“To Love, Honor, and Obey”

We have all heard the story of Romeo and Juliet, the tragic story of the star-crossed lovers broke all our hearts at one point or another. Patricia Seed, in her book To Love, Honor, and Obey in Colonial Mexico, begins by telling the story of Juana and Gerónimo, a similar version of Romeo and Juliet, with two lovers determined to be together despite their parents’ wishes, but this story had a very different ending. The differences, as Seed points out, lie in the understanding of the role of the Church, the role of love or will, and the role of the parents in making decisions in their children lives. It is a common misconception that Spain and therefore, its colonies are structured and governed much like other western European countries like England and France, but that was not the case. These countries favored the system of patriarchy, in which parental consent was required for children to marry. By the 18^th century Mexico too would favor the parents of the children with the gradual loss of power in the Catholic Church and the rise of capitalism, but in the 16^th century when Juana and Gerónimo’s story took place things looked very different.

In the 16^th century and the Crown and the Catholic church sort of co-ruled the empire. The Church was responsible for the “social control of the people,” which incorporated ideas about marriage and settling marriage conflicts.  This system allowed the church a good amount of independence when making decisions. For the Mexican Romeo and Juliet, their good fortune came in the fact that the church did not believe in the parents’ right to interfere in a child’s decision to marry especially when based on material reasons. This mainly came from the idea that love was seen as “the action of the will” or as “the expression of the will.” Parents were not allowed to force marriages and thereby control a child’s will. The child’s soul was at stake in making a marriage work since divorce was not an option, so the decision as to who they should marry was to be left mainly to the child. The church believed that a forced marriage would only make the daughter or son unhappy and lead to their disgracing the whole family.

Honor is another central theme in Seed’s book. Honor was everything in the Spanish culture and that even remains true to some extent today. What has changed is the manner in which one achieves honor. In the 16^th century women had honor by being virtuous, living a sexually pure life. If they violated this in some moment of passion, the church would almost always supersede the desire of the parents and secretly marry a couple in order to spare the women’s disgrace. As time passed and capitalism became the order of the day, materialism began to take on a whole new meaning. By the late 17^th and 18^th century one gained honor by being wealthy so now the church did not see the extreme importance of protecting a women’s sexual purity, especially if she wasn’t a noble.

As the crown and secular rulers gained more authority, the freedom of a child to choose their marriage partner dwindled. The crown eventually did not have the use of the royal police to force a parents’ hand and were more concerned with keeping the local rulers happy so as to keep their jobs than preventing any unwanted marriages.  In 1776 the king issued the Royal Pragmatic which now meant the parental permission was required for a marriage to take place. Where once a husband and a wife had a say in the household now a system of patriarchy took over and where once the crown and church had jointly ruled, the church slowly gave way to a more powerful secular authority, to the detriment of free will in marriage choices.