Preferred Citation: Ferry, Robert J. The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas: Formation and Crisis, 1567-1767. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1989 1989. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft5r29n9wb/


 
7— First Families

7—
First Families

The rebellion of 1749 ended in pain and punishment for those identified as having taken up arms against the royal order; a few were executed in the uprising's aftermath, and many were imprisoned or exiled from the colony. No member of the elite would be found guilty of treason, however, and the most severely punished spent only two years in a Madrid jail. This was because even those elites who were most desperate for a change in the Guipuzcoana Company's policies quickly abandoned their overt support for the movement when it suddenly shifted from protest to rebellion. Judging from the ease with which a royal army brigade restored the rebellious colony to order, it was probably apparent to many that an armed confrontation with the king's forces was at best foolhardy. In the first place mantuanos had more to lose, in that they had several generations of accumulated wealth and social prestige to protect and preserve. They also had other means with which to fight the Company. After more than a century of often bitter dealings between the cabildo and the administrators of empire, elites' knowledge of law and their experience at using it gave them confidence that their quarrel with the Basque monopoly could be resolved without resort to violence. Perhaps they put some trust in the belief that royal justice would eventually recognize the legitimacy of their complaints. Finally, as this chapter illustrates, in several other ways many of the elite families were closely bound to one another, and in their cohesiveness the gentry cacao planters may have found the strength for political, nonviolent resistance that was not available to those who chose instead to take up arms against the king's Company.

Residence and Marriage Patterns of the Caracas Elite

From one perspective, the following inquiry is a kind of interlude that examines the nature of the Caracas elite in the eighteenth


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century. It departs from the political and economic analysis that has been central up to this point to consider questions of residence, marriage, and demography. And it necessarily transcends the temporal focus of the rest of this study to include most of the eighteenth century. Although limited to the elites, the analysis of demographic data is in certain ways more detailed than any done to date for Latin America, and in its own right it will be of interest to population and family historians.

At the same time, however, the central interest in this data is in the light that they can shed on the internal processes that distinguished early Caracas, and the effort is made at every point to relate the changing web of elite kindred to the changes in the larger colonial society and economy. We begin with a discussion of elite residence using as a source a household census taken in 1759, a decade after León's rebellion.

Patterns of Elite Residence in 1759

This census, probably the first in the history of the town, is the earliest complete count that exists. Not a direct result of the uprising ten years earlier, the house-to-house canvas nevertheless followed logically the desire of the military governor, Brigadier General Felipe Ricardos, and the reforming ministers in Spain, to more efficiently control the Caracas population. The total population of the four parishes of Caracas in 1759 was 21,683 individuals who lived in 2628 households.[1] Of interest here is just the elite portion of the whole, 2059 people, 574 hispanic whites, and the other residents in their households—1485 black slaves or free servants. Taken together these people comprised about 9 percent of the total population. They lived in 85 households, about 3 percent of all households, of which 73 were located in the Cathedral parish and the remaining 12 in Altagracia, the contiguous parish to the north of Cathedral. The definition of elite used here is the one outlined in the introduction to this book, namely, those individuals whose paternal and maternal ancestors in most cases had been in Caracas since the middle of the seventeenth century, whose male relatives and ancestors had served as regidores or alcaldes ordinarios on the town cabildo, and whose family members appear on the lists of cacao haciendas taken in 1684, 1720, and 1744.[2] These mantuanos , as


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they were called by their contemporaries, will be viewed from two perspectives. The first is frozen in time and strictly empirical in that the characteristics of elite residence taken from the 1759 census are studied. The second is dynamic and more conjectural as it seeks to link the patterns of mantuano marriage to the economic history of Caracas during the course of the eighteenth century.

At first glance, except for the large number of either slave or free domestic laborers, 17.5 per household on the average, many of the residences that were home to the Caracas elite in 1759 seem quite modern in their composition. More than half, forty-seven of the eighty-five, were headed by married couples, and of the forty-seven, all but two were single-family households, comprised of 2 parents, 3.7 children on the average, and an occasional cousin, uncle, or niece. This high proportion of nuclear-family mantuano households (plus slaves and servants) may seem surprising, given the traditional assumptions about extended families in colonial Latin America. However, recent research has begun to show that elite households were not always complex, multifamily and multigenerational in composition.[3] That many elites lived in simple, single-family households at midcentury is not without significance, yet it would be erroneous to suppose that these households functioned essentially as independent units. Of course the census tells us nothing about day-to-day relationships within these homes, and the nature of domestic life, child-rearing practices for example, remains virtually unknown. But at a minimum we can sure that in spatial terms the mantuano society of urban Caracas was a small, highly concentrated world in 1759, where people, especially kin, associated with one another both frequently and intimately.

The town as a whole was a physically small community, reaching at its longest extension (north to south) about fourteen blocks, or cuadras , and about twelve or thirteen cuadras from east to west. No member of the elite lived in a house that was more than six blocks from the plaza mayor and the cathedral (see map 4). More importantly, in the typical case only two blocks separated the dwelling of one elite head of household from the residences of all the rest of his or her siblings.[4] With most of the kindred so close at hand, individual households may have lacked autonomy, and the numerous single-family, few-children households may have functioned essentially as so many knots in the several nets of clan


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residence. In this restricted environment neither the physical distance between houses of kin nor the precise location of residence probably mattered for very much. A sample of six sets of kin households in 1759 shows a pattern of elite residences concentrated generally north of the plaza, which may, more than any other factor, reflect an advantage of the terrain. Since Caracas was built on a hillside that slopes notably downward from north to south, water flowing in the tile-lined canals, or acequias , would have reached the northernmost houses first, while houses down-hill to the south would have run the risk of receiving the discharge water from those above them (see map 5 and appendix I). But by and large, the fact that the Herrera households were to be found on the blocks east of the cathedral or the Pacheco Mijares and Tovar households were clustered north and west of the plaza mayor probably did not make these families different in any significant way from other elite families, such as the Blanco, whose several households were scattered about the Cathedral parish.[5] The best measure of the limited spatial context of elite residence in the town may well be the case of Juan Antonio Mijares, the illegitimate son of Francisco Felipe Mijares Tovar and the half-brother of Francisco Nicolás Mijares, the third Marqués de Mijares. This man married his cousin, the fully legitimate doña Melchora Tovar Mijares, in 1756, the year after her father died, and the location of their residence in 1759, on the fringe of the parish seven blocks from the nearest house belonging to kin of either of them, was more isolated in this sense than any other elite dwelling in Caracas.[6] Perhaps outcasts for his birth and their marriage, in terms of time and space this couple lived at the outer physical margin of mantuano society, but they were just minutes from the plaza and the homes of their siblings and other relatives.

Patterns of Elite Marriage

As close as the Caracas elite lived to one another in physical space, many were even more closely knit by kinship and marriage. Of the forty-seven elite households headed by both living husband and wife in 1759, in eighteen households the spouses were consanguineous kin. In twelve of these eighteen cases the spouses were first cousins. More than one-fourth (twelve of forty-seven) of all


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figure

Map 4
Exacto Mapa de la Cuedad de Caracas  (1772). AGI, Caracas, leg. 81.

elite couples who were heads of household in 1759 were first cousins. What does it mean that such endogamous unions were so common in eighteenth-century Caracas? More basically, why was first-cousin marriage so common among Caracas elites? To examine these and other patterns of elite marriage over the long run of the eighteenth century a data set was compiled of 262 elite individuals, 128 men and 134 women, for whom age at first marriage can be determined. They are all of those elites who married in the eighteenth century for whom date of birth and date of marriage are known. While they represent less than 5 percent of the total 5778 people who were married in the Cathedral parish from 1700 to 1799, they are almost 40 percent of the 656 men and women who belonged to the families identified as elite who married in the parish during that century.[7]


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figure

Map 5
Spatial Distribution of the Households of Six Sets of Elite Kin, 1759. See Appendix I.


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Table 19 Age at First Marriage, Elite Men and Women, 1700–1799

 

No. Cases

Mean

Median

Mode

Men

128

29.0

28.4

23 (10 of 128 cases)

Women

134

23.9

22.3

22 (14 of 134 cases)

Difference (in years)

 

5.1

6.1

1

Source: See genealogical sources in chap 7., nn. 4 and 7.

Considered in the aggregate for the entire period, this data indicates that in the eighteenth century Caracas elite men waited until their late twenties before they married for the first time (median age: 28 years; mean: 29.0), while elite women married in their early twenties (median age: 22 years; mean: 23.9). The interval of five or six years indicates that these were not companionate marriages, but the difference in age may be somewhat less and the women somewhat older at first marriage than would be expected in a supposedly patriarchal society. The most frequently occurring, or modal, age at first marriage, 23 years for men (in 10 of 128 cases) and 22 years for women (14 of 134 cases) offers even stronger evidence that husbands very much older than their wives was neither the norm in practice nor a desired value in eighteenth-century Caracas (see table 19).

In comparison with their contemporaries and social equals in Buenos Aires, the only other Spanish American colony for which there is comparable data, Caracas elite men and women were much closer in age and the women several years older when they married for the first time. Of 142 first marriages of merchant families in eighteenth-century Buenos Aires, the median age at first marriage for men was thirty years and for women eighteen, and while the modal age for men was twenty-seven, it was fifteen for women.[8]

The median age at first marriage in Caracas increased modestly over the course of the century, very slightly for women and somewhat more significantly for men, especially toward the end of the century (see fig. 13). Elite men typically married in their early to middle twenties in the early decades, in their late twenties and early thirties by the 1770s and thereafter. Women married for the first time at about age twenty or twenty-one early in the century and at about age twenty-two or twenty-three from the 1740s on. The major impor-


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figure

Fig. 13
Median Age at First Marriage, Elite Men and Women, 1700–1799

tance of this moderate trend only becomes clear when it is combined with a second trend derived from the known information about date of death for the Caracas elite. The death date is known for many of the parents of the 262 individuals in the data set, and a factor of some significance becomes apparent if, in the cases where it is possible to do so, the death date of the parents is compared with the marriage date of their children. By studying the relationship between paternal death and the timing of marriage a most interesting pattern emerges: as elites married at an older age during the course of the eighteenth century, it was increasingly likely, particularly in the case of men, that they would marry after the death of their parents, especially their fathers. This pattern, which coincides with slowing of the cacao economy, the problems presented by the Guipuzcoana Company, and the hiatus in the slave trade after 1739, may reflect the decision of many mantuanos to marry only after they had received their inheritance portion.

With few exceptions, the death date of parents is unknown for individuals whose first marriages took place before 1720, and,


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strangely enough, for those who married after 1789 as well. Limiting the temporal focus to the seventy years from 1720 to 1789 reduces the size of the data base from 262 to 221 elite individuals whose age at first marriage is known. For this subset of 221 cases (33 percent of all elites who married in Cathedral parish from 1700 to 1799), the death date can be established for more than 75 percent of their parents (342 of 442 possible cases). The interval in years between the year of the death of the parent and the year of the marriage of the child can then be calculated, a positive interval representing the years that had passed after the death of a parent before the year of the child's first marriage, a negative interval being the years after the child's marriage before the parent's death.

The arithmetic mean of these intervals can then be calculated for the seventy-year period 1720–1789 on the basis of the sex of both parent and child. The interval between the marriage date of daughters and the death date of their mothers indicates that mothers typically survived the marriage of their daughters by several years (-2.32 years; 76 cases). Fathers of daughters lived to the wedding date, but died shortly thereafter (-.36 years; 102 cases). In the average case mothers of sons died a few years before their son's first marriage (2.12 years; 77 cases), while the fathers of elite sons were least likely to be alive when their sons married, having died about four years on the average before the event (3.88 years; 87 cases). When plotted by decade, the intervals between the parent's death and the child's marriage indicate that a dramatic transition may have taken place in the decade of the 1730s (see fig. 14). Before this time elite sons and daughters went to the altar usually accompanied by their father and mother; afterwards, especially in the case of sons, they went without their parents, who had died earlier.[9]

It is possible that Caraqueño elites married with increasing frequency after the death of their parents not so much because they were themselves older when they married later in the century, but rather because their parents died somewhat younger. There is no evidence, however, to suggest that longevity declined over the course of the eighteenth century. The available data, 145 cases of men and 151 cases of women from elite families for whom age at death can be calculated, is not entirely satisfactory for the purpose of determining a trend because only 20 percent of the cases are for deaths that occurred prior to 1750.[10] Nevertheless, with the excep-


225

figure

Fig. 14
Interval Between Death Date of Parents and Date of First Marriage of Their Children, 1720–1789


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tion of a slight decline for the decade of the 1760s, certainly the result of the smallpox epidemic that began in 1761 and killed several thousand inhabitants of the city,[11] the age at death of Caracas elites remained constant during the century. Generalizing from these cases, it would seem that in eighteenth-century Caracas elite women outlived men by only a few years (mean age at death for men in 145 cases: 53.2 years; for women in 151 cases: 55.1 years).

The mean ages at first marriage and at death can be combined to form mathematically typical cases that can serve as a test of the general accuracy of the 342 observed cases of the interval between parent's death date and child's marriage date. A man who married at the mean age of 29.0 years would have had a legitimate firstborn son no sooner than at age 29.7 years. If this son in turn married at the mean age, 29.0 years later, his father would then be 58.7 years old—dead in fact for 5.5 years, if he died at the mean death age of 53.2 years. The interval of 87 observed cases of father's death date and son's marriage date for the period 1720–1789 is 3.88 years. Although the difference between these intervals is slight, we should expect the typical mathematical interval to be smaller than the mean of the observed intervals, because while the test interval is based on the earliest possible case of a firstborn son, the mean of observed intervals includes second and all subsequent sons as well as firstborn.

In the case of fathers and daughters, the marriage of a firstborn daughter at the mean age of 23.9 years would occur when her father was 53.6 years old, 0.4 years after the mean age of death for men. The mean interval of 102 observed cases, -.36 years, suggests that fathers typically died within several months following their daughters' marriage date. These two intervals are also similar, but, again, since the test interval is calculated for the firstborn daughter we should expect it to be somewhat smaller, not larger, than the mean of the observed intervals, which consider all daughters, not just the firstborn. This discrepancy could mean that the mean age at death for men should be somewhat higher than 53.2 years, or that the fathers in the observed cases lived somewhat longer than the average, but in any event the fact is clear that there was but a small likelihood that an elite father in eighteenth-century Caracas would survive to attend even his firstborn son's wedding,


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and that the chance was about equal that he would be alive for even his firstborn daughter's matrimonio .

To consider mothers, a woman who married at the mean age of 23.9 years would have a legitimate firstborn daughter no sooner than age 24.6 years. If this daughter in turn married at the mean age, 23.9 years later, her mother would then be 48.5 years old, not to die for another 6.5 years if she were to die at the mean death age for women of 55.1 years. The average interval for seventy-six observed cases of mother's death and daughter's marriage is -2.3, a difference from the test interval of 4 years, but in this case the discrepancy is as it should be, since a mother who outlived her firstborn daughter's wedding by 6.5 years might well live beyond the marriage date of all of her daughters by an average 2.3 years.

In the instance of the final possibility, that of mothers and sons, a woman who married at the mean age for first marriage and whose firstborn child was a son would be 52.9 years old in the year of his wedding if the son married at the mean age of 29.0 years. If the woman survived to the mean age of female death she would live 2.2 years beyond the date of her son's wedding, a period similar to the average observed interval in 77 cases of mothers and sons, 2.1 years. The difference in this case is again too small, given that the interval derived from the arithmetic means is based on the firstborn son, while the observed cases include all sons born to mothers. But the general similarity of the two sets of intervals supports the results obtained from the 342 observed cases: for the period 1720 to 1789 as a whole, elite men, who typically married in their late twenties and died in their early fifties, were rarely still alive when their sons married, and alive to attend the weddings of their daughters in only about half the observed cases. Elite women, who married in their middle twenties and died in their middle fifties, might not witness their sons' weddings, but they would almost certainly be alive when their daughters were married. The eighteenth-century trend was toward increasing age at first marriage, and therefore toward greater frequency of marriages made in the absence of the parents of the nuptial pair, especially the father of the groom, who was almost always missing after 1730.

With some minor variations these patterns are replicated among the elite heads of household in Caracas in 1759. The age at death


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can be determined for 91 percent (107 of 118 cases) of the parents of 29 elite men and 30 women who were either a married or widowed head of household or the spouse of a household head in 1759, and for whom age at first marriage has been established. Of these parents, 61 percent (65 of 107 cases) had died before the year in which their children were married.

The fathers of fifteen of the twenty-five men for whom data is available had died before their son's marriage, and twenty of the fathers of thirty women had similarly died before their daughter's wedding day. With good reason the survey of mantuano households in 1759 reveals but two grandfathers, one of whom, Lorenzo Antonio Ponte, was head of the only three-generation elite household in Caracas at that time. In two-thirds of the fifty-five known cases, fathers had already died before even their own children were even married, and very few indeed ever knew their grandchildren. Ponte, a man who lived to see not only the wedding of most of his children but also the birth of many of his grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, would have been a rarity in mid–eighteenth-century Caracas even if he had not lived in the same house with some of these married children and grandchildren. Elite grandmothers were more common, there were ten grandmothers who were heads of household in 1759, but even in the case of women a majority of mothers, thirty of the fifty-two known cases, did not live to see the weddings of their sons and daughters. The mothers of elite household heads in 1759 varied somewhat from the seventy-year norm in that a majority of both mothers of sons (fourteen of twenty-six cases) and mothers of daughters (sixteen of twenty-six cases) had died before their children were married.

Finally, the observation that it was less common after the 1730s for parents to be alive at the time of their children's marriage is supported by the 1759 population. Alive in Caracas in 1759 were some twenty elites, married or widowed heads of household and their spouses, who had been married before 1729. In about half of the cases for which the necessary parent's death date and child's marriage date are known (nineteen of thirty-nine cases), the parents of these elites had been alive in the year of their marriage. On the other hand, of those elites who had married in the subsequent thirty years, from 1730 to 1759, in less than one-third of the known cases (twenty-two of sixty-eight) had the parent been alive in the


229
 

Table 20 Interval Between Date of First Marriage of Elite Household Heads and Death Date of Their Parents, in years (N = 107 )

 

Date of Marriage of Head

 

1711–1729

1730–1759

1711–1759

Fathers and Sons

-2.4 (10)*

4.9 (15)

1.9 (25)

Mothers and Sons

-4.9 (11)

1.3 (15)

-1.3 (26)

Fathers and Daughters

0.5 (10)

6.4 (20)

4.7 (30)

Mothers and Daughters

-6.5 (8)

3.4 (18)

0.3 (26)

 

1711–1729

1730–1759

 

Fathers and both Sons and Daughters

-0.9 (20)

5.8 (35)

 

Mothers and both Sons and Daughters

-5.6 (19)

2.5 (32)

 

Source: See genealogical sources in chap. 7, nn. 4 and 7.

*Number of cases is in parentheses. A negative interval indicates that the parent survived the marriage of the child by the given number of years; a positive interval indicates that the parent had died the given number of years before the marriage of the child.

marriage year of his or her son or daughter. The average interval between the date of marriage for elite household heads in 1759 and the death date of their parents is given in table 20.

Two major points remain to be made with the information derived from the long-term marriage patterns of the Caracas elite and from the nature of elite residence as it is revealed in the 1759 household census. The first has to do with the patriarchal character of Caracas elite society, which is placed in some doubt by these data. The second, necessarily rather hypothetical in nature, tries to relate the boom (from the 1650s to the late 1730s) and bust (in the 1740s) of the Tuy River cacao economy to the changes in elite marriage behavior and the changing role of patriarchs which may have occurred at the time.

Beginning in the 1730s, because they typically died before their sons married, fathers had no direct influence over their sons as they reached adulthood and formed families of their own. They did not participate either in the selection of a bride or in the domestic life of these sons once they had married. Thus what might be called the direct psychological generational transmission of male authority, that which a father might convey as a role model and "father


230

figure," came to young adult sons only in retrospect, as they remembered the behavior and recalled the image of their deceased fathers. For the rest, paternal authority reached a son only indirectly, through his father's property, his lasting reputation and social standing, and perhaps also indirectly through his uncles, his father's surviving younger brothers. Therefore, because they did not often survive to influence their children as adults, much of the authority of the father's lineage that was felt and exercised by Caracas mantuano men in the eighteenth century had to be resurrected or recreated in every generation, using the symbols and inherited wealth of the deceased fathers. In Caracas, where noble titles and entailed estates were rare, the force of personality of each new husband and father must have counted for a great deal in the establishment of his stature as padre de familia and holder of community power and prestige.

By contrast, the generational transfer of the valued qualities of the mother's family, either the groom's mother's family or the bride's mother's family, often came directly from the mother herself. This was particularly true for the mother of the bride, who usually lived long enough after the wedding to have had a continuing influence on a newly married couple. The exact nature of this influence is for the most part a matter of conjecture, but it was no doubt enhanced by the mother's presence in the household of the couple or by their residence in her household, both practices being common. In addition, it was not unusual for daughters to receive houses, household goods, and domestic slaves as their inheritance portion, while their brothers were assigned haciendas, field slaves, and other agricultural property. For these three reasons, because women customarily lived beyond the marriage date of their daughters and were the only parent to do so, because these women then shared a household with their married daughters, and because it was common for women to possess urban real estate, elite residence was strongly matrifocal in Caracas.

Expressed in a different way, the absence of fathers in lives of their married children meant that the authority of the male lineage was likely to be diffused at marriage. As meaningful or cherished as it might have been, without primogeniture, and with few titles of nobility or entails, the lineage of the father was a difficult concept to perpetuate. Marriage, the link between generations as well


231

as between families, could have served the purpose of reinforcing the patrilineage if an appropriate match were made. In the absence of the fathers, and often mothers as well, influence in determining suitable partners fell to other kin, aunts and uncles who were, in many cases, the younger siblings of the deceased parents of the marriage-age children. With remarkable frequency, these kin approved of marriages in which the nuptial pair were consanguineously related, usually as cousins, often as first cousins. In the seventeenth century cousin marriage among the elite was rare, but, beginning in the 1720s and continuing until the end of the century, there were, on the average, three elite weddings celebrated in the Caracas cathedral every year, and in one of the three the bride and groom were first cousins. Although the death of fathers typically took place some years before elite marriages were realized, emphasis could have been given to the father's lineage in these increasingly common cousin unions if the bride and groom were related through their fathers, or at least through the father of the groom. However, despite the potential present in cousin marriage for the generational transfer of patriarchal influence, in Caracas the many elite cousins who married were more often linked through their mothers than through their fathers.

Marriage has many meanings, but marriage between cousins has the distinctive function of retaining for the next generation a double portion of those things that are transferred from one generation to the next, especially wealth, but also such social attributes as status and authority. For example, in cousin marriage a dowry is given by a woman's father to the son of his own brother or sister, but the source of wealth that comprised that dowry, a cacao hacienda for instance, might have been created in the first place by a man who was the grandfather of both the bride and groom. A society or a segment of society may practice cousin marriage when wealth or status are in short supply, as was increasingly the case of the Caracas elite after the creation of the Guipuzcoana Company and the end of the South Sea Company asiento. Cousin marriages did become more common just at that time when, while the number of living people of elite ancestry continued to increase, the cacao boom that had lasted for several generations came to an end. Yet it is difficult to demonstrate an incontrovertible link between the function and frequency of cousin marriage and the mantuanos' economic problems. It is more


232

readily evident that these marriages, although they could have fortified the patrilineages of the usually deceased fathers, most often served the very different purpose of strengthening the ties between sons and the families of their mothers.

A total of seventy-seven first-cousin marriages of the Caracas elite have been identified for the period 1700–1799, all but three of which occurred after 1720. Of this number, five were matches in which not only were the bride and groom cousins to one another, but they were also the children of parents who were also first cousins. The multiple kinship links that result in these five cases make them difficult to classify, but each of the remaining seventy-two cases can be sorted into one of four categories. For cousins who marry, a man's wife will be either his father's brother's daughter, his father's sister's daughter, his mother's brother's daughter, or his mother's sister's daughter. First-cousin marriage in a society governed by patriarchal rules of authority, even if the inheritance of wealth was bipartible and not patrilineal, might be expected to be most often of the sort where brothers arrange for the son of one of them to marry the daughter of the other. In eighteenth-century Caracas this form of cousin marriage did not predominate, however, occurring in precisely one-quarter of the cases (eighteen of seventy-two). The most matrilineal link, the one in which the groom's mother and the bride's mother were sisters, was equally likely; Caracas elite men who married their cousins married their mother's sister's daughter 25 percent of the time (eighteen of seventy-two). The rarest kind of cousin marriage, occurring in less than 10 percent of the observed cases (seven of seventy-two), was that in which a man married his father's sister's daughter. The most common form of this most endogamous kind of marriage was that in which the man married his mother's brother's daughter, which took place in 40 percent of the cases (twenty-nine of seventy-two) (see table 21).

In two-thirds (forty-seven of seventy-two) of the instances in which first cousins of elite status married, the man was related to his cousin—wife through his mother. Given the observed fact that mothers were more likely than fathers to be alive for the weddings of their children, the matrimonial politics that influenced these unions probably operated on a principal of proximity. In other words, an elite mother, often a widow, considering acceptable


233
 

Table 21 The Structure of First-Cousin Marriage Among Caracas Elites, 1700–1799 (N = 72)

Number of cases in which a woman's relationship to her first-cousin husband was his:

FATHER'S BROTHER'S DAUGHTER:

18

MOTHER'S BROTHER'S DAUGHTER:

29

FATHER'S SISTER'S DAUGHTER:

7

MOTHER'S SISTER'S DAUGHTER:

18

wives for her son, turned first to her own brothers, then to her sisters, and only infrequently to the family of her deceased husband. The least appealing cousin match for her son was the daughter of her husband's sister, the daughter of a man to whom she was not in any way related herself, and this kind of union did not often occur. The daughter of her husband's brother was also not consanguineous kin to the mother of an elite son, but the daughter of her brother-in-law did belong to her husband's patrilineage, and this sort of marriage regularly met with acceptance. But the daughter of her own brother or sister was the most attractive choice, and if the opportunity to select between these two was present, her brother's daughter was preferred.[12]

These patterns are also replicated in the eighty-five elite households culled from the 1759 census. Of the forty-seven single-family households in which both husband and wife were alive in 1759, twelve of these spouse pairs were first cousins, and in two-thirds of the twelve cases the male heads were related to their wives through their mothers. Of the remaining thirty-eight (of the eighty-five total) elite households that were not headed by a spouse pair, five were headed by widowers, of whom four had been married to their first cousins, and twenty were headed by widows, of whom three had been married to their first cousins as well.[13] Including these seven cases of cousin spouses which had been truncated by the death of one of them, nineteen of the eighty-five elite households in Caracas in 1759 was or recently had been headed by a husband and wife who were first cousins. True to the observed pattern, in almost two-thirds of these cases, twelve of nineteen, husbands were or had been related to wives through their mothers.[14]

This evidence suggests that at midcentury, elite women were more influential than men in the strategies of family formation and


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in matters of residence. Both the predominance of mother-linked first-cousin marriages and the fact that in cousin and noncousin marriages alike only the mothers, and particularly the mother of the bride, were likely to be alive for the wedding and for some years thereafter indicate that the elite women of one generation had a strong and lasting influence on the next generation that elite men did not have. It was common, especially after 1730, for elite men to marry after their fathers had died, and in the absence of fathers the influence of mothers' families in the marriage choices of elite men was significant. In two-thirds of the observed cases of first-cousin marriages, elite men married the daughters of their mothers' brothers and sisters. It may also be supposed that women's influence was great in their homes, and this would be especially true in the case of widows. Almost one-fourth of the elite households in 1759 was headed by a widow (twenty of eighty-five). Of the ten elite grandmothers alive in that year, two, Josefa Mijares Tovar and her niece Melchora Ana Mijares Ascanio, lived with their husbands, but the other eight were widows and heads of household in their own right. All of them lived with their unmarried children, three lived in the same household with their married daughters and the spouses and children of those daughters, and one lived with a married son and his children. These widowed grandmothers were true matriarchs in their homes: the only males in these households were their sons, sons-in-law, grandsons, and great-grandsons. No brothers or nephews of their deceased spouses were present to represent his lineage, the patrilineage of the children they had had together. The strong influence of mantuano women, which might be called matriarchy both in the synchronic sense of their influence in their homes and in the diachronic sense that their predominant influence in the selection of marriage partners for their children allowed them to exercise authority into the next generation, was most likely on the increase in eighteenth-century Caracas.

At any given moment, the decisive role of a mantuano woman in the past, present, and future lives of her family was made manifest in the visible qualities of her residence. The continuation of prestige and status associated with a household was more in the domain of women than it was of men, and not only in the narrow sense that it was a woman's duty to manage the domestic business of the home during her lifetime. Just as an adolescent girl learned


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of the influence of her grandmothers in decisions that had determined the marriages of her parents and aunts and uncles, decisions that had resulted in the makeup of the world of kin in which she was reared, so too did a young woman experience a similar influence firsthand, with considerable interest and anxiety no doubt, as her mother's will made its impact on the matter of marriage in her own life. In her turn, an adult mantuano woman knew that she would be influential in such decisions as they affected her own children and her nieces and nephews, decisions that would determine the future composition of the dwelling in which she resided, and often that of other households occupied by her kin as well. That women received houses, household goods, and domestic slaves in the wills of their parents, while their brothers were typically given agricultural property, means something more than the commonplace observation that a woman's place was in the home. The home was a locus of the lineages of the people who lived in it as well as their residence, and because domestic material wealth played an important part in the continuing prestige and status of those who lived in the household, the furniture of the house, its slaves, and often the house itself appropriately belonged to eighteenth-century elite women, the foremost arbiters of the future shape of these lineages.

Midcentury: A Critical Conjuncture for Some Mantuano Families

Occasionally, the society-wide significance of elite women was manifest in an arena outside the related realms of marriage and household. The prominence of widow signatories in the memorials written in 1741 and 1744 to protest the excesses of the Guipuzcoana Company is illustrative of this. However, the arena of their major social influence, the household, was more visible than the women themselves in the tumultuous political life of midcentury Caracas. As will be seen in the following chapter, the household, as the physical manifestation of the family contained within it, was the principal target of much of the repression and many of the reforms of Governor Ricardos in the 1750s: candles and lamps were to be placed in windows and doorways, a household census was taken, and mantuano men were removed from their town homes and


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forced to remain under arrest on their haciendas. The most graphic and threatening expressions of the royal power in the hands of the reforming governor struck directly at the central place of the household in the social life of Caracas. First the door of the house of Juan Francisco de León was hung with the head of a black man who had joined him in protest, and then, after the canario rebel was himself dead in Spain, his family was turned out of their house, it was torn down and its ruins covered with salt. This brutal lesson, the example of household and family destroyed, was probably not lost on the elite, even though the immediate victims were not of their same social rank.

In the decades before León's rebellion many elite families experienced economic difficulties that directly threatened their collective wealth and established prestige in the Caracas community, and their protest against the Guipuzcoana Company was based on this sense that Company policies challenged them collectively, more as kin than as individuals. But the protest went too far, became a rebellion in the eyes of the authorities, and in response the action taken by Ricardos was to threaten the destruction of families and homes as he had destroyed the León family by in effect executing the father and in fact pulling down their dwelling and covering the ruins with salt. Indeed, the considerable success of the royal reaction to the events of 1749 may have been due as much to the threat presented to family and household as it was to the large contingent of king's troops at Ricardos's command. The fact that Ricardos's object lesson was not lost on the community may be one major reason why the newly permanent military presence in Caracas and the new taxes created to support the soldiers met with virtually none of the resistance that royal officials anticipated.

The reform decade of the 1750s confirmed as permanent a process of changes in the character of the Caracas elite which had begun prior to the creation of the Guipuzcoana Company in 1728. For elites the protest against the Company stemmed in part from anxiety that accompanied a fundamental restructuring of the nature of family authority, nothing less than the erosion of patriarchy. Similarly, the forceful expression of royal authority, the Bourbon reforms as they were meted out to Caracas by a vindictive Governor Ricardos, were received by Caraqueños whose traditional base of power, that of the patriarchs of elite families, had


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weakened noticeably in the previous generation. Cousin marriage and the mother-linked structure of cousin marriage are measures of this process drawn exclusively from family reconstitution data. The same data combined with surveys of cacao haciendas made in 1720 and in 1744 reveal the decline of patriarchal influence in another context: the ownership of the agricultural estates that had always been the basis of elite wealth and status.

The birth date is known for forty-seven mantuanos who owned cacao haciendas in 1720, hence their ages in that year can be calculated. These elite hacendados held 906,600 cacao trees on sixty-seven haciendas, which was 27.8 percent of all the trees in the province in that year, and 61.3 percent of all the trees owned by elites. Their mean age in 1720 was 37.8 years, the median age 38. For most of the forty-seven hacienda owners (thirty-nine of forty-seven cases) it is also possible to know whether the owners' fathers were still alive in 1720, and in nine of thirty-nine cases (23 percent) the father was in fact still alive in that year.

A similar portion of elite owners with a known birth date can be taken from the 1744 census. The sixty-four elite hacendados for whom age can be calculated in 1744 owned 1,266,724 cacao trees on 100 haciendas, 24.8 percent of all the trees in the province in 1744, and 61.3 percent of all the cacao trees owned by mantuanos. The mean age of these sixty-four owners was 43.8 years, the median age 43. They were, therefore, on the average 5 years older than their counterparts a quarter of a century earlier. However, the most significant difference in cacao hacienda ownership between 1720 and 1744 is revealed in the much smaller proportion of fathers of the 1744 owners who were still alive at that time. Again, the death date for the fathers of most of the sixty-seven owners is known (fifty-six of sixty-seven cases), but while the father of one mantuano hacienda owner in four was still alive in 1720 and such a circumstance was therefore common if not typical, in 1744 mantuanos who owned cacao haciendas had almost always outlived their fathers. The fathers of only three of the fifty-six elite owners for whom this fact can be determined were alive in 1744.

Thus it would seem that in 1720 it was not unusual for young elites to marry and to begin their own haciendas de cacao , usually in the Tuy Valley, while their fathers were still alive. But by 1744 the era of the rapidly expanding cacao frontier had passed, and in


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response elite marriages were ever more frequently postponed until after the death of the fathers, when the slaves and cacao groves that had belonged to these men became the property of their heirs. For many of Caracas's foremost families even this inheritance was not enough to compensate for the economic difficulties caused by shortages of slaves, and, in the 1740s, the low price paid for cacao beans by the Guipuzcoana Company. To minimize the dispersion of wealth from one generation to the next, those elites most affected by the end of almost a century of booming cacao prosperity made active use of the most endogamous form of marriage available to them, the marriage between first cousins. In the twenty-year period from 1700 to 1719, only 4 of 41 weddings celebrated in the Caracas cathedral in which at least one of the spouses was a mantuano brought first cousins together as husband and wife. But during the next thirty years, of 128 Cathedral parish weddings involving elites, 31 nuptial pairs were first cousins. One family far surpassed the others in these conservative unions. In one-fourth of the first-cousin marriages that took place from 1720 to 1749 (8 of 31), the celebrants were related to one another either paternally or maternally through the large and expanding family Blanco. The second-most frequent link, although it occurred only half as often as the Blanco tie, was through the family Mijares (4 of 31 cases). The probability that first-cousin marriage was indeed a strategy used by elites faced with declining cacao profits in the decades leading up to León's rebellion is strengthened by the fact that these same families, the Blanco and the Mijares, were also the most vocal and visible of the Caracas elite in their opposition to the Guipuzcoana Company.[15] As early as 1739, the royalist perspective held that the colony's troubles originated with a self-seeking faction that was determined to force the Guipuzcoana Company out of Caracas. In 1745 Governor Zuloaga described this faction as "the Conde de San Javier, Don Alejandro Blanco y Uribe, and the rest of the [Mijares de] Solórzano family, which is that of the conde, and his relatives and allies."[16]

The surname Blanco was as venerable as any other in eighteenth-century Caracas. The first Blanco immigrant had arrived in the colony from the Canary Islands in 1603 and, although they never acquired a noble title or married into a noble family,[17] the Blanco had


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always been alcaldes ordinarios, regidores, and the holders of other prestigious positions in the community. In 1744 members of many of the first families of Caracas gathered to sign a statement of protest against the Guipuzcoana Company in the house identified as belonging to "doña Luisa de Villegas, widow of the Provincial of the Santa Hermandad, don Alejandro Blanco," the same woman who had carried on a legal fight with the morenos libres and the canarios over land at Curiepe. Of the names of the ninety-four vecinos who signed the document, none appears more often than Blanco. A total of eighteen carried Blanco as a first surname, and seven others were sons and daughters of Blanco mothers. They were closely involved in the León uprising. A majority of the mantuano men arrested by Felipe Ricardos in 1751 were named Blanco: Juan Félix Blanco de Villegas, the son of doña Luisa de Villegas and don Alejandro Blanco, was identified as a covert ringleader and sent to Spain. Among those forced to spend the next year on their haciendas were his brothers Miguel Blanco de Villegas and Alejandro Blanco de Villegas, and several of their cousins: the regidor Pedro Blanco de Ponte, Pío Blanco de Ponte, Alejandro Blanco Uribe, and Miguel Blanco Uribe.[18] After Blanco, the next-most-frequent name on the 1744 memorial was the more prestigious one of Mijares, which was father's surname to four signatories, including the third Marqués de Mijares, and mother's surname to six others, including the second Conde de San Javier, Juan Jacinto Pacheco Mijares. It was the Conde de San Javier who, in the company of Alejandro Blanco Uribe, took the signatures gathered in November 1744 to Madrid early in 1745 to plead the Caracas case against the Guipuzcoana Company.[19] He was still there in May 1751, when he was arrested for his assumed part in the rebellion.[20]

By way of contrast, before he set sail from Spain with orders to crush the Caracas rebellion, Ricardos was given a list of principal citizens of the town whom he could count on as "peaceful and loyal to the King": named were Domingo Galindo y Sayas, Pedro Ruiz Arquinzones, José Bolívar, Feliciano Sojo Palacios, Agustín Piñango, Miguel de Aristeguieta, Antolín de Liendo, Mateo de Monasterios, and Miguel de Rengifo.[21] None of these men had signed the 1744 protest statement and, except for the family of Antolín de Liendo, cousin marriage was rare in their families;


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before 1749 a first-cousin match had taken place only in the families Bolívar and Rengifo, and there was only one instance of such a marriage in each case.[22] Neither cousin marriage nor active opposition to the Company were characteristic of these families at mid-century, probably because they had not yet reached a critical juncture between family expansion and cacao profits, as had the Blanco, Mijares, and others.


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7— First Families
 

Preferred Citation: Ferry, Robert J. The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas: Formation and Crisis, 1567-1767. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1989 1989. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft5r29n9wb/