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to
other men. These practices were anathema to the Christians, of course. The
church was committed to eradicating anything viewed as pagan and therefore kept
a close eye on the sex lives of the Indians who were strongly encouraged, or in
some cases even forced, to marry according to Christian rites. This was done in
part because the Indian nuclear family was responsible for paying tribute, so
the religious arm of the government took on the responsibility of getting these
familial units organized. Beyond this purely practical reason, however, the
fact remains that the church taught indigenous populations the notion of
Christian sin, including sex outside marriage or any form of non-procreative
sex within marriage, as a way of bringing these peoples to European systems of
belief. In pre-Columbian societies, the community’s moral code took as its
starting point the good of the whole community and the perpetuation of all
life, whereas the concern of the Roman Catholic Church with the individual soul
posed a challenge to the Indians’ communal values.
    Relationships between indigenous couples were usually
stable in spite of the fact that some sources indicate that wife beating was a
common, and commonly accepted, part of the couple’s daily life. Shortly after
the end of the colonial period, a notary for the archdiocese of Guatemala
commented as follows on a common-law marriage between two middle-aged
indigenous people: “. . . it is common for these women . . . to seek the protection
of the man wherever he may be, and although he may repeatedly mistreat her,
these women are long-suffering toward the end of preserving their relationship,
thus in this type of long-term lascivious relationship only the death of one of
the partners is sufficient to separate them.” 
     
    Marriage among the Enslaved
    While the church pressured, even forced, indigenous people
to marry, it generally ignored the cohabitation of enslaved Africans and their
descendants. Formal marriage for enslaved laborers was inconvenient for
masters, who constituted the primary source of funds for the church. So for
many enslaved workers, the norm was cohabitation, and legal marriage was
relatively uncommon. In addition to the opposition or lack of concern of
masters, another factor was the cost of Christian marriage; who would pay the
fee and host the party?
    Family formation, though, was central to both the physical
and emotional survival of the enslaved, the only refuge in the storm. It was a
common occurrence for a young woman to have a first child as the result of a
liaison shortly after puberty and then form a monogamous relationship, possibly
with a different partner who would be the father of subsequent children. While
some slaves lived in large collective quarters called barracoons, it was
common in many areas of Latin America for slaves to form relatively stable
couple relationships in family huts grouped together in one area of the estate
with a plot of land on which to grow their food. However, the short life
expectancy of enslaved laborers and the nearly total lack of control they had
over their futures was the source of great instability in family life,
especially in plantation areas where the demands of sugar production in
particular took a heavy toll on workers. Even in non-plantation regions, where
the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants were often very different,
the whim or the fortunes of the master often led to the separation of family
members. Since the children would stay with the mother unless sold away from
her, stepfathers were a frequent occurrence.
    In at least one area of Brazil, it appears that official
Christian marriage was common among the enslaved, but the documents also show
that these families were subject to the whim of the slave-holder. In the
probate proceedings at the death of Mariana Dias, wife of a slaveholder in late
18th-century Paraíba, the inventory of property held jointly with her husband
showed that of