Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (12 page)

CONCLUSION

The scraps of evidence that can be gathered concerning
sexuality and its expression during the colonial period suggest an interesting
irony. It is both an area of life over which the authorities attempted to exert
strict control and at the same time an area in which many people refused to be
controlled, insisting on practicing a very personal form of resistance and
rebellion. Sexuality is a tantalizing arena of historical study because it was
clearly a powerful part of daily life in the past, and yet it seems to hover
just out of reach much of the time. What is inescapable in the documented
incidents of proscribed sexual acts is that people of the colonial era
challenged the social rules that conflicted with their passionate desires. Some
who transgressed paid a high price, especially those whose low social status
exposed them to the harsher punishments. But surely many people found fun and
satisfaction in their sex lives, and the outnumbered authorities were at a
distinct disadvantage in their efforts to manage this aspect of social life.

Of course, heterosexual relations, whether inside or
outside the confines approved by the authorities, also served the function of
reproducing the population. Each resulting generation of children then had to
be raised as much as possible in accordance with prevailing customs or imposed
norms. First and foremost, young people were trained to replace their parents
and grandparents, either as the workers who sustained colonial society or, in
smaller numbers, as its rulers. The next chapter examines the nature and
experience of childhood, including the types of education, both informal and
formal, that children in the colonies received.

3 – CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION

As
we have seen in the realms of family life and sexuality, the inhabitants of
colonial Latin America lived very different lives depending on their rank in
colonial society. Thus the lives of children and youth, the focus of this
chapter, were shaped in fundamental ways by social status. Among the upper
classes, children were seen as the future guardians of the property of the
patriarchal family. They were educated and protected accordingly, and much of
what we know of their lives emerges in legal documents arising out of disputes
regarding an inheritance. Other legal provisions related either to the division
and stewardship of family property or to the tutorial function provided for in
the last will and testament of the head of household. Meanwhile, girls and boys
of the lower social ranks, who made up the vast majority of young people, were
expected to become laborers, and as such they were tracked into work from the
age of seven or eight. The modern-day concept of adolescence did not exist in
colonial Latin America; for most people, the end of childhood and the beginning
of adulthood came early. Although European tradition established the age of
adulthood at 21, people functioned as adults long before they reached that age.

CHILDHOOD IN CONCEPT AND PRACTICE

Childhood among Indigenous Peoples

During the colonial era, indigenous peoples clung to their
old patterns of child rearing and training of young people for adult life, and
in some ways, their understanding of children differed radically from that of
Europeans. The people of the Andes thought of age in terms of capabilities
rather than strict chronology. In early censuses, many indigenous people did
not know how old they were. In place of chronological age, people were measured
by their increasing capacity to contribute to the community. The two key
markers in these pre-Columbian societies were weaning, which occurred between
ages two and five, and puberty. Both these milestones indicated a shift in the
individual’s capacity for contributing to the larger society. At times,
children were given to the government as a form of tribute, and sometimes
sacrificed to the gods. One historian assessed the indigenous view of childhood
thus: “It would appear that children were perceived . . . as natural resources
produced by the community and therefore expected to benefit that community.” 

In the pre-Columbian period, both boys and girls worked
from about the age of five, with both sexes helping around the house; caring for
younger children; and collecting water, wood, and other household necessities.
In addition, the girls began to learn the weaving and cooking skills they would
need as adults. From ages 9 to 12, boys became collectors of wood, makers of
rope, spinners of wool, hunters, and animal caretakers, while girls continued
their cooking and weaving and in addition collected plants used to dye fabric
and herbs for cooking and healing. From ages 12 to 18 boys hunted and herded
animals, while girls did housework, spun and wove, worked in the fields, cared
for animals, and made the fermented corn drink
chicha.
Another task of
pre-Columbian society that was performed by young people between the ages of 16
and 20 was harvesting the government’s crop of coca leaf. When they reached 18,
girls were considered adults and ready to marry, while boys continued working
for their communities as messengers and errand boys for the nobility.
Pre-Columbian peoples expected children to participate actively in their
societies, performing useful functions at every phase of their lives.

A
drawing by Guaman Poma de Ayala of a five-year-old girl carrying a jug of
chicha
(homebrewed alcohol). Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, the peoples of
the Andes incorporated their children into the household tasks from an early
age.

Childhood among Europeans

The European concept of childhood differed from that of the
indigenous peoples. Whereas most of the indigenous peoples of the pre-Columbian
Western Hemisphere seem to have seen children as simply smaller adults, holding
them responsible for their actions and expecting them to contribute to the
survival of their families and communities, the European legal and social
system understood children as pre-rational beings who needed to be educated and
civilized before they could be accepted into the community of reasoning adults.
While European custom made 21 the formal age of adulthood, a defendant under
the age of 25 was legally entitled to a court-appointed lawyer to defend him in
court, and to a legal guardian to oversee his financial interests. However,
this pertained chiefly to children of upper-class families; working-class young
people carried out adult roles earlier, often going into a vocation at the age
of 15 or 16. Boys as young as eight were placed in apprenticeships, and girls
of the same age might be “adopted” or simply farmed out as servants to
wealthier families. Among people of all socioeconomic levels, the years between
20 and 25 were considered the young-adult years, and after that a person was a
full-fledged adult until old age.

Childhood in Colonial Practice

The practical impact of theoretical differences between the
views of Europeans and indigenous people is debatable, however. The Spanish and
Portuguese were not completely successful in introducing their views into the
homes of the peoples they had conquered. Because colonial societies consisted
of the peoples of three continents living side by side, children’s experience
could look very different depending on whether their parents were Spanish or
Portuguese; from West, Central, or East Africa; or from one of various
indigenous societies. Certainly, African parents working as coerced laborers
had less control over their offspring, due to the owner’s legal right to make
many key decisions pertaining to his workers, but just as certainly these
parents brought with them to the Americas a notion of what should be expected
of and provided to a child. So while the Spanish and Portuguese may have set up
the dominant structures in the colonial period, parents continued to raise
their children according to their long-term beliefs and practices.

Children and Household Relationships

Children lived in a variety of households, quite often
outside of nuclear families. Children in many colonial homes were subject to
various authorities such as wet nurses and nannies, aunts and uncles, as well
as mothers and fathers, so they were raised by a group of adults, not just
their parents. In rural areas among poorer people, married children generally
lived with or close to the husband’s parents, so grandparents or aunts and
uncles were important authorities in children’s lives, as well as channels to
the world’s resources (i.e., a wife/husband, a job, and a plot of land in the
community where the newly married young man could build a little house and
plant his cornfield).

Another feature of children’s homes was that they nearly
always contained women, while they might not have had any men. Spanish census
records show that almost all children grew up in houses with female adults,
although these women might not have been their mothers, but many of those
households listed no male adults. Hardly any houses showed men and children
living together without adult women in the home.

One interesting feature of the large patriarchal household
was that the children of the patriarch normally grew up with other children who
were not of the same race and class. For example, the child of the slave
owner’s family grew up in close relationship to enslaved children, later
becoming the owner of his former playmates. A variety of complicated
relationships developed between people in these situations, including the
special relationship that often bound the master’s child to the enslaved woman
who had breast-fed him or her and who might continue to care for the child
during its early years.

The households of the wealthier members of the community
included many servants and dependents who at times functioned as servants.
Indigenous children often worked in the homes of Spaniards as domestics,
beginning as young as age eight. Labor contractors who supplied these child
servants often referred to them as “orphans,” although both parents might be
living, probably a reference to the fact that their parents, although alive,
were dead in the sense that they could not afford to care for the child.

Foundlings and babies left at the door of the church grew
up in convents or orphanages where they might be tracked into a career as
servant in the institution. The authorities of these institutions took
responsibility for planning the lives of their charges, sometimes forcing these
young people into marriage or church work against their will, as demonstrated
by the many suits for escape from marriage or the church. At times, however, a
lasting bond that imitated the biological parent-child relationship was formed
between an orphan and one of the adults at an institution.

Work and Play

Most children’s lives consisted of work and play, with work
predominating for the majority, that is, those born into families on the lower
rungs of the social ladder. Child rearing was not considered a job in and of
itself, so children’s daily activities had to fit around the lives of adults
who had full-time responsibilities. Play was not supervised by adults, which
may have been fun for a lot of children but held certain inherent dangers.
Court records are full of cases brought by parents on behalf of children who
had been harmed at play. One case concerned a five-year-old girl who had been
abducted by a man on a horse while she was bathing alone in a stream. Another
case involved three playmates: an enslaved girl of eight who was playing with
the son of her owner and a slave boy and was raped by them. One mother of a young
girl who had been raped while playing with two teenage boys testified that the
struggle for survival among adults of the working classes meant these parents
“were reduced to seeing their tiny sons and daughters living in the streets for
the better part of the day.” 

Work was sometimes unsupervised as well. Children,
especially those of the serving class, ran errands for adults, so they were
likely to be in the streets without an adult. Surely they took advantage of the
lack of oversight to extend their time on an errand in order to include
visiting a friend who lived or worked nearby, watching a passing procession, or
playing a quick game of marbles. Some works of art from late 17th-century Cuzco
show children taking a moment out from their workday to harass passersby with
peashooters.