Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (14 page)

Elite Schooling

Most young people of Spanish origins, both boys and girls,
received at least a few years of education, usually in an institution run by a
religious order or under the guidance of a private tutor. Children from
wealthier families had more opportunities to advance, including some
individuals of non-European or mixed-race background, although the alleged stain
of African ancestry in particular was a social and, at the highest levels of
education, legal impediment to such mobility. Between the years 1651 and 1658,
about a hundred girls were educated in reading and writing as well as singing
and playing music in the elite convent of Santa Clara in Cuzco, Peru. Among
them was the daughter of a local
kuraka,
a member of the indigenous
Andean nobility. Some, although not all, of these students eventually professed
as nuns. A few girls of indeterminate origins, likely either illegitimate or of
modest parentage, also acquired at least some aspects of this convent education
after being abandoned at the entrance to the convent as infants. But these
girls were often being trained at the same time as servants and therefore held
an inferior status to those whose parents paid tuition. One Santa Clara nun
dictated a clause in her will favoring an orphan named Josefa Labaxonera whom
she had “raised from infancy to sing in the choir.” Josefa was also, however, a
provider to her benefactress of “personal services” along with several other
girls the nun was responsible for supervising. 

Boys intended for the priesthood or otherwise expected to
possess advanced formal education entered a
colegio,
which we would
consider to be a secondary school, as early as age 7, although not usually
before age 11. A requirement for entrance into such institutions was the
ability to read and write, generally acquired in early childhood through
private instruction or under the guidance of a priest. Colegios were almost
always run by religious orders, with those operated by the Jesuits seen to
provide the most rigorous education available to the sons of the colonial elite
prior to the expulsion of that intellectually oriented order from both Spanish
and Portuguese America in the mid-18th century. Toward the end of the colonial
era, the course of studies in a typical colegio included Latin grammar and
pronunciation, the literature and philosophy of the classical Greek and Roman
world, mathematics and physics, and, of course, Christian theology. In places
like Mexico, proficiency in one or more native languages was also expected of
candidates for a career in the church, if not necessarily achieved owing to
poor instruction.

Young men entering the priesthood often spent at least six
months engaged in an additional course of preparatory studies before embarking
on their career. In the seminary at Tepotzotlan during the late 18th century,
the day began with a half hour of silent prayer in the chapel at 5:30, followed
by mass and breakfast, three hours of private study, and a morning class in
moral theology. Following the noon meal, during which a biblical lesson was
read aloud, students retired for several more hours of private study before a late
afternoon class in church history, an hour and a half of private reflection in
the chapel, an evening lecture on the obligations of the priesthood, and a late
meal accompanied by the reading of another biblical lesson. One last round of
private meditation preceded bedtime at 9:30.

The bachelor’s degree, in theory a requirement for the
priesthood as well as a prerequisite for other professional degrees, was
granted at about the age the average student in the present day is finishing
secondary studies. In other words, the four years of coursework necessary to
acquire a bachelor’s degree in colonial Spanish America roughly coincided with
the period during which most modern North American youth are in high school.
The colegios granting the degree, nevertheless, are best thought of as the
colonial social equivalent of North American undergraduate colleges, while
entrance with a bachelor’s degree into more advanced studies in a colonial
university at the age of 17 or 18 was akin to moving on to graduate school in
the present day. Only a small proportion of would-be clerics went beyond the
bachelor’s degree to obtain the licentiate degree offered in universities, and
even fewer a doctoral degree.

Circumstances were a bit different in fields such as
medicine, where a four-year professional program in a university followed the
completion of a bachelor’s degree. Nevertheless, individuals finishing the
eight years of higher education needed for a medical degree emerged as
practicing physicians at about 21 years of age. Once again, the more advanced
licentiate degree, not required to practice, was pursued by only a few
students, while a doctoral degree in medicine, according to one scholar, was
little different from an honorary degree in the modern university, involving no
actual course work.

Some 150,000 degrees were conferred by Spanish American
universities during the colonial era, an indication on the one hand of the
importance accorded to higher education by colonial authorities and on the
other of the elite nature of that education. On average, just over 500 degrees
were awarded annually in Spanish America during the three centuries between the
establishment of the region’s first university in Santo Domingo in the 1530s
and the end of the colonial era in the 1820s, when 20 universities were in
operation. The majority of those degrees were awarded in the 18th and early
19th centuries as the number of universities, and university students,
increased. But even then, the percentage of the population holding such a
degree was infinitesimal and included almost no one from the poor and mostly
non-European majority.

CONCLUSION

The majority of children in colonial Latin America grew up
in circumstances in which the acquisition of truly functional reading and
writing skills was neither directly relevant to daily survival nor a realistic
expectation given limited access to formal education. The prospect of a
university-level education was simply outside the realm of imagination save for
an elite few. In societies that were largely rural, most children followed
their parents into the fields at a relatively young age, looked after animals,
or learned to carry out household duties, practical tasks that they would
continue to execute in their adult lives. The majority of urban children,
notably boys, could aspire at most to an apprenticeship that if it was not too
abusive and actually engaged the apprentice in learning valuable skills,
promised a decent economic future with a bit of status in the community as well
as occupational security. Girls, especially those from the non-European
majority, might find employment at a young age as domestic workers, exposed as
a result to all the possibilities for sexual or other abuse that were an
occupational hazard in employers’ houses. Enslaved children enjoyed the least
secure positions of all, even if in their earliest years they might be the much
loved playmates of boys and girls who would eventually own them.

But if childhood often involved hard work or exploitative
circumstances, most children lived in some sort of household context in which
they enjoyed close relationships with several other household members,
disproportionately women. Relatives often lived close by and cared for children
if parents were not present, although girls or boys who found themselves
serving in an employer’s household generally had to look for kindness among
unrelated fellow members of the household staff or, if fortunate, from one of
the household patriarch’s family. Of course, the experiences of the sons and
daughters of an elite family were quite distinct from those of the children of
the poor and mostly non-European majority that surrounded them, both as
servants at home and as social inferiors in the wider colonial society. Both
economic condition and race profoundly shaped the experience of childhood,
while boys and girls generally followed very different, culturally prescribed
paths from a young age, whatever their origins or economic status.

Some circumstances were common to all colonial Latin
Americans, however. Such things as geography, climate, or disease vectors,
which historians sometimes label the material conditions of existence, were not
in most cases respecters of social and economic status, even if the wealthy had
more resources than the poor with which to shield themselves from adverse
environmental circumstances. The next chapter examines aspects of material
culture in colonial Latin American society, focusing on the ways in which
people responded to their environment in mundane but crucial areas of daily
life such as the construction of dwellings, the making and wearing of clothing,
and the production and consumption of food. As we shall see, the responses
varied, sometimes by choice and other times out of necessity. The lives of all
inhabitants of colonial society, nevertheless, were profoundly shaped by the
constraints imposed by the natural world that surrounded them.

4 - MATERIAL CULTURE

INTRODUCTION

Since
daily life is one of the more difficult features of the past to grasp,
historians use various kinds of records in addition to written materials to do
so. One way to understand how people of the colonial period lived is to look at
their material culture, the structures in which they lived, what they wore and
ate, and how they transported themselves and their goods from one place to
another. Physical health can be explored not only by reading descriptions of
diseases included in colonial documents, but also, within the limits imposed by
cultural constraints on the disturbance of the dead, through forensic
examination of human remains. Attention to cooking utensils that have
survived—some, of course, still in use today and performing the same
functions—provides insight into a key feature of daily life, the preparation
and consumption of food. We can draw conclusions about social status by looking
at the houses of people of different social levels or by examining both
contemporary art and wills to discover what different people wore. This chapter
examines several key aspects of the physical world that shaped and constrained
the experience of colonial daily life: housing, clothing, food, transportation,
communication, and health and sanitation.

HOUSING

Rural Housing

More than 90 percent of Latin Americans in the colonial
period lived in rural areas in small houses scattered around in the countryside
or grouped together in hamlets. Most of these dwellings were rectangular
one-room structures of one story with no windows, a dirt floor, and virtually
no furniture. What little furniture there was, a few three-legged stools,
possibly a low wooden bed, were rough handmade pieces. The walls were of
low-cost materials native to the area; in many places, that meant adobe,
sun-dried blocks made of mud and straw. In more humid or hotter areas, the
construction might be of rough-hewn boards or bamboo. These structures followed
the ancient patterns of pre-Columbian housing constructed by the inhabitants
and could be built in a few days or, at most, weeks. Whatever the material used
to build the walls, all these houses were roofed with some kind of thatch made
from a local material, often palm fronds. Normally, those at the higher end of
the village social structure lived in the same kind of house that those lower
in the hierarchy occupied. Wealth in a rural community was more likely to be
expressed through the acquisition of land, animals, and laborers than through the
style and appointments of one’s house. Another possible difference was the size
and complexity of the home altar; nearly all homes had some area devoted to a
few religious objects, with people higher up on the social ladder devoting more
space and resources to this feature.

There was no running water coming to these houses, so women
or children went to a nearby river, spring, or lake to carry water to the
house. Clothing was washed in the same stream or lake and spread on the ground
or the bushes to dry. The cooking might be done inside the small house, filling
the whole room with smoke, or there might be another one-room structure, which
meant less smoke in the main living area, but in the chilly highlands, it also
meant the loss of the cooking fire as a source of heat. The fire was laid
directly on the floor or on a raised platform; a clay pot to heat food or
water, or, for tortillas, the flat stone griddle known in Mesoamerica as the
comal,
would be balanced directly on the burning sticks. Most people slept either
on the floor on a woven mat known as a
petate
or in a hammock; those
with slightly more resources might have a bed of a few boards knocked together
with only a petate for a mattress.

Housing was similar in Mesoamerica and the Andes, although
the rude dwellings of the common people in the latter region were usually
circular instead of rectangular. Since wood was scarce in the
altiplano,
as
the Andean highlands were known, the dung of llamas and other domestic animals
was used to feed the home fires. As families added members or improved their
economic status, they built additional one-room structures to accommodate tools
or store food, or possibly for a newly married son and his wife.