account of her life. * * * A 'Relación' of Catalina's final years, published in Mexico in 1653, places her death in 1650 in Orizava, on the road to Veracruz."