Sentimientos y vida familiar en el Nuevo Reino de Granada, siglo XVIII (review)

The last decade of research has made evident that the history of colonialism in Latin America is incomprehensible without incorporating themes of sexuality, of gender, and of family. By the end of the eighteenth century, generations of sexual liaisons within and without marriage and within and across race and class barriers had created a complexity of household arrangements that both anchored the social/racial/gendered hierarchy and threatened it. In Sentimientos y vida familiar en el Nuevo Reino de Granada, Pablo Rodríguez makes a distinguished contribution to understanding this complex colonial world, achieving much more than his modestly stated goal of providing "a more vibrant, a more complicated and a less nostalgic image of [the Colombian] family past" (p. 308).

Based on meticulous research in archives in Tunja, Medellín, Cali, Bogotá, and Popayán, Rodríguez compares similarities and differences in family and household composition in four eighteenth-century New Granadan cities. He contrasts the Caribbean port and slave entrepot of Cartagena; the interior mining/commercial/ agrarian world of mestizo and slave Medellín; the indigenous (Muisca) early conquest city of Tunja; and the hacendado/mining slavery complex of Cali. Relevant comparative themes include the "plasticity" of family composition, life-course stages (infancy, widowhood, old age, widowhood), matrimonial norms and variances (dissent, dispensations, failure to fulfill marriage promise), marital harmonies and conflicts, and daily life (material culture, routine and ritual).

Rodríguez judiciously blends quantitative and qualitative sources isolating demographic differences or similarities between Cartagena, Tunja, Medellín, and Cali as a take off point for analysis. He downplays the dominance of the extended family suggesting it might be more fruitfully conceptualized as a nuclear family with leftovers, in effect, "a family nucleus . . . linked to another in disintegration" (p. 67). Challenging the stereotype of the Antioqueño family presented in "Colombian sociology" as the embodiment of the "archetype of the patriarchal family", he demonstrates that Medellín had a notably greater percentage (78%) of nuclear households than Cartagena (60%), Tunja (55%), or Cali (53%) (pp. 63, 64).

While properly recognizing that censuses serve as but temporal snapshots of a population, Rodriguez research provides provocative grist for family historians. New Granada's cities were not cities of the married—they were cities of singles. In Cali, solteros represented 55% of the population, with 51%, 50%, and 48% respectively in Medellín, Tunja, and Cartagena (p. 75). Marriage proved a fragile state given the potential for concubinage, separation, abandonment, and early death. Colonialism limited the likelihood that many sexual and emotional relationships might culminate in marriage, given that both norms (honor) and legislation discouraged formalized unions between social and racial unequals. As elsewhere in Spanish America, the state proved unwilling to intervene to promote matrimony when broken promises to wed involved those of unequal "quality." In New Granada even mestizo and mulatto parents strove to maintain the hierarchy at their range of the spectrum as they invoked provisions of the Pragmatic Sanction on Marriages (1778), a measure designed for whites, but apparently used widely to forbid matrimonial unions between racial or social unequals.

New Granada's cities proved not only to be cities of singles, they were also cities of women: Tunja, 62 %; Cartagena, 59%; Medellín, 56%; and Cali, 57% (p. 72). Just as elsewhere in the colonies, women became urbanites because they were more likely to work as servants in city establishments, or to migrate to the relative security of populated areas, or to be widows. The female-male ratio of deceased spouses is striking: in Tunja, there were eight widows for each widower, with seven in Cartagena and Cali, and six in Medellín (p. 78). Plebian single women were necessarily active in the local economy; many survived by renting rooms in female-headed "polynuclear" households, with a number of occupants sharing a kitchen. Many were single...