Scholars of Latin American history have only recently begun to systematically analyze the family and household.1 A very few of the studies to date have dealt with lower-class household structures, and these investigations have been limited in scope to specific times and places. Such an approach tends to characterize household structure as static and culturally determined. By contrast, this analysis samples household structures, as indicated by general population enumerations, for various economic zones in Chile (see map). Using this technique, it is possible to show the variety of structures which can typify one ethnic-class group in different economic and social contexts. Households and families are portrayed as fluid institutions which change with economic and demographic change and reflect the position of the unit within the economic and social system. Specifically, changes in lower-class rural household and family structures in nineteenth-century Chile are related to the transformation from subsistence to market argriculture and to the position of the household within the market sector given an abundant supply of labor.2
The Family, Household, and Dwelling
The terminology used in writing about the family and household has become increasingly sophisticated and specialized.3 Since this vocabulary has evolved from European and North American models, it is not always directly applicable to the Latin American situation. In addition, the documents used in this study do not indicate the exact relationship of the household members.4 Thus the vocabulary used here must be adapted to the Chilean context. “Household” refers to all the people living in one dwelling. The exact biological-juridical relationship between members will not be specified. Instead, this essay will differentiate only between those households where the occupants all share common surnames and those households containing unrelated or distantly related members. Likewise, little attempt will be made to deal with ties of kinship or informal cooperation between households. While such links are undoubtedly important, this paper primarily analyzes relationships between the people who reside together.
The term “family” has so many potential meanings that it will not be used in a technical context. Instead, “conjugal family unit” will refer to groups composed of either a married couple, a married couple with offspring, or a single or widowed parent with children.5 The conjugal family household contains only the conjugal family unit, plus servants in a few cases. However, every conjugal family unit does not necessarily occupy an independent household; it can form the core of a household containing other relatives or nonrelatives, or it can share a dwelling with another conjugal family unit. When relatives such as aunts, uncles, grandparents, or nephews live together or with a conjugal family unit, the household is called an “extended household.” Households with unrelated or distantly related occupants—either alone or in combination with the conjugal family unit, relatives and servants—are called “complex households.” The Chilean term, allegado, will be used to refer to the non-kin household member.
Since the unit of analysis here is the individual residence, it is important to develop a clear picture of the rural dwelling. Most lower-class Chileans in rural areas lived in ranchos in the mid-nineteenth century. The other term for rancho, casa de paja, or literally “house of straw,” is a more descriptive name for the dwelling. The nature of the rancho is clearly indicated in nineteenth-century photographs and drawings6 which depict a thatched hut of modest proportions housing the family, its tools, and its animals. Contemporary critics noted that these “miserable shacks” did not “. . . deserve to be called comfortable, either from a material point of view or from the point of view of the morals of the family.”7 Their inhabitants lived “in worse conditions than the imported animals.”8
Maria Graham, widow of a British naval officer and author of a diary which records a wealth of information about immediate post-independence Chilean society, differentiated between houses and ranchos: “The brick buildings, and such huts as are plastered within and without over the wattled work, and tiled, are called houses; the others are called, generally, ranchos.”9 The interior of the dwelling reflected the humble status of the inhabitants:
Most . . . had a decent bed; a few stakes driven into the ground and laced across with thongs, form the bedstead; a mattress of wool and where the women are industrious, sheets of coarse home-spun cotton and thick wollen coverlets form no contemptible resting place for the man and wife.. . . The infants are hung in little hammocks of sheepskin to the poles of the roof; and the other children or relations sleep as they can on skins, wrapped in their ponchos, on the ground. In one of the huts there was no bed; the sole furniture consisted of two skin trunks; and there were eleven inhabitants.. . .10
While most of the rural ranchos were freestanding dwellings, some shared common walls. This caused some confusion in distinguishing between dwellings with two rooms and two independent habitations. Census takers considered any dwelling with an independent outside entrance as a separate household and thus the statistics show more dwellings than there actually were.11 Another possible distortion caused by the definition should be considered; by taking each room with an outside door to be an independent dwelling, the census takers probably further fragmented into separate households groups which actually lived and worked as units.12 While it is only possible here to analyze the occupants of the dwelling as defined by census officials, the probable ties between households should be kept in mind.
The Traditional Family in the Peasant Subsistence Sector
For Chile, as for many other parts of Latin America,13 the patriarchal complex household has been accepted as traditional. Mario Góngora, who deals briefly with the colonial rural household, concludes that the traditional household consisted of “the head, his wife, their single sons and daughters, and often married ones with their own spouses and children, other relatives, including natural children, the servants, and the ‘agregados’ who often also have offspring.”14 However, census manuscripts indicate that in areas of noncommercial farming and ranching, where land was both abundant with respect to the population and not controlled by a few powerful landowners, the individual dwelling was usually inhabited only by a conjugal family unit.
To find examples of the subsistence peasant household in the central agricultural zone of Chile, it is necessary to step back to the eighteenth century. A population enumeration of the doctrina of Perquilauquén, now the department of San Carlos, in 1754 provides the necessary data. Cattle grazing was the primary agricultural activity, with vineyards and gardens found on relatively small plots. Along the main roads, a few landowners produced a small amount of wheat for nonlocal markets. To cite figures, out of some 300 to 500 landowners, only 31 sowed wheat, and they devoted less than four hectares each to the crop. Land was already somewhat concentrated, with less than ten percent of the owners owning over fifty percent of the land, but “precarious possessors” or squatters abounded. Many of them grazed their livestock on the abundant open range and claimed no specific land at all. There were twelve black slaves and twenty-six free black servants in the doctrina, and one estancia had Indian retainers. Other than that, labor was primarily supplied by household members.15
In Perquilauquén, the harbingers of market agriculture—which in Chile consisted of wheat, land concentration, and a dependent labor force—were just barely evident in 1754.16 Since land was still relatively accessible, new households of self-sufficient ranchers could be established. This is reflected in the household structure. The 3,515 inhabitants of the doctrina lived in 628 houses, giving a rather low ratio, for Chile, of 5.5 people per dwelling. A century later, the inhabitant per dwelling ratio in this region was more than 6.6.17 Except for the few with black slaves or servants, no household in 1754 contained unrelated members. Ninety-nine dwellings contained no children, another 243 conjugal family households had only one, two or three children. In other words, less than half of the households had more than three children. Very few households contained other relatives. In short, this was an area of small, conjugal family households. Young adults could establish their own households and did not have to live with parents or as extra field hands on the estates of others.
The households of Perquilauquén studied here belonged to a ranch economy in the eighteenth century. An example of rural households in a basically uncommercialized crop-producing economy in the mid-nineteenth century is found in the south of Chile, outside the zone of wheat production, large estates, and dependent laborers. The evidence is provided in census manuscripts of the 1860s for Carelmapu in the far south of Chile, just across the straights from the islands of Chiloé. In 1865, there were only 13,000 residents in the extended region.18 Even so, Carelmapu was one of the better settled southern departments simply because of its proximity to the overpopulated islands of Chiloé. The types of dwellings found in Carelmapu are the same used originally by the indigenous inhabitants of Chiloé, suggesting that the residents of Carelmapu listed in the manuscripts were colonists from the islands. However, the inhabitants of Carelmapu were not Indians: the two predominant surnames were Soto and Maldonado, both Spanish. The subsistence farmers of Carelmapu were ethnically comparable to the residents of Perquilauquén a century earlier although their Indian heritage was different.19
Agricultural statistics show clearly that Carelmapu was an area of self-sufficient agriculturalists in 1865. According to the annual statistical abstract, only about 12,000 fanegas, or 8,600 qqms. (metric quintals) of wheat were produced yearly. This was one of the few regions in Chile where vineyards did not thrive and cattle herds were small. The potato was the agricultural staple of the area and it was produced for home consumption, not for export.20 Because of the lack of commercial agriculture, the region was relatively poor. In 1854, rural per capita income was only 4.95 pesos, significantly below the 7.30 pesos per year for such rich and commercially active areas as Los Andes in the central provinces of Aconcagua.21 There were only 10 properties which earned over 100 pesos a year in agricultural income, and none earned over 1,000 pesos. By contrast, well over 1,000 small holdings earned less than 50 pesos a year.
The household structure in this isolated region of subsistence farmers was more varied than in the ranching region of Perquilauquén a century earlier. The enumeration notes 655 people living in 109 separate households, which yields a ratio of 6.0 inhabitants per dwelling, slightly higher than in Perquilauquén. Eleven of the 109 households, or about ten percent, contained two or more conjugal family units. Altogether about thirty percent of the households contained relatives or unrelated allegados in addition to the parent, or parents, and offspring. Twelve households had only relatives, such as daughters-in-law and grandparents, in addition to parents and children. Twenty households, or about one-sixth of the total, housed unrelated inhabitants. There were no domestic servants in this poor area, but some of the extra members undoubtedly served as additional field hands.
With respect to family heads, females headed only 11 of the 120 conjugal family units, or less than ten percent of the total. Four of these female-headed units lived with other conjugal family units, meaning that out of 109 households, women were the heads of only 7. Six of the eleven female heads were widows; only one was married without a husband in residence. Four were single women with children. In other words, in this sparsely populated subsistence farming region, women were family heads only if they had no husbands; married women were not left with the children while the husband worked in another area. Alternatively, only three men without wives headed households. Evidently men who were widowed readily remarried.22
The size of the conjugal family unit and the ages of the children show that young adults remained at home until they could establish independent households by marriage. As Table I demonstrates, the average number of children varies as expected by age of parents. The young family head and the aged parent had relatively few children at home. Parents at the end of their childbearing years had the most children at home. Of the fifty-three heads of conjugal family units who were over forty-five and therefore could be expected to have children over twenty, thirty-eight had adult children living with them. This suggests that children remained in the conjugal family unit until marriage. However, parents over fifty-five had a decreasing number of children at home which in turn suggests that most adult children did eventually establish independent households.23
In conclusion, the traditional household structure, in areas with accessible land and very little market contact, was neither the extended nor the complex household. Household membership was slightly more complicated in farming than in ranching regions. However, while the composition of households varied, the patriarchal conjugal family unit occupied most dwellings. Only single or widowed women headed families; the abandoned married woman with children was rarely found. Family sizes were small; in those with the largest number of children, the parents were at the end of their reproductive years. Older parents had few children at home, their adult sons and daughters having established their own households. Few houses contained relatives in addition to the conjugal family unit and only a few more contained unrelated allegados. With this traditional household structure as a point for comparison, it is possible to proceed to study the modifications caused by market agriculture accompanied by an abundant labor supply.
The Commercial Agriculture Sector
Examples of the impact of commercial agriculture and increased labor supply on household structure are drawn from the region of Aconcagua, a naturally dry area transformed by irrigation into one of the most fertile agricultural zones in Chile. The well-watered river valleys of Aconcagua, because of their fertility and proximity to a seaport and to the capital, were the principal zone of grain production for export in the eighteenth century.24 Throughout that century, agricultural production increased steadily, but the internal turmoil of the wars for independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century and the loss of Peru as an export market caused the growth rate of agricultural production to dip dramatically in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Wheat exports rose again after the end of hostilities, with Aconcagua and neighboring provinces being the major producers. In 1834, according to reports of local officials, about 165,000 qqms. of wheat were produced in the Aconcagua-Valparaíso-Santiago region. By 1860, production had risen to 600,000 qqms. of wheat, with almost 200,000 qqms. being produced in Aconcagua alone.25 After 1860 when Chile finally became a fairly important producer of wheat for a large North Atlantic market, the wheat output of Aconcagua was far surpassed by other regions. Full market potential was realized between 1835 and 1865, and wheat production in Aconcagua rose little after the latter date.
Since wheat was grown on estates rather than on small holdings,26 the increase in wheat production in Aconcagua necessitated a change in the use of estate land. Extra land, formerly used to settle new retainers, was brought under cultivation. Property boundaries, nebulously defined in the original land grants, were more decisively set, and small-holders were prevented from encroaching on estate land.27 Figures for 1845 show that land was highly concentrated. In the department of Putaendo, where level irrigated land was scarce, less than one percent of the properties contained fifty-four percent of all irrigated land or more than ninety-five percent of irrigated and dry hill land combined. In San Felipe, where there were more hectares of irrigated than non-irrigated land, 8 of the 659 major properties contained two-thirds of the total land and fifty-seven percent of the irrigated land.28
At the same time that land was being withheld from potential self-sufficient estate retainers and smallholders in order to produce grain for an external market, the population continued to grow. Aconcagua had been the destination of internal migrants in the colonial period,29 and the region’s prosperity in the early nineteenth century continued to attract migrants to certain parts. However, after 1835 in some places and 1850 in others, the province became a zone of net out-migration,30 indicating that the increased labor supply could no longer be fully employed.
While the early nineteenth-century censuses are laced with deficiencies, they do indicate roughly the variations, if not the absolute amount, of population absorption within the region. While the rate of natural growth was probably the same for the province as a whole, the amount of the population increase absorbed at its place of birth depended on the area and type of landholding. During the years of the wars of independence when agriculture as a whole suffered, population was absorbed in all parts of Aconcagua other than the dry hills of La Ligua.31 Between 1834 and 1854, by contrast, population grew little except in the poorer agricultural areas where expanding markets created incentives to use second-rate land more fully.32 The lower yields of inferior land became profitable and investments in irrigation worthwhile.33 The increase in arable land and production supported a larger population. On the better lands, by contrast, production could be raised simply by more efficiently using existing resources. In those areas, an increasing proportion of the expanding population had to emigrate.
Population absorption varied by landholding type as well as by ecological regions, and again market forces were the determining factor. In the early nineteenth century, the estates formed “veritable agricultural colonies on which the laborers, numbering 3,000 to 4,000, live off the products of the land which the hacendado distributes to them.”34 As long as land had relatively little value, additional retainers were allowed to settle on the estate because of the intrinsic benefits—such as prestige and security—rather than the monetary gain accruing to hacendados having vast numbers of estate retainers. The number of workers allowed to settle on an estate, according to one foreign commentator, depended solely on the hacendado. “The greater or lesser benevolence of these could be divined by the number of inquilinos which they retain, since while some haciendas of families characterized by a noble spirit house numerous retainers, others are almost abandoned.”35
After 1835, then, when the market provided new incentives to estate owners, increased production could be achieved simply by bringing more land under cultivation and using existing estate labor more fully. Rather than settle new families on the estate, landowners required existing retainers to supply more day labor, either by increasing their own work loads or by subcontracting unattached day laborers.36 Additional seasonal labor could easily be hired, for unlike other parts of Chile, this region had an abundant labor supply by 1830. Because outside labor was readily obtained, agricultural income on estates in Aconcagua rose dramatically in the second quarter of the nineteenth century while the population and resident male labor force grew very little. This is illustrated in Table II. The income of Pullalli more than doubled between 1834 and 1854, while the permanent working male population grew by only thirteen. The hacienda of Catapilco had an even larger income with a smaller working male population. For the hacienda of Pedegua, population data for 1813 and 1833 show that in 1813 the hacienda had only 145 men between fifteen and forty-nine years of age and a total population of only 964, or approximately one-half of the population of 1833.37 This substantiates the contentions made above; hacendados settled large numbers of retainers in the first third of the nineteenth century while land was relatively worthless and later were able to increase their output simply by using existing labor more effectively and employing extra labor as needed. In some cases, the larger landholders may have actually expelled the original settlers and installed new retainers willing to work under less favorable conditions. A Polish visitor, Ignacio Domeyko, noted in 1841 that one owner of an hacienda of 15,000 cuadras of irrigated land in Aconcagua “follows the example of the others; he expelled many inquilino families from his land and is using those of the neighborhood, or he contracts neons for the tasks.”38
While the increase in production did not occasion population absorption on the estate, it did allow population to grow temporarily in areas of small holdings. Families were able to live on ever smaller parcels of land because the expanding market sector provided seasonal employment to supplement the garden crops, wine, and small livestock produced on the small holdings. Thus the expansion of population in areas of smaller properties and the increase in market production were symbiotic: the small properties provided most of the extra seasonal labor to harvest the crops while the market grain sector allowed smallholders to supplement their sub-subsistence production. In Aconcagua in the first half of the nineteenth century, the subsistence sector of peasants living off of their own produce was transformed into a peasant auxiliary force tied to the estate market sector via seasonal labor.
By determining the amount of population absorption, the transformation from subsistence to market agriculture affected household structures. The changes in household structure, of course, reflected the variation in population absorption between estates and small holdings, as well as among estates and small holdings on agriculturally good and poor lands. The nature of these changes will now be discussed by land-holding type and quality of land in the province of Aconcagua in the second third of the nineteenth century, as its market activities increased.
Families and Households on Market-Oriented Estates
An enumeration of all inhabitants over seven years of age in the parish of Quilimarí in 1839 provides the earliest manuscript data for the Aconcagua region.39 This parish encompassed primarily dry, hilly lands, traversed by small rivers. The estates of the region were much less affluent than those along the Aconcagua River, yet they became increasingly oriented toward export production between 1835 and 1865.
In Quilimarí in 1839, as in other areas of primarily self-sufficient farmers and ranchers, the majority of the households contained only the conjugal family unit. While in isolated Carelmapu, seventy percent were conjugal family households, in slightly more exposed Quilimarí somewhat fewer—287 of the 438 households, or sixty-five percent—contained only a conjugal family unit. Extended and complex house-holds were the most numerous on the more market-oriented estates. For example, conjugal family households accounted for sixty-five percent of the regional total, but on the hacienda of Pupío, only fifty-nine percent of the 120 households contained just a conjugal family unit. For the hacienda of Las Vacas with 68 households, a similar percentage of conjugal family households was calculated. With respect to heads as well as composition, the households of Quilimarí were slightly more varied than those of Carelmapu. Women were heads of seventeen percent of the conjugal family units in Quilimarí, as opposed to ten percent in Carelmapu.
By far the most important difference, however, between households on estates in Quilimarí in the early nineteenth century and households in more isolated regions at other periods is the frequent presence of apparently unrelated members. Only eighteen percent of the house-holds of Carelmapu contained allegados while 52 of the 188 dwellings, or almost thirty percent, had allegados on the two estates of Quilimarí considered here. This large proportion of complex households reported for the estates of Quilimarí may be attributed partially to the methods of differentiating relatives and nonrelatives.40 However, the same methodology was used for Carelmapu and fewer nonrelatives were found. Furthermore, contemporary comments attest to the frequent presence of unrelated household inmates. As a student research team commented at the end of the nineteenth century:
Usually [the household of] each family is formed, not by relatives, but by compadres (that is, as is known, the godparents of one’s children or the parents of one’s godchildren) chosen almost always from members of the same class, by the family of these compadres, and by the allegados, a name given to selected friends who have achieved a degree of confidence in the home.. . .41
Why didn’t individuals remain with relatives? The frequency of migration in the area was responsible in part. As already noted, Aconcagua had long been an attractive destination for migrants. As population pressure increased during the early nineteenth century, fewer long-distance immigrants became permanently attached to estates and small holdings. Still, short-distance migration remained important.42 Many of these migrants went to live with their godparents or distant kin on neighboring estates and thus appear in this analysis as unrelated household inmates. As a second explanation, the rural household was probably just one segment of a larger social family. Since more than one household may have cooperated in the support and care of their members, an individual could choose to reside in any of several dwellings. The interchange of members between residences within the community is suggested by the fact that while three or more surnames were frequently listed for one dwelling in the census manuscripts, these surnames were usually common to the district. Young single adults who lived as allegados probably supplied extra day labor. Some of the allegados were children, suggesting that orphans may have been cared for by godparents or distant kin.43
Allegados and female-headed households were already more numerous in Quilimarí in the early nineteenth century than in more isolated frontier regions like Perquilauquén and Carelmapu because this northern agricultural region was already more densely populated and market-oriented. With continued population growth and commercialization of agriculture between 1835 and 1865, the proportion of households with allegados and female heads also increased. This is demonstrated for Quilimarí by comparing the household structures of 1839 to those of 1865. Using the haciendas of Maimalicán and Cóndores as examples, exactly half of the fifty households in 1865 were occupied exclusively by a conjugal family unit.44 Compared with figures for 1839, then, the proportion of extended and complex households had increased. This was one of the effects of restricting the construction of new houses on land with potential for market production; new residents still had to occupy the same number of dwellings.
A more detailed analysis shows that population increase on estates with limited expansion of dwellings changed the household in other ways although the changes varied with the economic prosperity and activity of the estate. For example, the hacienda of Cóndores in the upper sector of one of the small river valleys was relatively prosperous and market-oriented; its annual income was assessed in 1875 at 2,000 pesos.45 In 1865, the estate contained twenty-seven houses, one with the owner, his wife, five children, and six servants and dependents. On this estate there was only one female-headed household. Evidently men did not migrate, leaving the women at home. In fact, sex ratios suggest that this hacienda attracted extra male laborers: there were sixty-one women for every 100 men in the twenty-five to forty-nine age group. While most of the households were male-headed, only thirteen were conjugal family households, and some of these had adult children in residence. In total, twenty-nine children over the age of twenty lived with their parents. Three of these adult children had families of their own. This meant that one-third of the households contained adult children as well as other adult allegados. In other words, neither fathers nor youths had to migrate from this estate, but independent households were hard to establish. Therefore, each existing house had a large and varied membership; the average household size on Cóndores was 7.3 inhabitants. Nine of the twenty-seven houses contained 10 or more inhabitants.46
The household structure on the neighboring hacienda of Maimalicán was slightly different. The differences stemmed in part from the fact that this hacienda, with an even larger population than Cóndores, earned only half of the income.47 On this less affluent hacienda, eleven of the thirty-three households were headed by women. The absence of working-aged men is also shown by sex ratios: there were 105 women for every 100 men for the total population and 121 women for every 100 men for the twenty-five to forty-nine age group. Other evidence suggests that the men were only temporarily absent from the estate. In the first place, eight of the eleven female heads of households were married, rather than widowed or single. Secondly, each woman’s children shared a surname, presumably that of their absent father. Had the women been abandoned, they probably would have had fewer children by one husband.
With respect to composition, many of the households of Maimalicán, as those of Cóndores, contained more than just the conjugal family unit: four households contained relatives with the same surnames as the head of household or spouse; seven households consisted of two or more conjugal family units; seventeen households had nonrelated or distantly related members in addition to the conjugal family unit and relatives; ten households had adult children over twenty living with parents. The average number of inhabitants per dwelling was 7.7. In short, as on Cóndores, it was difficult for young people to establish independent households; the youngest male head was twenty-eight. Instead, the more fortunate conjugal family units admitted relatives and nonrelatives into their households. However, since the estate was comparatively poor, many men were forced to migrate at least temporarily, leaving a high proportion of female-headed households.48
Even the river valleys of Quilimarí are poor, isolated agricultural areas when compared to the basin of Aconcagua. Thus the haciendas of Panquehue in the department of Los Andes served different economic functions than those of Quilimarí in the mid-nineteenth century. The surviving documentation for this region illustrates the demographic and economic changes which occurred in the middle third of the nineteenth century. First, the annual income of the 3 haciendas in the district almost quadrupled between 1834 and 1854.49 This increased wealth reflected the growth of grain exports; already in 1843 the district was a major producer of wheat. Out of some 600 properties in Los Andes, the 3 of Panquehue produced ten percent of the department’s wheat.50 Furthermore, almost three-fourths of the wheat produced in Panquehue was exported.51 By 1875, wheat production had quadrupled in the district, now accounting for about one-fourth of the total production of Los Andes.52
On the affluent, market-oriented estates in Panquehue, less population was absorbed as income and production increased. The total population of the district rose only slightly from 1,921 inhabitants in 1834 to 2,097 in 1854, while the number of men of prime working age, that is from fifteen to forty-nine years of age, actually fell from 580 in 1834 to 526 in 1854.53
Fortunately, some of the census manuscripts for the district of Panquehue survive for both 1843 and 1865. These documents permit an evaluation of how the declining population growth rate on haciendas affected family structure. In 1843, eighty-five percent of the 106 households enumerated had both a father and mother in residence. Three-fourths of them contained only conjugal family units. In other words, as in Quilimarí in 1839 and Carelmapu in 1865, the majority of the households were of the traditional patriarchal conjugal family form. Following the pattern of Quilimarí, household structure became more complicated with the growth of population and the reorganization of land and labor for commercial wheat production in the second third of the nineteenth century. By 1865, household structure on the affluent estates of Panquehue had changed significantly. Of the 52 households for which information is available, seventy-eight percent still had two parents in residence, only a small decline from the eighty-five percent twenty years earlier. However, only one-third, as opposed to three-fourths, were conjugal family households. Eleven conjugal family units lived with other families, which meant that twenty percent of the conjugal family units did not have their own dwelling. The majority of the nonconjugal family households contained one or two allegados, some of whom may have served as extra field hands for the inquilino head of household.54 Though allegados ostensibly benefited the estate by providing occasional labor as needed, on the whole, the sheltering of outsiders was considered detrimental to the order and morality of the estate. Many haciendas attempted to prohibit the lodging of outsiders without permission of the manager.55
By the mid-nineteenth century, unrelated members were not the only additions to the household on the estate. As is demonstrated in Table III where the average number of children by age of the head of the conjugal family unit is given for an aggregate of several haciendas, children commonly lived with parents into adulthood. As noted in the discussion of the size of the subsistence peasant conjugal family unit, typically the largest families belong to parents just at the end of their reproductive years. By the time parents are sixty-five, most of their children have established their own households. In this context, sizes of the conjugal family units on haciendas in the mid-nineteenth century were unusual. Those parents surviving to age sixty or sixty-five commonly had several adult children at home. The average size of the conjugal family unit for heads over fifty-five was approximately the same as for those aged thirty-five to forty-four. Of the forty-six conjugal family units whose heads were over forty-five, twenty-nine had adult children in residence.56 Because land was being used for commercial production, and because additional labor could be drawn from neighboring small properties, few new households were allowed to be established on estates. However, at least some adult children could remain, supported by themselves as day laborers or by parents.
George McBride, writing in the 1930s, observed the unusual cohesion of families on estates, both upper and lower classes:
Not only among the landowning group, however, has the hacienda tended to keep the family united; its influence in this direction is perhaps even more marked among the inquilinos. . . . Some of the young men and young women drift into the cities, the mining centers, or the nitrate fields of the north . . . but the number of these is not great, and they come back frequently to the estate where their families belong. ... In general . . . the tendency has been for the farm laborer to stay on the estate, for the family to remain together.57
Evidently, influenced by the market pressures of the second half of the nineteenth century, estates elsewhere in Chile developed household structures similar to those on the estates of Aconcagua in mid-century.
Peasant Auxiliary Families and Households
Household structures among smallholders responded to different economic and social stimuli. There were no artificial pressures, such as those imposed by the strict control of the landowner, against the construction of new dwellings. The small holding could be subdivided and dwellings could be added as long as the increased population could subsist. However, while the number of households could multiply more naturally, the size and content of the household was more restricted as the census manuscripts show.
In the areas of poorer land such as Quilimarí, about forty percent of the households on the more market-oriented estates already contained more than the conjugal family unit by 1839. On the primarily self-sufficient small holdings, by contrast, only half of that ratio comprised extended or complex households. Manuscripts for the same region of smallholders a few decades later, however, show that about sixty percent of the households contained more than the conjugal family unit, a larger proportion than on estates.58 Equally significant, by 1865, forty percent of the households were headed by women. These statistics demonstrate the results of the saturation of the agricultural sector and the change from peasant subsistence to peasant auxiliary settlement. Young people could no longer readily establish independent households so two or more families lived together, or more probably young men and women lived as allegados and postponed establishing families. The average number of children per conjugal family unit was 4.3. Similarly, in this poor area, a family could not be supported on the meager yield of the family plot, and fathers left in search of extra work on estates or in the mines to augment the family’s income. There were 120 women for every 100 men in the district in 1865. This is at least part of the explanation for the large proportion of household heads who were women.
In Los Andes where the quality of the land was higher, properties were even more fragmented and smallholders more numerous, yet the household structure was remarkably similar. A district labeled Calle Patagual in the 1865 manuscripts of Los Andes consisted of various small properties, some of which were rented, some exploited by their owners, and some divided among two or three inquilinos.59 Of the eighty-three households, sixty-five percent contained related or unrelated members in addition to parent(s) and children. There were 158 women for every 100 men aged twenty-five to forty-nine. Not surprisingly, then, about one-third of the households were headed by women. Only a few of these female heads of households lived with their children alone. The rest provided a dwelling for other relatives or more frequently, for retainers with unspecified relationships. The variety of household forms and correspondingly, the lack of space for new households and the absence of husbands, show the extent of mutation to household structure in a society where economic conditions militated against the male-headed conjugal family household.
Regardless of the area, adult children were usually an economic burden on small holdings because of the limited resources. Even though forty-eight of the seventy-three conjugal family units with heads of forty-five years or older had adult children in residence, each unit had fewer adult children on the average than did their counterparts on estates. As shown in Table IV, the average number of children per conjugal family unit declined for those units with older heads. In fact, the size of the conjugal family unit was generally smaller on small holdings than on estates, although the difference was most dramatic for the older heads of families. Adult children simply could not be supported by a more economically secure parent, as was the case for the children of inquilinos attached to prosperous estates. Young adults thus left their birthplaces becoming part of the much maligned “great mass of peones’ or day labourers, many of whom have neither fixed abodes or regular family ties . . . [and who are] the curse of Chile and might under given eventuality become its chief danger.”60
Conclusions
The patriarchal conjugal family household, not the extended or complex household, predominated in Chile provided sufficient land was available for subsistence farming. The complex household resulted from population pressure without corresponding territorial expansion. As long as market incentives were mild, land, even on large estates, was fairly accessible to new subsistence farmers. However, when rising demands for wheat furnished new incentives to put land under cultivation, territorial expansion of settlement was restricted or even frozen. Further population increase had to take place within the existing households of estate retainers, or in the comparatively small portion of land held by smallholders.
The adjustments of the household to the transformation from subsistence to market agriculture varied between estates and small holdings and even among similar types of properties depending on their location, the quality of the land, and general prosperity. Although no generalization perfectly suits every case, a basic dichotomy between households on estates and on small holdings existed. The establishment of new households was limited on market-oriented estates, but heads of existing households did have a relatively privileged position. Unless expelled by the landowner, they did not have to migrate in search of seasonal labor and in fact could support adult children and extra allegados who served as day laborers on the estate. Households on estates were large, primarily male-headed, and complex in composition. By contrast, on small holdings where men frequently left their families to search for supplemental income, a high proportion of women headed households. The conjugal family unit was smaller than on estates as parents could neither support their offspring nor help them find supplemental day labor. However, on estates and small holdings alike, the rural lower-class household readily sheltered allegados, who were passers-by, unattached persons in search of a job, and godchildren or friends from neighboring families.
In conclusion, no single structure typifies households in all agricultural regions; alterations in household structures accompany economic and demographic change. In nineteenth-century Chile, the complex household resulted from the population pressure occasioned by the transformation in land and labor use which attended the commercialization of agriculture. However, household composition should be viewed as more than a simple response to demographic and economic changes: the flexibility of the household enabled the lower rural class to survive the transformation from subsistence to market agriculture. Extensive relationships through kinship, compadrazgo, and friendship distributed the responsibility for an individual’s survival across a large community. The ability of the household to shelter outsiders was uniquely suited to a rural society where occasional employment necessitated frequent moves. The complex household was both the product and the mechanism of survival in a rural sector where the majority of the people existed on a small, fixed proportion of the resources.
Among the most recently published works on the structure of the lower-class Latin American family in the historical period are those of Donald Ramos, “Marriage and the Family in Colonial Vila Rica,” HAHR, 55 (May 1975), 200—225, using census manuscripts; and María Luiza Marcílio, La ville de São Paulo: Peuplement et population, 1750-1850 (Rouen, 1968), using parish records. For Chile, Robert McCaa of the University of Minnesota has done extensive research on the family using the method of family reconstitution. The results of the research are as yet unpublished. Mario Góngora deals briefly with the colonial family in Chile using manuscripts of population in his “Vagabundaje y sociedad fronteriza en Chile,” Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios Socioeconómicos (Santiago), 2 (1966).
“Subsistence agriculture,” as used here, means agricultural production for home consumption or for limited local distribution. The term does not imply a biological minimum for survival. “Subsistence farmers” can be either smallholders or estate residents as long as they neither destine a major proportion of their production for sale in nonlocal markets nor depend on wage labor. In other words, subsistence farmers are basically self-sufficient. “Market agriculture,” by contrast, implies that a significant portion of total production is exported to a nonlocal market.
The best guide to definitions for family history is Peter Laslett, “Introduction: The History of the Family,” in Laslett, ed., Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge, Eng., 1972).
The census manuscripts available for Chile contain the following information for each person: name, sex, age, marital status, literacy, profession, vaccination, physical defects, and nationality. Individuals in the manuscripts are grouped by households, and households by property units and administrative divisions. The relationships of members of the household are not explicitly stated, but the same general format is probably used for every household. The male head of the household, if there is one, is listed first, followed by his wife, their children, and then by other members. Relationships are indicated by the order of the household lists, by marital status, age, profession, and surnames. Husbands and wives used different surnames; children used their father’s name, if known. For this study, household members were considered relatives only if their surnames were those either of the head of the family or the spouse. All others were considered unrelated. The assumptions used in inferring relationships in this study are within the guidelines set in Laslett, ed., Household and Family, especially pp. 88-89. However, it should be noted that more distant kin whose surnames differed from the two allowed for each household will appear in this analysis as nonrelatives. Servants are differentiated from nonrelatives by their professions.
Laslett, ibid., suggests that only dual-parent families and widowed parents with children be included in the category of the conjugal family unit, but the large number of informal marriages and illegitimate children (about one-third of all births were illegitimate in the mid-nineteenth century; see Oficina Central de Estadística, Anuario Estadístico [hereafter cited as AE], Primera entrega, 1848-1869, “Movimiento de población”) makes it necessary to consider single parents with children as also forming conjugal family units.
The most important of these are the sketches of Claudio Gay, Atlas de la historia física y política de Chile (Paris, 1854), reprinted in Sergio Villalobos R., Imagen de Chile histórico (Santiago, 1973), and in Eugenio Pereira Salas, Imágenes de Chile (Santiago, 1974); the photographs of William Oliver, published in Alvaro Jara, ed., Chile en 1860; William L. Oliver: Un precursor de la fotografía (Santiago, 1973); the sketches of Recaredo S. Tornero, Chile ilustrado (Valparaíso, 1872); and the sketches of Rudolfo Armando Philippi in Julio Philippi Izquierdo, ed., Vistas de Chile (Santiago, 1973).
Boletín de la Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura (hereafter cited as BSNA), 2 (1871), 388.
Abel A. Gutiérrez, Habitaciones para obreros (Santiago, 1919), p. 36.
Maria Graham, Journal of a Residence in Chile during the Year 1822 (1824; reprint ed., New York, 1969), p. 125.
Ibid., p. 143.
Oficina Central de Estadística, Quinto censo jeneral de la población de Chile, levantado el 19 de abril de 1875, hereafter cited as Censo 1875 (Valparaíso, 1876), p. li.
Whether in different rooms of the same dwelling or in other nearby households, relatives did live in clusters. The difficulty lies in determining the closeness of the relationship. For example, the estate of Don José Vicente Larraín in Ovalle in 1854 contained 198 people living in twenty-six dwellings. Although fifty-one surnames were listed in the census manuscripts, over half the population of the estate used one of nine surnames. But whether the households were headed by brothers or more distant cousins is unknown. See Archivo Nacional de Chile (hereafter cited as ANC), Colección de la Intendencia de Coquimbo (hereafter cited as ICoq), vol. 308, no page. Data are for Ovalle 1:5, which should be read district 5 of subdelegation 1 of the department of Ovalle. As another example, the marriage registers for rural areas also indicate that many of the parishioners were kin. In the parish of Quilimarí, located in the same general region as the hacienda of Don José Vicente Larraín, between fifteen percent and twenty percent of the marriages in 1854 required special dispensation because of “relaciones ilícitas,” or potentially incestuous kinship ties between bride and groom. However, again, relatives “to the third and fourth degree” were included in this ban. Archivo de la Parroquia de Quilimarí, Registro de Matrimonios, book 2, nos. 316-348, and book 3, nos. 1-41.
For example, Gilberto Freyre, The Mansions and the Shanties: The Making of Modern Brazil, trans. by Harriet de Onís (New York, 1956), and The Masters and the Slaves: A Study in the Development of Brazilian Civilization, trans. by Samuel Putman (New York, 1956), describe the patriarchal extended family in Brazil. Joaquín Capelo, Sociología de Lima, 4 vols. (Lima, 1895-1902), discusses the extended family in Peru.
Góngora, “Vagabundaje,” p. 16. This impression was based on the study of family structures in small towns, not solely in rural regions. Góngora notes that Perquilauquén does not fit the model and suggests that a different method of distinguishing households was used.
This discussion is based on the recapitulation of manuscript data for Perquilauquén found in Góngora, “Vagabundaje,” pp. 17-20; and Marcello Carmagnani, Les mécanismes de la vie économique dans un société coloniale: Le Chili, 1680-1830 (Paris, 1973), pp. 253-255. Some of the factors discussed for other areas, such as the proportion of female-headed households, were not stated in the sources consulted here and thus cannot be analyzed for Perquilauquén.
Ibid. Carmagnani claims that the market economy was already evident in Perquilauquén in the mid-eighteenth century. If so, obviously only a very small part of the community was affected.
Calculated from Censo 1875.
Oficina Central de Estadística, Censo general de la república de Chile, levantado el 19 de abril de 1865 (Santiago, 1866).
ANC, uncataloged volume labeled Gobernación de Carelmapu, Instruciones Públicas. The manuscripts are not dated, but the other documentation in the volume is for the 1860s. These manuscripts were probably made for the 1865 census.
AE, vol. 4, 1859—1860, p. 533; and AE, vol. 11, 1866, “Producción agrícola.” A fanega equals approximately 72 kilos, .72 qqm., or 157 pounds.
Calculated from Oficina Central de Estadística, Censo jeneral de la república de Chile, 1854, hereafter cited as Censo 1854 (Santiago, 1858); and Estado que manifiesta la renta agrícola de los fundos rústicos que comprende el espresado departamento para deducir el impuesto anual establecido en substitución del diezmo por la lei de 25 octubre de 1853, hereafter cited as Renta agrícola (Valparaíso, 1855). Monetary values used in this paper are given in Chilean pesos worth at the time about 44d of the British sterling pound, or 90 cents of the U.S. dollar.
This point, like many other suggestions in this paper, must be clarified by more research probably using family reconstitution methods.
In general, young people under twenty-five did not head households. Assuming that they did not marry until twenty-five, household heads would have been forty-five before having children over the age of twenty.
Carmagnani, Les mécanismes, pp. 32-34, 51-52, 59, 213-233.
Ibid., p. 224; and AE, vol. 4, 1859-1860, p. 533. Originally the figures were given in fanegas and converted here as one fanega to .72 qqm.
The meaning of “estate” and “small holding,” as used here, must be specified. First, no attempt was made to differentiate between large and small properties for Perquilauquén and Carelmapu because production on both sizes of holdings was primarily for local consumption. The estates analyzed here for the Aconcagua region were so labeled by census takers. In size they ranged from a few hundred to many thousand hectares. Their incomes and productivity varied equally. The distinguishing characteristic of an estate is that many people live and work on land belonging to one person. The small holdings considered here varied in size from a fraction of a hectare to twenty or more hectares depending on location. Income was generally small; the most affluent of the small properties considered here had an assessed yearly income of 150 pesos. In most cases, there was only one house-hold per property, though some had two or three resident inquilino tenants. Middle-sized properties are not considered here. Property evaluation for 1847 and 1854 show that small holdings did not produce wheat for export. For example, one property with an annual income of 100 pesos in 1847 had 100 grape vines and reaped only 15 pesos worth of wheat and 2 pesos of corn plus some beans on four cuadras of land. See the property lists in ANC, uncataloged volume (since consulted, it has probably been included in the Colección de la Intendencia de Aconcagua), labeled Gobernación de Los Andes, #4, Estadística 1843-1860 (hereafter cited as GLA, Estadística), no pages.
Eduard Pöeppig, Un testigo a la alborada de Chile, trans. by Carlos Keller (Santiago, 1960), pp. 101, 114, 124-125, describes a scattered mixed settlement for the late 1820s. The order of enumeration of dwellings in 1854 and 1865 suggests that estates had come to form more cohesive units.
Calculated from data in the ANC, Colección de Ministerio de Hacienda (hereafter cited as MH), vol. 304, no pages. See also Arnold J. Bauer and Ann Hagerman Johnson, “Land and Labour in Rural Chile, 1850-1935,” in Kenneth Duncan and Ian Rutledge, eds., Land and Labour in Latin America (Cambridge, Eng., 1977), pp. 83-102. On the evolution of property in Aconcagua, see Ximena Aranda, “Origen y evolución de la pequeña propiedad,” in Valle de Putaendo: Estudio de estructura agraria (Santiago, 1961), pp. 139-218.
René Salinas Meza, “Tendencias migratorias de una población regional en Chile colonial: El Norte Chico, 1700-1800,” paper presented at the Seminario de Demografía Histórica: Migraciones Internas en Chile, Siglos XVII al XX, Santiago, Centro Latinoamericano de Demografía, April 14-16, 1975.
Ann Hagerman Johnson, “Internal Migration in Chile to 1920: Its Relationship to the Labor Market, Agricultural Growth, and Urbanization” (Ph.D. Diss., University of California at Davis, 1978), p. 542.
The annual rate of geometric growth of the departments between 1813 and 1835 ranges from 2.8 percent to 4.9 percent, except for the department of La Ligua which had an annual geometric growth rate of only 0.5 percent. Calculated from ANC, Censo de 1813, levantado por Don Juan Egaña de orden de la Junta de Gobierno formado por Señores Pérez, Infante, y Eyzaguirre (Santiago, 1853), and results of the 1835 census, published in Fernando Urízar Garfias, Repertorio chileno (Santiago, 1835). These variations in population growth are supported by qualitative information. See Johnson, “Internal Migration in Chile,” pp. 102-103, 210.
The annual geometric growth rates between 1835 and 1854 for San Felipe and Los Andes were 1.0 percent and -0.7 percent respectively. For Putaendo, Petorca and La Ligua, by contrast, the rates range from 1.2 percent to 2.7 percent. Calculated from Urízar Garfias, Repertorio chileno, and Censo 1854.
Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, El clima de Chile (1877; reprint ed., Buenos Aires, 1970), pp. 290-292, 328, discusses the advances in irrigation in Aconcagua in the first half of the century.
Claudio Gay, Agricultura chilena, 2 vols. (1862-1865; reprint ed., Santiago, 1973) , I, 87-88.
Pöeppig, Un testigo, p. 124.
Arnold Bauer, Chilean Rural Society from the Spanish Conquest to 1930 (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 159-161. The timing of population absorption on estates in Aconcagua is somewhat different from that in other parts of central agricultural Chile because Aconcagua was more densely settled and more market oriented in the early nineteenth century.
Censo de 1813.
As quoted in Horacio Aránquiz Donoso, La situación de los trabajadores agrícolas en el siglo XIX (Santiago, 1967), p. 13. A cuadra equals 1.57 hectares.
Archivo de la Parroquia de Quilimarí, Matrícula de la doctrina, 1839. I am grateful to René Salinas Meza of Valparaíso for informing me of this document and for lending it to me. The document is now in his possession. It should be noted that Quilimarí was in the province of Aconcagua until the administrative reorganization of 1927-1929 when it became part of the province of Coquimbo.
See n. 4.
Guillermo Eyzaguirre Rouse and Jorge Errázuriz Tagle, Estudio social: Monografía de una familia obrera de Santiago (Santiago, 1903), p. 71.
Johnson, “Internal Migration in Chile,” p. 74.
An analysis of kinship between households was carried out for the estate of José Vicente Larraín in Ovalle in 1854, as found in ICoq, vol. 308, district 1:5.
ANC, uncataloged volume (see n. 26) labeled Gobernación de Petorca, Censo 1865 (hereafter cited as GP, Censo 1865); data are from districts 10:1-2.
Impuesto agrícola: Rol de contribuyentes (Santiago, 1875).
GP, Censo 1865, district 10:1.
Impuesto agrícola.
GP, Censo 1865, district 10:2.
Income increased from 6,100 pesos to 22,500 pesos. ANC, Colección de la Contaduría Mayor, 2d series, Catastro, 1834: Aconcagua (hereafter cited as CM, Catastro), and Renta agrícola.
GLA, Estadística, no page.
In 1843, Panquehue produced 4,865 fanegas of wheat, 3,000 of which were exported. Ibid.
In 1875, Panquehue produced 18,094 fanegas of wheat. AE, vol. 16, 1875, Producción agrícola; Panquehue was subdelegation 4 of Los Andes in 1875.
ANC, Colección de Ministerio de Interior (hereafter cited as MI), vol. 113, no pages; and Censo 1854.
See GLA, Estadística, no pages; and ANC, uncataloged volume (see n. 26), labeled Gobernación de Los Andes, Censo 1865 (hereafter cited as GLA, Censo 1865), no pages.
For example, the model hacienda of Viluco, just south of Santiago, prohibited the lodging of outsiders, BSNA, 2 (1871), p. 181.
In addition, eight conjugal family units whose heads were aged forty to forty-four had children over twenty in residence.
George McBride, Chile: Land and Society (1936; reprint ed., New York, 1971), pp. 181-182.
For 1839, manuscripts are from the parish of Quilimarí, see n. 39. Data are for a section called Arrayán. For 1865, GP, Censo 1865, district 9:4.
GLA, Censo 1865, district 12:2.
Horace Rumbold, Report by Mr. Rumbold on the Progress and General Condition of Chile (London, 1876), p. 329.
Author notes
The author has recently completed her doctorate at the University of California at Davis. She wishes to thank Ted Margadant, Francesca Miller, Arnold Bauer, and Rollie Poppino for their helpful comments.
