Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (23 page)

The professionals constituted another group of wage
workers, either in the countryside or in nearby urban areas. The mill owner retained
a lawyer and agents in the city to defend and advance his interests. The owners
also employed professional workers on their estates; there was usually a
chaplain, as well as semiprofessionals like nurses, midwives, doctors, and
herbalists.

Overseers, those who supervised work in the fields and the
mill, earned about as much as the skilled mill workers, and they were essential
to the functioning of the engenho. They might be black, racially mixed, or
white, free or enslaved. In early Brazil, they were often Portuguese
immigrants, but as time went on, they were more likely to be people of
part-African descent. Overseers held a low position on the social ladder, as
demonstrated by their marital prospects; often they married enslaved women.

The lowest form of wage labor was that done for a specific
task or period. Finding and returning a runaway slave, clearing land, day labor
in the fields, taking down a tree, messenger service, all these tasks would be
done by rural subsistence farmers and their family members for a small wage.
This economic relationship reflects the patronage system in which local
peasants were dependent on the nearby estate owner for wages to supplement the
family economy.

Wage Labor and Racial Status

Like everything else in colonial Latin America, the wage
structure was racialized. The usual expectation in Brazil was that whites would
be paid most, blacks second, and Indians third for the same work, although
workers sometimes leveraged more, depending on their proficiency and the demand
for their skill. The colonists tried to set up a rigid hierarchy with whites in
management positions, blacks in the fields, and Indians doing occasional tasks,
but as Africans and people of African descent learned the skilled tasks of the
mill, they upset this neat system. It was to the owners’ advantage for enslaved
laborers to perform skilled labor, since they could be paid nothing or granted
a small privilege for their labor. Brazilian-born slaves,
crioulos,
came
to be disproportionately represented in artisan and skilled positions in the
engenho, as well as in the house as servants. Indeed, the 1788 census in Bahia
shows that the dominant class had been quite successful in maintaining a
division of labor into three levels: mill owners and administrators were white,
field hands were black, and the skilled positions in between were held by
racially mixed people of African descent.

Other Variables in the Status of Wage
Labor

Various factors affected the wage and social structure of
wage workers. Gaining a skill improved a worker’s bargaining position as the
rise in status and wage of the
mulato
Alvaro demonstrates: he appears on
the engenho records in 1625 as “Alvaro mulatto kettleman,” reflecting the usual
identification of workers by a first name, a racial designation, and their
occupation. At that time, he earned 24
milréis.
Nineteen years later, he
had gained a last name, and his salary had nearly doubled; in 1644 he appears
as Alvaro Fernandes at a salary of 42 milréis.  The records of another engenho
list a black carpenter among the highest-paid workers on the estate.

Another factor that affected the wage structure was the
market price of sugar. When the price fell, wages also fell. In an effort to
economize in difficult times, mill owners opened up skilled positions to people
of color who lacked bargaining power and therefore worked for less. Literacy
was another factor. Some positions at the mill, especially administrators,
general overseers, and craters required reading, writing, and some arithmetic.
Since enslaved laborers were not given the opportunity for education, they were
normally excluded from these positions, but in all skilled labor not requiring
literacy, Africans and their descendants became dominant as the colonial period
matured.

Sometimes freed slaves worked as wage laborers on the
engenho, but they were in constant danger of being seized as property in
punishment for an action deemed disrespectful or simply to pay a mill owner’s
debt. In one case from late in the 17th century, the freedman Domingo Lopes da
Silva from Angola worked for a year as a specialist in the boiling house, but
when he sought payment of his wages, he found himself branded and in chains. In
these cases, the whim of the wealthy and politically powerful mill owner
carried the day; there was little recourse for the injured party.

Temporary or intermittent wage labor was normally done by
indigenous people. Indians filled unskilled or semiskilled positions that
included supplying wood, catching and returning runaways, and working in
transportation. They might be paid in goods rather than cash, at the end of
either the month or the task. Their wage was often a small fraction of that of
others doing the same work. Often they were not listed in the records by name,
but by the designation
indio.
To make matters worse, while wages
increased slowly over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries, prices went up
faster so that real wages for Indians fell as the colonial period continued.

Working on the Ranch

Cattle ranching, which occupied vast tracts of grasslands
in the interior of Brazil, the Río de la Plata region, and Venezuela, was the
specialty of the cowboy, known in parts of Spanish America as a
vaquero
after
the Spanish
vaca
(cow), a
llanero
(plainsman) in Venezuela, and a
gaucho
in the Southern Cone. Wild cattle roamed all of these regions, as
well as parts of Mexico and Central America, within a few decades of the
European arrival in the Americas. Along with imported sheep and horses, great
herds of these cattle quickly produced widespread environmental devastation,
adversely affecting native agricultural activities in many areas.

At the same time, growing demand for beef, hides, and
tallow (for candle wax) made cattle ranching an important economic activity.
Small numbers of skilled horsemen, mostly people of color who varied in their
ethnic makeup depending on the racial mixture of the area, hunted and herded
these cattle under the direction of a Spanish or Portuguese landowner who might
have laid claim to tens of thousands of acres. To give an idea of the scale, in
1772 the largest ranch in the Brazilian captaincy of Piauí was twice the size
of the modern country of Lebanon, yet the entire captaincy, with 582 ranches,
was home to only 26,000 people. The employees of such estates might include a
mix of wage laborers, debt peons, and even slaves. All enjoyed a rough sort of
personal freedom based on the nature of the enterprise, which frequently took
them far away from the immediate oversight of their supervisors.

Some idea of that independent life can be seen in the
records of investigations into illegal cattle slaughter on the Pacific coast
ranches of Guatemala in the early 17th century. Royal officials set out to
track down gangs of ranch workers, identified as a mix of black slaves, free
mulatos,
and Indians, who were accused of killing cattle owned by landowners other
than their own employers. One investigator found an abandoned hideout used by a
group of rustlers, perhaps with the support of their boss, to prepare hides and
tallow for sale without royal approval to buyers in the nearest large town. The
investigator had less luck apprehending a
mulato
ranch foreman who was
said to be the gang’s leader. That trail ran cold in the man’s home village,
where the official encountered nothing but a few personal belongings left
behind in haste and stony silence from his neighbors.

Women: A Special Class of Workers

While it is apparent from some of the descriptions above
that women worked in many of the same occupations as men, women’s work was
shaped by the gender system. The work site for most women, whether urban or
rural, was the household. Indeed, the household was so important as a locus of
work that it often produced most of what its members needed to be self-sufficient.
Pottery and hides, bread and tortillas, honey, candles, soap, liquor, and
clothing were all made at home. Cleaning and maintaining of clothes was done in
the household, as was haircutting. Women produced all these goods and services.
Most of the work women did in the colonial period sprang from women’s customary
work in the household and was simply expanded from the private to the public
sphere. This meant that work for most women was related to food preparation,
sexual services, or caring for clothing, children, the sick, and the elderly.

Social standards prevented women of elite households from
working publicly, although in most elite homes, the domestic help was
supervised by the women of the patriarch’s family. At times, however, a wealthy
businessman’s widow or daughter inherited a position of economic power upon his
death. It was by this route that some women came to be the owners and managers
of sugarcane plantations in Brazil or great haciendas in Spanish America. Some
of the farms that supplied food to mining areas were run by women, and in late
colonial Bahia, 10 percent of the cane farmers supplying local sugar mills were
women.

While women of the elites supervised the servants’ work, at
lower social levels the housewife usually worked alongside the domestic help. A
middle-class woman might also run a boarding house or manage rental property.
Some became girls’ governesses or seamstresses, the latter earning less than
their male counterparts, the tailors. Other women from the middle groups became
booksellers or tobacconists. The wives of tradesmen like printers, weavers, or
bakers sometimes inherited their husband’s business upon his death, and by the
end of the 18th century, some guilds were admitting women. In 1788, women silk
spinners even formed a guild of their own.

Certainly, there were some women of the elites and middle
groups who worked, generally inside the house, but most women who worked during
the colonial period were of the working classes. Many were employed as
domestics in the homes of their social “betters,” sometimes earning nothing
more than room and board, although after learning a domestic skill, they might
leave and establish themselves as self-employed laundresses, cooks,
seamstresses, or nurses. Of these, the best paid were the child-care workers
and wet nurses. As women migrated to urban areas seeking domestic work, urban
populations became heavily female. In the early colonial period, poor white
women sometimes worked as domestics, but by the beginning of the 17th century,
domestic jobs were filled by Indians and Africans. Market vendors were usually
women of color who sold food, flowers, and woven goods; most meat vendors in
Guatemala City were black women and
mulatas.

One occupation that was exclusively women’s work was that
of midwife, and it was a short step from midwife to
curandera
and
herbalist. For this reason, the local midwife was often the main rural health
care provider, knowledgeable about pain management, the health-giving
properties of different plants, and even birth control methods. By the end of
the colonial period, however, male doctors had begun delivering the children of
elite families, and many of these “professionals” employed bloodletting rather
than the midwife’s herbal concoctions that may have been both safer and more
effective.

There was a fine line in colonial Latin America between
street vendors or market women and sex workers. Since according to the dominant
values women who worked outside the house were corrupted by contact with men of
all social levels, their work made them fair game. By definition, they were
morally inferior to housewives who worked in the seclusion of their homes,
completely dependent on the goodwill and protection of their fathers, husbands,
or brothers. Since men viewed these market women as having loose morals, the
women’s honor was in jeopardy at all times. Of course, there were also women
officially engaged in prostitution; they at least managed to collect a fee for
their services, and their work paid better than many other types of work open
to women. Prostitution was especially lucrative in areas with high
concentrations of unaccompanied men, like peddlers or sailors. Not
surprisingly, records show high levels of venereal disease among women of the
lower social groups in urban areas.

In the early colonial period, women worked as weavers in
obrajes
where they were locked in and lived tied to the loom in a system very like
slavery. Later, in the 18th century when the colonial government set up
factories where tobacco was rolled into cigarettes, women flocked to the
factories to enter this trade. At the end of the colonial period, Mexico City
was home to 9,000 cigarette workers who left their young children in the
factory child-care center. At times, women managed to work their way up the
factory hierarchy to low- and mid-level management positions. Women sometimes
paid a high price for the independence they found in factory work though,
contracting tuberculosis and other diseases as a result of malnutrition and
poor living and working conditions.

Although men generally earned more for their labor than
women, in both urban and rural areas women’s work was essential to sustaining
life and creating wealth in the colonial period. In the countryside, finding a
partner was a prerequisite to the establishment of the peasant farm, and
subsistence farming was impossible without the mothers, wives, and daughters of
the family. In addition to producing the pots, candles, soap, and clothing
mentioned above, women participated in the planting and harvesting of crops and
cared for the farm’s small animals, chickens, pigs, and goats, as well as the
sheep that produced the wool for weaving some of the family’s clothing.