Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (3 page)

Race

Perhaps the most problematic of the terms employed in this
study is
race,
a concept essential to any understanding of Latin
American history. In the early 21st century, most historians, supported by
geneticists, would agree that it is impossible to distinguish among groups of
human beings on the basis of immutable “racial” characteristics. This does not,
however, make
race
insignificant or, unfortunately, an outdated or
irrelevant concept. At this point in human development, when we know that all
members of the human species share the same origins, basic characteristics, and
potential, most of us have arrived at an understanding of race as important but
not natural in any biological sense. That is, a person’s
race
is
important because humans have made it important. Because human beings have used
race to define positions in the social hierarchy and to restrict access to
scarce resources, it has
become
an important determinant in a person’s
life, an important indicator of what kind of life a person can expect to have.
However, this fact is based on social, rather than biological, factors. Biologically,
we are all members of one race, the human race, but socially we divide
ourselves, or we are divided by others, into groups based on phenotype (i.e.,
characteristics of pigmentation, hair, and the shape of physical features). The
inaccuracy of such judgments is underscored by the fact that all of the
characteristics just mentioned can change dramatically from one generation to
the next in a family where a genetically related parent and child, such as U.S.
president Barack Obama and his mother, are not seen to share the same race.

Latin America is a fine example of how racial divisions can
be employed to structure society, and the race-based social structure of the
region is discussed below at some length. It must be noted right at the
beginning, however, that modern ideas about race emerged out of the misplaced
zeal for biological classification displayed by (white) scientists of the late
19th century whose interests lay in finding a “natural” justification for the
creation of social hierarchies based on phenotypic differences. In contrast to
these relatively recent ideas of race, Catholic Iberians of the 15th century
were working with ideas of human difference rooted in the notion of
limpieza
de sangre,
or blood purity. This concept was first employed to marginalize
Jews and Muslims during the consolidation of the Catholic nation states and
then carried to the New World where it was applied to peoples of non-European
ancestry. Thus, the concept of
impurity
carried in the blood long
predated 19th-century notions of race as natural, although earlier proponents
of what look a lot like racial concepts to us did not employ the methods or
terminology of 19th-century scientists.

In addition to distinctions among and between Iberians,
Africans, and Indians, there was another important division employed during the
colonial period, this one between whites born in the mother countries and those
born in the colonies. People born in Spain but living in the colonies,
frequently as agents of the Spanish crown, were
peninsulares,
a term
referring to their origin in the Iberian Peninsula. The equivalent term in
Brazil is
reinois,
from
reino
meaning “kingdom” (i.e., people
from the kingdom of Portugal). In Spanish America, white people born in the
Americas were labeled
criollos
(creoles), while whites born in the
Portuguese colony of Brazil were known as
mazombos.
While all these
terms refer to white people who generally occupied the top socioeconomic levels
of these colonial societies, those who came from the mother countries and those
who were born in the Americas had interests that sometimes diverged widely. As
the forces that led to independence developed, the rift between these two
groups widened as creoles and mazombos grew increasingly restless under the
colonial system administered by the peninsulares and reinois. The independence
movements that would be successful in most of Latin America and bring the
colonial period to an end in 1826 emerged primarily out of creole/mazombo
dissatisfaction with the colonial system and their place in it.

Daily Life

Finally, a word on the meaning of
daily life.
While
even kings and high statesmen have a daily life, when that concept is used in
history it refers to the lives of the majority, the ordinary people who became
the protagonists of much historiography in the late 20th century, partly as a
result of the rise of a feminist analysis of history and the application of
gender as a key analytical tool. When the focus of historical study is, as it
often has been, the study of great events and those who led large groups of
people during these events, we normally encounter few women. In a study of
daily life, not only do we find women playing a starring role, we also find
other formerly excluded groups — peasants and other working people, people
engaged in buying and selling, lawbreakers, children and young people,
churchgoers, sinners, craftspeople — in short, we find people like most of us.
So the history of daily life is the history of women, men, and children; its
focus is what most people did every day, their work, what they ate and wore,
what they built, how and what they worshipped, what they celebrated, and, to
the extent that we can find or guess this, what they hoped and feared. The task
of this study will be to condense the research done on these topics over the
past 20 years or so and bring to life the daily pleasures and struggles of the
people who made colonial Latin America.

TWO DIFFERING COLONIES

Latin America is made up of a wide range of natural
geographic and climatic features that led to very different societies and
cultures in the pre-Columbian period, but the arrival of Europeans from two
different kingdoms also created social and political differences in the region.
Some of the important differences that existed between the colonies of the
Spanish crown and the colony of the Portuguese still shape the Latin American
experience.

Early Portuguese Colonialism

The major difference between the Spanish and Portuguese
crowns in the late 15th century lies in the direction of their expansionist
projects. After expelling the Muslims from the southernmost part of the kingdom
of Portugal in the middle of the 13th century, the Portuguese had achieved the
social and political unity that allowed them to look outward. Early in the 15th
century, they conquered Ceuta in northern Africa and then began heading down
the coast of West Africa. Prince Henry’s seafaring research center focused on
trade with Africans and rounding the continent to find a sea route to the spice
trade in the Far East that would allow the Portuguese to break the hold of the
Muslim merchants of the eastern Mediterranean on trade between Asia and Europe.
Four years before Columbus first landed in the Caribbean, the Portuguese
navigator Bartolomeu Días reached the southern tip of Africa, achieving one of
the goals of the Portuguese and setting the stage for their entry into the
commercial network of the Indian Ocean. Once there, the Portuguese made war on
the Muslim and Chinese traders who had plowed the Indian Ocean for hundreds of
years. Following Vasco da Gama’s return from India itself in 1499, other
Portuguese navigators began setting out for Asia. One of these, Pedro Alvares
Cabral, made a detour on his way east and reached Brazil. He made his landfall there
in 1500 and claimed the territory for the Portuguese crown. For several decades
thereafter, the primary interest of the Portuguese in their newly claimed
territories would be in trading with various subgroups of Tupi, mainly for
brazilwood, which produced a red dye in great demand for textile production in
Europe.

The Portuguese focused most of their energy on building a
seafaring empire dedicated to trade between Europe and the East, and they had
considerable success in this endeavor. Wealthy citizens of Portugal who were
interested in investing in agriculture could, and did, go to islands off the
western coast of Africa where they mainly grew sugarcane, relying on the labor
of captured Africans. In the early days, they showed little interest in traveling
across the ocean to an untamed land inhabited by, as they must have seen it,
primitive tribes of cannibals, where the huge profits that could be made in the
spice trade were nowhere in evidence. Brazil would turn out to be rich in gold,
not to mention its suitability for the production of sugar and coffee, but all
that lay in the future. In the early 16th century, Brazil could not compete
with the Indian Ocean for the attention of either the Portuguese investor or
the crown.

Early Spanish Colonialism

The Spanish crown, on the other hand, aspired to control a
region of its own for trade and colonization, partly in order to compete with
the Portuguese and Italians who controlled the bulk of European trade, and
partly as a source of resources — especially precious metals. So Spanish
investors looked to the Western Hemisphere and were rewarded by their discovery
of two complex hierarchical empires known to us as the Aztec, in Central
Mexico, and Inca, in the South American Andes. In both of these imperial polities,
organized systems of tribute and labor founded on intensive agricultural
production of corn, potatoes, and other Western Hemisphere crops maintained an
urban class of nobles living in luxury. It was not long before the Spanish
removed the native elites and placed themselves at the top of the tribute
system that continued functioning much as it had before.

RACE AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE IN THE COLONIES

The life of everyone who migrated to or was born in the
Spanish and Portuguese colonies of Latin America was shaped by two tremendously
powerful institutions established by the Europeans and still very much in
evidence today. They are the patriarchal extended family and the race-based
social structure; together they provide twin keys to understanding daily life
during the period.

Religious and Cultural Conflict in the
Iberian Peninsula

Catholic rulers in the Iberian Peninsula had been engaged
for centuries in religious campaigns of varying intensity against the Muslims
they considered
infidels.
Portuguese Catholics drove Muslim forces out
of southern Portugal in the middle of the 13th century, and in 1492, the rulers
of the main Spanish kingdoms captured Granada, the last outpost of Muslim rule
in the Iberian Peninsula, making it, at least nominally, completely Christian.
The Catholic monarchs who defeated Granada, Isabella of Castile and Ferdinand
of Aragon, advanced the unification of Spain as an explicitly Christian
nation-state. The crown expelled Jews who did not convert and began a campaign
against Islam, burning books and decreeing conversion for Muslims who wished to
remain on the peninsula. The relative religious tolerance of the Muslims on the
Iberian Peninsula was a thing of the past, and, when Martin Luther
inadvertently started a theological revolution among Western European
Christians 30 years later, the response by the Roman Catholic Church made it
clear that there could be only one true religion, that it was Christianity as
defined by the pope in Rome, and that the souls of those who did not share this
belief were in extreme peril.

The attitudes born in this project of military conquest,
territorial expansion, commercial growth, and Christian zealotry fueled the age
of European discovery and certainly accompanied the Iberians on their arrival
in the rest of the world. The religious tolerance and cultural relativism that
receive at least lip service in our own “postmodern” period of Western history
were not even on the horizon of the 15th-century Catholic kingdoms of the
Iberian Peninsula. The Christians, as they called themselves in their
chronicles of the conquests, showed no signs of doubt concerning their mission
from God, who they believed was aiding them in winning the conquest wars so
that the eternal souls of these barbaric peoples might be saved — and possibly
so the Spanish crown could have enough gold to fund its military mission as the
primary defender of Christianity. Conquest of the New World was the extension
of the project of Re-conquest that they viewed as carrying out God’s work in
the world.

Religion, Culture, and Race in the
Americas

The Iberian Christian sense of religious and cultural
superiority set the tone for the colonial systems that the Spanish and
Portuguese would construct. It may be impossible to colonize a group one sees
as equal, but be that as it may, when the Europeans came to the Western
Hemisphere and met peoples who engaged in human sacrifice or ritual
cannibalism, drew pictographs or had no form of writing at all, and relied on
human energy to carry heavy objects long distances, they did not pause to
debate their own superiority. In their view, their role was clear: it was to
take control of these lands, resources, and peoples and to put all to “good”
use, meaning a use that would promote the projects in which Europeans were
already engaged in Europe. Collectively, this meant state building and the
extension of Catholicism; for individuals, it meant accumulating wealth and
securing a place among the Iberian nobility.