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

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]

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

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-

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,

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-

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.