Familias amestizadas in slave contexts. A comparative study between the Iberian Peninsula of the 16th-17th centuries and the Minas Gerais of the 18th century

Abstract

This paper deals with a comparative study about the constitution and composition of mestizo families in the Iberian Peninsula in the 16th-17th centuries and in Minas Gerais in the 18th century. The methodological-conceptual scaffolding has been built on three fundamental pillars. The first is based on understanding the dynamics of miscegenation as complex and multifactorial processes of biological and cultural mixtures, and not only as final products resulting from inequality and legal dependency. Secondly, in the expansion of the concept of family, generally reduced to the Tridentine model of father and mother united in legitimate marriage and their descendants, which has hidden other forms of family organization. And, finally, in the epistemological paradigm of comparative-connected history. The relationship of two spaces so far apart, in addition, in two different temporalities, but constituted as two of the most important urban-slaveholding areas of their respective times, allows the approximation to the development of the dynamics of miscegenation and its interference in the formation processes of mestizadas families in contexts marked by slavery. Because these, despite the local/regional specificities, were framed in global processes. The analysis of notarial, parish and diocesan documentation in both spaces has made it possible to reconstruct specific individual/family histories. In this way, it has been possible to perceive the role that the dynamics of miscegenation developed in different spaces of sociability -traffic and markets of slaves, houses, public spaces- and the relations produced in them between slaves and horros of different origins, their masters and the rest of the population in the conformation of mestizadas families.