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

to powerful people in the
community. Another common choice was other members of the community of slaves,
connecting the children horizontally to other people of African descent.
Nuclear families usually chose godparents from among other slaves, while single
mothers chose godparents from the planter class or the free peasantry,
presumably the fathers of their children or members of the father’s family.
    The event most threatening to a slave family was the death
of an owner and the distribution of his property. It was at this point that
slave families were broken up, couples separated, and children divided among
the heirs or sold to liquidate assets. At the death of one slave owner in the
mid-18th century in Paraíba, Brazil, most of the 25 married couples were kept
together, but many lost their children, or some of them. Even very young
children were separated from their parents in this case. A baby of one year was
sold on the auction block, a widow was separated from all three of her
children, and a female-headed family was completely separated with some of the
children distributed among the heirs and others sold at auction. Perhaps there
can be no greater clue to the dehumanizing nature of the system of slavery than
these dry facts. It is tempting to conclude that the slave-owning population
believed men to be better workers if they had a wife to care for them and for
that reason kept slave couples together. In addition, family ties tended to
discourage running off. For the estate owners, though, slave family stability
occupied a place that was a distant second to maintaining the productivity of
the laboring population. These statistics seem to say that a woman can always
have more children and adults can find new partners so they will not long feel
the loss of those who have been taken away. Respecting the humanity of the
African people would have forced the slaveholders to admit to causing them
enormous grief by separating their families.
     

    Mariage de nègres d’une maison
riche (marriage
of slaves belonging to a wealthy household) by Jean Baptiste Debret dated 1835.
Although Brazil was no longer a colony at this time, slavery would remain
firmly in place for several more decades. This drawing shows several black
couples being formally married by a priest in a chapel.
     
     
    Casta Families
    Among the non-Indian lower social groups, Christian
marriage was uncommon. The norm was cohabitation. One reason was the prohibitive
cost of marriage. Another was the lack of property to pass on. The landless
population, those living and working on haciendas, found little reason for
Christian marriage since there was no property to protect for future
generations. Without this hold over their children, parents had little control
over young people’s freedom to choose their partners and settle down without
benefit of marriage. The main reason to marry formally was to climb the social
ladder by practicing this most important rite of Christianity and European
values. Peasants who did choose to marry might do so after setting up a
household and acquiring some property. Or their reasoning might be to lift
their children out of the stigmatized category of illegitimacy. Frequently,
marriage applications state that the young woman is pregnant or that the couple
already has one or more children, indicating a connection even in this marriage-shy
population between having children and seeking formal marriage.
    The church did not succeed in exerting the same control
over these families that it had over the highest and lowest social groups. In
urban areas, the church was more concerned with ministering to elite families
than to the racially mixed working population, and in rural areas, villages
were scattered widely across the land and priests were few and far between, and
thus very overworked. Although they struggled to bring their wayward sheep into
the marriage fold, it was an uphill battle, given the broad acceptance of
common-law