Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (16 page)

Independence-era image of an
indigenous family dressed in simple clothing in the Bogotá region of what is
now Colombia, appearing in an account by the Frenchman Gaspard-Théodore Mollien
of his travels in the region in 1823.

FOOD

Food and Cultural Conflict

In addition to being the fuel our bodies need to function,
food is an expression of our culture and basic to our feelings of comfort and
security. Both Spanish and Portuguese colonists devoted their energies to
maintaining the diet they had enjoyed back home. Urban areas, especially at the
mines, grew up quickly in Spanish America, and suppliers established themselves
in marginal areas surrounding urban centers from which they carried fruit,
vegetables, and meat into the city markets every day. In Brazil, where there
had been no sedentary empires in pre-Columbian times with tribute systems
funneling food to the imperial core areas, there was less urban life than in
Spanish America. By the later colonial period, however, farms had been
established around cities in Brazil, and laborers might work in the countryside
on a large farm, growing food to bring to the owner’s city home. Some
plantation owners went into the business of supplying food to urban areas,
establishing fruit and vegetable farms on properties surrounding cities and
towns.

From the earliest days of the colonial period, food
production was an arena of conflict between Iberians and indigenous peoples.
The Spanish tried to force the Indians to produce wheat for bread, an essential
of the Spanish diet and an item the Europeans ranked far above the humble corn
tortilla, staple of the masses. For their part, the Indians struggled to find
the time and the land to continue producing the diet that had served them well
for millennia: a starch of potato in the Andes, maize in Mesoamerica, or manioc
(cassava, yucca) in Brazil and the Caribbean. Women ground maize and manioc
into corn meal or farinha (manioc flour) to make the staple of the diet, which
was supplemented with beans, squash, and chiles and washed down with a
fermented drink of
pulque, chicha,
or
cachaça.

New World Foodways

The diet of the common man in Mesoamerica was based on the
tortilla, prepared by women who cooked the corn for hours, ground it on a
concave stone called a
metate
using another stone shaped like a rolling
pin, and then kneaded the dough and formed a flat pancake to be cooked on a
griddle called a
comal.
A stack of tortillas served as the basis of
every meal; sometimes tortillas and salt made the whole meal. Luckier families
ate
frijoles
(beans) with their tortillas along with one of many
different kinds of squashes and
chiles
(hot peppers) chopped up with
tomato and onion. In tropical areas of Brazil and in the Caribbean, the staple
of the diet was manioc, a starchy root crop that had been cultivated in those
areas for hundreds of years.

In the Andes, one of many different kinds of potatoes made
up the basis of the meal. Often potatoes were freeze-dried, becoming
chuño
by
a process that involves alternately freezing the potato and thawing it to
express water and then freezing it again, producing a preserved food that can
be stored a long time, even years.
Charqui,
jerky made of llama meat in
the Andean highlands and, after the European arrival, of horse or beef, was
another common preserved food. The grain
quinoa
continued to serve as an
important cereal in this area as it had before the Spanish arrived. Indeed,
most of the crops mentioned above resulted from pre-Columbian agricultural
experimentation in the Americas and were unknown in the rest of the world prior
to 1492.

Nonalcoholic drinks also accompanied, or at times took the
place of, the meal. These might be a fruit drink made from handy oranges or
lemons, or
atol
(hot drink, often of cornstarch) of maize, plantain, or
some other starchy grain or vegetable. A chocolate drink made from cacao beans
was a luxury for special occasions, often restricted in Mesoamerica to the
nobility except in areas where cacao was readily available; where cacao grew
naturally, chocolate drinks might be a normal part of the diet of the common
people. In southern South America, the drink would be a tea of
yerba mate,
and
in the Andes, the tea might be made of coca leaf. With no potable water system
piping water to the houses in town, drinking water had to come from public or
private wells or natural sources like rivers located outside the towns.

In the early days of Portuguese colonization, enslaved
Indians were sent into the backlands to pursue the pre-Columbian food-gathering
activities of hunting, gathering, and fishing. In areas near a forest, Indian
and African workers might be sent to bring back armadillos, lizards, rodents,
monkeys, and various birds that found their way into the well-supplied kitchen
of the Brazilian plantation owner. Indians continued to engage in the activity
of gathering tropical spices and fruits, bringing them to the city for sale.
Honey and insects collected in the wild rounded out the diet of many
Brazilians.

Another important pre-Columbian activity that continued
into the colonial period was fishing. Fresh fish were caught in rivers, and the
ocean continued to supply seafood such as turtles, octopus, and large ocean
fish. Launches braved the ocean to bring back shark and whales, which supplied
oil in addition to meat. Most fish was salted to preserve it, then carried to
market. Since the Portuguese were fond of salt codfish, they continued to
import salted Newfoundland cod for themselves, feeding salted beef and fish to
their workers.

Old World Foodways

The newcomers from the Iberian Peninsula and Africa
introduced other products and culinary styles to the Americas. Old World grains
and legumes like rice, oats, and lentils all appeared after the European
arrival. Indigenous peoples enthusiastically adopted chickens, and those who
could find the resources raised a few pigs and occasionally feasted on pork.
The sheep brought by the Spaniards not only served as an important source of
warm wool clothing and blankets but also added lamb to the American diet. In
some areas, goats became the key provider of leather, meat, and milk, which was
sometimes made into cheese. Often the goats were herded through the city and
milked on demand when a customer appeared.

Larger domesticated animals from the Old World, like
cattle, mules, and horses represented a larger capital investment and were
normally the property of the estate owners, although they were tended by the
estate workforce. Hundreds of head of cattle would be driven to cattle fairs
for sale and then driven to slaughterhouses in the city. Demand for beef was
high, and cattle raising could be a lucrative business. Cattle were sometimes
driven to the cities from many leagues away, all the way from Honduras and El
Salvador, for instance, to be sold in Guatemala City. Once butchered, beef not
eaten fresh was preserved by salting or drying it, since there was no
refrigeration. People without the resources to buy their beef sometimes found
ways to help themselves to an animal, in spite of stiff penalties for cattle
rustling. They would then drive it surreptitiously to a local butcher who would
not inquire deeply into its origins. The exception to this picture of beef as a
luxury food was the cattle-raising areas where beef was so common it could be
almost the only food available and might be eaten several times a day,
according to contemporary observers.

Those in Spanish America who could afford the diet they had
followed in Europe imported olive oil, wine and other liquors, flavored
vinegars, and candied fruit, luxuries that worked their way into the Latin
American diet. Crown policies forbade the colonists from competing with Spanish
producers of some goods, especially wine and olive oil, so those in New Spain
who required those products had to rely on imports coming from the metropolis
except during certain times when smuggling from Peru flourished. Other features
of the upper-class diet were homemade cheese from cow or goat milk, and bread
and fancy cakes and pastries produced in bakeries aimed at the Spanish or
Portuguese consumer and supplied in many places by sugar produced on local
plantations. These desserts might also be made with chocolate, derived from the
cacao bean produced originally by the native peoples of Mesoamerica and grown
later in the colonial era, often by slaves, in Ecuador and Venezuela as well.
In Brazil and sometimes in Spanish America, baking was done by enslaved
laborers, with even the managers being slaves.

Some foods introduced to the Americas in the colonial
period came from West Africa where the Portuguese had become familiar with
bananas and okra, for instance. The West African peoples brought their knowledge
of how to use these foods with them, and such dishes as
gumbo,
a word
probably rooted in an African name for okra, entered the American menu. Many
enslaved laborers had no opportunity to savor these dishes, however, since the
norm for the American slaveholder was to maintain the workforce with simple
fare and little of it. Slaves in Brazil lived primarily on the tropical staple,
manioc. This high-calorie starch was supplemented with a bit of salted meat
produced on the region’s vast cattle ranches as well as other starches, rice,
and various kinds of bananas. Slaves on the west coast of South America lived
on a corn-based diet, although they might receive some meat or fish and
whatever starchy food was most accessible, potatoes from the highlands, a bit
of bread, or a few plantains. In many areas of Latin America these workers had
access to small plots of land on which to grow some vegetables, thereby
reducing the amount of food provided to them by the slaveholder.

TRANSPORTATION

Movement of people and goods is a problem that falls into
several categories. Since the primary reason for colonization was to extract
wealth, the Iberian crowns lost no time in establishing a system of moving
goods, especially bullion, from the New World to the Old World. Another problem
to be solved was disembarkation of people and goods arriving in the Americas.
Thus colonization required moving goods on their way to Europe toward the ports
and distributing people and goods coming from Europe across the interior, which
in some cases meant far inland. Where waterways existed, they were the ideal
route, but even then, porters were necessary to load and unload the barges and
riverboats, and some miles of land transport might be required to bring goods
to their point of departure at riverside. Another category of transportation
was the movement of goods and items necessary to sustain life, like food and
water, within the colonies.

Transatlantic Shipping

In the 16th century, the Spanish inaugurated the
Carrera
de Indias,
the fleet system, involving convoys of 10 or more ships
scheduled to sail annually between the Caribbean and Spain. The system was
designed to provide some protection for American gold and silver from Dutch and
English pirates, and it did so fairly effectively, but it was unwieldy and
inefficient. At the beginning of the 17th century, the average shipment of
silver from Potosí arrived in Spain more than four months later. From 1600 to
1650, instead of its scheduled annual departure, the fleet sailed about every other
year; a total of 29 fleets sailed from Spain to Panama during that 50-year
period. The occasional and unreliable schedule of the fleets contributed to the
growth of contraband trade, especially in the Caribbean. Since illegal
activities are only sporadically recorded, the extent of contraband trade is
impossible to estimate with any degree of accuracy, but it must have been
extensive.

Land Transport

Once arrived in Panama, people and goods were carried to
land on the backs of the longshoremen of the day, Indian or African slaves.
Until adequate port facilities could be constructed, this was the only means of
getting ashore. Africans followed their custom of carrying heavy objects on
their heads, while Indians generally employed the tumpline, known in Mesoamerica
as a
mecapal,
a wide leather strap placed across the forehead with long
strings attached at each end that secured the load behind the porter. Some
objects were carried tied to poles held up by pairs of porters. To reach inland
locations, people of some importance were usually transported in sedan chairs
carried by pairs of slaves; these porters might be elegantly dressed if the
chair’s occupant was a person of high social standing. The common people either
walked or were carried in hammocks hoisted by slave porters. Hammocks were also
used to transport people of low social status to the cemetery after they died.

Mining provided a strong motivation for extending roads and
building ports. In the Andes, the Spanish found useful the many miles of carefully
constructed road the Incas had built for imperial trade and troop movements.
These roads were too narrow for use by carts, since the pre-Columbian peoples
had had neither the wheel nor large draft animals, but the Spanish widened and
improved these roads for carts and mule trains. Indian porters, or
tamemes,
did
most of the transporting of goods and people in the early days of the colonial
period; later most goods went by mule train that often included hundreds of
animals.