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7— First Families
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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.


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7— First Families
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