Free Daily Life In Colonial Latin America by Ann Jefferson Page A

children, more of the enslaved
population was born into a network of family relationships; this, of course,
was not usually the case for workers newly arrived from Africa.
    Although polygamy, the practice of one man having more than
one wife at the same time, was practiced in Africa by those men who could
maintain more than one wife and the resulting children, there is little
evidence of this family form in the Americas. There were several circumstances
that mitigated against polygamy, primarily the unfavorable male/female ratio of
Africans and the difficulty of acquiring the necessary wealth as an enslaved
laborer. Certainly, the Christian slaveholders’ belief in monogamous marriage
also played a role in preventing the taking of several wives.
    In a frontier region of Brazil, 18th-century church records
show that priests performed 400 marriages of enslaved people in about a
100-year period spanning the 18th and 19th centuries. Most of these people
married while in their 20s. More than 90 percent of them married a person
belonging to the same owner. Enslaved workers also married free people at
times. Of all marriages involving at least one slave in this region, just over
20 percent included a free person as well, usually a person who worked for the
same owner. Children of the union followed the status of the mother, so a free
mother gave birth to free children, while a free father might find a way to buy
the freedom of his children. Whether the wife or the husband was the free
party, marrying a free person opened up options for one’s offspring.
    Given legal realities, an enslaved man was far more able to
take advantage of this possibility than an enslaved woman, since her status
passed automatically to her children, making her unattractive as a formal
partner. Outside plantation zones in places like Central America, a decided
majority of enslaved men who married found a free spouse, often an indigenous
woman, and thereby secured free birth for their children. Meanwhile, enslaved
women almost always married men who shared their own inferior legal status if
they married at all. But among people of African ancestry, it was those who
were already free who were most likely to marry, at least in the frontier area
of Brazil mentioned above. This is an interesting finding because they
themselves would have had to pay the fee and any costs related to their
marriage, suggesting that formal marriage was important to them. They might
have seen marriage as the path to legitimacy in the eyes of society and a means
of strengthening their hold, and that of their children, on any property they
had managed to accumulate.
    Not surprisingly, families headed by women were frequent
among the enslaved population. Often these families were the result of the
accessibility of black women to white men, whether these men were their owners
and the owners’ sons or overseers and other white men on the plantation.
Although we can assume that many of these relationships were unwelcome to the
woman, there were advantages to having a child fathered by a white man. In one
case, an enslaved woman with five mulato children, all fathered by
different men, managed to get their fathers to buy their freedom. She purchased
her own freedom as well, so that in the end she had managed to free the whole
family. Various events might cause the breakup of a nuclear family unit; the
father could die or be sold away from the house, leaving his wife and children
as a female-headed household. Later, if a stepfather entered the picture, the
family would regain its status as a nuclear unit. So a family might pass
through a cycle of female headed to nuclear, back to female headed, and then
back once again to nuclear.
    The institution of godparenting shows the enslaved workers’
attempts to connect their offspring to the community in ways that would be
helpful in the children’s future. Often slaves chose members of their owner’s
family, which linked the children vertically