Der Heiratsmarkt im kolonialen Uruguay: Geschlechterbeziehungen in einer Grenzregion Spanisch-Amerikas, 1727-1810

Abstract

The book studies marriage and gender relations in a unique historical region of Latin America, namely the Band Oriental del Uruguay. The peculiarity lies in the fact that the formation of the colonial society took place at a time when this process had already come to an end in other parts of the Spanish empire. Colonization was mostly directed and influenced by Spain, which meant that the cultural codes that came into contact—and sometimes into conflict—here, were the Creole and the Spanish one. Indigenous populations were relegated to the frontier, which constitutes the second peculiarity of this area. Due to Indian and Portuguese threats at the frontier, high militarization and male mobility as well as the presence of soldiers and sailors shaped society and gender relations.The author analyses the subject through a combination of quantitative and narrative sources, mostly parish and criminal records. These are summed up in numerous tables and figures in the appendix that will be useful for comparative studies of population, marriage, and gender relations. However, the book is written in a way that even nondemographers will read with interest. Individual cases are used skilfully to illustrate the arguments and give insights into subjects that cannot be understood by serial records, such as love, passion or honour. The organizational structure of this book is similar to Olwen Hufton’s book, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe (1995), on European women. After a short general introduction to the region, the author describes the process of establishing a relationship, the planning of a marriage, possible dissent and the reactions to it, widowhood and remarriage as well as illegitimacy and concepts of sexuality, love and honour, as far as the sources permit us to understand them.The analysis shows how the physical danger of the frontier, the excess of male population and the cultural influence of the Spanish settlers shaped a specific code for white women which differed in several ways from other Latin American or European patterns. Almost all white women married, and they married early, Spanish immigrants even much earlier than they would have in Spain. Widows remarried sooner and in greater numbers than their male counterparts, a fact that is unknown for other areas. Amancebamiento, illegitimacy, and child abandonment existed and increased at the end of the colonial period, as elsewhere in Latin America, but was mostly confined to the nonwhite population or interracial couplings. The study does not confirm, however, the picture of immorality and unconstrained sexuality that contemporary sources like Félix de Azara and others paint of the mestizo population of the countryside in the Rio de la Plata. Generally speaking, however, the strong and constantly reinforced influence of Spanish-Catholic values, fewer economic possibilities for women, and their very restricted spatial mobility kept the lives of the women in the Banda Oriental within narrower limits than in other Latin American regions. The strong surplus of males, however, gave them greater freedom of choice when they married.To sum up, the book is an important contribution to the still fragmentary knowledge of gender relations in colonial Latin America. To be sure, the Banda Oriental at the end of the eighteenth century represented a unique variety of colonial Spanish society, but in a way all regional varieties are unique and we should be careful not to restrict our view to Mexico or Peru.