Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (8 page)

Mariage de nègres d’une maison
riche
(marriage
of slaves belonging to a wealthy household) by Jean Baptiste Debret dated 1835.
Although Brazil was no longer a colony at this time, slavery would remain
firmly in place for several more decades. This drawing shows several black
couples being formally married by a priest in a chapel.

Casta Families

Among the non-Indian lower social groups, Christian
marriage was uncommon. The norm was cohabitation. One reason was the prohibitive
cost of marriage. Another was the lack of property to pass on. The landless
population, those living and working on haciendas, found little reason for
Christian marriage since there was no property to protect for future
generations. Without this hold over their children, parents had little control
over young people’s freedom to choose their partners and settle down without
benefit of marriage. The main reason to marry formally was to climb the social
ladder by practicing this most important rite of Christianity and European
values. Peasants who did choose to marry might do so after setting up a
household and acquiring some property. Or their reasoning might be to lift
their children out of the stigmatized category of illegitimacy. Frequently,
marriage applications state that the young woman is pregnant or that the couple
already has one or more children, indicating a connection even in this marriage-shy
population between having children and seeking formal marriage.

The church did not succeed in exerting the same control
over these families that it had over the highest and lowest social groups. In
urban areas, the church was more concerned with ministering to elite families
than to the racially mixed working population, and in rural areas, villages
were scattered widely across the land and priests were few and far between, and
thus very overworked. Although they struggled to bring their wayward sheep into
the marriage fold, it was an uphill battle, given the broad acceptance of
common-law marriage among the casta population.

The primary limitation on finding a partner was the small
number of families living on the hacienda or in the village. Marriage between
first cousins—a frequent occurrence among the elite, as discussed above—was
also fairly common in the casta population, although for different reasons. In
the latter case, cousins married not to protect family property and social
status, but because of the difficulty of finding a partner of the right age in
a small community where most of the population was related.

Among peasants who owned their own land or had rights to
common village lands, the patriarchal family might exert as much control over
the choice of their child’s marital partner as did elite parents. When he
married, the young man received his portion of his father’s land and space in
his father’s house, generally part of the common space, although an addition
might be added later; the bride went to live with her new husband’s extended
family. Some peasant families even employed the dowry as a symbol of their
upcoming contract, although its size would not reach that of the lavish dowries
provided to daughters of the elite.

This
engraving of a casta family by Juan de la Cruz from 1784 depicts a family of
the French Caribbean. Casta paintings, many of them produced in 18th-century
Mexico, were prized by European collectors fascinated with the exotic racial
categories depicted by artists interested less in representing colonial reality
than in conveying messages about the supposed social consequences of racial
mixing.

BIGAMY

What are we to make of the fact that statistically the
casta population was least likely to marry and also the most likely to marry
twice? Once again, the answer probably lies in the relative lack of control the
church exercised over the lives of these people and, of course, the growing
size of this population during the colonial period. In addition, the frequency
of bigamy in this group may be simply an indication of its more freewheeling
lifestyle and lack of enthusiasm for monogamous, lifelong Christian marriage.

The Inquisition devoted considerable energy to
investigating bigamy. Although the main business of the Inquisition in the
American colonies was to ferret out “New Christians” who might be secretly
practicing Jewish rituals, a phenomenon discussed more fully in chapter 6, the
institution concerned itself with a wide variety of violations of Christian
principles. Bigamy ranked high on the list of infractions. While Islam
permitted polygamy, the Roman Catholic Church treated bigamy as both immoral
and heretical. One way that Catholics differentiated themselves from the Muslim
culture that had dominated the Iberian Peninsula for hundreds of years was by
establishing marriage as an exclusive relationship between one man and one
woman.

Nevertheless, some people of the lower social groups
committed bigamy, and since the punishments doled out were severe, it makes
sense to ask why they did it. Usually they were men, many of whom had found it
necessary to leave one area and take up residence in another. This might happen
because a man found himself on the wrong side of the law, but more often simply
for employment. The assumption under the colonial patron-client system— the
traditional form being a plantation owner, or
hacendado,
with a large
household of dependents and servants, as well as many laborers who relied on
him for work—was that every member of the working classes needed a
patrón,
who
provided employment and credit, as well as protection for his workers in court
should that be necessary. The patrón served as a kind of insurance policy. The
only flaw in this system was that there were not enough positions for all the
laborers who needed to attach themselves to a master. As a result, many men of
the popular classes found it necessary to move from time to time and look for
work. The difficulty of travel would then prevent their returning home regularly.
Socializing with residents in the new location, along with the impossibility of
living alone, might lead to new couple relationships. The true vagabond would
not need to marry, of course, but the footloose and fancy-free life did not
appeal to the bigamists; they wanted to settle down and have a home. The fact
that they married a second time seems to indicate their desire to abide by,
rather than to violate, the social rules. Sometimes the authorities had a hand
in the decision to marry, since the local priest and government functionaries
were likely to appear at any time of day or night in their unceasing efforts to
end cohabitation. Once the authorities were in the picture, marrying headed off
unpleasant legal consequences, until bigamy was discovered, of course.

CONCLUSION

Like everything else in colonial Latin America, the family
looked different at different levels of the social structure. The church had
considerable success in enforcing Christian marriage as the portal to family
life for those at the two levels where the church exercised most power: among
elites and the indigenous people. Among the casta population and the community
of enslaved workers, family formation was less orderly. The existence of a
racially mixed population was always inconvenient for the Spanish crown and
never officially acknowledged. As a result, people at this level had
considerably more latitude in choosing a partner, as well as in the matter of
whether or not to formalize their relationship. Family formation among the enslaved
population was of less interest to the church, partly because insisting on
formal marriages in this case would have brought the church into conflict with
some of its most important donors. It is important to note, however, that the
frequency of slave marriages by a priest was often surprisingly high, as the
evidence from a frontier area of Brazil shows. This evidence indicates a
commitment on the part of owners to regularizing the laboring population and an
attempt by the workers themselves to seek shelter in the bosom of the
church-approved family.

Families were viewed as the basic building block of
society. An orderly hierarchical society depended on maintaining established
social levels, and this system in turn depended on guiding the process of selecting
a partner. Elite parents and the church exerted their influence over young
people at the highest social level as a way of protecting and perpetuating
elite patriarchal families and their property. In general, Indians married
other Indians, and this was certainly encouraged, partly to facilitate the
collection of tribute from that population. While things were a lot less
orderly at the level of middle groups, the record shows a clear preference for
Christian marriage and legitimization of the offspring among those aspiring to
climb the social ladder; the documentation also shows their imitation of elite
practices like the dowry. Enslaved Africans, and those free people who chose
enslaved partners, had very little control over their family life, married or
not. While slave owners seem to have made some effort to keep couples together,
that may have been more for the sake of order among the working people on the
estate than for humane reasons. Despite legal protection for marriage among the
enslaved, the adjudication of a will or the whim of an owner often separated
even formally married couples. Their children were normally considered future
laborers, rather than members of nuclear families, and distributed according to
the best interests of their owners.

The reader may note here that the focus in this chapter on
marriage as a contract between families and the basic building block of
colonial society has told us little about the nature of love or affection in
that society. For example, an examination of the institution of marriage
provides only a partial view of colonial sexual practices and their meaning to
participants. Historical documents show that people frequently employed their
sexuality outside the institution of marriage, in spite of the position of the
Roman Catholic Church that sex was sinful except when its purpose was
procreation within marriage. The next chapter addresses this extramarital
dimension of sexuality and affective life at greater length, including both
heterosexual and homosexual relationships and the sex lives of priests sworn to
celibacy.

2 - LOVE, SEX, AND
RELATIONSHIPS

INTRODUCTION

Love
and sexual attraction are among the areas most inaccessible to the student of
history. The emotional life of our subjects is often hidden from view. It does
not emerge explicitly in statistics, trials, wills, or other public documents
historians normally use to create a picture of life in the past. It seems
clear, however, that people are sometimes drawn to mates who might not be
suitable or socially convenient for a variety of reasons: the prospective mate
might be promised, or already legally joined, to someone else; might be from a
different social group; might not reciprocate the feelings; might be of the
same gender; or might be a religious worker bound by a vow of chastity. In
short, attraction to another is part of life and a part that does not respect
social rules. In the previous chapter, it became clear that marriage in
colonial Latin America was a contract between families, managed by the
authorities of the religious state. While there were exceptions to the rule,
generally marriage had little to do with love or attraction.