Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (2 page)

The term
whore
insulted not only the reputations of
these two wives, but also that of their husbands, since patriarchal society
held husbands responsible for the behavior of their wives, especially their
sexual behavior. This may be one reason Josefa’s husband considered the incident
serious enough to warrant a court suit, although the probable loss of the
anticipated child may have been the primary reason. The need to defend the
family honor, considered the responsibility of the man of the household, and to
assign blame for the likely miscarriage, provide clues to the workings of the
patriarchal family, an institution that undergirded colonial Latin American
society.

A surprising aspect of this case is that a woman of the
highest social rank exchanged insults with a woman clearly below her in the
social structure and even lowered herself to engaging in a cat-fight — complete
with scratching and hair pulling,
after Mass,
no less, in full view of
the Sunday morning churchgoers, who must have been highly entertained — with a
woman who was six months pregnant and visibly preparing to enter the sacred
institution of motherhood. If Josefa lost her child, her attackers might be
considered murderers. What could provoke such an attack?

Since the record is incomplete, the causes remain a matter
of speculation. Doña Teresa alleged that Josefa had brushed against her, but
Josefa’s husband denied this. What seems clear is that the two women had had
some previous unpleasant experience with each other, and it may be that one of
the women had information damaging to the reputation of the other. Or, since
attacking a pregnant woman in such a way as to jeopardize the life of the baby
suggests that causing a miscarriage may have been the goal, could it be that
Teresa suspected that her own husband Diego was responsible for Josefa’s
pregnancy? The record is silent on the real causes of the fight, as well as
whether José and Josefa received satisfaction, but in spite of its failure to
resolve all our questions, the document provides a window on the Latin American
colonial period and some of the underlying assumptions shared by the people who
lived there. The chapters to come will examine in more detail the patriarchal
family system and the race-based social structure, of which fleeting glimpses
appear in the record of the fight between Josefa Cadena and Teresa Bravo in
1782.

OBJECTIVE OF THE BOOK

The purpose of this book is to investigate how people lived
their daily lives in the American colonies of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns
from the late 16th to the beginning of the 19th centuries, and how their
everyday lives shaped the history of the region. In the past few decades, the
historiographical focus has shifted from the traditional emphasis on momentous
events and the lives of “great” men to the daily lives of everyday people, and
to their beliefs and values, their hopes and fears, and especially to the
relationship between these and their actions. While daily life may be
intrinsically interesting, its importance as a historical category lies in its
relationship to the events that rate a spot on history’s timeline. These major
events that touch, and in some cases shape, many lives are made by large groups
of people engaged in living their lives in an ever-changing world and, in so
doing, both enacting big changes and reacting to them. The major events
historians struggle to interpret cannot be understood apart from people’s
everyday lives.

The book’s temporal focus is the mature colonial era, a
designation given to the second and third centuries of rule by the Iberian monarchs
over nearly all of the central and southern part of the Western Hemisphere.
This era witnessed the consolidation of colonial institutions first imposed in
the decades following the arrival of Spanish and Portuguese adventurers, who
initiated the process of bringing new territories and peoples under Iberian
control. An understanding of the three centuries of Iberian colonial rule is
fundamental to an understanding of Latin America today, since the period before
independence lasted longer than the 200 years that have followed. The
political, social, and economic institutions developed during this lengthy era
of colonial domination constitute the foundations of the structures that
organize the daily lives of Latin Americans in our time.

In addition to investigating daily life in the colonial
period, an additional goal of this work is to broaden and deepen the North
American student’s grasp of Latin American life and culture. Perhaps because we
share the Western Hemisphere, or because there are some similarities between
the pre-Columbian peoples of the northern and southern parts of this hemisphere
and some parallels in the way they experienced European colonization, there is
a tendency for students in the United States to look southward and judge the
success or, as they often see it, failure of Latin American economies,
societies, cultures, and polities according to standards that are deeply
ingrained in the North American experience. Often these measures are almost
totally unrelated to the real day-to-day lives of Latin Americans and to their
historical experience. Understanding the early centuries of European
colonization is the key to grasping the subsequent divergence of the paths on
which the northern and southern continents of the Western Hemisphere set out.
Looked at in this way, the fact that these paths have led our two regions to
very different places in today’s world is not surprising.

Talking about Latin America as one region is inevitably
misleading, of course; the geographic scope for our study includes all
territories under at least the nominal control of the Spanish and Portuguese
crowns. At its largest extent, this Iberian-ruled section of the Western
Hemisphere stretched from what are now the U.S. Southeast and Southwest to the
tip of Patagonia, including the Spanish Caribbean. We will emphasize regional
distinctions within Latin America from time to time, especially between Spanish
realms and Portuguese-dominated Brazil, and these should be kept in mind as a
counterweight to an overly rigid notion of Latin America’s social and cultural
commonalities. These commonalities were evident, however, and underpin the
book’s topical focus: what people living in this time and place did every day
and — to the extent that we can catch glimpses of or make an educated guess
about these intangibles — what they thought and felt about themselves and their
societies.

Ultimately, this study is designed as an exercise in both
analysis and empathy, as the best historiography always is. We will visit the
past, meet the people who live there, and interrogate them — or the traces they
have left — regarding what mattered to them, how they lived, what they did, and
why they did it. We will explore the boundaries of people’s lives and the lives
people constructed inside these boundaries, or in some cases across them, as
they negotiated space for their lives within legal structures and social norms.

DEFINING TERMS

A book on daily life in colonial Latin America must begin
by defining some of the central concepts of the region and the period. While
terms like
Latin America, colonial, race,
and
Indian,
probably
convey some general meaning to all readers, there are debates within the
discipline on their meanings and their usefulness.

Colonial Latin America

The term
Latin America
refers to the
Spanish-speaking countries of North, Central, and South America plus
Portuguese-speaking Brazil. Haiti is sometimes included because, although a
colony of France, it shares a history with the Spanish-speaking Dominican
Republic, the other country of the island of Hispaniola.
Latin
is a
reference to the Romance languages spoken in these countries that have their
roots in Latin, the language of the Romans.

As noted earlier, this volume covers the mature colonial
period, the 200 years that followed the initial conquest years of the 16th
century. The period ends with the successful expulsion of the last Spanish
troops from Peru in 1826, the victory that brought independence to all the
former Spanish colonies on the American mainland. Brazil, following a very
different path to the same goal, declared independence in 1822. Unlike Africa
and parts of Asia, the Americas were thoroughly colonized by Europeans soon
after their arrival, with the Spanish conquests preceding by nearly 40 years
the settlement of Brazil by the Portuguese. Some historians dispute the
accuracy of the term
conquest
because of the importance of the native
peoples in shaping life in the Americas even after the arrival of the Europeans.
These historians argue that if the indigenous peoples had been thoroughly
defeated, as the term
conquest
implies, they would not have been in a
position to play as large a role as they did in constructing Latin American
history. It would be accurate, however, to state that the Spanish and
Portuguese crowns succeeded in delineating administrative areas, sending agents
to manage them, and imposing systems of social control over the native population.
Since these are characteristics of colonization, it is useful and reasonable to
refer to this span of just over 300 years, from the European invasion to the
independence era, as a
colonial
period, a time during which the two
Iberian crowns managed to establish judicial and political authority; extract
resources, including labor, from the territory and the people under their rule;
and play a large role, although certainly not the only role, in making daily
life what it was.

Colonies exist for the benefit of the mother country.
Therefore, the goals and motives of the Europeans who went to the Americas to
serve the crowns’ interests were frequently at odds with those of the native
peoples. Nevertheless, there were indigenous people, generally from the upper
levels of pre-Columbian society, who found ways to benefit from working with
the Europeans. Therefore, a strict binary system that places Europeans and
Indians at opposite poles would not be an accurate schematic of social
relations. Some who came from Europe to make their fortune ended up falling
down several rungs on the social ladder because of poor health, an unlucky
accident, or simply an inability to find a niche in the societies under
construction. Some among the indigenous groups, generally those who had
occupied high positions in pre-Columbian society, exercised their ingenuity by
collaborating with the new rulers to secure a fairly cozy place for themselves
and their families in the new social, political, and economic systems.

Indians

Another term that presents some problems is
Indian.
The
application of this misnomer to the native peoples reflects the
misunderstanding on the part of Columbus and his navigators of world geography
and their landfall. Since they thought they were in the Indies, they referred
to the people they met there as Indians. This study will use the term, but not
to refer to specific nations of indigenous people and not before the arrival of
the Europeans. During the colonial period, because of the Iberian crowns’
success in establishing systems of law and administration, the widely varying peoples
of the First Nations of the region were lumped together under the single
heading
Indian.
This appellation was used in legal documents to refer to
anyone who held this legal status in society and so is unavoidable, even
accurate, since the Spanish and Portuguese were in a position to define the
terms. So while referring to the native peoples as Indians before the arrival
of the Europeans would be inaccurate, since neither they nor anyone else in the
world used this term to refer to them, during the colonial period we are left
with no other option. Indians they were called, and Indians they became. Indeed
the emergence of indigenous movements in the late 20th century has led to the adoption
of that term by various groups that have joined together to make demands on
local and international governing bodies specifically as
Indians,
a term
that underlines their commonalities, many of which are rooted in the colonial
period, rather than their differences.

A
New World
or the
A
mericas
?

Another term that has often come in for criticism is
New
World.
The attacks on this way of characterizing the Western Hemisphere are
well founded, given that this part of the world was no newer than the so-called
Old World in a geological sense and that it was certainly not new to the great
variety of peoples who had been living in it and using it for thousands of
years. Is there a better, more accurate term though? The
Americas
is no
better, since that name was applied by the Europeans in honor of an early
Italian navigator named Amerigo Vespucci, a fact, incidentally, that also makes
the widespread substitution of
Native American
for
Indian
less
than satisfying. Even the term
Western Hemisphere,
probably the most
neutral term used, is based on a Eurocentric pole from which east and west are
then measured. Since at times it is necessary to distinguish between the
landmass new to the Europeans who began setting out on the open sea during the
15th century and the world they already knew that stretched from the Atlantic
Ocean to Asia, some term is necessary. The term
New World
was used by
the Europeans in writing about what was for them a discovery, certainly, so it
will be used here at times when our concern is the point of view of the
Europeans. Given their important role in defining the terms of this new
situation, and the fact that the written records on which history relies so
heavily are nearly all of European origin and refer to the
New World,
use
of the term is at times unavoidable.