118 CHAPTER 5 STATE, CHURCH, AND SOCIETY
Duels, assassinations, even pitched battles between
different Spanish factions were events frequently
mentioned in offi cial records and private diaries.
From time to time, the misery of the masses in the
native and mixed-blood wards exploded in terrify-
ing upheavals. In 1624 the mobs of Mexico City,
goaded by famine and a decree of excommunica-
tion issued by the archbishop against an unpopular
viceroy, rose with cries of “Death to the evil govern-
ment” and “Long live the church.” They vented
their wrath in widespread destruction and looting.
In 1692 similar circumstances caused an even
greater explosion, which ended in many deaths, the
sacking of shops, and the virtual destruction of the
viceroy’s palace and other public buildings.
The hacienda constituted another great cen-
ter of colonial social life. We must again stress the
major variations in size, productive potential, la-
bor systems, and other aspects of the colonial haci-
enda. Changing economic trends brought frequent
changes in the size, products, and ownership of
these enterprises, with large haciendas sometimes
broken up into smaller units, and vice versa. The
overall trend in the course of the colonial period
was toward concentration of landownership in
fewer hands, usually at the expense of small land-
owners. Because of the “polymorphic” nature of
the colonial hacienda, however, the following de-
scription of its social life may be regarded as more
characteristic of “traditional” haciendas found in
certain areas of Mexico and Peru, and not of haci-
endas everywhere.
On the haciendas lived those creole aristocrats
who could not support the expense of a city estab-
lishment or whose estates were in remote provinces
or frontier areas. By the end of the seventeenth
century, the hacienda in many areas had become
a largely self-suffi cient economic unit, combining
arable land, grazing land for herds of sheep and
cattle, timberland for fuel and construction, and
even workshops for the manufacture and repair
of the implements used on the hacienda. The ha-
cienda was often also a self-contained social unit,
with a church or chapel usually served by a resi-
dent priest, a store from which workers could ob-
tain goods charged against their wages, and even a
jail to house disobedient peons. In the hacendado’s
large, luxuriously appointed house often lived not
only his immediate family but numerous relatives
who laid claim to his protection and support.
The hacienda often contained one or more in-
digenous villages whose residents had once owned
the land on which they now lived and worked
as virtual serfs. They lived in one-room adobe or
thatch huts whose only furniture often was some
sleeping mats and a stone used for grinding maize
(calledmetate in New Spain). Unlike the indepen-
dent indigenous communities, which continued
to resist the landowners’ aggressions with strate-
gies ranging from revolts to prolonged litigation,
the resident peons had usually learned to make
the appropriate responses of resigned servility to
the master. The hacienda, with its characteristic
economic and social organization, represented the
most authentic expression of the feudal side of co-
lonial society.MARRIAGE, SEXUALITY,AND THE STATUS OF WOMEN
Marital and familial relationships in elite society
were generally characterized by male domina-
tion, expressed in the customary right of fathers
to arrange marriages for their daughters and in a
double standard of sexual morality enjoining strict
chastity or fi delity for wives and daughters without
corresponding restrictions on husbands and sons.
Both the church—the guardian of public moral-
ity—and the state—concerned with the economic
and political consequences of marriage—sought to
supervise and control it. Throughout the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, the church tended to
support the right of children to select their mar-
riage partners, while conceding the right of parents
to have a say in the matter. In the second half of the
eighteenth century, however, when large prop-
erty interests grew in importance and infl uence,
the state and then the church gradually adopted
positions supporting parental objections to mar-
riage between “unequal” partners as prejudicial to
the family’s “honor.” Although the royal decree of
1778 on the subject sanctioned parental opposi-
tion to only one kind of “inequality”—that arising
from interracial unions—the interpretation placed
on it by high colonial courts made clear that they