Los hijos del pecado: ilegitimidad y vida familiar en la Santafe de Bogota colonial (review)

Los hijos del pecado: ilegitimidad y vida familiar en la Santafé de Bogotá colonial. By Guiomar Dueñas Vargas. Bogotá: Editorial Universidad Nacional, 1997. Plates. Maps. Tables. Figures. Notes. Bibliography. 284 pp. Paper.

In recent years historians of the family have turned their attention to illegitimacy, concubinage, and other "illicit" aspects of domestic life in the Latin American past. This burgeoning literature, however, includes few full-length monographs that place such phenomena in a broad social and political context. Guiomar Dueñas Vargas's book on eighteenth-century Santafé de Bogotá is a welcome contribution in this regard. What her book does best is to show how domestic practices and the broader socio-racial order characterized by mestizaje, status hierarchies, and social polarization were ineluctably intertwined. While the notion that "private" behaviors and the "public" sphere are interdependent has become something of a truism in many historical circles, Dueñas actually describes the social practices that underlay this dynamic. She convincingly argues, for example, that in colonial Bogotá marriage functioned as a marker of status. Matrimony was limited mostly to a white elite who monopolized the civil and religious privileges it conferred. Cultural and legal norms of endogamy, in turn, reinforced the barriers among different racial and status groups that hardened in the late eighteenth century.

Some of Dueñas's findings echo what we already know about other colonial Latin American societies. She reports high and growing illegitimacy rates in eighteenth-century Bogotá, especially among the castas, as well as an increased urban population in which women greatly outnumbered men and matrifocality was widespread; in fact, an 1801 census survey shows that almost 50 percent of all families in the city were headed by females. The demographic patterns may be clear, but what do they suggest? Here Dueñas moves beyond parish records and census data to examine judicial, inquisitional and notarial records, as well as contemporary social commentary. Widespread concubinage, she argues, was in part a consequence of women's weak position in an urban marriage market in which females significantly outnumbered males. Consensual unions, thus, implied a lower status for women and their children who "found themselves deprived of the legal and labor benefits the colonial state offered to its legitimate subjects" (p. 163). Thus while single mothers and their children were accepted by their communities, they faced legal discrimination and entrenched poverty.

Dueñas could have provided more empirical evidence for some of her assertions. For example, the relationship she posits between widespread concubinage and women's weak social position, while intriguing and certainly plausible, remains more speculative than proven. Indeed, one wonders if the opposite conclusion might also be drawn: that consensual unions were associated with a measure of power for women who were not subject to indissoluble patriarchal marriage and who may have enjoyed more legal control over their property, wages, and children than their lawfully wedded counterparts.

Interpretive differences aside, Dueñas should be commended for having tackled these issues in the first place: she has moved beyond a strictly demographic framework to explore the social meanings and cultural practices associated with illegitimacy, concubinage, and other aspects of domestic life. Moreover, by placing these phenomena in a broader social and political context, her study serves as a welcome reminder and convincing demonstration that "private" lives and the socio-racial order are most fruitfully understood as working in concert. In this sense, she has succeeded in writing a book about ilegitimidad y vida familiar that is much more than the sum of its parts.

Nara Milanich
Yale University

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