What is known about the life of Catarina de San Juan is from published seventeenth-century texts. One is the funeral sermon, preached by Jesuit Francisco de Aguilera, and two are by her confessors, Jesuit Alonso Ramos, who wrote a three-volume life of Catarina, and a parish priest, José del Castillo Grajeda, who wrote hagiographies of her life, at the request of Diego Carrillo de Mendoza y Pimentel, Marquis of Gélves and Viceroy of New Spain. Ramos's three-volume life of Catarina is by one scholar's account the most lengthy published text during the colonial era. The account of her life is improbable and has been extensively studied by modern scholars not so much as text narrating history but as an example of the ways that colonial hagiographers constructed the text of a holy person's life. According to these sources, a young Indian woman was brought from the Philippines by merchant ship to be the viceroy's personal servant. This girl, named Mirra, was kidnapped by Portuguese pirates and taken to Cochin, in the south of India. There, she escaped her kidnappers and took refuge in a Jesuit mission, where she was baptized with the name Catarina de San Juan. Mirra was then delivered to Manila where she was purchased as a slave by a merchant who later took her to New Spain. But once they disembarked in the port of Acapulco, instead of delivering her to the Marquis, the merchant sold her as a slave to the Pueblan man Miguel de Sosa for ten times the price that the viceroy had promised for her. Catarina de San Juan, or Mirra, followed the style of dress of her birth country, India, completely wrapped in a sari that covered her whole body. She could have worn the Langa Voni which consists of a blouse and a petticoat. It is possible that this mode of dress gave rise to the china dress. A few years after her arrival in Mexico, Miguel de Sosa died, providing in his will for the manumission of his slave. She was taken in by a convent, where it is said she began to have visions of the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus. Catarina de San Juan died 5 January 1688 at the age of 82 years. In Puebla de los Ángeles she was venerated as a popular saint until 1691, when the Holy Inquisition prohibited open devotion to her. Today, the former Jesuit church, the Templo de la Compañía, in Puebla, is known as La Tumba de la China Poblana because in its sacristy lie the remains of Catarina de San Juan.
