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chapter 4 Death, Debt, and Inheritance Families and the Circulation of Credit In 1828, Alcalde Pasqual Iñigo of Pueblo de Seris traveled to the home of the deceased Don Vicente Antúnez to pay his final respects to the local landowner. Antúnez was not a wealthy man, but he did have land and some livestock. As the nearest judicial authority, Iñigo’s visit was also a matter of business. He needed to carry out an inventory of Antúnez’s belongings and find out if he left a will. We cannot know if Iñigo was surprised to find that local merchant Ambrosio García Noriega had already arrived, hoping to collect the considerable sum of 225 pesos from Antúnez’s troubled estate. Antúnez also owed several neighbors and relatives smaller amounts, usually between 5 and 50 pesos, as well as cattle , mules, and sides of beef. By the time Iñigo divided Antúnez’s estate among his creditors, including the eager García Noriega, Antúnez’s heirs were left with nothing. Like many rural Sonorans, Antúnez established informal credit relationships with neighbors and kin to operate his ranch. It was an effective strategy for managing finances in a region that faced chronic currency shortages and lacked a formal lending system, but as Antúnez’s wife and children learned, an untimely death could still be disastrous for heirs.1 In this chapter I use civil debt disputes and wills to analyze the changing relationship between petty credit and debt servitude in Sonora during the early republican era. The events surrounding Antúnez’s death reveal some important patterns in the circulation of petty credit in early republican Sonora, and how it changed over the course of the nineteenth century. First, the death of a relative was at once a public and an intimate affair. The business of settling estates began in the home among mourners as opposed to an actual courtroom. Antúnez’s death, like many others recorded in Sonora’s civil court records, reflects the frequency with which local officials came into intimate contact with residents in the course of their duties. In these mostly rural communities, news of death traveled quickly among mourning relatives and neighbors, but one could death, debt, and inheritance 97 also find creditors such as Ambrosio García Noriega, who wasted little time before they called to collect their debts. Second, during the late colonial and early republican eras, Sonora’s credit system was based largely on ties of family and friendship, often cementedbybondsofcompadrazgoorgodparentage.Sonorahadnoformal lending institutions, with the exception of merchant houses that catered largely to notables.2 The church, an institution that served as an important source of credit in Mexico’s urban centers, was comparatively weak in the hinterlands of northwestern Mexico. Missions were certainly an integral part of regional credit networks during Sonora’s colonial era, but between secularization in the eighteenth century and a new republican order in the nineteenth century, their influence declined.3 Increasingly, Sonorans depended on networks of kinship and trust for their survival, making personal reputation critical to one’s ability to conduct the routine business of buying and trading. To develop credit relationships with family, neighbors, and friends, landowners such as Antúnez had to create a sense of trust (confianza) by both repaying debts and making loans of cash, livestock, and grain. According to Antúnez’s estate inventory, his neighbors, friends, and relatives placed enough trust in him to loan grains, hides, and cash, and conversely, they depended on Antúnez to reciprocate with loans. Sonorans almost never used the term honor to explain why they formed bonds of credit with some people and not others.4 More commonly the term confianza appeared in testimonies, that is, the idea that neighbors and friends could depend on you to repay debts and sometimes extend credit. Confianza was achieved only through active participation in the local petty credit network, not by inheritance and bloodline. Confianza was not necessarily exclusive to notables, although clearly, they had the advantage of having more resources to loan and exchange. More important than the amount exchanged, however, was the act of repeatedly settling debts and providing credit. Only with the continued show of dependability did one develop a good reputation among friends and relatives, and instill confianza. A Widow’s Dilemma: Paying and Collecting Debts As Vicente Antúnez’s widow and children surely discovered, the death of a...

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