Letter and Love in Colonial Spanish America

LETTERS AND LOVE INCOLONIAL SPANISH AMERICA*

INTRODUCTION: THE TRANSIT OF VENUS

Is love a modern invention? This question is perhaps not quite as ludi-crous as it might appear. For nearly three decades scholars have beenexploring whether contemporary ideas about love are in fact as ancient

as we might believe. As a result of these investigations, some historians haveconcluded that our current attitudes towards love date from no earlier thanthe seventeenth century. This opinion was expressed most forcefully byLawrence Stone in his 1977 The Family, Sex and Marriage in England,1500-1800. In this path-breaking study Stone argued that recognizablymodern ideas about marriage did not emerge in England until the seven-teenth century.1 Only then did what he called “companionate marriage”develop. “Companionate marriage,” as described by Stone, was character-ized by certain distinguishing features. Firstly, a companionate coupleexpected their relationship with each other to be their most important emo-tional connection. Companionate husbands and wives, in other words,viewed each other not only as sexual and economic partners, but also as“bosom friends.” Affection was thus an essential element of a successfulcompanionate marriage. Moreover, from the eighteenth century on suchaffection was increasingly regarded as a necessary precursor to, and indeedmotive for, marriage, at least among the English elite who formed the sub-ject of Stone’s analysis. The focus on companionship tended to underminepatriarchal rhetoric of wifely subjugation and obedience. “I don’t take the

The Americas62:1 July 2005, 17-46Copyright by the Academy of AmericanFranciscan History

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* I would like to thank Christa Hämmerle, Steve Hindle, Peter Marshall, Iris Montero and the Amer-icas referees and editors for their very helpful comments. I am also indebted to Everette Larson for guid-ance on Spanish linguistics, and Rosario Márquez Macías for providing me with a copy of her Historiasde América: La emigración española en tinta y papel. This article originates from a paper I presented atthe University of Vienna in 2000. That paper appeared as “Briefe und die Liebe im kolonialen Spanisch-Amerika” in Christa Hämmerle and Edith Saurer, eds, Briefkulturen und ihr Geschlecht. Zur Geschichteder privaten Korrespondenz vom 16. Jahrhundert bis heute (Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 2003), pp. 135-62.I am grateful to the editors for their permission to publish this revised English-language version.

1 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (New York: Harper &Row, 1977).

Sherry Massoni

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state of matrimony to be designed . . . that the wife is to be used as an upperservant in the house,” insisted Daniel Defoe in 1726. “Love,” he maintained,“knows no superior or inferior, no imperious command on the one hand, noreluctant subjugation on the other.”2 Finally, these trends placed increasingpressure on parents to allow their children to choose their own marriagepartners, so that they might select spouses with whom they felt some degreeof emotional affinity.

To complement his picture of companionate marriage in seventeenth- andeighteenth-century England, Stone described several very different types offamily relationship, which, he claimed, had preceded the development of com-panionate marriage, and which he regarded as typical of family structures inmany parts of Western Europe for perhaps as much as a millennium previ-ously. These earlier models of marriage he called the “Open Lineage Family,”in which a married couple’s primary emotional attachments were towards theirblood relatives, or neighbors, rather than each other, and the awkwardly-titled“Restricted Patriarchal Nuclear Family.” The latter, which according to Stonewas characteristic of the early modern period, saw the reduction of influencesby kin and neighbors, and a corresponding increase in the authority of themale patriarch. In neither of these family types, Stone maintained, did lovebetween husband and wife play much of a role, and in neither model did hus-band and wife expect to derive companionship from marriage. Marriage wasinstead intended to provide economic and status maintenance.

The theories articulated in The Family, Sex and Marriage have been chal-lenged on many fronts, but their most contentious aspect remains Stone’sclaim that intimate, affectionate relationships were relatively uncharacteris-tic of the English family prior to the mid-seventeenth century. It is his bleakpicture of pre-companionate marriage that has drawn most fire from fellowhistorians, particularly early modernists, some of whom insist that romanticlove was a distinguishing feature of the English marriage from at least thefourteenth century, and who dispute Stone’s claim that romance was essen-tially an eighteenth-century invention.3 Undeterred by such criticisms ofStone’s analysis, scholars studying other parts of the world have taken up theStone model, and have attempted to extend it beyond England. A number ofhistorians working on Britain’s colonies in North America have argued that

18 LETTERS AND LOVE IN COLONIAL SPANISH AMERICA

2 Daniel Defoe, cited in Stone, The Family, p. 326. 3 This issue was raised in some of the earliest reviews of The Family, Sex and Marriage. See, for

example, the reviews by Alan Macfarlane, E. P. Thompson, and Randolph Trumbach in History andTheory 18:1 (1979), Radical History Review 20 (1979), and Journal of Social History 13:1 (1979),respectively. For a later critique, see Alan Macfarlane, Marriage and Love in England: Modes of Repro-duction, 1300-1840 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).

that region experienced an analogous development. Suggesting that Stone’swork translates well to the United States, Stanley Mintz and Susan Kellogghave claimed that from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century a “silentrevolution” took place in the nature of marriage: “In both northern andsouthern colonies, a new style of family life was beginning to emerge,emphasizing domestic intimacy, the care and nurture of children, and free-dom in choice of a spouse.”4 Similarly, Jan Lewis has argued that “the pur-suit of happiness,” particularly through the choice of a marriage partner oneloved, became a dominant activity (at least for the free population) in lateeighteenth-century Virginia. By the end of the century, she asserted, “bothmen and women believed that marriage should be based on affection.”5 JayFliegelman has provided ample evidence from literary sources that the ideaof paternal authority itself came under sustained attack in eighteenth-centuryNorth America.6 Moreover, such historians have stressed that not only did arhetoric of personal fulfillment and romantic love develop in late eighteenth-century North America, but also that, as Stone claimed for England, this wasa dramatic change from previous centuries.7 Whether or not one acceptsromantic love as an essentially modern invention, this scholarship hasshown that love can be subjected to historical analysis. Indeed, the insis-tence that attitudes towards love are historically contingent is part of a largerhistory of the emotions whose implications extend beyond England and theThirteen Colonies.

LOVE AND MARRIAGE IN THE SPANISH INDIES

As an historian of Spanish America I have followed with interest the his-toricizing of love by scholars of England and North America. To what extent

REBECCA EARLE 19

4 Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life(New York: Free Press, 1988), p. 41. Mary Beth Norton similarly describes the “new egalitarianism” ofpost-revolutionary American marriages. (See Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters. The RevolutionaryExperience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 232.)

5 Jan Lewis, “The Pursuit of Happiness”: Family and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1983), esp. chapter 5 (the quotation is from pp. 188-89).

6 Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority,1750-1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). See also Carl Degler, At Odds: Women andthe Family in American from the Revolution to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp.8-25 for his description of the “modern American family.”

7 See, for example, Philip Greven, “Family Structure in Seventeenth-Century Andover, Massachu-setts,” William and Mary Quarterly 23:2 (1966), for a description of the extensive control Puritan fathersexercised over their sons’ marriages in the seventeenth century. Edmund Morgan, The Puritan Family:Religious and Domestic Relations in Seventeenth-Century New England (New York: Harper & Row,1966), similarly asserted that “Puritan love . . . was not so much the cause as it was the product of mar-riage” (p. 54). There is an ongoing debate about the accuracy of Morgan’s characterisation of Puritanmarriage, which it is beyond the scope of this article to consider.

are either their insights or their methodologies applicable to Spain and itsAmerican colonies? Scholars of colonial Spanish America have for somedecades concerned themselves with the nature of marriage and sexuality inthe region. The role of the Catholic church in governing marriage and shap-ing sexual mores has been studied in many works, as has the impact of Span-ish America’s racial heterogeneity on the development of honor systems.Historians have moreover stressed the importance of marriage to the main-tenance of social and familial networks. Demographic studies, together withqualitative sources, have illuminated the centrality of concubinage and otherforms of consensual union to colonial culture. The persistence of pre-con-quest attitudes towards sexuality has been charted in a number of works, andindividual cases of separation, bigamy, and seduction have been the subjectof close, careful analysis.8 All these works have contributed greatly to ourunderstanding of the colonial world and its inhabitants. Marriage and sexu-ality are now rightly considered core topics within colonial history. Far lessattention has been paid to charting the history of love. Often the concept isconspicuous primarily by its absence. For example, love appears in Alexan-dra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook’s account of a sixteenth-centurybigamy case only once—as part of an appeal for money (“This I ask that youdo for love of me”). The considerable efforts by Francisco Noguerol deUlloa and Catalina de Vergara to justify their bigamous marriage werecouched not in a language of affection but rather of legal and religious obli-


8 See for example Daisy Rípodas Ardanas, El matrimonio en Indias: realidad social y regulaciónjurídica (Buenos Aires: Fundación para la Educación, la Ciencia y la Cultura, 1977); Silvia Arrom, “Mar-riage Patterns in Mexico City, 1811,” Journal of Family History 3-4 (1978-79); Robert McCaa, “Cali-dad, Clase, and Marriage in Colonial Mexico: The Case of Parral, 1788-90,” Hispanic American His-torical Review 64:3 (1984); Asunción Lavrin, ed., Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989); Verena Martínez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour inNineteenth-Century Cuba: A Study in Racial Attitudes and Sexual Values in a Slave Society (Ann Arbor:University of Michigan Press, 1989); Alexandra Parma Cook and Noble David Cook, Good Faith andTruthful Ignorance: A Case of Transatlantic Bigamy (Durham and London: Duke University Press,1991); Pablo Rodríguez, Seducción, amancebamiento y abandono en la colonia (Santa Fe de Bogotá:Fundación Simón y Lola Guberek, 1991); Juan Almécija, La familia en la provincia de Venezuela(Madrid: MAPFRE, 1992); Robert McCaa, “Marriageways in Mexico and Spain, 1500-1800,” Continu-ity and Change 9:1 (1994); Pilar Gonzalbo Aispuru and Cecilia Rabell, eds., La familia en el mundoiberoamericano (Mexico City: UNAM, 1994); Ward Stavig, “Living in Offense of Our Lord: IndigenousSexual Values and Marital Life in the Colonial Crucible,” Hispanic American Historical Review 75:4(1995); Richard Boyer, The Lives of the Bigamists: Marriage, Family and Community in ColonialMexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995); Steve Stern, The Secret History ofGender: Women, Men and Power in Late Colonial Mexico (Chapel Hill and London: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1995); Pablo Rodríguez, Sentimientos y vida familiar en el Nuevo Reino de Granada(Santa Fe de Bogotá: Ariel, 1997); Lyman Johnson and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, eds., The Faces of Honour:Sex, Shame and Violence in Colonial Latin America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,1998); and Ann Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality and Illegitimacy inColonial Spanish America (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

gations.9 Similarly, in her thoughtful study of eighteenth-century illegiti-macy cases Ann Twinam refers to the individuals involved in extramaritalrelationships as “lovers,” but love itself scarcely puts in an appearance.10

Some scholars of colonial Spanish America have engaged more explicitlywith the Stoneian insight that cultural attitudes towards love can changeover time. A few have even maintained that the meaning of love in the His-panic world underwent a transformation similar to those that allegedlyoccurred in England and British North America. This is surprising, as therise of romantic love in those regions is usually attributed to the growth ofindividualism and the advent of capitalism, forces whose presence in eigh-teenth-century Spanish America is by no means accepted. Ramón Gutiérrezhas presented some of the strongest evidence for an increased eighteenth-century emphasis on love as a necessary precursor to marriage. In his 1991study of colonial New Mexico, Gutiérrez argued that the late eighteenth cen-tury saw significant changes in attitudes towards love within Spanish colo-nial society. He found evidence for this change in a variety of locations. Inthe early eighteenth century, for example, when couples were asked bypriests to give their reasons for marrying, “the most common responses . . .were religious or obligational.”11 When asked in 1702 why he wished tomarry, Cristóbal García explained that it was “in order to put myself in astate of grace.” Gregoria Valverde explained in 1712 that she was marrying“to serve God and [for] no other reason.” Francisco Saes similarly stressedin 1718 that he wished to marry “to serve God and save my soul.”12 How-ever, by the end of the eighteenth century, new reasons began to appear. In1798 José García explained that he wanted to marry María López “becauseof the growing desire that we mutually have for each other.”13 By the turn ofthe nineteenth century, “a flurry of new responses appeared in the matrimo-nial investigations, which stressed individualism and love as reasons forwishing to marry.”14 Couples began to explain that they planned to marrybecause they had fallen in love, not out of any sense of Christian duty. InGutiérrez’s view this shows the arrival of the ideology of romantic love inthis Spanish colony. Such developments indicated to Gutiérrez that by 1800,

REBECCA EARLE 21

9 Cook and Cook, Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance, 49 (for quote).10 Twinam, Public Lives, Private Secrets.11 Ramón Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and

Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 328.12 All examples from Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, p. 328. Several of these examples are also dis-

cussed in Ramón Gutiérrez, “Honor, Ideology, Marriage Negotiation, and Class-Gender Domination inNew Mexico, 1690-1846,” Latin American Perspectives 12:1 (1985), pp. 94, 100-01.

13 Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, p. 328. See also p. 330.14 Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, p. 329.

“a love born of passion was sufficient reason for choosing a particular con-jugal mate,” in dramatic contrast with the previous orthodoxy that “love was. . . a subversive sentiment,” and certainly no basis for a sound marriage.15

Gutiérrez ascribed this change to a series of transformations that hadshaped colonial New Mexico: the blending of indigenous and Spanishsexual values, the language of missionary Catholicism, and the effects ofSpanish economic reforms implemented in the second half of the eighteenthcentury. Although Gutiérrez thus attributed the advent of romantic love tocauses different from those cited in the English and North American cases,he nonetheless described its effects in language virtually identical to thatused by Stone to describe eighteenth-century England. Romantic love,Gutiérrez argued, “placed the sexes on a more equal footing in terms of mar-ital formation,” and put particular emphasis on personal autonomy.16 Otherscholars have supported this view with different sorts of evidence. EdithCourturier argued that the disappearance of the dowry in eighteenth-centuryMexico marked a reduction in parental control over daughters’ marriages,and permitted men and women to marry without parental interference.17

Indirect evidence that romantic individualism was on the rise is provided bythe outpouring of late colonial legislation intended to limit individual choicein marriage. In 1776 Charles III issued a Royal Pragmatic on Marriageaimed explicitly at limiting the “disorder and violent passions of youth” whosubscribed to inappropriate ideas about the primacy of love.18 This legisla-tion allowed parents to disinherit their children should they marry withoutparental consent. It was followed by a series of laws passed in the early1800s that extended the power of the state to control marriage, and furtherlimited the rights of individuals to marry without permission. The fact thatthe colonial state found it necessary to issue such legislation suggests thatpatriarchal authority was thought to be under particular attack, as indeed itwas from certain quarters. Advocates of the Enlightenment in both Spainand its colonies criticized marriages not based on true affection; José


15 Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, pp. 227, 329. 16 Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, pp. 331-32.17 Edith Courturier, “Women and the Family in Eighteenth-Century Mexico: Law and Practice,”

Journal of Family History 10:3 (1985).18 Pragmática Sanción para evitar el abuso de contraer matrimonios desiguales, El Pardo, 23 March

1776, in Richard Konetzke, ed., Colección de Documentos para la Historia de la Formación Social deHispanoamérica, 1493-1810, 3 vols (Madrid: CSIC, 1962) vol. 3:1, p. 411. See also R.C. declarando laforma en que se ha de guardar y cumplir en las Indias la Pragmática Sanción de 23 de marzo de 1776sobre contraer matrimonios, El Pardo, 7 April 1778, in Konetzke, ed., Colección de Documentos vol. 3:1,pp. 438-442. The Royal Pragmatic and subsequent marriage legislation are discussed clearly in Martínez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Colour in Nineteenth-Century Cuba; and Steiner Saether, “Bourbon Abso-lutism and Marriage Reform in Late Colonial Spanish America,” The Americas 59:4 (2003), pp. 475-509.

Cadalso, in his late-eighteenth-century imitation of the Lettres Persanes,ridiculed such marriages, describing, for example, the series of disastroushusbands inflicted on a young woman by her “capricious parents whobelieve that the wishes of a daughter should not be taken into account whenarranging a marriage.”19 The Bishop of Buenos Aires likewise argued, usingthe Biblical story of Sampson as an example, that “marriage begins withlove, continues through love and ends with love.” Parents, he insisted, hadno right to interfere in their children’s choice of spouse.20

Not all scholars of Spanish America agree that the late eighteenth centurysaw the development of new ideas about love. Asunción Lavrin has notedthat eighteenth-century Hispanic theologians “constantly referred to love asthe force that should bind husband and wife,” but she does not present thisas a change from previous centuries. Lavrin has further observed that refer-ences to “pasion y amor” were common in Mexican matrimonial petitionsthroughout the eighteenth century.21 Patricia Seed, in turn, has claimed thatromantic love fell into disrepute in the eighteenth century, after enjoyingwidespread acceptance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a resultof the Council of Trent’s insistence that marriage required the free consentof the couple.22 Other historians argue that romantic love scarcely penetratedinto colonial Spanish American society. Pablo Rodríguez has asserted that inearly nineteenth-century Colombia marriage was viewed by the middleclasses as a primarily religious undertaking. Matrimony, a middle-classColombian father advised his son in 1808, should be undertaken in consul-tation not “with our passions but with God.”23 In nineteenth-century Cuba,Verena Martínez-Alier has insisted, romantic love was considered a“socially subversive feeling,” likely to undermine racial and class hierar-chies.24 Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz has moreover shown that it was not untilthe mid-nineteenth century that ideas about companionate marriage began to

REBECCA EARLE 23

19 José Cadalso, Cartas marruecas [1789] (Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1950), pp. 69, 183-85 (for quote).20 Manuel Azamor y Ramírez, 1795, cited in Rípodas Ardanaz, El matrimonio en Indias, pp. 402-04

(403 for quote).21 Asunción Lavrin, “Sexuality in Colonial Mexico: A Church Dilemma,” in Lavrin, ed., Sexuality

and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, pp. 59 (for quotes), 84n.15, 85n.26. See also Richard Boyer,“Women, La Mala Vida, and the Politics of Marriage,” in Lavrin, ed., Sexuality and Marriage in Colo-nial Latin America, p. 273.

22 Patricia Seed, To Love, Honor and Obey in Colonial Mexico. Conflicts of Marriage Choice, 1574-1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).

23 Rodríguez, Sentimientos y vida familiar en el Nuevo Reino de Granada, p. 158.24 Martínez-Alier, Marriage, Class and Color in Nineteenth-Century Cuba, pp. 66-67, 70 (for

quote), 161n.24; and Mark Szuchman, “‘A Challenge to the Patriarchs’: Love among the Youth in Nine-teenth-Century Buenos Aires,” in Mark Szuchman, ed., The Middle Period in Latin America: Values andAttitudes in the Seventeenth-Nineteenth Centuries (Boulder: Rienner, 1989).

penetrate Costa Rican polite society, and that when they did the result wasnot the creation of a more egalitarian form of marriage, but merely the “civ-ilizing” of patriarchal power.25 There is thus little consensus on whetherideas about love underwent a transformation in Spanish America in any waycomparable to the one that allegedly occurred in England and its Americancolonies. Although there has been considerable scholarly focus on the natureof the colonial marriage there has been less research on the role of lovewithin marriage, and what research does exist is contradictory.

“LETTERS ARE THE BEST THING”26

Would an examination of personal letters shed any light on this confusedsituation? Historians such as Lawrence Stone used letters, particularly loveletters, to show that marital intimacy increased in the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries; Stone indeed regarded the love letter itself as a moderninvention, indicative of changing personal relations. From the seventeenthcentury, he claimed, “there developed a series of almost wholly new genresof writing, the intimately self-revelatory diary, the autobiography and thelove letter.”27 He and others have sought evidence for the development ofromantic love in the changing forms of address used by husbands and wivesin their correspondence. Stone noted that while in the seventeenth centuryhusbands and wives addressed each other as “Sir” and “Madam,” by theeighteenth century such formal terms were increasingly being abandoned infavor of more affectionate or intimate expressions. In the earlier period theuse of a husband’s first name by his wife was seen as a sign of disrespect,but mid-eighteenth century couples addressed each other as “my loved crea-ture,” or “my dear.”28 Historians of North America have similarly claimedthat we can use changing salutations in personal letters to chart the chang-ing relationship between husbands and wives. Mary Beth Norton and CarlDegler both analyzed personal correspondence to support their claims thatby the early nineteenth century relations between spouses were becomingincreasingly intimate. In the early years of the eighteenth century such cor-respondence revealed hierarchy; in their letters middle-class husbands mightaddress their wives by their first name, but wives rarely addressed husbands


25 Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz, “Civilizando la vida doméstica en el Valle Central de Costa Rica (1750-1850),” in Eugenia Rodríguez Sáenz, ed., Entre Silencios y voces. Género e historia en América Central(1750-1990) (San José: Centro Nacional para el Desarrollo de la Mujer y la Familia, 1997).

26 Diego Risueño to Josefa Micaela Carrasco, Mexico, 15 September 1722, in Isabel Macías andFrancisco Morales Padrón, eds, Cartas desde América, 1700-1800 (Seville: Junta de Andalucía, 1991),p. 77.

27 Stone, The Family, p. 226.28 Stone, The Family, p. 329.

in this way. Rather, wives either avoided the use of salutations altogether, oraddressed their husband as “Mr. —.” This, Norton argued, reveals that“eighteenth century American white men clearly expected their wives to besubmissive.”29 The salutations used in personal letters thus reflect the powerrelations of early eighteenth-century marriages, according to Norton. By themid-nineteenth century, on the other hand, both men and women had begunto write to each other as “my dearest friend,” “my other self,” or “my dar-ling,” which Degler regarded as evidence of the emergence of the “modernAmerican family.”30

Can historians of the Hispanic world use letters to examine the relation-ship between husbands and wives in the way that historians have done forEngland and North America? In particular, is it possible to reproduce in thecontext of colonial Spanish America the use of epistolary address as a meansof charting changing ideas about love? To set about answering this question,I have reviewed some three hundred and fifty conjugal letters from colonialSpanish America dating from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth cen-tury, looking in particular at the salutations and closings.31 In other words, Iemployed a set of “Stoneian” sources and methodologies, although my pur-pose was not so much to confirm or reject the applicability of Stone’shypotheses to Spanish America, as to explore the nature of marital intimacyin the Hispanic world via an under-utilized group of documents.32

The letters that I used were written in their vast majority by Spanish menresident in the Indies. These writers were among the many thousands ofSpaniards who emigrated, either permanently or temporarily, to the Ameri-can colonies in the years between 1493, when the first settlements wereestablished in the Caribbean, and 1824, when Spain lost most of its overseascolonies as a consequence of the Spanish American wars of independence.33

REBECCA EARLE 25

29 See Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, pp. 61-62.30 Degler, At Odds, pp. 38-40. Not all historians share this view. Edmund Morgan, for example,

claimed that affectionate salutations and closings were not atypical of seventeenth century Puritan let-ters. See Morgan, The Puritan Family, pp. 50-51, 60-61.

31 That is, I have examined every personal letter exchanged by couples during the colonial periodthat I could locate.

32 To my knowledge no overview of Hispanic “America Letters” has been written. For an assessmentof the uses scholars have made of the “America Letters” from immigrants to the United States, see DavidGerber, “The Immigrant Letter between Positivism and Populism: American Historians’ Uses of PersonalCorrespondence,” in Rebecca Earle, ed., Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600-1945(Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 1999).

33 For an overview of Iberian emigration, see Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, “The Population of Colo-nial Spanish America,” in Leslie Bethell, ed., Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 2 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1984); and Mark Burkholder and Lyman Johnson, Colonial Latin America(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 104-06.

Although the precise number of Spanish immigrants to the Americasremains unknown, during the period between 1500 and 1700, whichincludes the years of greatest emigration, nearly half a million Spaniards set-tled, at least temporarily, in the Americas. Immigration continued during theeighteenth century, although on a much smaller scale, and with somewhatdifferent characteristics. Eighteenth-century immigrants were more likely tobe merchants or officials, in contrast with earlier migrants, many of whomwere peasants or artisans. Nearly a third of immigrants settled in Mexico;unsurprisingly, most surviving letters are from that viceroyalty. Very fewsurviving letters were written by women.34 However, although few “Amer-ica letters” were written by women, most were written to women. They wereaddressed to wives, or other female relatives, who had remained in Spain.The existence of a wife in Spain distinguishes the authors of many of the let-ters examined here from the typical immigrant, who, although male, wasunmarried. These letters thus do not entirely reflect the most common expe-rience of Spanish immigrants in the Americas.35

It is not possible to determine the social class or even occupation of manyof these letter-writers. It seems however that most were men of reasonablemeans, who desired their wives to join them in the Indies, and who were ableto foot the roughly 200 peso bill for this voyage. Indeed, the primary purposeof most of the preserved correspondence appears to have been to convincewives to undertake the transatlantic voyage.36 These letters are thus full oftender inducements to travel to America, promises of immense comfort onarrival, and reassuring declarations of undiminished love. “Although when Ileft [Seville] I was tired of the city, I was not tired of you,” insisted Antoniodel Angel in 1721. He went on to remind his wife that “I married [you] of myown wish and choice, which I do not regret.”37 “I received your most recentletter, and with it great happiness and consolation, as it came from the one I


34 For examples of conjugal letters written by women see Sergio Vergara Quiroz, Cartas de mujeres enChile, 1630-1885 (Santiago: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1987), pp. 64-66, 67-78, 84-90, 104-05, 126-29;Macías and Morales, eds, Cartas desde América, pp. 141; Rosario Márquez Macías, ed., Historias deAmérica: La emigración española en tinta y papel (n.p.: Gráficas Nerva, 1994?), pp. 126-27, 132, 141; andSusan Migden Socolow, The Women of Colonial Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2000), pp. 196-98. I am grateful to an anonymous Americas referee for recommending Vergara’s book.

35 For comments on the “typicality” of such eighteenth-century letters, see the introduction to Macíasand Morales, eds., Cartas desde América.

36 In her study of eighteenth century immigration to the Americas Rosario Márquez asserts thatrequests for their wives to join them in the Indies are the single most characteristic feature of letters fromimmigrant husbands. See Rosario Márquez Macías, La emigración española a América (1765-1824)(Oviedo: Universidad de Oviedo, 1995), p. 259.

37 Antonio del Angel to Petronila Jiménez, Mexico, 15 April 1721, in Macías and Morales, eds.,Cartas desde América, pp. 72-73.

love most in this life, and will until I die,” wrote Juan López de Sande to hiswife in 1568.38 The attractions of the Indies feature in many eighteenth-cen-tury letters. “Here you can become a lady and have someone to command,”offered one blunt lover in Trinidad.39 From Havana, Joaquín Ugarte sought tolure his wife to his side through an enticing description of luxury and ease:

I have spent a great deal of money establishing a decent house, such as I nowhave, and need for my work. I have the girls who work in the house, I have amulata woman who looks after me and after them, I have my little black boyto serve me, my carriage and mule, but they do not look after me the way youwould. . . But, my dearest, here you’ll live very comfortably and it could bethat here you’ll feel well. . . My dearest, come here, as you’ll live very well;with the life here you’ll live easy. . . Let me know that you’re coming here,my soul, here you can rest easy. . . Come here, my dearest, and look after yourown. . . I’ve already told you that here you can rest and you’ll have yourslaves, your carriage for promenades.40

“Once you’ve come here you’ll never give Spain another thought,” prom-ised Juan Miguel de Ortesa from Veracruz.41

Sixteenth-century writers focused somewhat more on denigrating Spainthan on praising the Americas. “This land [Mexico] is tired, but still it isbetter than Spain,” wrote Juan Díaz Pacheco to his wife in 1586.42 Theystressed that their wives would be better off spending “this small and miser-able life” in the Indies, but they did not offer happiness to the same degreeas eighteenth-century spouses. “Here you won’t lack God’s mercy, andbetter than [in Spain],” promised Luis de Cordoba in 1566.43

Such enticements were not always successful, and husbands respondedwith dismay when they learned that their partner had decided not to join themin the Americas. After Faustino Fajardo’s wife refused to travel to Cartagena:

REBECCA EARLE 27

38 Juan López de Sande to Leonor de Haro, Mexico, April 1568, in Enrique Otte, ed., Cartas pri-vadas de emigrantes a Indias, 1540-1616 (Seville, Jerez: Escuela de Estudios Hispanoamericanos,1988), pp. 51-53.

39 Andrés José Marín to María Antonia Pérez, Puerto España, 8 May 1791, in Macías and Morales,eds., Cartas desde América, p. 234.

40 Joaquín Ugarte to Juana Landero, Havana, 14 June 1768, in Macías and Morales, eds., Cartasdesde América, eds., p. 255. I have translated hija as “dearest.”

41 Juan Miguel de Ortesa to María Nicolasa de León y Toledo, Veracruz, 12 July 1755, in Macías andMorales, eds., Cartas desde América, pp. 123-24.

42 Juan Díaz Pacheco to Ana García Roldan, Mexico, 30 April 1586, in Otte, ed., Cartas privadas,p. 112.

43 Luis de Cordoba to Isabel Carera, Puebla, 5 February 1566, in Otte, ed., Cartas privadas, pp. 147-48. “Small and miserable life” is from Luis de Illescas to Catalina Gutiérrez, Mexico, 24 September1564, in Otte, ed., Cartas privadas, p. 45.

Nothing pleases me, I don’t eat or sleep, nor can I lift my eyes from the ground,nor dress in fine clothes. . . When I learned that you were not coming I dressedmyself in mourning, and I shall die wearing it, unless you come to take it off me.Don’t believe that I could deceive you in anything, since I tell you what I feelwith all my heart and soul. I myself did not believe that I loved you so much, butnow that you withdraw from me I know how greatly I esteem you, since if it werenot so I would not feel such pain—God knows I speak the truth.44

“My treasure, my greatest pain is not seeing you, and being so distant,although not in my imagination, and it gets worse every day, so that if Goddoes not cure me, I don’t know what will become of me,” lamented GasparMejía in 1587.45 “If the fleet arrives without you, my life will end,” sworeanother sixteenth-century husband.46

Letters might also contain detailed information of the husband’s activitiesand current level of wealth, lists of items that might usefully accompany thewife to the Indies,47 greetings to relatives in Spain, and perhaps indignantdenials of infidelity. “I assure you, with the truth of my heart, that I have nothad any diversion, nor such children as they have told you,” insisted Anto-nio de los Ríos in 1721.48 “I can hear you say “Now that I am not there hewill have his little comforts,” but I promise you, as a gentleman, that fromthe moment that I left Castile I have not spent a penny on such things,” Bal-tasar de Valladolid had assured his wife two centuries earlier.49 While pro-viding such alluring details of marital relations, these letters generally offerrelatively scanty information about the larger context in which the husbandoperated. They rarely contain extended descriptions of the local environ-ment or of contemporary events. Overtly hostile letters are unusual; pre-sumably alienated husbands simply didn’t write to their wives at all. Angeris usually directed towards third parties. “As regards what you tell me about


44 Faustino Fajardo to Josefa de Tapía, Cartagena, 16 July 1713, in Macías and Morales, eds., Cartasdesde América, pp. 175-76. Fajardo remained without his wife until at least 1720.

45 Gaspar Mejía to Catalina Domínguez, Zacatecas, 5 January 1587, in Otte, ed., Cartas privadas,p. 212.

46 Bartolomé de Morales to Catalina de Avila, Mexico, 1573, in Otte, ed., Cartas privadas, p. 71.47 Fine clothing figured prominently in such lists. “The most important thing is not to come without

good cloaks and skirts,” warned Salvador Sala in 1762. (Salvador Sala to Gertrudis Sala, Veracruz, 4March 1762, in Macías and Morales, eds., Cartas desde América, pp. 126-27.) For the links betweenclothing and identity in Spanish America, see Rebecca Earle, “‘Two Pairs of Pink Satin Shoes!!’: Cloth-ing, Race and Identity in the Americas, 17th-19th Centuries,” History Workshop Journal 52 (2001), pp.175-95.

48 Antonio de los Ríos to Catalina de la Cadena, Mexico, 19 October 1721, in Macías and Morales,eds., Cartas desde América, pp. 75-76.

49 Baltasar de Valladolid to Clara de los Angeles, Santa Fe, 1 May 1591, in Otte, ed., Cartas pri-vadas, pp. 283-85.

my brothers and relatives, they are dogs who have devoured everything ofmine that they could, and were God to grant me any wealth I would rathergive it to a complete stranger than to any of my relatives,” wrote oneaggrieved husband in 1722.50 Letters were treasured, and husbands veryoften complained that their wives did not write to them with sufficient fre-quency. “I never want to reach the end of one of your letters, which to meare as consoling as they are rare,” lamented one husband in 1587.51 Anothernoted, “I have written to you many times and I have never seen a reply toany letter; I don’t know what the cause of this is.”52 “I marvel that althoughthis fleet carries many familiar people, you have not written me any letter,nor have I had more news of you than that which your father has wished togive me,” complained Pedro de Leon to his wife in 1706.53

When then do these letters reveal about attitudes towards love? Morespecifically, what do the salutations and closings used in these letters indi-cate? Before discussing the outcome of this small investigation, we shouldnote that examining the salutations and closings in colonial Hispanic let-ters is a reasonable enterprise, rather than an insensitive transposition ofStone’s methodology to an alien environment. Letter-writing in the Span-ish world was an art governed by established formulae, in which the cor-rect heading and closing played no small part. Indeed, in the late sixteenthcentury the Spanish crown issued legislation stipulating the honorific titlesappropriate for use in letters to different ranks of person. The monarch, forexample, was to be addressed as “Señor,” and all letters to him were toconclude “God guard the Catholic person of your Majesty.” The use of“Your Excellency” and “Illustrious Sir” was forbidden altogether, andletter-writers were similarly forbidden to decorate their letters with coatsof arms or other emblems of rank.54 In Spain, as elsewhere in Europe,letter-writing manuals detailing correct forms of address were publishedfrom the sixteenth century on.55 Many of these works emphasized the dis-

REBECCA EARLE 29

50 Diego Risueño to Josefa Micaela Carrasco, Mexico, 15 September 1722, in Macías and Morales,eds., Cartas desde América, p. 77.

51 Miguel Hidalgo to Maria de la Cruz, Cartagena, 4 June 1587, in Otte, ed., Cartas privadas, p. 303. 52 Juan de Palencia to Magdalena Jiménez, Mexico, 16 December 1570, in Otte, ed., Cartas pri-

vadas, pp. 59-60.53 Pedro de León to his wife, Mexico, 10 October 1796, in Macías and Morales, eds., Cartas desde

América, p. 63. Letter-writing manuals provided detailed information about the sailing schedules of mailboats to facilitate correspondence. See J. Antonio D. y Begas, Nuevo estilo y formulario de escribircartas misivas y responder a ellas (Madrid, 1794).

54 Martin A. S. Hume, “A Fight against Finery (A History of the Sumptuary Laws in Spain),” in TenYears after the Armada and Other Historical Studies (London: 1896), pp. 235-37.

55 These include Gaspar de Tejada, Cosa nueva: Estilo de escribir cartas mensajeras cortesanamente(1549); Antonio de Torquemada, Manual de escribientes (1552?); J. Pablo de (or Gerónimo?) Man-zanares, Estilo y formulario de cartas familiares (1575?, 1600, 1607); Juan Vicente Piliger (or Peligero),

tinctive nature of Spanish salutations and closings, which one eighteenth-century manual characterized as “so different from that of the othernations.”56 Antonio de Torquemada’s sixteenth-century primer, for exam-ple, devoted nearly twenty percent of the entire discussion of letter-writ-ing to the art of choosing the correct salutation and closing. Gaspar deTejada similarly described in great detail the “practice that today is fol-lowed in titles and courtesies.” Writing to a new correspondent thusinvolved a complicated series of etiquettes, as José Cadalso noted satiri-cally in the late eighteenth century:

First, I would need to consider with great care the width of the margin.Second, much reflection would be required to determine the distance I oughtto leave between the first line and the edge of the paper. Third, I would med-itate at length on which salutation to use at the opening. Fourth, I wouldstudy with no less application the corresponding expression used at theletter’s end. Fifth, no less care would be required in determining how Ishould address you in the body of the letter itself, or whether I should directthe discourse as if I were addressing you alone, or a third person, or the nobletitle that you might perhaps hold, or your excellency, or other similar quali-ties, without referring to your person, out of which would grow terrible con-fusion, fear of which very often leads Spaniards to abandon all idea of writ-ing to each other.57

TERMS OF AFFECTION IN COLONIAL SPANISH AMERICAN LETTERS

“Mon enfant, ma soeur,Songe à la douceurD’aller là-bas vivre ensemble!”Charles Baudelaire, L’Invitation au voyage


Estilo y methodo de escribir cartas missivas (1607); Gabriel Pérez del Barrio, Dirección de secretar-ios de señores (1613, 1622, 1645, 1667); Miguel Yelgo de Vásquez, Estilo de servir de príncipes(1613?); Juan Fernández Abarca, Discurso de las partes y calidades con que se forma un buen secre-tario (1618); Juan Páez de Valenzuela y Castillejo, Nuevo estilo y formulario de escribir cartas misi-vas y responder a ellas (1630); Gabriel Joseph de la Gasca y Espinosa, Manual de avisos para el per-fecto cortesano (1680); Diego de Salazar (?), Secretaire espagnol enseignant la maniere d’écrire deslettres espagnols, selon le stile moderne (1732); Gaspar de Ezpeleta y Mallol, Práctica de secretarios(1760-1); J. Antonio D. y Begas, Nuevo estilo y formulario de escribir cartas misivas y responder aellas (1794); and Antonio Marqués y Espejo, Retórica epistolar o arte nuevo de escribir todo génerode cartas (1803). I have seen copies only of those manuals whose titles are underlined. See alsoJacques Lafaye, “Del secretario al formulario: Decadencia del ideal humanista en España (1550 a1630),” in Lía Schwartz Lerner and Isaías Lerner, eds., Homenaje a Ana María Barrenechea (Madrid:Castalia, 1984).

56 Salazar (?), Secretaire espagnol, prologue. 57 Cadalso, Cartas marruecas, pp. 112-13.

I have noted the most frequent salutations and closings employed in 361letters exchanged between couples from 1558 to 1823.58 The vast majority ofthese letters are from the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, and werewritten by men, so I have confined my quantitative analysis to these two cen-turies, and to the missives of men only. The outcome of the numerical analy-sis is presented in Tables 1 and 2. These reveal that the most common salu-tation used by husbands in the sixteenth century was “mi señora” (“mylady”), which was trailed in popularity by “hermana mía” (“my sister”). Inthe eighteenth century, the most common salutation was “mi esposa querida”(“my dear wife”), followed by “mi hija querida” (“my dear daughter”).

In the sixteenth century the most common closing was “vuestro marido”(“your husband”), or “el que más que a si os ama/quiere” (“he who lovesyou more than he loves himself”), while in the eighteenth century the mostcommon closing was “tu esposo” (“your spouse”), followed by “quien decorazón te quiere y estima y desea ver” (“he who from his heart loves andesteems and wishes to see you”) (or some subset of this phrase).

Popular in both centuries was a closing containing some reference to thewriter’s desire to see the recipient. Of course, an individual letter might con-tain several of these popular phrases, or some more personal variant onthem. Thus for example in 1583 Juan de Córdoba began a letter to his wifewith “a mi muy amada y querida hermana Catalina Pérez, señora mía de misojos” (“to my very loved and beloved sister Catalina Pérez, my lady of myeyes”), and closed “su marido hasta la muerte que más que a si la quiere”(“your husband until death who loves you more than himself”).59 In the earlyyears of the nineteenth century, Manuel Cárdenas addressed his wife as“amantísima y querida esposa mía” (“my most loved and beloved wife”),and closed “Dios te guarde por dilatados años para mi consuelo, su atento yhumilde servidor que tus manos T.B.M. que más bien quisiera verte que noescribirte” (“God preserve you for long years as my consolation, your atten-

REBECCA EARLE 31

58 These letters are taken from Otte, ed., Cartas privadas; Hermes Tovar, “Cartas de amor y guerra,”Anuario Colombiano de Historia Social y de la Cultura 12 (1984); Macías and Morales, eds., Cartasdesde América; Rosario Márquez Macías, ed., Historias de América: La emigración española en tinta ypapel, Gráficas Nerva (n.p., 1994?); Nancy van Deusen, “‘Wife of my Soul and Heart, and all mySolace’: Annulment Suit between Diego Andrés de Arenas and Ysabel Allay Suyo,” in Richard Boyerand Geoffrey Spurling, eds., Colonial Lives: Documents on Latin American History, 1550-1850 (NewYork and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 135-37; Socolow, The Women of Colonial LatinAmerica; and the collection of personal letters preserved in Estado 6375, Archivo Histórico Nacional deMadrid, Madrid. I am grateful to an anonymous Americas referee for drawing my attention to VanDeusen’s work.

59 Juan de Córdoba to Catalina Pérez, Cartagena, 27 May 1583, in Otte, ed., Cartas privadas, pp.296-97.

tive and humble servant who kisses your hands and who would rather seeyou than write to you”).60

We may begin our analysis by making several observations about theseopenings and closings. The first is that they do not reflect the conventionaltitles recommended by letter-writing manuals. Gaspar de Tejada’s sixteenth-century manual did recommend “señora” as an appropriate title to use whenaddressing any woman, but for “cartas amorosas,” or love letters, he gener-ally prescribed no opening at all. “Hermana mía,” so popular with our six-teenth-century letter writers, does not appear at all in Tejada’s text.61 Like-


TABLE 1. MOST COMMON SALUTATIONS IN LETTERS TO WIVES,SIXTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Number of Usages Percent

16th century(mi) señora 40 41(señora) hermana (mía) 27 28mi (deseada) mujer 20 21(mi muy) deseada señora 13 13mi (muy deseada) señora mujer 11 11

total usage 111 114*

18th century(mi) esposa querida 105 56(mi) hija querida 32 17hija (mía) 18 10querida mía 15 8

total usage 170 91

Sample size: 97 sixteenth-century letters and 187 eighteenth-century letters.

Sources: Enrique Otte, ed., Cartas privadas de emigrantes a Indias, 1540-1616 (Seville, Jerez: Escuelade Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1988); Isabel Macías and Francisco Morales Padrón, eds., Cartas desdeAmérica, 1700-1800 (Seville: Junta de Andalucía, 1991); and Rosario Márquez Macías, ed., Historias deAmérica: La emigración española en tinta y papel (n.p.: Gráficas Nerva, 1994?).

Translations: (Mi) señora means “(my) lady,” (señora) hermana (mía) means “(my) (lady) sister,” mi(deseada) mujer means “my (desired) wife,” (mi muy) deseada señora means “(my very) desired lady,”and mi (muy deseada) señora mujer means “my (very desired) lady wife.” (Mi) esposa querida means“my dear wife,” (mi) hija querida means “(my) dear daughter,” hija (mía) means “(my) daughter,” andquerida mía means “my dear.”

*Some letters employ more than one term.

60 José Manuel Cárdenas to María Celestina Rubio, Tambo, 6 August 1811, in Tovar, “Cartas de amory guerra,” p. 161.

61 See Tejada, Cosa nueva.

wise, eighteenth-century manuals did not recommend the use of “hija,”although nearly thirty percent of our eighteenth-century correspondents usedthis term in their openings.62 This is interesting in a number of ways. Tobegin with, it suggests that the phrases found in our letters were not copiedwholesale out of letter-writing manuals. Even if these letters were tran-scribed on behalf of their senders by evangelistas, as professional scribeswere known, they were working from a vocabulary unrepresented in the

REBECCA EARLE 33

TABLE 2. MOST COMMON CLOSINGS IN LETTERS TO WIVES,SIXTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

Number of Usages Percent

16th centuryvuestro/su marido 46 47el que más que a si os ama/quiere 22 23vuestro 14 14el que os desea ver 11 11(vuestro) hermano 6 6

total usage 99 101*

18th centurytu esposo 141 75quien (de corazón) te quiere y estima

y desea ver** 99 53quien te ama y desea ver 9 5quien besa tu/vuestra mano 5 3total usage 254 136*

Sample size: 97 sixteenth-century letters and 187 eighteenth-century letters

Sources: Enrique Otte, ed., Cartas privadas de emigrantes a Indias, 1540-1616 (Seville, Jerez: Escuelade Estudios Hispanoamericanos, 1988); Isabel Macías and Francisco Morales Padrón, eds, Cartas desdeAmérica, 1700-1800 (Seville: Junta de Andalucía, 1991); and Rosario Márquez Macías, ed., Historias deAmérica: La emigración española en tinta y papel (n.p.: Gráficas Nerva, 1994?).

Translation: Vuestro marido and su marido mean “your husband,” el que más que a si os ama andel que más que a si os quiere mean “he who loves you more than himself, vuestro means “your,” elque os desea ver means “he who desires to see you,” and (vuestro) hermano means “(your) brother.”Quien (de corazón) te quiere y estima y desea ver means “he who (with all his heart) loves andesteems you and wishes to see you,” tu esposo means “your spouse,” quien te ama y desea vermeans “he who loves you and wishes to see you,” and quien besa tu/vuestra mano means “whokisses your hand.”

*Some letters employ more than one term** I have here amalgamated a vast range of closings containing at least two of the following four ele-ments: de corazón, te quiere, te estima, te desea ver.

62 See Salazar (?), Secretaire espagnol; and D. y Begas, Nuevo estilo.

widely-owned manuals of correct style.63 On the other hand, there is con-siderable similarity between the terms of endearment used in the eighteenth-century letters and those appearing in popular verses of the era. For exam-ple, a love poem seized by the Mexican Inquisition concludes: “Farewell,then, my adored mistress/Farewell my soul/Farewell my delicious darling/[from] he who would have you at his side.”64 Either our letter-writers werecribbing their amorous expressions from such illicit sources, or, more prob-ably, popular verses and conjugal letters together drew on contemporaryromantic idiom.

It is moreover particularly noteworthy that the terms hermana and hija donot appear in the letter-writing manuals, as the shift from referring to one’swife as a sister (hermana), to referring to her as a daughter (hija) is one ofthe most striking features of Table 1. If we were hoping to find evidence fora growing closeness between husbands and wives in the eighteenth century,we might have expected the opposite transformation. The tendency of hus-bands to address their wives as “my child” is mentioned specifically bysocial historians as evidence for the patriarchal nature of pre-revolutionaryAnglo-American marriages.65 Lawrence Stone moreover stressed the declin-ing age-gap between husbands and wives in the eighteenth century as one ofthe features leading to more companionate marriage, because it reduced thetendency for the husband to assume the role of the father. Companionatehusbands, such historians have suggested, viewed their wives as friends, notas daughters. Does the shift in these Spanish letters from the wife as “sister”to the wife as “daughter” indicate the development of a more patriarchalrelationship between husband and wife? It may in fact suggest the opposite.To begin with, in the eighteenth century hijo or hija was, among its multiplemeanings, an “expression of affection for persons who care a great deal foreach other,” in the words of the 1726-37 dictionary of the Spanish Real


63 Evangelistas operated in town markets and for a fee would draw up written documents on behalfof the illiterate. For descriptions from nineteenth-century Mexico, see Joel Roberts Poinsett, Notes onMexico made in the Autumn of 1822 (New York: Praeger, 1969), p. 78; G. F. Lyon, Journal of a Resi-dence and Tour in the Republic of Mexico in the Year 1826, 2 vols (Port Washington: Kennikat Press,1971), vol. 2, p. 130; and Brantz Mayer, Mexico, As It Was and As It Is (Philadelphia, 1847), pp. 39-40.For the ownership of letter-writing manuals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Lefaye, “Delsecretario al formulario,” p. 255.

64 “Abre niña este papel,” in Geogres Baudot and María Agueda Méndez, eds., Amores prohibidos:La palabra condenada en el México de los virreyes, Siglo XXI (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1997), p. 145.I am grateful to an anonymous Americas referee for recommending this book.

65 Mintz and Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions, p. 48. Their assertion is based in part on Norton’sanalysis of eighteenth century correspondence in Liberty’s Daughters, pp. 61-2. Norton comments thatthe hierarchical nature of such marriages is obvious “in those cases where husbands addressed theirwives as ‘dear child.’”

Academia de la Lengua.66 The Real Academia’s definition suggests that theword was used reciprocally by both men and women, and indeed, husbandsin their letters not only referred to their wives as “daughter,” but on occasionalso signed themselves “your son.” (In much the same way sixteenth-cen-tury husbands might conclude a letter to their wife by referring to them-selves as “your brother.”) In neither century were these terms employed inan explicitly hierarchical way.67

Indeed, an insightful argument by Patricia Seed suggests that the mostsignificant aspect of this change is not the shift from “sister” to “daughter,”but rather the tendency of eighteenth-century husbands to call themselves“your son,” rather than “your brother.” Seed has noted that in Mexico eigh-teenth-century husbands not only signed themselves “your son,” but alsoemployed a range of other images of submission in their love correspon-dence. In addition to labeling themselves small children, they describedthemselves as servants, or as slaves, ready to follow their mistress’s everybidding. “Your slave,” “your black,” “your servant,” Mexican lovers signedthemselves. Alongside this abject language of slavery, they also stressed theemotional powerlessness they felt in the face of a lover’s disdain: “My hearthas been destroyed in my bosom,” “with these delays and bad moments, Isuffer unimaginable torments thinking that I will lose my jewel,” “my dar-ling, I do not continue writing because my sighs and tears do not permitme.”68 According to Seed, this feature—the abject denial of male power inthe face of female resistance—characterizes a distinctive Hispanic form ofseduction that differs markedly from French models of the same period. It isalso consistent with the sentiments expressed in Spanish proverbs of earliercenturies. “Amar es bueno, ser amado es mexor/Lo uno es servir, lo otro serseñor” (“To love is good, to be loved is better/One is to serve, the other tobe the master”) ran one early seventeenth-century proverb.69 The self-abas-

REBECCA EARLE 35

66 hijo, Real Academia de la Lengua, Diccionario [1726-37], republished as Diccionario de Autori-dades, 3 vols. (Madrid: Gredos, 1963).

67 This is consistent with the fact that the average age gap between husbands and wives does notappear to have increased from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. For a discussion of age of mar-riage in Spain and Mexico, see McCaa, “Marriageways in Mexico and Spain”; Ramón Gutiérrez, “FromHonor to Love: Transformations of the Meaning of Sexuality in Colonial Mexico,” in Raymond Smith,ed., Kinship, Ideology and Practice in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,1984), p. 256; and Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, p. 327.

68 Patricia Seed, “La narrativa de Don Juan: el lenguaje de la seducción en la literatura y la sociedadhispánica del siglo XVII,” in Gonzalbo Aizpuru and Rabell, eds., La familia en el mundo iberoameri-cano, pp. 110-14. While the title of Seed’s piece refers to the seventeenth century, her argument aboutmale epistolary vulnerability is based on examples drawn from the eighteenth century.

69 Gonzalo Correas, Vocabulario de refranes y frases proverbiales [1627], Luis Comber, ed., (Bor-deaux: Institut d’études Ibériques et Ibéro-américaines de l’Université de Bordeaux, 1967).

ing tendency identified by Seed is not present in all of the eighteenth-cen-tury letters I have consulted, but it does form a strong undercurrent. Seed’sargument implies that the language of love used by men in the eighteenth-century Spanish world challenged patriarchal authority, rather than affirm-ing it. In describing themselves as weak victims of female imperiousness,such men created narratives of romantic power that reversed the economicand social superiority they enjoyed in other spheres of life. Seed’s interpre-tation, in short, suggests that these conventions of epistolary endearmentserved to undermine hierarchy, rather than reinforce it.

Other features suggest more strongly that the language, and therefore per-haps the concept, of marital intimacy underwent a shift from the sixteenth toeighteenth centuries. In particular, couples began to use a different personalpronoun to address each other. During the sixteenth century husbands gen-erally addressed their wives as vos. By the eighteenth century they almostinvariably used tú. This change marks an increase in intimacy; scholars arein broad agreement that from the sixteenth century the pronoun tú was usedto indicate familiarity and great levels of intimacy.70 Until about 1500 voswas a reverential, courteous form of address used in situations where for-mality was desired. It is used in this sense in Antonio de Nebrija, Gramáticade la lengua castellano (1492), and in numerous literary works of theperiod. But as vuestra merced (“your mercy”) began during the course of thesixteenth century to replace vos as a general polite pronoun, vos began toacquire a pejorative tone, particularly when used by people of high rank toaddress each other. “The secretary Antonio de Eraso addressed GutierreLópez, who was a member of the Council, as vos, and for this he wasstabbed,” reported Hurtado de Mendoza in 1579.71 Vos may have continuedin use throughout the sixteenth century among people of less exalted status,although evidence for this is not completely satisfactory. In Spanish Amer-ica, in turn, vos in some areas it remained in polite usage long after it hadbeen abandoned in the Peninsula. Iraset Páez Urdaneta for example refers tothe “widespread use of vos” in sixteenth-century Spanish America.72 The vos


70 See William Entwistle, The Spanish Language together with Portuguese, Catalan and Basque(London: Faber & Faber, 1936), p. 209; Charles Kany, American-Spanish Syntax (Chicago: Universityof Chicago Press, 1951), pp. 58-61; Rafael Lapesa, Historia de la lengua española (Madrid: Escelicer,1965), pp. 251, 356; Iraset Páez Urdaneta, Historia y geografía hispanoamericana del voseo (Caracas:Casa de Bello, 1981), pp. 34-67; and María Beatríz Fontanella de Weinberg, El español de América(Madrid: MAPFRE, 1992), pp. 81-91.

71 Kany, American-Spanish Syntax, pp. 60-61.72 For the history of the voseo in colonial and early nineteenth-century Spanish America see Andrés

Bello, Gramática de la lengua castellana destinada al uso de los americanos [1847] (Santacruz deTenerife: Instituto Universitario de Lingüística Andrés Bello, 1981), pp. 237, 243; Kany, American-Span-ish Syntax, p. 61; José Joaquín Montes Giraldo, “Sobre el voseo en Colombia,” Thesaurus: Boletín del

used by our sixteenth-century correspondents thus reflects either their non-elite status or this Spanish American voseo. It was a mark of respect, but notof intimacy, for from at least the fifteenth century the pronoun of intimacywas tú. Tú was used both to address inferiors and by persons of equal rankand great intimacy; it was a mark of informality. In his 1619 grammaticaltext Juan de Luna for example asserted that “the first and lowest [title] is tú,which is used to address children or persons to whom one wishes to displaygreat familiarity or love.”73 A century later the Real Academia de la Lenguadefined tú as appropriate for use “in everyday speech, speaking with famil-iarity or friendship, or for use by a superior to an inferior.” Vos and vosotroswere restricted to “persons of great dignity,” and in certain circumstances toinferiors.74 Everyone else was to be addressed as vuestra merced. The use bysixteenth-century husbands of vos therefore suggests a greater level of for-mality, when compared to the near-universal employment of the intimatepronoun tú in the eighteenth century.

Moreover, the eighteenth-century husband made far greater use of terms ofendearment than his sixteenth-century predecessor. (See Table 3.) We shouldstart by observing that each century had its preferred terms of affection. Thesixteenth-century writer wrote to his “deseada” (“desired”) wife, while theeighteenth-century husband addressed his “querida” (“beloved”). Neithercentury made heavy use of amar or querer, the two commonest verbs mean-ing “to love.”75 The eighteenth-century husband preferred to describe his

REBECCA EARLE 37

Instituto Caro y Cuervo 22 (1967); María Beatríz Fontanella de Weinberg, “El voseo en Buenos Aires enlas dos primeras décadas del siglo XIX,” Thesaurus: Boletín del Instituto Caro y Cuervo 26 (1971);María Beatríz Fontanella de Weinberg, “La constitución del paradigma pronominal de voseo,” The-saurus: Boletín del Instituto Caro y Cuervo 32 (1977); and Páez Urdaneta, Historia y geografía his-panoamericana del voseo, pp. 34-67 (63 for quotation).

73 Paez Urdaneta, Historia y geografía hispanoamericana del voseo, pp. 50-56 (53 for quote).74 tú, usted, and vos, Real Academia de la Lengua, Diccionario.75 Other historians concerned with the nature of romance in the Hispanic world have accorded the

verb amar (“to love”) undue analytical importance. Both Patricia Seed and Ramón Gutiérrez claim thatthe term was not widely used until the late eighteenth century, a fact that both regard as highly signifi-cant, although they disagree in their interpretations of this change. Gutiérrez argues that the increasinguse of the words amor (“love”) and amar after 1800 reveals the growth of a rhetoric of romantic love.Prior to then, he asserts, these terms were used to refer either to the Christian sentiment of agape, or toillicit sexual activity. It did not convey a positive image of physical affection. The latter sense of theword, he claims, appeared only at the end of the eighteenth century. (Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, p.329.) According to Seed, amor carried implications of uncontrolled sexual desire throughout the eigh-teenth century, and hence remained a term of abuse. She argues that its increased use in the eighteenthcentury as a motive for marriage implied a devaluing of that institution, rather than a growth in the lan-guage of romantic love. (Seed, To Love, Honor and Obey, pp. 48-49, 119-20.)

In fact, the 1726-37 dictionary of the Real Academia de la Lengua gave virtually synonymous defi-nitions for amar and querer, with little suggestion that amar carried an illicit sense. Amor itself wasdefined as the “sentiment of the rational soul.” Only amores, and enamorar carried negative, lascivious

“esteem” for his wife, while one quarter of sixteenth-century husbandsstressed rather their desire to see their wife. This contrasts with the situationin colonial North America. Mary Beth Norton has noted that in British NorthAmerica, eighteenth-century husbands often wrote “not of how much theymissed their wives, but of how much their wives must be missing them, inthe process disclosing their own exalted sense of their relative impor-tance.”76 In Spanish America, in neither century were letters from husbandsdevoid of expressions of affection and intimacy. Even in the sixteenth cen-tury, when the most common elements of salutations and closings were therather stark “mi señora” (“my lady”), and “vuestro marido” (“your hus-band”), many writers embellished these stock phrases with additionalendearments. In 1564 Pedro Sánchez used these standard phrases in hisletter to his wife, but he also added “a mi deseada mujer” (“to my desiredwife”) to the opening.77 Nonetheless the tremendous growth in the use ofendearments in the eighteenth century is striking. In the sixteenth centurywriters on average employed one affectionate term in the opening or closingof their letters. In the eighteenth century the number of such terms more thandoubled; most writers used strings of adjectives to describe their love fortheir spouse: “querida esposa . . . hija de mi alma” (“dear wife . . . daughterof my soul”), “hija y querida de mi corazón” (“daughter and beloved of myheart”), “hija de mi corazón . . . querida de mis entrañas, amada esposa míade mis ojos” (“daughter of my heart, beloved of my intestines, my dear wifeof my eyes”), “estimadísima hija mía, única y sola” (“my most esteemeddaughter, unique and alone”).78 References to hearts—“estimada dueña demi corazón,” “hija mía de toda mi corazón,” “tuyo de corazón hasta lamuerte” (“esteemed mistress of my heart,” “my daughter of all my heart,”“yours with all my heart until death”)—became almost obligatory in theeighteenth century. Such was the growth of affectionate terminology thathusbands who wished to place particular emphasis on their love were


overtones. (See amar, amor, amores, enamorar, and querer, Real Academia de la Lengua, Dic-cionario.) Moreover, Spanish golden-age poetry gives ample evidence that amar was in wide andpositive use from at least the sixteenth century, and the term was indeed used by our letter-writersin the body of their letters, if not in the salutations. In any event, this focus on one verb is unrea-sonable. The letters examined here reveal that from the sixteenth century spouses employed a wealthof endearments with great expressiveness. The presence or absence of the single verb amar thusreveals little.

76 Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, p. 62.77 Pedro Sánchez to Juana Ramos, Mexico, 26 June 1564, in Otte, ed., Cartas privadas, p. 44.78 Jacinto de Lara y Rosales to Manuela de Lara Rosales, Mexico City, 2 August 1730; José

Rodríguez Vidal to Florentina María de la Bastida, Santa Fe, 31 May 1720; Francisco DomínguezMorales to wife, Mexico City; and Pedro Ildefonso Trujillo y Seixas to Frasquita Manuela Seixas Tru-jillo, Veracruz, 9 February 1770; all in Macías and Morales, eds., Cartas desde América, pp. 84-85, 167-68, 74, 130-31.

obliged to add additional endearments. It was no longer sufficient to end aletter “tu esposo que te quiere y estima” (“your husband who loves andesteems you”). To show real affection writers would conclude “tu másamante esposo que de corazón te quiere y aguarda con los brazos abiertos”(“your most loving husband who loves you with all his heart and waits for

REBECCA EARLE 39

TABLE 3. TERMS OF AFFECTION IN LETTERS TO WIVES.USAGE OF ENDEARMENTS IN THE SALUTATIONS AND CLOSINGS OF

SIXTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURY LETTERS

Sixteenth EighteenthTerm Century % Century %

amada 3 18deseada 37 0estimada 0 12querida 16 179

total 56 58% 209 112%*

amar 10 23desear 1 0estimar 0 81querer 15 31

total 26 27% 135 72%

alma 5 4corazón 3 109fino 0 8hasta morir 10 3de mis ojos 5 4servicio 9 6

total 32 33% 134 72%

TOTAL 114 118%* 478 256%*

Sample size: 97 sixteenth-century letters and 187 eighteenth-century letters.

Sources: Enrique Otte, ed., Cartas privadas de emigrantes a Indias, 1540-1616 (Seville, Jerez: Escuelade Estudios Hispanoamerianos, 1988); Isabel Macías and Francisco Morales Padrón, eds, Cartas desdeAmérica, 1700-1800 (Seville: Junta de Andalucía, 1991); and Rosario Márquez Macías, ed., Historias deAmérica: La emigración española en tinta y papel (n.p.: Gráficas Nerva, 1994?).

Translation: amar and querer mean “to love.” Desear means “to desire” (I exclude uses of desear thatrefer to wishing, such as “tu esposo quien desea verte”), and estimar means “to esteem.” Amada,deseada, estimada, and querida are the past participles of these verbs. Alma means “soul,” corazónmeans “heart,” fino means “delicate,” hasta morir means “until death,” de mis ojos means “of my eyes,”and servicio means “[at your] service.”

* Some letters employ more than one term.

you with open arms”). The language of love, in other words, underwent aprocess of linguistic inflation in the course of the eighteenth century.

This more intimate language was not confined to correspondencebetween husbands and wives. Sisters, brothers, parents and children alsoaddressed each other in highly affectionate language, which sometimesmakes it difficult to tell from the salutation alone whether the recipient is awife, or a daughter or sister. “Hija querida de mi corazón” (“dear daughterof my heart”), wrote Pedro García Mojarro to his daughter Felipe MaríaMojarro in 1717, using the same opening that Ignacio Muñoz de Sandovalemployed in a 1718 letter to his wife.79 The increase in affectionate languagewithin the family more broadly, which has been observed in eighteenth-cen-tury correspondence elsewhere in Europe, suggests that a language of sensi-bility had penetrated the Hispanic world.80 The transformed vocabulary ofhusbands and wives perhaps hints at broader changes in family relations ineighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America.

These letters thus offer some evidence that the eighteenth-century marriagewas more intimate than its sixteenth-century counterpart, but the sixteenth-cen-tury letters provide little support for the view that the early modern marriagewas cold or loveless. The eighteenth-century growth in the use of affectionateterms is striking, but so is the relatively high use of terms of endearment in bothcenturies. Indeed, a tendency towards exaggeration and over-dramatization wasapparently regarded as a distinctive feature of the Spanish character during theentirety of this period.81 European writers had long complained that Spaniards


79 Pedro García Mojarro to Felipe María Mojarro, Mexico, 16 May 1717; and Ignacio Muñoz deSandoval to Beatriz García Pérez de Vargas, Mexico, 27 February 1718, in Macías and Morales, eds.,Cartas desde América, pp. 70-71. The same phrase was used by an eighteenth-century Mexican priest ina letter to a parishioner whom he aimed to seduce. See Baudot and Agueda Méndez, eds., Amores pro-hibidos, p. 140 (and also pp. 128-29).

80 For a study of the terms of endearment used in French personal letters from the eighteenth cen-tury, see Marie-Claire Grassi, “Friends and Lovers (or the Codifications of Intimacy),” in Charles Porter,ed., Yale French Studies: Special Issue on Men and Women of Letters 71 (1986), pp. 77-92.

81 For comments on “the Spanish character,” and particularly its spoken dimensions, see WilliamShakespeare, Love’s Labour’s Lost, esp. Act V, sc. I; Torquemada, Manual de escribientes, p. 202; thelament of Quevedo’s Caballero de la Tenaza, in Francisco de Quevedo, Cartas del Caballero de laTenaza [c1600], in Obras satíricas y festivas (Madrid: Espasa-Caple, 1965), p. 82 (letter XI); Anon., TheCharacter of Spain: Or, An Epitome of their Virtues and Vices (London, 1660); Nicolas de Fer, Histori-cal Voyages and Travels over Europe, tome II: Containing all that is most curious in Spain and Portugal(London, 1693), esp. pp. 34-35; C. T., A Short Account and Character of Spain (London, 1701), p. 19;M. Buzen de la Martiniere, Le Grand Dictionnaire géographique, historique et critique (Paris, 1737), pp.125-26 (entry for “Espagne”); Marie Catherine La Mothe, Countess d’Aulony, The Lady’s Travels intoSpain (London, 1774), particularly the preface; and Michael Duffy, The Englishman and the Foreigner:The English Satirical Print 1600-1832 (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1986), pp. 23-27. I am gratefulto Peter Marshall for his advice on this topic.

carried their fondness for “metaphors and extraordinary comparisons with thesun, the moon, the stars and precious stones” to ridiculous lengths.82 “Howcompletely Spanish!,” exclaimed one of Dumas’s musketeers on learning of aflamboyant gesture planned by a fellow courtier.83 In the view of some Euro-pean travelers, this tendency merely worsened among Spaniards resident in theIndies. As the Spanish priest Francisco de Ajofrín remarked, when taking leaveof acquaintances, Mexicans were “very friendly and to European seriousnessvery strange. For even when a man is speaking to a woman, they say, “farewellmy soul,” “farewell my life,” “farewell my consolation,” “farewell mirror ofmine.”84 In other words, the linguistic evidence suggests that Lawrence Stone’smodel of cold, loveless marital relations prior to the mid-seventeenth centurydoes not function for the Hispanic world. Nonetheless, eighteenth-century hus-bands did have a new and distinctive vocabulary with which to express theiremotions. This language may be seen in its full glory in the early nineteenth-century letter reproduced in the appendix. But fashionable terms aged quickly.By the nineteenth century, Spanish poets were describing these “new” endear-ments as nothing more than tiresome insincerities. Manuel Breton de los Her-reros’ mid-nineteenth-century poem “Dios me libre y me defienda” asks Godto protect the poet from:

una mujer zalamera an ingratiating womanque su amor quiera probar who wants to demonstrate her lovediciéndome sin cesar ceaselessly calling me“consuelo mío, mi prenda.”85 “my consolation,” “my darling.”

REBECCA EARLE 41

The Spanish emphasis on “their own peculiar grandeza” was the most frequently-cited example ofthe supposed Spanish weakness for hyperbole. Travellers maintained that in Spain even poverty-strickenbeggars claimed noble status using the elevated language of the court. When a beggar craves your char-ity, one anonymous seventeenth-century writer affirmed, “it shall be in these or the like terms, May itplease you sir, to do some courtesie for a distressed cavaliero.” (These quotations are from Anon., TheCharacter of Spain, pp. 3, 6.)

82 The quotation is from Amédée Frézier, Relación del viaje por el mar del sur [1716] (Caracas: Bib-lioteca Ayacucho, 1982), p. 207.

83 Alexandre Dumas, The Man in the Iron Mask [1848-50] (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991),p. 271.

84 Francisco de Ajofrín, Diario del viaje que por orden de la sagrada congregación de propaganda fidehizo a la America septentrional en el siglo XVIII, cited in Anthony Pagden, “Identity Formation in SpanishAmerica,” in Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), p. 89 (and see p. 88). For similar assertions that colonialSpanish was more florid than peninsular Spanish, see Enrique Florescano, Memory, Myth and Time inMexico from the Aztecs to Independence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994), p. 187. I am grateful toIris Montero for these references. “Spanish courtesy, of which we still retain some remains (and God forbidthat we should ever lose them to accept in their stead a false and hollow politeness), was once proverbialthroughout the world,” noted the Peruvian writer Manuel Fuentes in 1866; Manuel A. Fuentes, Sketches ofthe Capital of Peru, Historical, Statistical, Administrative, Commercial and Moral (London, 1866), p. 118.

85 Manuel Breton de los Herreros, “Dios me libre y me defienda,” Francisco Caudet Yarza, ed., Lasmil cien mejores poesías en lengua española (Madrid: A.L. Mateos, n.d.), pp. 205-07.

These phrases of love had become banal.

CONCLUSION: THE LETTER AS AN HISTORICAL SOURCE

Do these letters tell us anything distinctive about personal sentiment in theHispanic world from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries? Hitherto scholarsof Spanish America have made little use of personal correspondence toexplore this issue, and the outcomes of their investigations have been shapedby this omission. Ramón Gutiérrez based his argument for growing romanticlove primarily on declarations made by betrothed couples to priests. In thesehe found an increasing tendency to ascribe the wish to marry to having fallenin love. Earlier declarants had stressed their desire to serve God. Patricia Seedbased her study of marriage in colonial Mexico, which came to very differ-ent conclusions from Gutiérrez’s, on church records documenting marriagedisputes. Unlike Gutiérrez, she found many sixteenth and seventeenth-cen-tury couples who ascribed their wish to marry to their “attachment and will,”or to their “liking” for each other.86 Her study examined conflicts betweenparents and children over the choice of partners, and looked particularly atcases of conflict that came before the church courts. In these cases, for rea-sons related to Catholic doctrine enunciated at the Council of Trent, it wasadvantageous for couples to stress that they wished to marry each other oftheir own volition. (Post-Tridentine Catholic marriage codes stipulated thatmarriage was valid only when undertaken with the full consent of thecouple.) In cases where there was no parental opposition, such as those exam-ined by Gutiérrez, couples had no discursive need to emphasize their ownwishes. Other studies based on yet different sources come to yet differentconclusions. Richard Boyer’s study of colonial bigamists gives the impres-sion that most marriages were motivated neither by love nor by religiousduty, but by lust. One typical seventeenth-century bigamist defended hissecond, bigamous, marriage by explaining that he had been:

dragged down by human weakness because he wanted [Juana Montaño, thesecond wife] so much and, since she was a virgin, there was no other way togain access to her because Juana said he could have her only if they married.Thus carried away and defeated by passion he committed the error.87

In such cases, recorded in Mexican inquisitorial records, the defendantsought to minimize his guilt by emphasizing that he had not been in control


86 “attachment and will” are Seed’s translation of afiliación y voluntad. (Note that Gutiérrez translatesvoluntad as “liking.”) She translates de mi gusto as “to my liking.” (Seed, To Love Honor and Obey, p. 48.)

87 Boyer, The Lives of the Bigamists, p. 85. Lavrin similarly notes that such inquisitorial records tendto emphasise “the frailty of the human condition.” See Lavrin, “Sexuality in colonial Mexico,” pp. 61-62.

of his actions. Marriage, in these accounts, is thus described as the result ofirresistible lust, rather than of either love or religious duty.

These historians, all searching for love in colonial Mexico, come to verydifferent conclusions, largely as a consequence of the particular sources theyemployed. Gutiérrez’s romantic nineteenth-century couples perhaps reflectthe declining religiosity and growing individualism of early nineteenth-cen-tury New Mexico, but declining religiosity is not the same thing as roman-tic love. Seed’s star-crossed sixteenth-century lovers used the rulings of theCouncil of Trent to bolster their attempts at marriage, thereby creating nar-ratives of personal attachment and love. Bigamists and fornicators draggedbefore the Inquisition presented themselves as weak victims of sensuality, inaccounts that minimized any personal volition. These sources reveal theability of colonial couples to employ different languages in their dealingswith different colonial authorities, in order to obtain different aims.88 Theycan provide vital and vibrant material for the making of social history. How-ever, they reveal only obliquely the language normally used by men andwomen in their daily relations. This is what personal letters can provide:concrete examples of how Spanish and creole men (and to a far lesser extentwomen) actually addressed their partners, at least in their written communi-cation. They thus amplify our knowledge of domestic life in a way differentfrom, and complimentary to, court records or clerical investigations. Suchletters are certainly not a transparent records of reality, devoid of artisticembellishment or self-construction. Husbands crafted epistolary narrativesof constancy and undiminished affection that may have borne little relationto their daily behavior in the colonies; we know that concubinage and adul-tery were common among Spaniards resident in the Americas.89 Depictionsof male abjection in the face of female authority likewise fit poorly withwhat we know about the centrality of violence to the construction of colo-

REBECCA EARLE 43

88 For court testimony (in this case from early modern England) as a narrative genre, see LauraGowing, Domestic Dangers. Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press,1996), esp. chapter 7. I am grateful to Steve Hindle for drawing this source to my attention.

89 See Luis Martín, The Daughters of the Conquistadores: Women of the Viceroyalty of Peru (Albu-querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1983), chapter 6; Thomas Calvo, “Concubinato y mestizajeen el medio urbano: el caso de Guadalajara en el siglo XVII,” Revista de Indias 44:173 (1984); SergioOrtega, “Teología novohispana sobre el matrimonio y comportamientos sexuales, 1519-1570,” in SergioOrtega, ed., De la santidad a la perversión, o porqué no se cumplía la ley de Dios en la sociedad novo-hispana (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1985); Lavrin, “Sexuality in Colonial Mexico”; and Kathy Waldron, “TheSinners and the Bishop in Colonial Venezuela: The Visita of Bishop Mariano Martí, 1771-1784,” both inLavrin, ed., Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America; Rodríguez, Seducción, amancebamientoy abandono en la colonia, chapter 3; and Almécija, La familia en la provincia de Venezuela, chapter 5.For cases of transatlantic bigamy, see Cook and Cook, Good Faith and Truthful Ignorance; and Boyer,The Lives of the Bigamists. For epistolary self-construction, see Earle, ed., Epistolary Selves.

nial masculinity.90 Efforts to lure wives to the Indies may have been influ-enced by the pressures of colonial office, rather than by deeply-felt longing;the crown strongly encouraged all married Spaniards to reside with theirpartner, a requirement of which colonial officials were particularlyreminded.91 However, the intended readers of these epistolary fictions werenot priests or members of the Council of the Indies. The image of the rela-tionship presented in these letters was not intended to influence a judge orgain a marriage license. On the contrary, such images were intended for con-sumption by the couple itself. The fictions, reworkings and self-deceptions,are, in a deep sense, the very substance of these marriages. These letters tellstories, but they are precisely the stories we want to hear if we are interestedin exploring the inner workings of colonial marriages. In other words, per-sonal letters, like court depositions, are a genre, but unlike court depositions,they belong to the genre of domestic intimacy.

In this, letters reveal the accuracy of one of the earliest and most long-lived metaphors used to describe correspondence: that of a long-distanceconversation. Correspondence has since the time of Saint Jerome beendescribed as a conversation in writing, and many letter-writers, both greatand small, have reproduced this image in their own epistles. In personal let-ters, as J. Antonio D. y Begas noted in his eighteenth-century letter-writingmanual, “it appears that [the correspondents] are speaking to each other.”92

Although the letter-writers that I have examined here emphasized in missiveafter missive that they regarded their correspondence as a poor substitute foractual conversation, these letters do allow us to get nearer to unmediateddomestic intimacies than virtually any other source available to historians ofcolonial Spanish America.

University of Warwick REBECCA EARLE

Coventry, United Kingdom


90 See in particular Stern, The Secret History of Gender.91 This principle was formulated in the early sixteenth century, and was reiterated throughout the

colonial period. See Rípodas Ardanaz, El matrimonio en Indias, pp. 364-70; and Peter Bakewell, A His-tory of Latin America (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), pp. 77, 172.

92 D. y Begas, Nuevo estilo y formulario. For additional examples, see inter alia, William HenryIrving, The Providence of Wit in the English Letter Writers (Durham: Duke University Press, 1955), p.6; Ruth Perry, Women, Letters and the Novel (New York: AMS Press, 1980), p. 77; Richard Brown,Knowledge is Power: the Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700-1840 (New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1989), p. 21; and Lisa Jardine, “Reading and the Technology of Textual Effect: Erasmus’sFamiliar Letters and Shakespeare’s King Lear,” in James Raven, Helen Small and Naomi Tadmor, eds.,The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996),p. 6.

APPENDIX. A NINETEENTH-CENTURY LOVE LETTER93

Puerto Rico2 de junio de 1823

Alma mía,Desde la Coruña escribí avisandote mi salida de aquel puerto el 3 de abril y por

mi carta te habrás penetrado de lo sensible que me ha sido el dejar un país en quepuedo decir he pasado los mejores años de mi vida, pero tu estas bien penetrado delo crítico de mi suerte y de lo imposible que me era ya permanecer por más tiempogozando de tus atractivos, continuando al mismo tiempo dándote finas pruebas delfino amor que siempre te he profesado, sin hacer en esto más que corresponder a tusin igual cariño.

Mi corazón no llenará jamás este vacío, hasta tanto que no logre la dicha deverme cerca de ti, y mi amistad siempre una. Solo espero tan lisongero porvenir paraconfirmarte con hechos positivos, lo que las palabras unicamente expresan condebilidad.

Tu bien lo sabes querida mía, y te haría suma injusticia, si por un instante meimaginase que dudabas de la verdad de estas expresiones. ¿Te acuerdas Eloisa deaquellos ratitos de placer que tu excesivo amor me proporcionaba? ¡Que pásalobien, amada mía, goza tu sola de los placeres de la Corte, pero no olvides de con-sagrar un momento de los pocos que tengas de soledad a la memoria de quien nuncapodrá olvidarte y es de corazón tu finísimo amigo Q.B.T.P.

A.X.

Da mis expresiones a tu hermana Adelaida.

TRANSLATION

Puerto Rico2 June 1823

My soul,From La Coruña I wrote advising you of my departure from that port on 3 April

and from my letter you will have understood how painful it has been for me to leavea land in which I can say that I passed the best years of my life, but you understandvery well the critical nature of my situation and the impossibility of my remainingany longer to enjoy your attractions, and to give you at the same time delicate proofsof the delicate love that I have always professed for you, without thereby doingmore than returning your own unequalled love.

REBECCA EARLE 45

93 A.X. to Eloisa Artega, Puerto Rico, 2 June 1823, in Archivo Histórico Nacional de Madrid,Madrid, Estado 6375, carpeta 15.

My heart will never fill this emptiness until I achieve the happiness of findingmyself at your side, with my undivided friendship. I long for this future so as toconvince you with positive deeds of that of which words alone are only a feebleexpression.

My darling, you know all this very well, and I would do you an injustice, if fora moment I imagined that you doubted the truth of these sentiments. Eloise—do youremember those moments of pleasure that your excessive love afforded me? Mayyou be well, my beloved. Enjoy alone the pleasures of the Court, but do not forgetto dedicate one of your few moments of solitude to the memory of one who willnever be able to forget you and who is from his heart your most delicate friend whokisses your feet.

A.X.

Give my greetings to your sister Adelaida.
