The university was closed to St. Martin de Porres, ten

LIMA, Peru, about 1590 AD — Don Juan de Porres had been given the job of governing Panama, and he had to sail for it. Before he went, he settled three things for his ten-year-old son in Lima, Saint Martin de Porres. The boy would be confirmed, and his mother would have money in her hands to feed him and keep him at school. When the schooling was done, he would learn the barber’s trade.

St. Martin de Porres was born in Lima on December 9, 1579 AD. His father was a Spanish gentleman, and his mother, Ana Velázquez, was a freed woman born in Panama. The house where she was raising her two children was not her own. A woman called doña Francisca Vélez Miquel had taken the three of them into hers, on a street called Malambo.

Later his father’s business took him north to the city of St. James of Guayaquil. He took both children with him, the boy and his sister Juana, and put them in school there. With the master his father chose, St. Martin de Porres learned to read and write in a short time. In that city his father’s uncle, Captain Diego de Miranda, saw don Juan with the two children and asked who they were. Don Juan answered him: “They are my children, and Ana Velazquez’s, and therefore I must support them and give them the education that belongs to them.” Then he brought the boy back down the coast to Lima.

The archbishop on the road

The archbishop of Lima, St. Toribio Alfonso Mogrovejo, had spent years travelling the roads of his diocese. As he crossed it he baptised and confirmed nearly half a million people. On one of those journeys he confirmed St. Martin de Porres.

Then don Juan left Lima for the coast, nine miles away at the harbour of Callao. The city had grown because of that harbour. There he got on a ship for Panama, up the coast to the north.

St. Martin de Porres stayed with his mother in the house on Malambo. She sent him out every day to buy the day’s food. He gave part of it away to poor children.

Not only haircuts

One thing his father’s money could never buy him was a place at the university. By law only people born to married parents, and descended in a straight line from Spaniards, could take a degree there. A boy with one Spanish parent and one African parent was not allowed to study there at all. St. Martin de Porres was one of those boys, and his parents had never married.

The barber’s trade was open to him, and it was a skilled one. In Peru four kinds of people treated the sick: physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, and the barbers, who were also the bloodletters. The city had already made rules for them. An ordinance of 1559 AD said a barber could not treat the sick until he had shown proof that he was trained, because patients were being put in danger.

When the schooling was done, Ana Velázquez and doña Francisca found the boy a master between them. He was a bloodletter as well as a barber. He taught St. Martin de Porres to shave and cut hair, to open a vein, and to treat wounds, ulcers and abscesses with the cures people used then.