Familiar: Thinking beyond lineage and across race in Spanish atlantic family history

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 70, Issue 2, 2013, Pages 295-316

  Premo, Bianca ^a  

^a FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 84887449550     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 19337698     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5309/willmaryquar.70.2.0295     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. "Familia⋯. Los hijos, pero también los padres y abuelos y los demás ascendientes del linaje⋯ que por otro nombre decimos parentela. Y debajo desta palabra familia se entiende el señor y su mujer, y los demás que tiene de su mando, como hijos, criados, esclavos"; "Familiaridad. La comunicación y amistad muy casera, que uno suele tener con otro, y aunque sea uno dellos señor, suele tratar al inferior familiarmente, comúnicandole los negocios de su casa, hacienda y persona," in Sebastián de Covarrubias Orozco, Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, 2d ed., ed. Felipe C. R. Maldonado, rev. by Manuel Camarero (1611; repr., Madrid, 1995), 536. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
2. I borrow the term genealogical fictions from María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, Calif., 2008).
3. On the endurance of elite definitions of family, see Nara B. Milanich, Children of Fate: Childhood, Class, and the State in Chile, 1850-1930 (Durham, N.C., 2009). Milanich points out that in republican Chile "'family' ⋯ marked a distinct, and distinctly privileged, set of gendered and generational dependencies to which not all progenitors, nor all offspring, belonged." Ibid., 12.
4. Note that more than twenty years ago, Asunción Lavrin remarked that studies of marriage had been dominated by scholars who viewed the institution as a "social and economic mechanism binding the interests of families and expressing class or group objectives rather than personal emotions." See Lavrin, "Introduction: The Scenario, the Actors, and the Issues," in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Lavrin (Lincoln, Neb., 1989), 1-43 (quotation, 2).
5. On Spain, see Allyson Poska, "Elusive Virtue: Rethinking the Role of Chastity in Early Modern Spain," Journal of Early Modern History 8, nos. 1-2 (2004): 135-46.
6. On Spanish America, see Pablo Rodríguez, Seducción, amancebamiento y abandono en la colonia (Bogotá, 1991);
7. Pilar Gonzablo Aizpuru and Cecilia Rabell, comps., La familia en el mundo iberoamericano (Mexico City, 1994);
8. María Emma Mannarelli, Pecados públicos: La ilegitimidad en Lima, siglo XVII (Lima, 1994);
9. Rodríguez, Sentimientos y vida familiar en el Nuevo Reino de Grenada, siglo XVIII (Bogotá, 1997);
10. Guiomar Dueñas Vargas, Los hijos del pecado: Ilegitimidad y vida familiar en la Santafé de Bogotá colonial (Bogotá, 1997);
11. Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America (Stanford, Calif., 1999), esp. 126-83.
12. Pioneering work on illegitimacy also includes Muriel Nazzari, "An Urgent Need to Conceal: The System of Honor and Shame in Colonial Brazil," in The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America, ed. Lyman L. Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1998), 103-26;
13. Nara Milanich, "Historical Perspectives on Illegitimacy and Illegitimates in Latin America," in Minor Omissions: Children in Latin American History and Society, ed. Tobias Hecht (Madison, Wis., 2002), 72-101;
14. Linda Lewin, Surprise Heirs, vol. 1, Illegitimacy, Patrimonial Rights, and Legal Nationalism in Luso-Brazilian Inheritance, 1750-1821 (Stanford, Calif., 2003);
15. Lewin, Surprise Heirs, vol. 2, Illegitimacy, Inheritance Rights, and Public Power in the Formation of Imperial Brazil, 1822-1889 (Stanford, Calif., 2003).
16. On the shift away from viewing diverse family forms as inherently dysfunctional, see Robert E. McCaa, "Introduction," in special issue, ed. McCaa, Journal of Family History: Studies in Family, Kinship, and Demography 16, no. 3 (1991): 211-14 (quotation, 211).
17. On child circulation, see Ondina E. González and Bianca Premo, eds., Raising an Empire: Children in Early Modern Iberia and Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 2007);
18. Jessaca B. Leinaweaver, The Circulation of Children: Kinship, Adoption, and Morality in Andean Peru (Durham, N.C., 2008);
19. Milanich, Children of Fate.
20. On the tautology inherent in viewing the existence of castas - hybrid race categories - as a failure of a (presumably already fixed) caste system, see Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 4. Also see Kathryn Burns's comments on academics' contemporary construction of race categories and the complex histories of colonial caste: Burns, "Unfixing Race," in Rereading the Black Legend: The Discourses of Religious and Racial Difference in the Renaissance Empires, ed. Margaret R. Greer, Walter D. Mignolo, and Maureen Quilligan (Chicago, 2007), 188-202.
21. Here I am indebted to Ann Laura Stoler's description of the "tense and tender ties" of colonialism and of the centrality of "sentimental education" to the colonial project. She argues that "identifiying the production and harnessing of sentiment as a technology of the colonial state ⋯ sets a research agenda [that allows us to] appreciat[e] how much politics of compassion was not an oppositional assault on empire but a fundamental element of it." Stoler, "Tense and Tender Ties: The Politics of Comparison in North American History and (Post) Colonial Studies," Journal of American History 88, no. 3 (December 2001): 829-65;
22. Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley, Calif., 2002), 19 ("sentimental"). However, her focus is on state-led programs of fostering proper sentiment between servants and the children of colonizers. I propose here that colonialism, at least in the context of the Spanish colonies, also relied on the creation of multiple cross-caste, circum-Atlantic, intergenerational alliances that predated a strict divide between the public and the private and operated sui generis, outside the coordinated state programs that intensified in the late eighteenth century.
23. Familiar had an additional, perhaps tangentially related, meaning in the Spanish Atlantic, referring to informants of the Inquisition who were required to prove purity of blood. See Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 64.
24. Sarah M. S. Pearsall, Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (New York, 2008).
25. Naomi Tadmor, Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001), 21-24.
26. As an example of the overlap between concepts of family and household, Sandra Lauderdale Graham has observed the interchangeability of the terms family, dwelling, and hearth in nineteenth-century Brazil. See Graham, House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro (1988; repr., Austin, Tex., 2002), 11.
27. Adopting a last name was not a requirement for slaves and servants in the Spanish Atlantic since there were other means of identification, such as regional origin, ethnicity, color, or occupation. Research on Lima suggests that when slaves did adopt, or were prescribed, a last name in ecclesiastical and legal documents, that last name was most frequently their owner's. See María del Carmen Cuba Manrique, "Antroponimia e identidad de los negros esclavos en el Perú," Escritura y Pensamiento 5, no. 10 (2002): 123-34, esp. 134.
28. R. Douglas Cope finds that around 6 percent of all slaves in seventeenth-century Mexico City used a master's last name. See Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660-1720 (Madison, Wis., 1994), 61.
29. On Indians and Spanish patrons' last names, see Karen B. Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550-1700 (Stanford, Calif., 2007), 108.
30. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (New York, 2001), 104-7.
31. Many scholars have begun to profitably work around the formulaic language of wills. See Kris Lane, "Captivity and Redemption: Aspects of Slave Life in Early Colonial Quito and Popayán," Americas 57, no. 2 (October 2000): 225-46;
32. Michelle A. McKinley, "Till Death Do Us Part: Testamentary Manumission in Seventeenth-Century Lima, Peru," Slavery and Abolition 33, no. 3 (September 2012): 381-401.
33. Ruth Hill, Hierarchy, Commerce and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America: A Postal Inspector's Exposé (Nashville, Tenn., 2005), 200.
34. On the failure to segregate city inhabitants by class and a general questioning of race-based hierarchies as the most pervasive parts of colonial subjects' lives, see Karen Vieira Powers, "Conquering Discourses of 'Sexual Conquest': Of Women, Language, and Mestizaje," Colonial Latin American Review 11, no. 1 (2002): 7-32, esp. 25.
35. On the desegregated living arrangements of the lower classes and prevalence of patron-client relations in the colonial city, see Cope, Limits of Racial Domination.
36. This, of course, begs the question of whether familiaridad was an exclusively or especially urban phenomenon. Work on rural areas of Latin America, such as Alida C. Metcalf's nowclassic study of family in Santana de Parnaíba, Brazil, convincingly show that different groups - in this case, class groups of slaves, peasants, and planters - had "fundamentally different family lives." Metcalf, Family and Frontier in Colonial Brazil: Santana de Parnaíba, 1580-1822 (1992; repr., Austin, Tex., 2005), 6-7 (quotation, 7).
37. Yet certain kinship ties between rural groups, for example in the form of "vertical" godparentage, did exist. Ibid., 188-90 (quotation, 189), 138. On Lima as a South Seas hub and Baroque border city between the Andes and the East, see Alejandra B. Osorio, Inventing Lima: Baroque Modernity in Peru's South Sea Metropolis (New York, 2008).
38. Population numbers derive from my sample of 16.7 percent of the households from a 1700 census, reproduced as Noble David Cook, comp., Numeración general de todas las personas de ambos sexos, edades, y calidades q[ue] se hà hecho en esta Ciudad de Lima, año de 1700 (Lima, 1985).
39. For sampling methods, see Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King: Youth, Authority, and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2005), 257.
40. Paul J. Charney, "El indio urbano: Un análisis económico y social de la población india de Lima en 1613," Histórica 12, no. 1 (July 1988): 5-33, esp. 7.
41. Nancy E. van Deusen, "Diasporas, Bondage, and Intimacy in Lima, 1535 to 1555," Colonial Latin American Review 19, no. 2 (August 2010): 247-77 (quotation, 249).
42. Ibid., 255 ("good service"), 258 ("ant hill[s]"). The adoption of the Spanish-Andean concept of originario, a local native as opposed to an indigenous migrant, by peoples of African descent in the seventeenth-century coastal city of Trujillo is described in Rachel Sarah O'Toole, Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru (Pittsburgh, 2012),
43. and the Indian adoption of the concept of American-born slaves encapsulated in the term creole is discussed in Karen B. Graubart, "The Creolization of the New World: Local Forms of Identification in Urban Colonial Peru, 1560-1640," Hispanic American Historical Review 89, no. 3 (August 2009): 471-99.
44. See Paul Charney, "Negotiating Roots: Indian Migrants in the Lima Valley during the Colonial Period," Colonial Latin American Historical Review 5, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 1-20.
45. For this view in the case of Indian women who migrated to cities, see Elinor C. Burkett, "Indian Women and White Society: The Case of Sixteenth-Century Peru," in Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives, ed. Asunción Lavrin (Westport, Conn., 1978), 101-28.
46. Lyn Brandon Lowry, "Forging an Indian Nation: Urban Indians under Spanish Colonial Control (Lima, Peru, 1535-1765)" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1991), 207.
47. The census, a 1613 count undertaken by Miguel Contreras, has been published as Contreras, Padrón de los In[dio]s que se hallaron en la ciuda[d] de los Reyes [del] Pirú hecho e virtud de Commisió del Ex.mo s.RMR Qs de Montes claros Virei DL Piru, transcr. Mauro Escobar Gamboa (Lima, 1968). These asientos de aprendiz (apprentice contracts) are found in Protocolos Notariales, Notary Juan de Beltrán, 1699, Protocolos 215, fol. 93, Archivo General de la Nación (AGN), Lima, Peru; Protocolos Notariales, Notary F. C. Arrendando, 1722, Protocolos 59, fols. 789-90, ibid.
48. For an analysis of adult representation at apprenticeship signing, see Premo, Children of the Father King, 57.
49. Also see Teresa C. Vergara, "Growing Up Indian: Migration, Labor, and Life in Lima (1570-1640)," in González and Premo, Raising an Empire, 75-106, esp. 80-81;
50. Charney, Colonial Latin American Historical Review 5: 11-12.
51. Some Andeans moved into urban areas only temporarily, later resettling and creating new rural communities of forastero (foreign) Indians in the countryside or integrating through marriage into originario (native, original) communities depopulated by migration, death, and coerced labor. See Ann M. Wightman, Indigenous Migration and Social Change: The Forasteros of Cuzco, 1570-1720 (Durham, N.C., 1990), esp. 85.
52. On indigenous marriage patterns, see Jesús A. Cosamalón Aguilar, Indios detrás de la muralla: Matrimonios indígenas y convivencia inter-racial en Santa Ana (Lima, 1795-1820) (Lima, 1999), 138-49.
53. In the first generation after conquest, noble indigenous girls were enrolled in convents, where their families, like those of Spanish nuns, could enjoy a financial relationship with the institution that Kathryn Burns has dubbed a "spiritual economy." Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham, N.C., 1999), 3-6.
54. For the complexity of family metaphors inside Lima's convents, see Luis Martín, Daughters of the Conquistadors: Women of the Viceroyalty of Peru (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1983), 192-200;
55. On commoner indigenous girls, see Vergara, "Growing Up Indian," 95.
56. For similar ties of reciprocity in late colonial northern Mexico, see Laura Shelton, "Like a Servant or Like a Son? Circulating Children in Northwestern Mexico (1790-1850)," in González and Premo, Raising an Empire, 219-37, esp. 230-32.
57. Patronage extended well into adulthood. Domestic service could also be a stopover for single adult Indian women on a larger trajectory of entrepreneurship. See Graubart, With Our Labor, 65-67.
58. In addition, a significant number of elites carrying the honorific title "don," a large percentage of whom can be presumed to have been Spanish patrons, served as witnesses for indigenous marriages in Lima. See Cosamalón, Indios detrás, 139.
59. The prevalence of the term familiar among servants and slaves might be due to the etymological relationship between the words family and slave. Note David Herlihy's observation that the Latin root of familia derived from famulus, or "slave." Herlihy, "Family," American Historical Review 96, no. 1 (February 1991): 1-16, esp. 2.
60. For a legal delineation of what it meant for a slave minor to be a familiar, defined in terms of the limits on the state's power to punish a slave, see "Autos criminals que se sigue por don Antonio Lopes," 1789, Cabildo, Criminal, legajo (leg.) 9, causa (c.) 2, fol. 106, AGN.
61. On gendered and generational patterns of slave manumission, see Stuart B. Schwartz, "The Manumission of Slaves in Colonial Brazil: Bahia, 1684-1745," Hispanic American Historical Review 54, no. 4 (November 1974): 603-35;
62. Frederick P. Bowser, "The Free Person of Color in Mexico City and Lima: Manumission and Opportunity, 1580-1650," in Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Eugene D. Genovese (Princeton, N.J., 1975), 331-63.
63. Historians logically have wondered whether the freed slave children were male masters' illegitimate offspring, and in Lima slave mothers certainly regarded bearing their masters' children to be grounds for the manumission of either themselves or their children. See for example the case a slave woman named Rosa leveled against her priest-master in 1791: "Autos seguidos por Rosa Montenegro contra Manuel Baeza, presbítero, sobre que quell e otrorgue escritura de venta," 1791, Causas de Negros, leg. 32, no. 29, Archivo Arzobispal de Lima, Peru.
64. But Frank "Trey" Proctor III challenges the assumption that most manumitted children were the offspring of male masters, finding instead that in colonial Mexico, female owners frequently manumitted children who had been born into their households. See Proctor, "Gender and the Manumission of Slaves in New Spain," Hispanic American Historical Review 86, no. 2 (May 2006): 309-36.
65. Also see Christine Hünefeldt, Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima's Slaves, 1800-1854 (Los Angeles, 1994).
66. Slaves also privileged information gleaned from nonslave individuals whom they deemed to be familiares in master households. See the dubbing of a mestizo tundidor (fabric cutter) as a "familiar" and confdante of slave residents in the household of the Provisor General of Ica in "Autos seguidos por Antonio Ansieta," 1785, Real Audiencia, Causas Civiles, leg. 256, c. 2252, n.p., AGN. On marriage, godparentage, and familiaridad among slaves and free blacks in Mexico, see Herman L. Bennett, Africans in Colonial Mexico: Absolutism, Christianity, and Afro-Creole Consciousness, 1570-1640 (Bloomington, Ind., 2003), 88-91.
67. For similar processes of slave-route kin making in Brazil, see James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2003), esp. 32-33.
68. For Mexico, see Bennett, Africans, 112, 117-20.
69. Of course, affection itself was a changing concept during the colonial period in Spanish America. Scholars have various opinions on precisely how romantic and paternal love evolved, with some claiming that traditional early modern Spanish notions of love were subordinated in the late eighteenth century to the passion of interest and others pointing out that expressions of romantic love and paternal sentiment grew in the late colonial and republican periods. For the first view, see Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico: Conficts over Marriage Choice, 1574-1821 (Stanford, Calif., 1988), 23, 48-56.
70. On the greater expression of romantic love, see Rebecca Earle, "Letters and Love in Colonial Spanish America," Americas 62, no. 1 (July 2005): 17-46.
71. Jeffrey M. Shumway, The Case of the Ugly Suitor and Other Histories of Love, Gender, and Nation in Buenos Aires, 1776-1870 (Lincoln, Neb., 2005).
72. Santa Cruz de Atocha and its students' applications have been previously explored by Martín, Daughters of the Conquistadores, 99-100;
73. Mannarelli, Pecados públicos, 282-305;