Family Ties

Emigration to the Indies often meant the temporary or long-term separation of families; as seen, men might leave their families behind, or parents would take older children with them but leave the younger ones at home. While return migration could mean reuniting with spouses or children, it too could work to perpetuate or complicate the geographical dispersion of families. In 1581, at the time of the final division of the estate of Captain Gonzalo de Olmos, a returnee from Peru who died in 1574, three of his sons were in Peru, while two other sons and four daughters (one was a nun in the convent of San Pedro) were living in Trujillo. Olmos may have returned early to Spain, in the 1530s, so possibly his sons were born in Trujillo and later emigrated to Peru on their own.^[63] A daughter of Licenciado Diego González Altamirano stayed behind in Peru and entered a convent in Lima and, as mentioned, one of her brothers later returned there to serve on the audiencia.

Children who were born in the Indies or had been there from an early age, however, might come to Spain, sometimes with parents

or guardians, other times on their own. A man named Domingo de Arquinigo, who in 1578 testified that he had known some trujillanos in Peru, said he had lived there since he was a child and had come to Spain only recently. He was thirty-two years old.^[64] Families with strong ties and stakes on both sides of the Atlantic could generate a good deal of movement back and forth and end up fairly well scattered. The Loaysa family of Trujillo was a case in point. Two brothers, Alonso and Francisco de Loaysa (nephews of the archbishop of Lima, Fray Jerónimo de Loaysa), went to Peru in the mid-1530s, probably with Hernando Pizarro. Alonso de Loaysa married doña María de Ayala, and possibly some of their children were born in Peru before they went to Trujillo, where Loaysa died in 1574. One of their sons, don Gaspar de Ayala, went to Peru in the late 1580s, returning to Trujillo in 1596. At least one other son, Captain Francisco de Loaysa, and possibly a daughter, made Peru their permanent place of residence.^[65]

The careers and choices of the cacereño Juan Cano and his descendants reflect the complexities that could arise in families that maintained a foothold in both Old World and New. An associate of Hernando Cortés, Juan Cano received an encomienda after the conquest of Mexico but lost most of it. He became an important encomendero only by virtue of his marriage to doña Isabel, daughter of the Mexican emperor Moctezuma. Doña Isabel received the large encomienda of Tacuba from Cortés before she married Cano, with whom she had three sons (Pedro, Gonzalo, and Juan) and two daughters, who entered a convent in Mexico City. Doña Isabel's son by a previous marriage, Juan de Andrade de Moctezuma, after his mother's death in 1551 disputed Cano's claim to the encomienda, and eventually it was divided; in the 1560s the encomenderos were Juan de Andrade, Juan Cano, and the latter's sons Gonzalo and Pedro Cano. But the encomienda represented only part of the basis of the Cano Moctezuma family's fortunes. In the 1530s and 1540s Cano initiated petitions for mercedes (grants or awards) from the crown, alleging that his wife had received only a portion of the patrimony due to her from her father, Moctezuma. Cano's son Gonzalo pursued these claims with some success, and the family also accumulated large landholdings in New Spain. Gonzalo Cano also received several pueblos outside the Tacuba

encomienda and the Valley of Mexico through the terms of his mother's will.^[66] At the same time, before he returned to Seville in the 1560s, Juan Cano was buying lands and rents in and around Cáceres.

Juan Cano's third son, don Juan Cano Moctezuma, left Mexico to settle in Cáceres, where he married doña Elvira de Paredes Toledo and probably inherited most of his father's estate in Spain. He received a royal annuity of 1800 ducados and in the 1570s apparently still had some income from the encomienda or other family properties in Mexico. Contacts between family members in Cáceres and Mexico continued even beyond the generation of Juan Cano and his sons. In 1602 another don Juan Cano Moctezuma (grandson of Juan Cano and the son of Gonzalo Cano, who remained in New Spain) was in Cáceres litigating with his cousins, the sons of his uncle don Juan Cano Moctezuma. The dispute concerned Juan Cano's entail and legacy, which included 300,000 maravedís of juros that Juan Cano had held in the rents of the almojarifazgo (customs duties) of Seville.^[67]

Did these lingering connections between people in Spain and the Indies, sometimes enduring over two generations, mean that some extremeño families were able to maintain themselves as true transatlantic units, comparable to some of the great mercantile families of Spain? Probably only to a very limited extent. Mercantile fortunes were fairly manipulable, but the properties held by extremeños both in Spain and America often were not. Transferring the income from properties and holdings in the Indies back to Spain could cause problems, and maintaining holdings in absentia—especially encomiendas—was difficult or impossible. As a result the familial center of gravity usually could not be shared between family members in Spain and the Indies for long and ultimately came to rest on one side of the Atlantic or the other. If some extremeños returned home to live, others became important figures in colonial society and founded new family dynasties quite independent of family and relatives in Spain. The Cano Moctezumas achieved sufficient wealth and prominence to establish themselves firmly on both sides of the Atlantic. But while Juan Cano's sons and grandsons in Mexico and Cáceres maintained some contacts (if nothing else because of properties held in absen-

tia and occasionally in dispute), the Mexican and extremeño relatives soon came to constitute distinct and independent branches of the family and no longer comprised a single unit.