Objective:

This article aims to show how Catalina de los Ríos Lisperguer, "la Quintrala", became a cultural icon whose first narration dates back to bishop Francisco de Salcedo's writings in 1630, in the context of the prosecution of various crimes of which she was accused. In this sense, the significance of Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna's Los Lisperguer y la Quintrala (1877) does not lie in being the first written version of the life and crimes of Catalina de los Ríos, but rather in that it materialized those initial narratives into a model episode, which made it possible for her criminal biography to become widely known.

Methodology:

This article analyses Los Lisperguer y la Quintrala, published in 1877 as a feuilleton in the newspaper El Ferrocarril, and the relationship it established with the colonial archives to which it refers and to whose origins it can be traced back.

Originality:

Although the works of Vicuña Mackenna have been scrutinized from several different angles in relevant fields of study, these two aspects in question have largely gone unexamined.

Conclusions:

Notably, this nineteenth-century publication is not only linked to colonial era texts in terms of its content, but also how the author continues a tradition inaugurated centuries earlier by constituting himself as a poet-judge that symbolically reopens the cases which, from his perspective, resulted in "la Quintrala's" impunity.