Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (7 page)

Formal marriage under the auspices of the church involved
several steps. The first was the
palabra de casamiento,
or betrothal;
followed by an interview with the parish priest recorded in the
expediente matrimonial;
then the marriage banns, which were read on Sunday for three successive weeks;
and finally, the marriage itself conducted by the priest. The Council of Trent
in the mid-16th century established the minimum age requirements for marriage:
14 for boys and 12 for girls. Average ages at marriage were frequently higher,
however, with males normally marrying after age 25 and females between the ages
of 14 and 21. In some areas and periods, the average age of brides was about
25; this average probably reflects many second marriages of women whose
previous husbands had died.

Elite Marriage

Formal marriage among elites was more a rite of passage to
adulthood for men than for women. Women simply went from dependency on their
fathers to dependency on their husbands, but young men gained control over one
of the prerequisites of home life: women’s labor. Marriage was an essential
step toward male independence. As for women, since a spinster’s life was
generally seen as no life at all, they also had a powerful motivation for
finding a husband, regardless of the inegalitarian nature of the bargain.
Another option for avoiding spinsterhood, of course, was entering a convent, a
subject to be addressed later in the book.

While the church might have seen reproduction as the primary
purpose of marriage, families generally treated the institution as a way to
climb the social ladder. What elites sought in formal marriage was not simply
the joining together of two people in a socially approved relationship for the
purpose of producing heirs to the family property, but the securing of an
alliance between patriarchal extended families. These alliances were of great
importance to a family’s standing in the community and therefore to the family
economy, as well as to the appeal of other sons and daughters as future marital
partners. As a result, parents arranged marriages with an eye toward improving
their economic position and their access to the politically powerful. A
favorable marriage served to secure the place of two families in the top
echelon of society.

In a race-based social structure like that of colonial
Latin America, white families evaluated possible marital partners for their
potential to protect the family from charges of racial mixing. Formal marriage
was a way to control the racial characteristics of offspring, or to attempt
this control, although people frequently formed alliances outside formal
marriage and racially mixed children were sometimes the result.

Among property-holding families, the most important
marriage was that of the first male child. After 1505, and far in advance of
similar legislation in the English-speaking world, Spanish inheritance laws
were clear in specifying that one-half of the property of the male head of
household was to go to his wife upon his death, and the other half to be
divided among the legitimate children both male and female. However, the father
would frequently try to arrange matters so that the bulk of his property,
especially land, remained intact under the management of his eldest son, by
means of a legal process known as entailment that was intended primarily to
prevent the dissolution of great noble estates. In addition, the advantageous
marriage of the eldest son raised the prospects of his younger brothers and all
his sisters. The son who inherited most of the property would also probably be
responsible for maintaining other family members and dependents, so for this
reason too, his favorable, honorable marriage was important. Not surprisingly,
since the eldest son stood a good chance of receiving the bulk of the
inheritance, statistics show he was the child most likely to agree to his
father’s wishes respecting the choice of a marital partner.

At times, disagreements arose between parents and their
children over the choice of a marital partner. Research on matrimonial
documents from the Río de la Plata area in the late 18th century finds that the
church consistently defended the rights of the couple, and that most of the
parental appeals originated among the urban families of Buenos Aires. These
parents were more likely to oppose sons’ marriages than those of daughters,
possibly because daughters lived a more protected life while sons got out more,
thereby finding more opportunities to meet inappropriate partners. It may also
be, though, that parents put up less opposition to a borderline choice by
daughters if the main inheritance would go to their sons, and they might employ
the dowry to exert some control over their daughters. Legal cases were
expensive for the parents, costing on average more than 100 pesos, a sum well
beyond the means of the vast majority of the population at the time, so this
was clearly a recourse only for those with substantial resources.

Cousin marriage was common among some elite groups,
especially where small populations restricted the availability of marriage
partners of the same
calidad,
an informal but powerful understanding of
social status based largely on a combination of ancestry and economic
well-being. Some who married their cousins in colonial New Mexico stated their
reasons as follows: protection and maintenance of family honor, status, purity
of the bloodline, and protection of the family patrimony. The key thing was not
to lose control over the family’s property.

If the role of the eldest son was to protect the family
property by making a favorable marriage, the role of the daughters was to
maintain their virginity, a valuable commodity among elites. Virginity was a
sign that daughters had been protected by a vigilant patriarch, and it was a
mark of high social status. Among the common people, women who were not virgins
could marry and retain their honor, at least in the estimation of their social
peers, but the property-holding classes, who believed that honor was the
exclusive property of the social elite, left no stone unturned in their efforts
to protect the virginity of daughters, and thereby the honor of the family.

Other than her virginity and the status of her family, what
made an elite woman appealing as a marriage partner was the size of her dowry.
Dowries of wealthy brides were normally made up of semi-liquid assets that
could be moved easily, things like clothing and jewelry, family furniture and
art, a few slaves, cash, or some farm animals. In 1623, the parents of doña
Inés de Guzmán of San Salvador, capital of present-day El Salvador, sent an
enslaved woman, Isabel, and Isabel’s three children along with their daughter
to Guatemala, where the four slaves formed a valuable portion of the
substantial dowry accepted by their new son-in-law, Juan de León. Generally,
brothers got the family business, often either the plantation or the mine,
along with the family home, but at times these too were part of a dowry. The
dowry was seen as advance payment of the inheritance that would come to a daughter
eventually, but paid to her early in order for her to enter into a favorable
marriage. A woman’s dowry remained her property, to be passed on to her
children upon her death or to revert to her family if there were no children.
In some cases, women won court suits that removed their property from the
management of a careless husband.

In 16th-century Brazil, it was quite common to favor
daughters by granting them large dowries that would allow them to marry well
and maintain elite status. This forced their less-fortunate brothers to find
their own way in the economy, perhaps by entering into the business of
capturing the native people of the area for sale in the slave market, or by
finding a place in the agricultural or commercial economy.

The dowry was not absolutely necessary for a favorable
marriage, and by the 1750s, it was falling out of use. In some areas of Spanish
America, the bride or her family might receive a reciprocal gift from the
bridegroom known as
arras,
frequently amounting to 10 percent of the
bridegroom’s net worth.

Indigenous Marriage

Marriage rites prior to the arrival of the Europeans varied
as widely as the First Nations themselves. Just to give one example, among the
pre-Columbian Pueblo groups of New Mexico, girls married at about age 17, boys
around 19. Marriage was initiated by the boy, who asked his parents for
permission to marry the chosen girl. His parents and extended family then
collected gifts for the girl’s family and presented them along with the
proposal of marriage. Those of the girl’s family who accepted a gift were
expected to reciprocate with a gift of equal value four days later.

When the Europeans came and the Roman Catholic Church took
up the project of civilizing and Christianizing the indigenous people, part of
it was to get the indigenous people formally and legally married. Some
pre-Columbian cultures had practiced polygamy and approved of premarital
relations and cohabitation. One bridegroom in the Andes even expressed the
opinion that his bride’s virginity indicated that she was not attractive to
other men. These practices were anathema to the Christians, of course. The
church was committed to eradicating anything viewed as pagan and therefore kept
a close eye on the sex lives of the Indians who were strongly encouraged, or in
some cases even forced, to marry according to Christian rites. This was done in
part because the Indian nuclear family was responsible for paying tribute, so
the religious arm of the government took on the responsibility of getting these
familial units organized. Beyond this purely practical reason, however, the
fact remains that the church taught indigenous populations the notion of
Christian sin, including sex outside marriage or any form of non-procreative
sex within marriage, as a way of bringing these peoples to European systems of
belief. In pre-Columbian societies, the community’s moral code took as its
starting point the good of the whole community and the perpetuation of all
life, whereas the concern of the Roman Catholic Church with the individual soul
posed a challenge to the Indians’ communal values.

Relationships between indigenous couples were usually
stable in spite of the fact that some sources indicate that wife beating was a
common, and commonly accepted, part of the couple’s daily life. Shortly after
the end of the colonial period, a notary for the archdiocese of Guatemala
commented as follows on a common-law marriage between two middle-aged
indigenous people: “. . . it is common for these women . . . to seek the protection
of the man wherever he may be, and although he may repeatedly mistreat her,
these women are long-suffering toward the end of preserving their relationship,
thus in this type of long-term lascivious relationship only the death of one of
the partners is sufficient to separate them.” 

Marriage among the Enslaved

While the church pressured, even forced, indigenous people
to marry, it generally ignored the cohabitation of enslaved Africans and their
descendants. Formal marriage for enslaved laborers was inconvenient for
masters, who constituted the primary source of funds for the church. So for
many enslaved workers, the norm was cohabitation, and legal marriage was
relatively uncommon. In addition to the opposition or lack of concern of
masters, another factor was the cost of Christian marriage; who would pay the
fee and host the party?

Family formation, though, was central to both the physical
and emotional survival of the enslaved, the only refuge in the storm. It was a
common occurrence for a young woman to have a first child as the result of a
liaison shortly after puberty and then form a monogamous relationship, possibly
with a different partner who would be the father of subsequent children. While
some slaves lived in large collective quarters called
barracoons,
it was
common in many areas of Latin America for slaves to form relatively stable
couple relationships in family huts grouped together in one area of the estate
with a plot of land on which to grow their food. However, the short life
expectancy of enslaved laborers and the nearly total lack of control they had
over their futures was the source of great instability in family life,
especially in plantation areas where the demands of sugar production in
particular took a heavy toll on workers. Even in non-plantation regions, where
the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants were often very different,
the whim or the fortunes of the master often led to the separation of family
members. Since the children would stay with the mother unless sold away from
her, stepfathers were a frequent occurrence.

In at least one area of Brazil, it appears that official
Christian marriage was common among the enslaved, but the documents also show
that these families were subject to the whim of the slave-holder. In the
probate proceedings at the death of Mariana Dias, wife of a slaveholder in late
18th-century Paraíba, the inventory of property held jointly with her husband
showed that of their 17 enslaved laborers, 6 of them were married, 3 were
unmarried adults, and 8 were children. Three of these children were labeled
mulatos,
indicating that they were not the offspring of black couples. When
Mariana’s husband Antonio died six years later, all property either went to pay
off debts or was distributed among the heirs. Antonio’s will manumitted the
three young mixed-race slaves, suggesting that they may have been his own
children, and all the others either went to the auction block to pay the
couple’s debts or were distributed among the heirs without any regard for their
marriages or their parent-child relationships. None of the three married
families remained together after the death of Antonio.

This distribution of the property of Mariana and Antonio
demonstrates the key feature of families in the slave community: an external
force—the hand of the slaveholder—was decisive. Since slaves were property,
that status generally, although not always, trumped the rights they were
explicitly accorded as married couples or parents under medieval law codes like
the Spanish
Siete Partidas.
So in a situation in which there was
precious little warmth or protection, what little there was turned out to be as
precariously balanced as a house of cards. We can only dimly grasp the importance
of family relationships in a coerced labor system in which there were few
oases, and it is probably impossible for us to imagine the pain and loneliness
these separations caused the enslaved Africans and their descendants. We can,
however, recognize the centrality of family relationships to the survival of
the enslaved. Family formation in this situation became almost a form of
resistance, a way for people whose lives were defined by their role as workers
to insist on having a life with some pleasure and humanity in it. In addition,
African and African American culture was passed from one generation to the next
through their families, which makes the family an important institution to
examine in order to understand the development of black culture in the
Americas.

On the large estate where there might be hundreds of field
hands, the male to female ratio of two to one did not favor family formation.
Where the nature of the work made male workers preferable to female, new
workers from Africa were constantly introduced. Often they lived in primitive
communal dormitories known as
barracoons
and were marched out to the
fields every day like prisoners on a chain gang. In those cases, their chances
of forming a family were very slim. At work sites that remained stable over
several generations, workers reproduced, and the ratio of males to females
naturally adjusted itself somewhat. In that situation, couples formed, and they
might obtain a hut with a bit of land to grow food.

Many census records make it difficult to identify families
in the enslaved community because slaves were categorized according to their
age or work assignments rather than as families. Some estate records do
identify slave families, however. On one 18th-century Brazilian estate of 110
enslaved workers, nearly all of them were living in families, with just over 50
percent living in nuclear families of a couple with their children. And in
early 17th-century Guatemala, one of many areas of Spanish America where
enslaved Africans and their descendants played a more important role in colonial
society than is often recognized, all 54 children listed in an inventory of the
largest sugar plantation in the region had at least one parent among the
resident adult workforce of 98 men and 39 women. While families were the norm
for slaves on the larger estates, at least to the extent possible given the
frequent imbalance between women and men, domestic workers who lived in urban
areas might have just a few other African people in their place of residence
and work, making family formation with other people of African ancestry more
difficult. As Africans in the Americas had children, more of the enslaved
population was born into a network of family relationships; this, of course,
was not usually the case for workers newly arrived from Africa.

Although polygamy, the practice of one man having more than
one wife at the same time, was practiced in Africa by those men who could
maintain more than one wife and the resulting children, there is little
evidence of this family form in the Americas. There were several circumstances
that mitigated against polygamy, primarily the unfavorable male/female ratio of
Africans and the difficulty of acquiring the necessary wealth as an enslaved
laborer. Certainly, the Christian slaveholders’ belief in monogamous marriage
also played a role in preventing the taking of several wives.

In a frontier region of Brazil, 18th-century church records
show that priests performed 400 marriages of enslaved people in about a
100-year period spanning the 18th and 19th centuries. Most of these people
married while in their 20s. More than 90 percent of them married a person
belonging to the same owner. Enslaved workers also married free people at
times. Of all marriages involving at least one slave in this region, just over
20 percent included a free person as well, usually a person who worked for the
same owner. Children of the union followed the status of the mother, so a free
mother gave birth to free children, while a free father might find a way to buy
the freedom of his children. Whether the wife or the husband was the free
party, marrying a free person opened up options for one’s offspring.

Given legal realities, an enslaved man was far more able to
take advantage of this possibility than an enslaved woman, since her status
passed automatically to her children, making her unattractive as a formal
partner. Outside plantation zones in places like Central America, a decided
majority of enslaved men who married found a free spouse, often an indigenous
woman, and thereby secured free birth for their children. Meanwhile, enslaved
women almost always married men who shared their own inferior legal status if
they married at all. But among people of African ancestry, it was those who
were already free who were most likely to marry, at least in the frontier area
of Brazil mentioned above. This is an interesting finding because they
themselves would have had to pay the fee and any costs related to their
marriage, suggesting that formal marriage was important to them. They might
have seen marriage as the path to legitimacy in the eyes of society and a means
of strengthening their hold, and that of their children, on any property they
had managed to accumulate.

Not surprisingly, families headed by women were frequent
among the enslaved population. Often these families were the result of the
accessibility of black women to white men, whether these men were their owners
and the owners’ sons or overseers and other white men on the plantation.
Although we can assume that many of these relationships were unwelcome to the
woman, there were advantages to having a child fathered by a white man. In one
case, an enslaved woman with five
mulato
children, all fathered by
different men, managed to get their fathers to buy their freedom. She purchased
her own freedom as well, so that in the end she had managed to free the whole
family. Various events might cause the breakup of a nuclear family unit; the
father could die or be sold away from the house, leaving his wife and children
as a female-headed household. Later, if a stepfather entered the picture, the
family would regain its status as a nuclear unit. So a family might pass
through a cycle of female headed to nuclear, back to female headed, and then
back once again to nuclear.

The institution of godparenting shows the enslaved workers’
attempts to connect their offspring to the community in ways that would be
helpful in the children’s future. Often slaves chose members of their owner’s
family, which linked the children vertically to powerful people in the
community. Another common choice was other members of the community of slaves,
connecting the children horizontally to other people of African descent.
Nuclear families usually chose godparents from among other slaves, while single
mothers chose godparents from the planter class or the free peasantry,
presumably the fathers of their children or members of the father’s family.

The event most threatening to a slave family was the death
of an owner and the distribution of his property. It was at this point that
slave families were broken up, couples separated, and children divided among
the heirs or sold to liquidate assets. At the death of one slave owner in the
mid-18th century in Paraíba, Brazil, most of the 25 married couples were kept
together, but many lost their children, or some of them. Even very young
children were separated from their parents in this case. A baby of one year was
sold on the auction block, a widow was separated from all three of her
children, and a female-headed family was completely separated with some of the
children distributed among the heirs and others sold at auction. Perhaps there
can be no greater clue to the dehumanizing nature of the system of slavery than
these dry facts. It is tempting to conclude that the slave-owning population
believed men to be better workers if they had a wife to care for them and for
that reason kept slave couples together. In addition, family ties tended to
discourage running off. For the estate owners, though, slave family stability
occupied a place that was a distant second to maintaining the productivity of
the laboring population. These statistics seem to say that a woman can always
have more children and adults can find new partners so they will not long feel
the loss of those who have been taken away. Respecting the humanity of the
African people would have forced the slaveholders to admit to causing them
enormous grief by separating their families.