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As street vendors and store owners constructed a citywide community, horizontal ties criss-crossed vertical ones, multiplying their contacts with a broad segment of the population. Business itself meant constructing networks, but those engaged in the food trade were not merely economic creatures. They had a variety of ties to others, pointing in many directions. From these connections they naturally built up solidarity with some and hostility toward others while defining themselves. Families, friendships, neighborhoods, and venues where they frequently gathered provided occasions for sociability and the sharing of cultural backgrounds as well as tense moments that could lead to negotiating compromises or heighten animosities . Even their relationships with borrowers and creditors were personal ones, laced with emotional significance. family, friends, and neighbors Family ties filled the lives of food traders, but formal marriage, although a sign of higher status, was not the usual pattern in Salvador . The proportion of married men and women to those who lived in consensual unions cannot be known, of course, since census takers did not note these latter arrangements. The historian Kátia M. de Queirós Mattoso, who has studied fragmentary manuscript schedules surviving from an 1855 census, concludes that households headed by a man listed as single but which included a single woman of appropriate age, especially one with children and no other man present, amounted to 52 percent of the total. Certainly such unions were a deeply rooted practice in Salvador, as elsewhere in Brazil and Portugal . Foreign travelers commented on them, in one case saying that Chapter 3 connections Graham-final.indb 54 Graham-final.indb 54 6/30/10 10:32:11 AM 6/30/10 10:32:11 AM connections 55 “marriage is rejected by the majority.” Anyway, the less affluent could hardly be expected to undertake expensive Church-sanctioned marriages , the only legal ones, although there were ways to get around such obstacles.1 Surely concubinage had its own rules and understandings, but because it operated informally, it remains largely hidden from our gaze. But not always. The children of a concubine—in the probate documents that I examined the word is never used to signify a passing relationship or an adulterous one—had many legal rights, and lawyers, witnesses, and judges spoke favorably of the children’s mother as having been “always understood, held, and maintained as a concubine [sempre havida, theúda, e mantheúda como concubina].”2 Evidence from other places in Brazil drawn from civil and ecclesiastical court cases reveals that in these unions almost all the men enjoyed higher status than the women by virtue of class, race, or legal status (free). Marriage was only for equals, although not all equals married. The man could certainly be patronizing, as was one who declared, “I have always remained in the state of bachelorhood and had no children until now and, therefore, I institute as my sole heir Theresa de Jesus with whom I have lived and from whom I have received important services in carrying out her duties, therefore making herself worthy of my gratitude.” Portuguese men, most of whom moved to Brazil in their youth, frequently entered into such relationships with women of color, as their wills disclosed. One declared that “at no time was I ever married and, as a bachelor, by my weakness I had repeated carnal copulations with one of my slaves named Francisca and from them I have a daughter whom I had baptized with the name of Josefa, whom I hereby institute as the heir of both parts of my goods.” The unequal terms of such a liaison are obvious, but that does not rule out mutual attraction and affection.3 Men often explicitly acknowledged the children of such longterm consensual unions as theirs, firmly transforming them into legal heirs. Typical was the case of Bartolomeu Francisco Gomes, a cattle merchant and store owner, who made Epifânia Maria da Conceição, “in whose company I have lived for sixteen years,” the executor of his estate and recognized his paternity of her two daughters. When a concubine died, the man might subsequently establish a similar association with another woman, having had children by both and treating the children of both unions as all his. The grocer José Pinto de Almeida lived with Raimunda Veríssiama de Jesus until her death, Graham-final.indb 55 Graham-final.indb 55 6/30/10 10:32:12 AM 6/30/10 10:32:12 AM [3.137.174.216] Project...

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