Family

It would be difficult to overemphasize the role of the elite family in the organization of the colonial economy (production and distribution) and in the development of political institutions in Latin America. One explanation is that both Spain and Portugal established the family as the appropriate institution for purposes of settlement, land distribution, and political power. For example, Spain preferred to award encomiendas (grants of Indian labor) to married men (who were, preferably, married to Spanish women). These encomenderos (who also received a seat on the city council) were required to establish a Casa Poblada, a house on the town square of the Spanish seat of government large enough to house thirty-five people and to supply horses and arms sufficient for seventeen men. One result of this policy was that many of the encomendero's Spanish relatives or friends migrated and became a part of his effective extended family and business arrangements.

In Brazil the Donatario system that originally was intended to facilitate settlement and development also resulted in the dominance of the original grantee and his relatives. Land grants were based on the productive potential (capital, slaves) of the petitioner and led to a system of Latifundia, in which a small group of families had effective control over production. In the same way, the Brazilian city councils were made up of homens boms (good men). "Good men" were defined as married men of property, legitimate birth, and clean blood (i.e., no Jewish or Moorish background and no history of vile occupations, such as merchant). "Good men" were "elected" by the "good men" already serving on the council. Thus the hierarchy reproduced itself. The city councils had unusual importance in Brazil because there were so few crown administrators. Many villages were literally hundreds of miles from the residence of any official. The "royal judges" constantly traveled between towns and villages, attempting to provide some semblance of law. But much of this was completely ineffective, and only the power of the dominant families and their personal "armies" determined what could happen within a settlement.

In terms of economic development, the elite family was essential. Neither the Spanish nor the Portuguese crown provided much in terms of resources to build public buildings, roads, or port facilities. Nor did they provide armies separate from the colonial militias. Instead, it was the elite families who organized contributions of building materials, slave labor, and other materials for these projects. True, the Indians in Repartimiento labor in Spanish America also worked and often died working on public projects, but the labor of these Indians was directed through elite Spanish encomenderos, who organized the gathering of appropriate materials. For Brazil these tasks were always performed by the slaves of elite families who contributed their labor for the cause.

Elite families in Latin America intermarried with each other, creating within politically defined regions clusters of kin who controlled both politics and the local economy. In addition, the inherited Iberian trait of "patriarchalism," enforced through law and tradition, gave the male head of lineage authority over his kindred throughout the colonial period. By the nineteenth century, it was the domestic group, rather than the kindred, that was dominated by the patriarchal figure.

Inheritance was the major means of property distribution until the end of the nineteenth century, when limited partnerships and incorporation laws were passed. In the absence of limited liability, prudence dictated that business partners also be cousins or brothers-in-law. Furthermore, most elite men established their households and businesses with the help of their wife's dowry until the nineteenth century, when other factors such as education became more important and the dowry gradually disappeared.

Indigenous families in Latin America went through an exceedingly difficult period in the sixteenth century, when from 40 to 90 percent of them died, mostly of European diseases brought in by the conquistadores. The recovery of these populations involved substantial miscegenation with Europeans and Africans, as well as the forced coresidence of tribes (congregación) formerly hostile to each other. Indigenous families utilized the European institution of ritual kinship to reestablish ties of reciprocity and exchange in their shattered communities. This means of "family creation" was also adopted by African slaves brought in from diverse areas of Africa, who sometimes also viewed those who traveled in the same slave ship as members of their family.

In religious and legal terms the Latin American family system was based on European categories. Kinship was bilateral, with kin counted on both the maternal and the paternal side. It was also widely extended, with kinship recognized to the seventh or tenth degree. Ritual kinship (compadrazgo in Spanish) had substantial importance as both a means of recognizing reciprocal obligations and as a category that required church dispensation for marriage to take place. It could also be used to reinforce a kin relationship or to formalize a patron-client relationship, and was highly significant as a means of expanding kindred on an interclass basis. Divorce and remarriage had been common among the pre-Hispanic cultures of Latin America. While the Catholic Church sometimes allowed "separation of bed and board" in exceptional circumstances, remarriage was never permitted in colonial Latin America. Furthermore, spouses were legally required to cohabit.

The average household in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Latin America was relatively small (between four and six free members), both in urban and rural areas, with more affluent households generally being larger. This picture is similar to that of Europe over three centuries. What was unexpected, however, was the evidence that household size in Latin America increased significantly in both the rural and urban areas during the nineteenth century as the domestic unit expanded its productive capacity and oriented itself toward the marketplace. Just as families played an important role in the development of roads and other infrastructures and were important sources of credit, so also the early stages of commercialization and industrialization were almost always organized through the household. The low levels of liquid capital, the precarious condition of markets, and poor communications all meant that factories developed very slowly and that, for a long time, households followed a mixed economy of subsistence and market production. At a later stage in industrialization, the participation of the household and family in the exchange economy ceased to be a matter of choice. Capitalism overpowered prior modes of production as the economy took on an export character.

From the late eighteenth century until at least 1870, commercialization and protoindustrialization in Latin America were characterized by urban communities with 25 to 45 percent female-headed households. In some cases they were more common than couple-headed or single-male-headed households. This is particularly startling, for the female-headed household has never been the modal type in published studies of European or American communities, nor have female-headed households typically been portrayed as exceeding 10 to 15 percent of total households in a comparable historical period elsewhere. The high frequency of the female-headed household in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Latin America appears to have been related to the peculiar characteristics of the changes in modes of production in Latin America and to the development of protoindustrial households based on domestic industry.

The prevalence of this form of household in nineteenth-century Latin America suggests much greater autonomy for women of all classes than had been perceived previously. It indicates that the nineteenth-century domestic unit was determined more by the productive organization of the household than by consumption, sexual ties, or affective needs. The reproductive unit (a mother with her children) was generally retained, but stable couple units were notable by their absence, particularly among the urban lower classes.

Female-headed households in the early nineteenth century were predominantly lower-class and involved in such occupations as subsistence agriculture (in the rural areas), textile or cigarette manufacture, and services such as laundering, ironing clothes, or preparing food to sell in the street. Many female-headed households were created through the dissolution of consensual unions that had been organized around the domestic mode of production in agriculture. The commercialization of agriculture resulted in a change in productive patterns and the migration of many men to areas of agricultural employment, leaving women and children either to continue subsistence agriculture or to migrate in search of better opportunities in urban areas. In the nineteenth century, development efforts tended to victimize the lower-class family, as they still do today.

Another dimension of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century household organization was the presence of non-related members (allegados, agregados), particularly in lower-class or female-headed urban households, often comprising up to 30 percent of household members. Accepting allegados into a household appears to have been a major strategy to alleviate financial difficulties in periods of urbanization and economic change for both family and nonrelated members. In some cases the non-related members may simply have been boarding with a family, either paying money or providing services such as housework, child care, water carrying, and the like. Housing shortages also accounted for some of this development. Still another dimension of the presence of non-related members in the household was the expansion in this period of the workshop attributes of the household. It became common to include apprentices, clerks, cashiers, and other helpers involved in the productive side of the household in its residential arrangements. Elite families also commonly incorporated agregados (including orphans, relatives, Indian captives in Brazil, and others) into their households, where they generally functioned as domestic servants.

Today, families in urban working-class communities depend on wages for support, though these are often uncertain and frequently insufficient to cover the needs of the household. Consequently household members try to acquire access to auxiliary resources, including extra employment benefits, state services, nonmonetary inputs from home production, and benefits from wider exchanges among kin or neighbors. In addition, the household often has multiple earners as well as earners with multiple employment.

Positive mechanisms utilized by poor households to defend themselves against inadequate wages and poor access to social services have been characterized as "family survival strategies." In the case of female-headed families, the increase in poor households headed by women is directly related to processes of modernization, including internal and international migration, mechanization of agriculture, the development of agribusiness, urbanization, overpopulation, lower-class marginality, and the emergence of a class system of wage labor. Female-headed households are not only more likely to be poor than are other households, but they are also less likely to be employed in formal-sector jobs and, therefore, are frequently excluded from other benefits associated with employment.

In twentieth-century rural communities, household size, the organization of household labor, the use or sale of household production, and the overall mode of production continue to be closely related. Important strategies for survival and social mobility among peasant families include marriage, fertility, inheritance, and migration. Among Peruvian peasant families, it is common for the youngest son to inherit the parents' house, living with them in their declining years and taking over the farm after their deaths by purchasing the inheritance shares from his siblings. In some areas, the migration of adult children to new farmlands (in order to avoid extreme parcelization of properties) has been succeeded, as lands become unavailable, by migration to urban areas for employment, as well as by rural wage labor. Remittances from migrants in the United States to family members in their home countries have in fact become critical to the overall economic growth in Mexico and Central America. In Mexico, only oil and maquiladora profits surpass revenue from remittances. Diverse family survival strategies involving several workers and types of relations (wage laborer, sharecropper, unpaid family laborer, estate tenant) are commonly joined for mutual benefit. Thus, while proletarianization makes labor more of an individual enterprise, it may still be strongly oriented toward family goals.

Often scholars of the family have assumed an "ideology of solidarity and cooperation within the family." Recent studies, although acknowledging that such an ideology exists, have emphasized that it is important to know how economic changes affect power relations within the household and family. For example, the proletarianization of rural labor in Brazil may have resulted in a decline in the solidarity of the lower-class rural family. This occurs because the husband cannot fulfill his role as provider and because the redefinition of wage labor tasks by gender has forced women and young girls into the most intensive, seasonal, and the lowest-paying jobs. Women give their entire wage to the household, but the older sons resist, paying only room and board, and the husband keeps drinking money. Many women resent having to accept wage labor and prefer to care for their houses and their families themselves. In addition, women's labor is often used to facilitate the entrance of children into the labor force. People sometimes ask whether the contemporary family in Latin America has declined in importance as compared to the colonial period. While modernization has definitely changed the definitions and roles of the family, in the twenty-first century the family and kin network continue to be the primary units on which individuals depend for support, regardless of their class. In that regard, the Latin American family will always be critical.

See alsoAgregado; Children; Class Structure in Modern Latin America; Donatários; Encomienda; Marriage and Divorce.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gilberto Freyre, The Masters and the Slaves, translated by Samuel Putnam (1933); Journal of Family History, special issues on Latin America: 3, no. 4 (1978), 10, no. 3 (1985), and 16, no. 3 (1991).

Elizabeth Kuznesof, "Household and Family Studies," in K. Lynn Stoner, ed., Latinas of the Americas: A Source Book (1989), pp. 305-388.

Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (1991).

Additional Bibliography

Borges, Dain. The Family in Bahia, Brazil, 1870–1945. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992.

Boyer, Richard E. Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family, and Community in Colonial Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Fomby, Paula. Mexican Migrants and Their Parental Households in Mexico. New York: LFB Scholarly Publishers, 2005.

Frank, Zephyr L. Dutra's World: Wealth and Family in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janiero. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004.

Htun, Mala. Sex and the State: Abortion, Divorce, and the Family under Latin American Dictatorships and Democracies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Hünefeldt, Christine. Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor among Lima's Slaves, 1800–1854. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Martínez, Rubén. Crossing Over: A Mexican Family on the Migrant Trail. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001.

Novais, Fernando A., ed. História da vida privada no Brasil. 4 vols. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997–1998.

Pino, Julio César. Family and Favela: The Reproduction of Poverty in Rio de Janeiro. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997.

Teixeira, Paulo Eduardo. O outro lado da família brasileira: Mulheres chefes de famílias, 1765–1850. Campinas, Brazil: Editora UNICAMP (State University of Campinas), 2004.

Torrado, Susana. Historia de la familia en la Argentina moderna (1870–2000). Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 2003.

Twinam, Ann. Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999.

                                      Elizabeth Kuznesof