Daily Life In Colonial Latin America (6 page)

Thus a man’s home was viewed as his sacred space, and women
were his most closely guarded property. An elite family line was continued
through the womb of the female who therefore had to be pure at marriage. While
young men served the family by continuing the work of their father, or entering
the clergy or the military, virgin daughters played the part of pawns in the
family’s efforts to maintain its social position.

Where is romantic love in this picture? It was suspect.
Youthful love and passion were conducive to social disruption and therefore
treated by the church and the community elders as threatening to an orderly
society. Affective life also threatened a family’s strategies for maintaining
its social position and, as such, was an unwelcome intruder in the business of
making an advantageous match. Parents and the authorities were therefore allied
against youth and romance in the battle to preserve social order and maintain a
strict hierarchical social structure. We have already seen where insisting on
the right to choose one’s partner led Catalina de Vega and Pedro de Ribero, as
well as Gómez de León and his bride.

Lately, new research has suggested that the patriarchal
family may not have incarcerated its members quite as neatly as this picture
suggests, certainly not in the middle and lower classes. While it was a model,
and one held up by the church as an example for all, some people found ways to
open the cage doors so they could come and go and exercise a higher degree of
control over their lives. Recent research on families low on the social ladder
in colonial New Spain has uncovered various contested areas. Marriage among the
common people was viewed as a reciprocal contract in which the husband was
responsible for maintaining his partner, while she was responsible for carrying
out the domestic tasks and obeying her husband. A wife often based her
cooperation on her husband’s faithfulness in fulfilling his side of the marital
bargain. Women employed subterfuge to get what they wanted out of their lives,
to some extent; they dallied with friends when going to fetch water, they
stretched out a visit to mother, they delayed meal preparation, and they organized
the housework in their own way. Some women, as we shall see, even engaged in
sexual relationships outside marriage. While some of these women paid with
their lives, the ultimate price, others got away with breaking the patriarchal
sexual rules. In any case, the stereotype of the patriarchal household run by
an iron-willed male to whom all females and subordinate males were submissive
does not tell the whole story.

THE ROLE OF THE AUTHORITIES

The colonial institution most concerned with maintaining
the official family, and through it, an orderly society, was the Roman Catholic
Church. The church viewed all activities of daily life through the lens of its
central mission, that of saving the individual soul. In pursuit of this
mission, the church intruded deeply into personal life in a variety of ways, as
subsequent chapters will demonstrate. Here the focus is on its intense interest
in enforcing Christian precepts of marriage and sexuality. Further, as the arm
of the government charged with stabilizing society and maintaining social
order, a subject also discussed at greater length later in the book, the church
sought to restrict individuals to alliances within their social rank.

It was during the 12th century that the church began to
play its role of organizing society by controlling marriage. The three players
in marriage arrangements were the couple, their families, and the church.
Through marriage, the church legitimized the couple, the basic nucleus of
society, keeping these unions public and acknowledged by the whole community.
In prenuptial interviews with the couple, the priest gathered the information
that would protect society from incestuous relationships as defined by canon
law, and he made sure both parties were willing. The church became both
mediator and judge at times when the couple and the parents did not agree.

In the mid-16th century, just as the conquest period was
ending and the colonial system was being set up, the Council of Trent (see
chapter 6) codified marriage, declaring that a priest had to witness the couple
willingly consenting to marry. Previously, following a practice inherited from
Roman law, the church had recognized marriage carried out in secret based
solely on the consent of both members of the couple. The Romans had two classes
of marriage, an older one that ignored the will of the couple and simply
required the legal transfer of the woman from her father’s to her husband’s
household, and one that developed later recognizing consent as the key
component of marriage. The latter form even recognized sexual union as
marriage, on the assumption that engaging in sexual relations proved consent.
In general, like the concept of common-law marriage still recognized in parts
of the Western world, a couple was considered married if they behaved willingly
and publicly as husband and wife. The clandestine marriages that took place
during the colonial period in Latin America were rooted in these ancient Roman
practices, but the Counter-Reformation, discussed later in the book, tightened
church control over marriage. In an effort to put an end to the wrangling that
sometimes resulted from clandestine marriages based solely on consent and to
impose greater order over social relations, canon law after the Council of
Trent recognized only marriages overseen by the church.

Canon law also defined the coerced marriage as invalid.
Marriage was a holy sacrament overseen by God, undertaken “to serve God
better,” as many marriage applications state. According to canon law, this
union served God’s plan only if the free will of both parties was the basis of
their decision to marry. In this matter of free will, however, the church
played a contradictory role. Priests sometimes took the side of the family to
force a marriage on a resisting child or servant, but there are examples of
priests standing firm in defense of the freewill provision of canon law and
refusing to marry couples in which one party was unwilling, regardless of the
wishes of the parents. At times the church denied its support to parents who
opposed unions that crossed boundaries of social class or ethnicity. This
probably happened infrequently, however, since most priests were closely linked
to powerful families of the parish, through blood or financial dependency, and
therefore had to think twice about jeopardizing their own situation. In
addition, the church was no more enthusiastic about cross-class marriages than
were the parents.

In one case, the priest himself was the one who forced
marriage on an unwilling party in early 17th-century Peru. Ysabel Allay Suyo,
after a little more than a year of marriage to Diego Andrés de Arenas, spoke
with a Spanish inspector who was making the rounds in 1618, telling him that
she had been forced to marry Diego against her will. The inspector encouraged
her to bring an annulment suit. In the suit, she attested that the person who
had forced the marriage was a priest, Diego’s master. According to her own
testimony and that of several witnesses, Ysabel practically had to be dragged
to the ceremony, and two or three times during the ceremony, when asked if she
was willing to marry Diego, said no, in spite of various attempts to persuade
her. Apparently, she had been crying before the ceremony and continued to cry
while it took place, after which she ran away and had to be brought back and
ordered to embrace her husband. Although several witnesses impugned the
testimony of Ysabel’s witnesses, in the end the court agreed with her and the
marriage was annulled. There is no mention of any reprimand for the priest who
forced the marriage in clear violation of his legal and spiritual obligation to
ensure the free will of both parties.

The Spanish crown considered canon law to extend to slave
and Indian marriages as well and in the 16th century issued edicts protecting
free will as the basis of their marriages. Given the slight control servants
and laborers had over their choice of a partner, as well as over whether or not
that choice was legitimized in formal marriage, these edicts may have been
ineffectual, but there are some examples of priests defending free will between
partners from the lower social ranks. In a complicated case from New Mexico in
the mid-18th century, an Indian slave named Cipriano appealed for permission to
marry Isabel, the Indian slave of another landowner, in spite of the fact that
he had had relations with a different Indian slave that resulted in the birth
of a child. After a beating sufficiently severe to cause Cipriano to lose some
of the sheep in his care, the church intervened and supported the right of
Indian slaves to marry whomever they wished. Since Isabel and Cipriano wished
to marry each other, the marriage took place, under the protection of the
church, but against the will of both masters.

Impediments to Marriage

Although the church considered the spiritual path of the
chaste and celibate life superior to married life, Christian teachings
established marriage as a sort of second-best state to that of celibacy.
Through marriage, man controlled his lustful, sinful nature and served God by
producing and socializing children. So serious was the church about the
procreative function of sex that anything blocking the possibility of having
children, impotence for instance, was considered an impediment to marriage. If
a complaint was brought to the priest within one month after marriage and
proved to his satisfaction, the marriage could be invalidated and the couple
freed to marry other people.

Marital plans could be interrupted by other impediments
under canon law. The priest interrogated the prospective couple to find out if
any impediments existed, in which case a waiver or
dispensa
was required
from the diocese. The most common impediment was a blood relationship between
the couple,
consanguinidad,
because this impediment applied to family
relationships up to the fourth generation. Many people, especially those living
in villages founded by two or three settler families, shared a
great-grandparent, and this was an impediment to their marriage. However,
applications for the waiver of these impediments were regularly approved by the
archdiocese, and the marriage of first cousins was quite common. Another
obstacle to marriage was the age of the couple since those under age could not,
by law, possess free will, the assumption being that they could not appreciate
the seriousness of the life they were undertaking. In addition, a marriage
application could be invalidated by giving false information for name, marital
status, or social rank.

Marriage and the Bourbon Reforms

Until the late 18th century, church and secular
administration were simply two closely linked arms of a government that viewed
official marriage as crucial to the maintenance of social order. The church was
the wing of government that most concerned itself with supervising morality and
managing social relations. In the Bourbon reforms that began in the 1770s,
cracks between church and state widened. The secular arm of the state began to
exert more power over the church and its social functions. Primarily interested
in the stabilization of society through marriage as the nucleus of social life,
the state strengthened the parental hand, most especially that of the head of
the patriarchal household. Secular authority began to restrict the power of the
church over marriage because the state viewed the church’s emphasis on the free
will of both parties as detrimental to the creation of a stable, well-ordered
society. Beginning where stability mattered most, the administrative reforms of
1778 specified that white American couples under age 25 needed parents’
permission to marry; the racially mixed were exempt. Also, under Charles III,
economic differences joined canon law impediments as legitimate cause to
prevent a marriage. So much for love and free will.

The Decree of 1778 was followed in the 1780s by other
measures that strengthened the hand of the father. A wife was prohibited from
willing her property to a child who had effected a marriage without paternal
approval. Also, in violation of more than 200 years of emphasis on the free
will of the couple, parental consent, meaning primarily that of the father, was
made a necessary prerequisite to marriage. These measures had the effect of
limiting the power of the church to define marriage as a sacrament and emphasizing
the civil role of legitimate families. In addition, the regulations were
extended to people of mixed race.

The Spanish crown’s concern in tightening restrictions on
marriage was that unions not approved by parents created social disorder and
friction in families. The new legislation was based on the view that children
owed their parents respect, in accordance with one of the Ten Commandments, and
the church’s support of free will rather than parental consent as the basis of
marriage was destroying family values. These provisions can also be assumed to
have supported a more rigid social structure, since parents generally opposed
marriages that were considered unfavorable and could lower the family’s station
in life and its future prospects.

THE MARRIAGE NORM

The two social groups most likely to be formally married
were colonial elites and indigenous people, both for reasons having to do with
the Roman Catholic Church. In 17th-century Guadalajara, Mexico, for example,
whites represented just over half of all marriage cases, but less than
one-third of the population. The church had great power over elites because a
violation of church protocol could ruin a family’s good name, and thereby it’s
economic viability. The church also exercised tight control over the lives of
the indigenous people who needed, from the European point of view,
Christianization and civilization, meaning Europeanization. Because formal
marriage was most frequent among these two groups, we will first turn our
attention to each of them and then go on to examine marriage among people of
African descent and the racially mixed middle groups of colonial society.