Familia y orden colonial (review)

Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru is a distinguished historian whose earlier work on the history of education and women led her to the study of the family. In this work, she considers the relationship between public and private order, principally but not solely, in Mexico City during the colonial period.

The book is divided into three sections: "El Orden Intolerable," "Historias de Familia y Familias sin Historia," and "El Desorden de una Sociedad Ordenada." The first section is the most general; it concerns the application of medieval Spanish legislation to sixteenth-century Mexico; natural law and the validity of pre-Christian indigenous marriages; and the contradictions and conflicts between traditional Christian morality and modern common sense. Gonzalbo uses aptly chosen anecdotes to illustrate the abstract points she is making. I especially enjoyed the story of a man who admired the "devotion" of another's wife in church and was later discovered hiding in her bedroom. Rather than ending with bloodshed, the husband, his wife, and her admirer all attended mass together. Gonzalbo is a gifted writer with a special talent for summing up: "En estos casos, la fragil barrera entre lo privado y lo público dependía del grosor de los muros, de la altura de las ventanas, de la agudeza del oído de los vecinos, de la imaginación de los timoratos, y en casi todos los casos, de las envidias y rencores de los denunciantes" (p. 84).

The second section focuses on the seventeenth-century and makes up nearly half of the book. Here Gonzalbo considers the fragmentation of families by transatlantic migration, the construction of new families in the New World, the intermarriage of elite families, the effects of demographic decline on rural indigenous families, and issues of power and family prestige. She remarks that powerful officials were circumspect in their appraisals of candidates for official appointments knowing that "el insistente pedigüeño de hoy podía convertirse en el despótico funcionario de mañana" (p. 129). The chapter on "Los Recursos Familiares de Adaptación" marks a shift to parrochial and notarial documentation, principally records of some 25,110 baptisms and 7,299 marriages in the Mexico City parishes of Sagrario and Santa Veracruz in the 1650s and 1660s and hundreds of wills from 1640-1680. The section concludes with an outstanding chapter on the historical background of Iberian slavery and the history of people of African heritage in Mexico.

The third section is much shorter. It begins with the eighteenth-century elite's "enlightened" concerns about disorder in society and moves quickly to further quantitative analysis of additional thousands of baptisms and hundreds of marriages from the two Mexico City parishes in the 1780s and an ecclesiastical census from 1777. These are compared with the earlier data from the seventeenth century. A very interesting discussion of "Baroque Piety and Demographic Oscillations" included here might better have been part of the earlier section since there is only a concluding paragraph tying it to the late eighteenth century. Gonzalbo turns her attention here to measuring the effects of seasonal restrictions on sexual activity, specifically the abstention from sexual relations during Lent, as a measure of the religiosity of the population. Most demographic studies of the Lenten sexual renunciation use monthly totals over fairly long periods and do not take into account the change from one year to the next in when Lent began. Gonzalbo has taken the changing dates of Lent into account by grouping years with similar starting dates. This is a significant innovation, but the seventeenth-century pattern could have been compared to corresponding data from the eighteenth century.

Gonzalbo concludes that the model family based on medieval Castillian legislation and Tridentine Catholic norms contrasted with a wide variety of historical family types. The contradictions between the ideal and real were resolved by the Church when they became widely known, but the community...