Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (35 page)

In the realm of sexuality and love, people’s real lives
seem to have diverged considerably from the model prescribed by the church, and
in a way, the post-independence instability served to lessen the threat to
people’s private lives posed by the authorities. Not only is there substantial
evidence of homosexual activity, but baptismal records show high levels of
children born to unmarried parents and appreciable numbers of children who were
the product of adulterous relationships. Significant numbers of children were
also fathered by priests. The surviving evidence shows that punishments were
inflicted on enslaved workers who had sneaked off the plantation to visit a
loved one, an outcome they surely could have anticipated but seem to have been
willing to risk. The church faced a challenging task as it attempted to apply
its moral precepts to the people of the Americas, especially since many people
had roots in African or indigenous societies that held views on sexuality that
diverged widely from Catholic teachings.

In elite circles, however, the church had better success.
As the recognized authority on appropriate behavior both inside and outside the
house, the church used its power to set the parameters of acceptable sex. Since
elite families had a lot to lose, specifically the family honor and good name,
intangibles that carried little significance among the common people, they went
to great lengths to create at least the appearance of propriety. In chapter 1
we saw that several couples who seem to have felt a deep commitment to each
other were separated, for years or forever, by parents and priests who valued
the family’s status above the wishes of the young couple. A premarital
pregnancy might pose a serious threat to the family honor too, in which case
all the family members conspired to hide the evidence of this divergence from
the church’s moral code.

A 1795 image from
revolutionary-era Paris, home to the abolitionist Society of Friends of Blacks.
The image is accompanied by a poem celebrating the capacity of slaves, “friends
of reason,” to recognize and enjoy what the poet describes as the social
virtues of marriage.

The culture of sexuality that characterized elite society,
obsessed as it was with concerns of family honor and adherence to church
guidelines, diverged widely from that of the masses of working people. This
suggests that these two widely divergent sexual cultures would leave two
distinct legacies to people of the postcolonial period, and this is indeed what
happened. Elites struggled to keep up the appearance of propriety after
independence, as they had before, while the common people enjoyed greater
success in avoiding the authorities, now quite busy with matters of state. Many
of the popular classes managed to do as they liked, discretely in most cases,
and stay out of sight and out of reach of the law.

As in matters of sexuality, the responses of ordinary
people to the efforts of the authorities to control their lives often took the
form of quietly pursuing their interests as best they could either within or
outside the law, while avoiding direct confrontation with the powerful forces
that backed the social order. But confrontation, violent or not, was sometimes
unavoidable, since in practice popular resistance was often the only curb on
the ambitions of the wealthy and powerful, in whose favor the law tended to
operate. The colonial era is full of examples of such resistance, whether in
the form of moral challenges to the lawless behavior of elites through a court
system that was supposed to protect the weak or in the form of armed unrest.
Yet even the wars of independence, in a certain way the greatest example of
violent resistance to authority, produced few fundamental changes in societies
marked by profound inequalities in the distribution of wealth and power. Simply
put, the struggle for daily survival among the poor and mostly nonwhite
majority created almost insurmountable difficulties to organizing on the scale
necessary to overcome tight-knit elite groups whose ancestors had violently
seized control over the vast majority of Latin America’s resources.

And yet, there were victories. The Haitian Revolution
stands as a remarkable testament to the determination of people to free
themselves from oppressive conditions of work and life. The attempt at social
revolution by Hidalgo and Morelos in Mexico, although a military failure,
nevertheless contributed to the emergence of a republic that with all its post-independence
problems elected a full-blooded Indian, the Zapotec Benito Juárez, as president
less than 50 years after the end of a colonial regime founded on the subjugation
of the native population. Even in Brazil, where African slavery lasted longer
than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere, outbreaks of slave resistance of
the sort that had troubled planters since the early colonial era helped bring
down the institution at last in 1888. There is no reason to suppose that any of
these developments would have occurred had the social hierarchy that the
Spanish and Portuguese worked so hard to impose on their colonies in the
Americas been accepted without complaint by those who were relegated to its
bottom reaches.

A FINAL WORD

Any deep understanding of Latin America rests firmly on a
base of colonial life as it was lived by the people of the region over the 300
years from the arrival of Columbus in the Caribbean in 1492 to the surrender of
the last Spanish loyalists on the mainland at the port of Callao, Peru, in
1826. The people already living in this hemisphere, the invaders from the
Iberian Peninsula, and the people brought from Africa to work came together to
talk, to fight, to worship, to eat and drink, to work and play, and to have
sex, some willingly and some against their will. They were born, lived their
lives, had children, and died, building societies, economies, and political
structures that slowly evolved over the period. And they bequeathed to those
who came after a legacy that set the terms of the early post-independence
period.

Some of the patterns and institutions they established have
disappeared, like the old coerced labor systems, but others are still important
today. The large estate, the patriarchal extended family, and the social
structure based on racial characteristics have lived on over the 200 years
since independence and are still very much alive in parts of the region,
structuring daily life as it is lived by Latin Americans in the 21st century.
In this study, we have tried to get as close as possible to the daily lives of
the people of the 17th and 18th centuries and to examine how they lived within
or across social boundaries, how the legal apparatus structured their lives or
failed to, and how at times they accepted and at other times rejected the world
they were born into, or brought into. Latin America today is the result of what
they did every day.

GLOSSARY

adobe
—Housing material of bricks made from mud, usually with a heavy
clay component,
mixed with straw and dried in the sun.

alcalde
—Municipal administrator in Spanish America.

aldeia
—Jesuit-run settlement in early colonial Brazil where native
peoples were congregated for purposes of Christianization and, in theory,
protection from enslavement.

altiplano
—Highlands.

arriero
—Mule driver.

atol
—Porridge or hot drink, usually based on a starch (e.g., maize,
plantain).

audiencia
—Large Spanish American administrative region governed by a high
court of the same name; there were several
audiencias
in each
viceroyalty.

bandeirante
—Participant in slaving expeditions sent up vast inland waterways
into the Brazilian interior from settlements like São Paulo.

barracoon
—Large, dormitory-like sleeping quarters on an estate used to
house the enslaved population.

cabildo
—Spanish American municipal council.

caboclo
—Term applied to people of mixed, often Portuguese-native,
ancestry in northeastern Brazil.

cachaça
—Alcoholic beverage in Brazil that was produced from sugarcane
juice.

calidad
—Social rank or status.

Carrera de Indias
—Spanish fleet system.

casa grande
—Main house.

casta
—General term applied to all persons of mixed ancestry in Spanish
America.

charqui
—Meat jerky.

chicha
—Andean corn beer; major source of alcohol consumption in the
Andes prior to Spanish arrival.

chile
—Pepper.

chuño
—Freeze-dried potatoes.

cimarrón
—Escaped slave, frequently living in an outlaw community with
other escapees.

cofradía
—A confraternity, or lay religious brotherhood, in Spanish
America.

colegio
—Private school generally run by a religious order.

comal
—Stone griddle for heating corn tortillas in Mexico and Central
America.

consanguinidad
—State of being related to someone by blood.

corregidor
—Regional administrator in Spanish America; duties included the
regulation and defense of the native population.

correo mayor
—Postmaster general.

criollo/a (Port. crioulo, Eng. creole)
—Term originally applied to an
enslaved person of African descent born in the Americas or the Iberian
Peninsula; later came to mean Spaniard born in the Americas as well.

curandero/-a
—Popular healer, often a woman of indigenous or African origin.

debt peon
—Individual tied to a rural estate or other economic enterprise by
debts originating in advances offered by an owner seeking a resident labor
force.

dispensa
—Church waiver of an impediment to marriage.

encomienda
—Grant to an individual Spaniard of labor and tribute from one or
more native villages; most
encomiendas
eventually reverted to the
Spanish crown.

engenho
—Brazilian sugar mill; often applied in the sense of
plantation
to an entire sugar-producing operation, including canefields.

expediente matrimonial
—Marriage document prepared by the priest
who interviewed a prospective couple.

farinha
—Manioc flour.

forastero
—Term applied to outsiders in native villages, often indigenous
people who had fled labor and tribute obligations in their own communities.

fr
ij
oles
—Beans.

garapa
—A type of sugarcane alcohol in Brazil.

gaucho (Port. gaúcho)
—Ranch hand, cowboy in the Southern Cone of South America.

hidalgo
—Member of the minor nobility
in Spanish realms.

huipil
—Women’s top, blouse.

Inquisition
—Roman Catholic tribunal charged with rooting out and punishing
heretical beliefs, witchcraft, and other thoughts or behavior considered to
deviate from religious orthodoxy; jurisdiction in Latin America restricted to
the nonnative population.

irmandad
—A lay religious brotherhood in Brazil.

kuraka
—Local ruler/chieftain among indigenous Andean peoples; often a
descendant of pre-colonial Andean nobility.

laborío
—Alternative tribute levied in Spanish America on free people of
African ancestry and natives not bound to specific villages by labor and
tribute obligations.