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

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

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

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

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;

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.