History 465- Week 6 Post

This week we examined in detail the “gender norms” present in colonial Latin America. It was very interesting to finally combine all the things we have been looking at this semester (how things were in pre-conquest LA, in Spain, and in Africa) into a detailed study of the ultimate focus of this class: The gender relations in early Latin America.

As was explained on Tuesday, there was a definite difference between prescription and practice. Although a certain lifestyle and value system (female chastity and male virility) was commanded by the Church, there was often a wide gap between what the Church required and actual lives. This brings up the question, “what was the norm?” Do we define the “norm” as the lifestyle most people in society had, or is the norm the lifestyle that the society viewed as ideal? I believe that the norm has to be defined as the lifestyle that most people had, not the idealized lifestyle. With such an overwhelming majority of the population partaking in a lifestyle other than the idealized one, it is incorrect to cast the idealized lifestyle as the societal norm. To correctly analyze and understand how a society operates, the most important thing to consider is the choices people actually made. Knowing what was viewed as ideal certainly provides insight into some practices of a society, but when a definite majority lives separate from the ideal, it is foolish to take the ideal as the norm.

On Thursday we delved into several of the readings in order to get a better idea of gender relations in the colonies. Peter Carrasco’s article on marriages in post-conquest LA particularly caught my eye. According to Carrasco, marriages between Spanish men and indigenous women were by far more frequent than marriages between Spanish women and indigenous men. Furthermore, marriages were primarily used as political tools, both for Spanish men to gain property in the colonies, and for indigenous royal families to become kin with the conquering Spanish (as was their custom). It was only high-up indigenous people who married the Spanish, as well. I think Carrasco makes some good points, but his lack of primary sources is somewhat troublesome. It appears that besides using a primary document or two, Carrasco cites mostly secondary sources. Also, one of the problems with Carrasco’s article is that he does not take into account Spanish-indigenous relationships that weren’t between the noble class. I don’t entirely blame him for it, since there is probably scant evidence of relations that took place between commoners (likely only upper class marriages would be recorded), but if he intends to classify all of the societal gender norms that took place in colonial LA, it would be incorrect to just examine the noble class. When studying Spain, we saw how Allyson Poska challenged classic views on gender relations by arguing that anthropologists incorrectly assumed elite practices to be the same as all of the Spanish people. In this case, Carrasco might be incorrect in assuming elite practices in colonial LA were the same as that of all people in LA. I would venture to guess that relations did occur between common Spanish people and common indigenous people in LA, and it is possible that those relations differed greatly from the practices of the elite.