Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (17 page)

The colonists also added roads from Lima and Cuzco to the
coast to enable the transport of silver to Spain, and they built a road across
the Panamanian isthmus in order to transport silver arriving at the Pacific
side from Peru to the Caribbean coast for departure for Europe. In Mexico,
roads were constructed from Mexico City northward to the mines at Zacatecas and
later to other mining areas that lay farther north. At the beginning of the
17th century, the vehicle for transporting goods was a large cart known as a
carro
that ran on iron-rimmed wheels at least six feet in diameter. These carts
were pulled by as many as a dozen mules. The muleteer, or
arriero
in
Spanish, often an enslaved worker in Brazil and sometimes in Spanish America as
well, played a key role in transportation since by the mid-colonial period most
goods that traveled any distance did so on the backs of mules. By the end of
the 18th century, the mules of Central America were moving goods worth about
two million pesos annually. In Costa Rica alone, one of the smaller economies
of the region, tobacco growers required the services of more than 3,000 mules
per year. The bigger economies of the isthmus, those of Guatemala and El
Salvador, would have required significantly more mules per year to transport
their products.

The growth of urban areas in the last third of the 18th
century also had an impact on transportation. As the urban population grew,
suppliers of food for these areas reached farther into the interior to satisfy
demand, which meant transporting agricultural products over greater distances.
This became another impetus for the widening of transportation networks.
Nevertheless, by the end of the colonial era, transportation remained slow and
laborious in many areas of Latin America, an obstacle to regional integration.

Obstacles to Transportation

The difficulties of travel by road in many parts of Central
and South America, where rugged mountainous topography often alternates with
soupy coastal lowlands, is illustrated in mid-18th-century descriptions of time
spent in Ecuador by Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, two young naval
lieutenants sent out by the Spanish government on a scientific expedition. They
described one lowland road as “so deep and boggy that the [mules] at every step
sunk almost up to their bellies.” A very different road experienced a few days
later in the process of ascending to the highlands around Quito was “[i]n many
places . . . so narrow that the mules have scarce room to set their feet; and
in others a continued series of precipices.” Travel by sea along the coast,
when a viable option for getting from one point to another, did not always
constitute a more attractive alternative. It took Juan and Ulloa eight full
days simply to make their way by boat from the port of Guayaquil to another
spot along the Ecuadoran coast. In complaining about this method of
transportation, they cited “the usual impediment of the current,” just one of
several environmental obstacles to rapid seaborne transportation along the
Pacific coast of South America, in addition to “several unfortunate
accidents.” 

Another 18th-century traveler gives us a contemporary
description of the laborious overland passage of oxcarts from Buenos Aires to
Jujuy in the northwestern Argentine interior. He first explained that mule
trains, the normal mode of land transportation, were not even used on this
route “because much of the way is through thick woods, where many mules would
get lost,” aside from the “many rivers in flood that [the mules] could not
cross with loads on their backs.” Sure-footed teams of four oxen apiece, by
contrast, could be trusted to conduct fully loaded carts across all but the
deepest riverine obstacles. Nevertheless, drivers of these teams spent much of
their time prodding the animals forward by means of a special goading device suspended
over each team. The device had been adapted precisely to a task in which it was
“essential to jab all four animals nearly simultaneously.” According to the
observer, most of the helpers who sustained a fleet of oxcarts and their
drivers during a journey that might take two months or more were “recently
arrived from Africa.” In his estimation, these enslaved laborers were not to be
trusted with handling valuable goods, although his description suggests they
were in fact vital to this particular trade. 

COMMUNICATION

The many obstacles to transportation in colonial Latin
America had a direct impact on the efficiency and speed of long-distance
communication. Such communication, at least in the form of letter writing, was
generally of vital interest only to a small minority of the population, notably
merchants and royal officials in addition to those individuals,
disproportionately from the colonial elite, who maintained personal contacts
with relatives and friends far away. While colonial archives in both Latin
America and the Iberian Peninsula are filled with correspondence written by
people from these sectors of the population, most of the inhabitants of
colonial Latin America communicated almost exclusively by word of mouth, forced
to depend on the memory of a traveling friend or acquaintance in cases where
they wished to convey a message to someone at a distance. There was little
alternative for an illiterate majority whose members were mostly too poor to
engage a notary or other educated individual to write letters for them, except
perhaps as absolutely necessary in situations of urgency.

The sectors of the Spanish American colonial population for
whom letter writing was an important tool of communication were able to depend
by the 17th century on a postal service that connected most of the larger urban
centers. The system was run more or less privately until the late colonial era
by the
correo mayor
(postmaster general) who, like most other
officeholders, was required to purchase the office from the crown and then, one
way or another, recoup that fee and make a profit through his operations. Where
overland transport was feasible, the mails were carried at first by runners of
mostly native or African origins and later by mounted riders. In Brazil, where
all major urban centers were located along the Atlantic coast prior to the
mid-18th century, maritime communication was most efficient. As a result, no
formal system of overland postal service was organized there until the last
decades of the colonial era.

The time it took written correspondence to travel in the
preindustrial Iberian empires, especially when crossing the Atlantic, had a
profound impact on the nature of Iberian rule and its influence on the daily
life of the residents of colonial Latin America. It was not unusual for a
dispute of local interest in a remote area to take several years to make its
way across the ocean, receive consideration from either the Spanish or
Portuguese crown, and finally return accompanied by a royal decision. By this
time the local situation might have changed dramatically; for example, one or
more of the parties involved in the original case might well be dead. As
discussed at more length in another chapter, the slow pace of communication
placed a substantial amount of power in the hands of local officials, who
frequently made judgments that did not accord with the king’s wishes even when
the officials were already aware of what those wishes were. Not surprisingly,
these judgments often worked to the benefit of powerful creole landowners or
other local notables, a much more immediate presence in the official’s life,
whether as important social connections or potential threats, than the distant
crown. Even when the Iberian monarchs genuinely sought to ameliorate the harsh
living and working conditions imposed on Indian and African workers by the
colonists, time and distance worked against the king’s efforts.

HEALTH AND SANITATION

From the perspective of human health, the conditions under
which the majority of the population of colonial Latin America lived were
decidedly less than optimal. In the first place, public health systems of the
sort that we take for granted in the modern industrialized world, aimed at such
basic tasks as the sanitary disposal of human waste, either did not exist or
were at best rudimentary. Meanwhile, bleeding and other widely accepted
practices of medical professionals were less often beneficial than directly
harmful to their recipients, with the most effective and least noxious
treatments often to be found among various folk remedies administered by
traditional
curanderos/as
(healers), frequently women of native or
African origins. In this world, even the wealthy and powerful had little
protection against the spread of epidemic disease or the more mundane
infections and other physical maladies that plagued the average individual in a
preindustrial society. Infant mortality was high among all social sectors,
women regularly died while giving birth, and most families experienced the loss
of at least one member in the prime of life owing to disease or a badly treated
injury.

Water and Sanitation

Assured access to clean water for drinking and sanitary
purposes, often judged to be the most significant contributing factor to recent
improvements in general human health, was something few individuals could count
on with any certainty. The open and communal water sources on which most of the
population depended included public wells and fountains, or streams and rivers,
although some people owned wells or fountains privately, selling water to their
neighbors. Authorities in the bigger cities were pressed hardest to organize
the large-scale acquisition and distribution of water for drinking and washing.
In Santiago de Guatemala, capital of Spanish Central America, a system of
aqueducts was constructed for bringing water from outside the city to its
various public fountains. As elsewhere, domestic servants or, at lower social
levels, the women of the family gathered at these fountains to bring home water
for drinking, cooking, and washing. A very few wealthy families were able to
use Santiago’s system to bring water directly into their own homes, however,
and the city’s better neighborhoods enjoyed disproportionate access to it.

Given the lack of septic systems, another major problem in
urban areas involved disposing of various kinds of household waste. Once again,
domestic servants, often enslaved workers, daily removed household garbage and
chamber pots of night soil from the houses of the wealthy, while people lower
on the social ladder were obliged to carry out their own waste or simply throw
it out the door into the street. Often there was no designated area for this waste,
so it simply collected in a vacant lot or on the streets where it attracted all
forms of bird and animal life and contributed to the unsanitary, disease-ridden
conditions of the colonial city. The issue of public sanitation was somewhat
less pressing in the countryside simply because population and housing were
less dense there.

Epidemic and Endemic Disease

Epidemic diseases such as smallpox, measles, and typhus
periodically ravaged colonial populations. The post-conquest devastation of
native peoples in the wake of their initial exposure to these and other Old
World diseases extended well into the 17th century, and the population as a
whole suffered from regular if less deadly rounds of epidemics throughout the
colonial era. One observer noted that a 1631–1632 typhus epidemic in Guatemala
largely singled out Indians, adding that the disease “rotted their mouths and
tongues, and made them as black as coal before they died.”  The Bogotá region
of what is now Colombia experienced major smallpox epidemics in 1558, 1588,
1621, 1651, 1667–1668, 1693, 1756, 1781–1783, and 1801–1803, with the earlier
outbreaks striking disproportionately at native communities. In Ecuador, a slow
process of demographic recovery among highland Indians during the 17th century
was temporarily reversed between 1691 and 1695, when as many as one-half of
their number died in a series of epidemics of smallpox, measles, typhus, and
diphtheria. Just over a decade later, in 1708, an outbreak of what may have
been influenza killed numerous residents in the regional capital, Quito, this
time striking people from all social sectors with little distinction. In 1724,
city councilors reported the apparent return of smallpox and lamented that
“many people had died as a result of the pestilence that has been introduced.” 
The city continued to be visited on a regular basis in subsequent decades by
epidemics of smallpox, measles, dysentery, and scarlet fever, sometimes in
combination. The most noteworthy outbreaks occurred in 1746, 1763–1764, 1769, and,
worst of all, 1785, when at least 2,400 people died during the two worst months
alone of an epidemic of measles that was still killing people well into the
following year.

Many of the diseases that flared up from time to time in
virulent epidemic form remained endemic among surviving populations during the
lulls between outbreaks. Meanwhile, a variety of other unspecified fevers,
coughs, and intestinal irritations seem to have been relatively constant
companions in the average household. No doubt some of these illnesses had their
origins in unhealthy sanitary practices. Others flourished or not in accordance
with patterns of social interaction, including those of a sexual nature. The
visiting Spanish naval officers Juan and Ulloa claimed that syphilis was so
common in Quito during the 1730s “that few persons are free of it, though its
effects are much more violent in some than in others.” 

Formal Medicine

For relief from their various ailments, the sick,
especially those with some means, were able to turn at least in larger urban
areas to a variety of licensed medical practitioners, notably physicians,
surgeons, and pharmacists. All of these were approved in Spanish America by the
protomedicato,
a regulatory body charged with oversight of the healing
professions. Transferred to the Americas from Spain in the 16th century, the
institution was initially embodied in a single inspector known as the
protomédico
and gradually transformed into an examining board composed of three or more
licensing officials in each of the major cities where it existed. A royal
charter of 1646 gave this board a formal institutional structure in New Spain
that was largely mirrored in Lima and several other major cities. By this time,
most of these cities also had one or more hospitals founded and run by
religious orders, often the Bethlemites, as did many smaller urban areas.

The formal medical infrastructure described above was quite
inadequate to public need, however. In 1608, Quito’s municipal council was
unable to confirm the presence of a single salaried doctor in the city, and as
late as 1785, there were just four licensed physicians working there among an
urban population of more than 20,000 inhabitants. A few years later, the 9,000
residents of Ecuador’s main port of Guayaquil were left with just one doctor to
serve their needs after a second died and a third found himself imprisoned for
debt. Meanwhile, one of the two hospitals operating in Quito in 1785 served
exclusively as a sanctuary for 22 victims of leprosy, while the other one was
little more than a poorhouse except in times of epidemics. Circumstances were
far more dire in rural Riobamba, home to five times as many people as the
capital held, where there was no hospital at all.

A more abundant supply of licensed medical professionals
and formal medical institutions would not necessarily have improved either
access to medical services or the quality of those services, however.
Physicians had developed few truly effective methods for confronting illnesses,
surgeons and barbers were one and the same, and pharmacists dispensed curatives
that were frequently indistinguishable from those proffered by unlicensed
healers and thus generally of no more (or less) utility. Indeed, the reigning
pharmaceutical handbook in early 18th-century Spanish America recommended the
ingestion of dried frog intestines for kidney stones, dried and powdered fox
lungs for asthma, and ground up tapir toenail or human cranium—although only
when obtained from a person who had died violently—for epilepsy. In any case,
such expertise as the formally qualified medical professionals possessed was
beyond the reach of the majority of the population, given the prohibitive fees
they charged in ordinary circumstances. During Quito’s 1785 epidemic, the
municipal council had to order the city’s four resident doctors to treat
patients who could not afford to pay, and it also promised to partially
reimburse two pharmacists who had succumbed to pressure to dispense free
medicines to victims of the outbreak.

A growing impulse among royal authorities to reform and
improve public administration toward the end of the colonial era did produce
some efforts to introduce a more scientific approach to medical practices.
Autopsies were mandated for some of the victims of Quito’s 1763 epidemic, for
example, although the doctors who performed them reported no findings of value.
In 1790, officials faced with a smallpox outbreak among the independent native
peoples of southern Chile ordered the local Spanish population to prepare for
inoculation, a procedure introduced into the Western world earlier in the 18th
century and still state-of-the-art treatment prior to Edward Jenner’s
development of a vaccine a few years later. Royal officials also sought
increasingly to crack down on unlicensed medical practitioners and their non-sanctioned
cures. But even toward the end of the colonial era, there continued to be
little evidence that the methods employed by these individuals posed any
greater danger to the general public than those of their licensed counterparts.

Informal Medicine

Efforts to eliminate unlicensed medical practitioners were
almost entirely ineffective during most of the colonial era, in large part
because of a chronic shortage of approved providers. The University of Mexico,
the most prestigious institution of its kind in colonial Spanish America,
conferred on average fewer than four bachelor’s degrees in medicine per year
between 1607 and 1738, with laws barring the nonwhite majority from access to
higher education helping to keep numbers low. Officials faced with frequent
medical emergencies were therefore willing to put up with and sometimes even
encourage the presence of a variety of unlicensed health workers in the areas
under their jurisdiction, especially among non-Spanish populations. The king of
Spain himself determined in 1652 that laws meant to restrict the practice of
medicine to legally qualified professionals did not apply in native villages.
Thus there was a proliferation in colonial Spanish America of the usual array
of charlatans and con men who are attracted in all ages to the informal
practice of the healing arts. Literate European foreigners, notably Frenchmen
and Italians, appear to have found this area of enterprise to be especially
appealing, constituting the sort of lucrative economic niche profitably filled
by individuals able to carry off the pretense of possessing great and esoteric
learning.

Quite distinct in the provision of unlicensed medical
services to the public were midwives, who attended most births in colonial
Latin America. Offering as they did a vital service, midwives were tolerated
out of necessity even if generally disparaged by the formal medical
establishment. A decision taken by the city of Caracas in the 17th century to
accord small housing allowances to local midwives gives us one indication of
their value to society, however reluctant such official acknowledgement may
have been. At the same time, their overall status and living conditions at the
time can be surmised on the basis of the city council’s description of the
midwife Ana Jiménez, who despite having assisted many of the city’s “principal
persons” in their hour of need was “destitute” and burdened down by the needs
of her many children and blind husband.  A clear sense of the status
distinctions drawn among medical providers, and of their relative economic
circumstances, emerges in a comparison of Caracas’s allotment to its midwives
of between 1/2 and 1 peso annually for their housing needs with an
appropriation of public health funds ordered by Lima’s city council a few
decades earlier. In 1572, the council set the salary of a physician assigned to
care for the health of workers in local tile and brick factories at 30 pesos
per year, allotting another 10 pesos annually for the services of a
barber/surgeon.

In part due to economic need, many midwives doubled as
curanderas,
offering clients a mix of herbs and potions intended variously to work
magic on lovers or enemies, relieve pain, cure chronic aches or illnesses, or
heal wounds. Often of non-European or mixed origins, such women frequently drew
the suspicion of the authorities, including in some cases the Inquisition,
which smelled
hechicería
(witchcraft) in their practices. At the same
time, they were regularly consulted by people from all social sectors, which
probably explains much of the hostility exhibited toward them by both medical
and religious authorities. Even official representatives of the colonial
government turned to these unlicensed healers. In Mexico City in 1618, a
Spanish officer of the law named Bartolomé Ruiz acknowledged to the Inquisition
that he had been treated by the
mulata
Ana de Pinto for internal
discomfort. Pinto had applied a poultice to his stomach, given him a mysterious
drink, which may have included peyote as an ingredient, and sewed a small bag
containing loose hairs into his shirt. Crucially, she had also “made the sign
of the cross over the chest and ears of the sick man, at the same time making
crosses everywhere in the name of the Holy Trinity, God the Father, God the
Son, and God the Holy Spirit” and incorporating other, indecipherable words
into her healing ritual. Ruiz’s rationale for submitting to Pinto’s “witchcraft”
is indicated clearly in his statement “that to have health there was nothing
that he wouldn’t take.”