Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (24 page)

The especially onerous work of preparing the staple of
indigenous life in Mexico and Central America, the corn tortilla, took many
hours by itself. The process involved simmering the kernels of maize with lime
and then laboriously grinding them on a stone implement called a
metate
to
produce dough. Flattening this dough into small disks, which were then heated
briefly on a
comal,
or griddle, created the finished product, the basis
of every meal. Preparation of manioc, the staple of the lowland South American
and Caribbean diet, and potatoes, the central Andean crop, had always been
women’s work as well. After the conquest, native women sustained these methods
of food preparation in the highlands of Spanish America, even in the homes of
people of European origins where wheat bread was preferred. Despite European
prejudices against native cuisine and its main ingredients, these remained
vital, owing in significant measure to the backbreaking daily labor of millions
of indigenous women. In the colonial period, women’s work truly was, in the
words of the old adage, never done.

A
woman and girl in 1908 El Salvador grind corn to make tortillas using the
pre-Columbian tools of the
metate
(grinding stone) and
mano
(an
elongated stone like a rolling pin). These tools are still used in parts of
Latin America more than 500 years after the arrival of the Europeans.

CONCLUSION

Whether working in encomienda, the mita, as an indebted
peon, in the sugar economy, in cattle ranching, or in the home, most people in
colonial Latin America worked long and hard. Prior to the Industrial Revolution
that changed the nature of all work and coincided with the late colonial period
in Latin America, work was labor intensive. The great majority of people,
whether weavers, domestics, enslaved or indebted agricultural workers, cowboys,
peasant farmers, or silver, gold or diamond mine workers, were engaged most of
the day in heavy manual labor. It was this labor that produced the enormous
wealth extracted from the American colonies by the crowns of Spain and
Portugal, and it was this labor that supported the lavish lifestyles of the few
colonists who were able to realize the colonial dream of power and riches.

Work also defined one’s position in the social structure.
The owners of mines and large estates were the ones who could provide
employment for working people, as well as the ones who relied on the labor of
these workers to support a comfortable life. In the absence of government
restraints, this system tended to give the patrón unlimited power over the
lives of his workers. At times, he might punish them severely, while at other
times he assumed a fatherly role, giving protection and advice to the families
that depended on him. He played the role of banker, lending money to his
workers, and of advocate for a worker facing a legal problem.

However, the working people of the colonial period were not
without powers of their own. If workers depended on the patrón to provide work
opportunities, the patrón needed them just as much, for without workers there
could be no production. The labor shortage that prevailed in most areas of
Latin America throughout the colonial period gave workers a bit of leverage as
they negotiated the obstacles of their situation. Some ran away to live in
outlaw communities in the woods or to seek a better opportunity, some managed to
earn or buy their freedom, and some developed personal relationships with those
above them in the work hierarchy that paid off in better working conditions. In
short, working people pursued their own interests within the parameters of the
labor systems that organized their lives as they sought to improve their lot
and the prospects for their children.

In this struggle for power over their lives, they found an
ally at times and an opponent at other times in the form of the Roman Catholic
Church, that all-important colonial authority. The church played an ambivalent
role in enforcing the labor systems, as it did in other areas of colonial life.
On one hand, the church hierarchy acted as an arm of colonial government,
enforcing royal decrees and aligning itself with colonial elites in the
colonization project. In this role, the church generally supported the
interests of the Iberian colonists and defended their impunity in disciplining
their workers. In addition, since church workers depended on the colonial elite
for their livelihood and for promotion to higher levels of the church
hierarchy, they were understandably reluctant to alienate powerful miners and
hacendados and normally maintained a respectful distance from the intimate
details of running an estate.

On the other hand, the church took seriously its ministry
to the souls of all the faithful. Catholic holy days, of which there might be
more than 30 in a year, served as a brake on the patrón’s tendency to keep the
productive process going seven days a week. In addition, quite a number of
priests employed their sermons to remind estate owners that concern for their
eternal soul demanded gentler treatment for their workers. Whether this had any
effect remains a subject for conjecture, but the church made an effort to
remind authorities and elites of their Christian obligation to love their
fellow man, and some parish priests took seriously their role of providing
spiritual, and at times temporal, comfort to their flock. The next chapter will
examine the role of the Catholic Church in shaping daily life and the place of
various religious practices, both Christian and others, in people’s efforts to
find ways within and around their work lives to pursue their own interests and
enjoy themselves. In spite of the demands placed upon working people in the
colonial period, there was, after all, more to life than work.

6 - RELIGION AND POPULAR
CULTURE

INTRODUCTION

Christianity Comes to the Americas

As
the previous chapter makes clear, the desire for wealth drove Iberian expansion
in the New World and, in the process, shaped the various labor systems that
played such an important role in shaping the daily lives of the people of
colonial Latin America. But the primary justification given for the
establishment of Iberian rule in the New World was not economic. It was,
instead, religious: the spread of the “one true faith” to formerly unknown
peoples who had evidently never been exposed to it, and the consequent
salvation of souls “hitherto lost,” as Columbus put it in his first letter to
Isabella and Ferdinand. The introduction and development of exclusively
Christian forms of religious practice throughout the newly conquered lands soon
emerged as a priority, with the church’s influence gradually extended into
daily life at all levels of colonial Latin American society. That influence was
profound, and not merely in the spiritual realm. At the same time, the church
never dominated the arena of popular culture, of which religious practices were
an integral part, quite as fully as either religious or royal authorities might
have preferred.

The early decades of Iberian expansion in the Americas
coincided with a Western European religious crisis brought on by the sudden
eruption of heretical Protestantism after 1517. The eventual response to this
religious rebellion was the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation, a process
formalized during the Council of Trent (1545–1563) and intended to establish
more effective and systematic regulation of the religious practices of ordinary
people in the interests of rooting out heterodoxy. In propagating and defending
its version of the faith, the Roman Catholic Church enjoyed the full support of
royal government in territories under Iberian control. The church, in fact, was
in an important sense an arm of the monarchy. From the late 15th century
forward, both the Spanish and Portuguese crowns exercised ultimate authority
over clerical appointments and other aspects of church administration in lands
under their jurisdiction by means of a concession from the Vatican known in
Spanish as the
patronato real
and in Portuguese as the
padroado real.
Another 15th-century innovation, the Holy Office of the Inquisition, was
transferred across the Atlantic to New Spain and Peru in the 1570s, further
contributing to the consolidation of a militant Catholicism throughout the
overseas possessions.

Role of the Clergy

Two types of clergy performed the groundwork for the
introduction and consolidation of the new faith:
regular
and
secular.
The first Catholic missionaries in the Americas came mostly from the
regular clergy, members of monastic orders who lived according to the specific
regla,
or “rule,” formulated by the founder of the order to which they belonged.
At least some of these early missionaries appear to have been motivated by a
near-ecstatic evangelical fervor, whose manifestations included intensive
efforts to learn and communicate in native languages as well as a less
admirable tendency to destroy material evidence of non-Christian religious
practices and other aspects of pre-colonial societies. Franciscans and
Dominicans were especially prominent among the missionaries working in early
colonial Spanish America, while the Jesuit order, founded in 1534 during the
initial wave of Counter-Reformation zeal, soon took precedence in Brazil.

The members of these and other orders often exhibited an
independence that did not endear them to the church hierarchy, in part because
they were not directly subject to the authority of the bishops and archbishops
who were eventually named to posts in the Americas and in part because of
disagreements over policy and methods. As a result, following the Council of
Trent, church authorities strove to enhance the presence and power of the
secular clergy instead. The latter, made up mostly of ordinary parish priests,
operated under direct episcopal authority and ultimately, in the Iberian world,
the authority of the royal patron who made episcopal appointments. As of the
late 16th century, the task assigned to this branch of the clergy in the
Americas was the routinization of the church’s, and by extension the crown’s,
authority in societies whose every member was by this time presumed to be
subject to it.

The regular clergy did not easily cede its control over
native parishioners, however, nor did its members submit willingly to episcopal
dictates. As a result, parallel and sometimes feuding clerical administrations
developed in many places. Nevertheless, in a larger sense, crown-supported
Catholicism now dominated all areas under Iberian control. Whether a given
layperson fell under the spiritual jurisdiction of the regular or the secular
clergy, his or her life was firmly expected to be book-ended by the Catholic
sacraments of baptism and the last rites, with the years in between marked
insistently at regular intervals by the church’s interventions in daily
affairs, as at confession or Mass. The clergy also governed and closely
scrutinized key life changes, notably marriage, which was for many people the
most profound shift in formal social status they would undergo during their
entire lives. And if marriage was far from a universal experience, unlike birth
or death, the only major institutionalized alternative to it for both men and
women was the taking of religious vows. These vows, incidentally, performed as
vital a reproductive function in the eyes of the church as marital ones. After
all, they alone created the new generations of celibate priests, friars, and
nuns who would perpetuate the institution’s central role in shaping colonial
society.

Expansion of Church Wealth

In the process of organizing and managing an
all-encompassing belief system, the church quickly grew to become the largest
single holder of wealth in colonial Latin America. This development owed
something to the generosity of its better-off members, but far more to a royal
fiscal system under which it was allotted a share of native tribute payments as
well as the proceeds of a mandatory tithe collected for the most part from
Spaniards and other non-natives. Moreover, both individual clerics and entire
religious orders actively engaged in agricultural production and other
wealth-generating activities. The Jesuits, for instance, developed a network of
plantations and other rural enterprises that by the 18th century collectively
employed thousands of native workers as well as the largest pool of enslaved
laborers of African ancestry in Latin America. And they were not alone. Take
the example of just one relatively marginal area of the Spanish American
Empire: Guatemala. During the 1670s, the Mercedarian and Augustinian orders
each owned a sugar plantation worked by dozens of slaves in the region just
south of present-day Guatemala City. Yet these sugar-producing enterprises
actually ranked among the smallest operated locally by religious orders. A
nearby Jesuit plantation held more than a hundred enslaved residents, as did
three of four Dominican-owned plantations scattered farther afield around the
Guatemalan countryside.