Free Daily Life In Colonial Latin America by Ann Jefferson

their 17 enslaved laborers, 6 of them were married, 3 were
unmarried adults, and 8 were children. Three of these children were labeled mulatos, indicating that they were not the offspring of black couples. When
Mariana’s husband Antonio died six years later, all property either went to pay
off debts or was distributed among the heirs. Antonio’s will manumitted the
three young mixed-race slaves, suggesting that they may have been his own
children, and all the others either went to the auction block to pay the
couple’s debts or were distributed among the heirs without any regard for their
marriages or their parent-child relationships. None of the three married
families remained together after the death of Antonio.
    This distribution of the property of Mariana and Antonio
demonstrates the key feature of families in the slave community: an external
force—the hand of the slaveholder—was decisive. Since slaves were property,
that status generally, although not always, trumped the rights they were
explicitly accorded as married couples or parents under medieval law codes like
the Spanish Siete Partidas. So in a situation in which there was
precious little warmth or protection, what little there was turned out to be as
precariously balanced as a house of cards. We can only dimly grasp the importance
of family relationships in a coerced labor system in which there were few
oases, and it is probably impossible for us to imagine the pain and loneliness
these separations caused the enslaved Africans and their descendants. We can,
however, recognize the centrality of family relationships to the survival of
the enslaved. Family formation in this situation became almost a form of
resistance, a way for people whose lives were defined by their role as workers
to insist on having a life with some pleasure and humanity in it. In addition,
African and African American culture was passed from one generation to the next
through their families, which makes the family an important institution to
examine in order to understand the development of black culture in the
Americas.
    On the large estate where there might be hundreds of field
hands, the male to female ratio of two to one did not favor family formation.
Where the nature of the work made male workers preferable to female, new
workers from Africa were constantly introduced. Often they lived in primitive
communal dormitories known as barracoons and were marched out to the
fields every day like prisoners on a chain gang. In those cases, their chances
of forming a family were very slim. At work sites that remained stable over
several generations, workers reproduced, and the ratio of males to females
naturally adjusted itself somewhat. In that situation, couples formed, and they
might obtain a hut with a bit of land to grow food.
    Many census records make it difficult to identify families
in the enslaved community because slaves were categorized according to their
age or work assignments rather than as families. Some estate records do
identify slave families, however. On one 18th-century Brazilian estate of 110
enslaved workers, nearly all of them were living in families, with just over 50
percent living in nuclear families of a couple with their children. And in
early 17th-century Guatemala, one of many areas of Spanish America where
enslaved Africans and their descendants played a more important role in colonial
society than is often recognized, all 54 children listed in an inventory of the
largest sugar plantation in the region had at least one parent among the
resident adult workforce of 98 men and 39 women. While families were the norm
for slaves on the larger estates, at least to the extent possible given the
frequent imbalance between women and men, domestic workers who lived in urban
areas might have just a few other African people in their place of residence
and work, making family formation with other people of African ancestry more
difficult. As Africans in the Americas had