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Household Structure and Political Crisis: Buenos Aires, 1810–1860

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Mark D. Szuchman
Mark D. Szuchman*
Affiliation:
Florida International University
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This article will provide an overview of the changes in household composition in the city of Buenos Aires during the first decades of nation building. The discussion of household structures is based on a detailed analysis of the homes of thirty-five thousand porteños (residents of the city of Buenos Aires). The quantitative data are taken from three relatively complete manuscript census returns for the years 1810, 1827, and 1855. Once certain flaws in these census tracts are taken into account, the tracts represent an ample cross-section of urban Buenos Aires society. The variations found in household structures will be used to advance a theory about an underlying dimension of the durability of caudillo rule in Argentina. The proposed thesis on the relationship between strongman leadership and popular following is also based on interpretations employing classic sociological theory. The tentative conclusions concern the nature of early nineteenth-century political culture and afford opportunities for fresh explanations of the period's caudillismo. The data are thus presented in the hope of broadening the scope of discussion about political leadership in the early stages of nation building in Spanish America.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 21 , Issue 3 , 1986 , pp. 55 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © 1986 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

This research was made possible by grants from the Social Science Research Council, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Latin American and Caribbean Center of Florida International University. I would like to express my appreciation to Joseph Love, Richard Slatta, Lowell Gudmundson, and Stuart Voss for their comments and suggestions at earlier stages of this work. Terry Young assisted in coding the data.

References

Notes

1. Raw data come from the manuscript census schedules for the city of Buenos Aires of 1810, 1827, and 1855. The schedules of 1827 and 1855 have been employed minimally or not at all in longitudinal studies. They are located in the Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter cited as AGN): Sala IX, 10-7-1 (1810); Sala X, 23-5-5 and 23-5-6 (1827); and Sala X, vols. 1390–1404 (1855). Frequently consulted works on the population of Buenos Aires include Emilio Ravignani, Documentos para la historia argentina: territorio y población, vol. 12 (Buenos Aires, 1919); Registro estadístico del estado de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1854–1857); Emilio R. Coni, Movimiento de la población de la ciudad de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1889); Emilio Ravignani, “Crecimiento de la población en Buenos Aires y su campaña (1726–1810),” Anales de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas, vol. 1 (Buenos Aires, 1919), 405–16; Nicolás Besio Moreno, Buenos Aires, puerto del Río de la Plata, capital de la Argentina: estudio crítico de su población, 1536–1936 (Buenos Aires, 1939); Registro estadístico de la provincia de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, 1822–1826); Ernesto J. A. Maeder, Evolución demográfica argentina de 1810 a 1869 (Buenos Aires, 1968); César García Belsunce et al., Buenos Aires: su gente, 1810–1830 (Buenos Aires, 1976); Marta B. Goldberg, “La población negra y mulata de la ciudad de Buenos Aires, 1810–1840,” Desarrollo Económico 61 (Apr.–June 1976):75–99; Alfredo E. Lattes, “Las migraciones en la Argentina entre mediados del siglo XIX y 1960,” Desarrollo Económico 48 (Jan.–Mar. 1973):849–65; Lyman L. Johnson, “Estimaciones de la población de Buenos Aires en 1774, 1778, y 1810,” Desarrollo Económico 73 (Apr.–June 1979):107–19; and José Luis Moreno, “La estructura social y demográfica de la ciudad de Buenos Aires en el año 1778,” Anuario del Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas de la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Universidad Nacional del Litoral 8 (1965):151–70.

2. Julio Irazusta, Vida política de Juan Manuel de Rosas a través de su correspondencia, 8 vols. (Buenos Aires, 1940), vol. 1, p. 85, cited in John Lynch, Argentine Dictator: Juan Manuel de Rosas, 1829–1852 (London, 1981), p. 27.

3. For an overview of the impact of English liberalism on the revolutionary generation, see Mario C. Belgrano, “Fuentes anglosajonas en la formación intelectual de Manuel Belgrano,” Anales (Buenos Aires) 1 (n.d.).

4. José Ingenieros, La evolución de las ideas argentinas (Buenos Aires, 1946), 1:178.

5. For excellent analyses of mercantile activities in viceregal Buenos Aires, see Susan M. Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires, 1778–1810 (Cambridge, 1978); and Jonathan C. Brown, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776–1860 (Cambridge, 1979).

6. Herbert S. Klein, “Las finanzas del Virreinato del Río de la Plata en 1790,” Desarrollo Económico 50 (July-Sept. 1973):369–400.

7. For a review of military costs in the revolutionary period, see Tulio Halperín Donghi, Guerra y finanzas en los orígenes del estado argentino (Buenos Aires, 1982), 73–144.

8. Tulio Halperín Donghi, Revolución y guerra: formación de una elite dirigente en la Argentina criolla (Buenos Aires, 1972), 329–64.

9. On the insistent measures of law and order, see Mark D. Szuchman, “Disorder and Social Control in Buenos Aires, 1810–1860,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 15 (Summer 1984):83–110.

10. The 1810 census employed a different numbering scheme for the cuarteles, and the area included within each cuartel covered twelve city blocks rather than the sixteen blocks encompassed by each cuartel in the censuses of 1827 and 1855. I decided, for the sake of historical continuity and geographic standardization, to select the population that in 1810 resided in the same sixteen blocks that were incorporated within each of the four cuarteles used in 1827 and 1855. Further standardization was required to identify the same blocks throughout the three censuses because the numerical designations given to the blocks (manzanas) were different in every one of the three censal dates. It thus became necessary to provide universal numbering that could facilitate locational definitions and boundaries for large-scale statistical computations. The solution was to convert every manzana number from every census to the designation given in 1810, which had the advantage of already having been sequentially ordered from 1 to 406. The sequentially numbered city-block system employed in 1810 also permitted assigning block numbers to manzanas not existing in 1810 but occupied by 1855. This method is particularly appropriate for low-lying areas along the shores of the Río de la Plata. In the aggregate, the problem of missing data was kept to a minimum. The 1810 census had missing tracts for nine residential blocks in the cuartel that have been designated here with the number 3; none were missing in Cuartel 4; nine were missing in Cuartel 12; and four were missing in Cuartel 19. The 1827 and 1855 censuses had no missing data, containing every block of every selected cuartel. On the basis of average family sizes for the whole period in the blocks and neighborhoods covered, the data missing from the selective universe is estimated at 370 households. This figure implies if all the data had been available, the selective universe would have contained 6,700 households instead of the 6,310 analyzed here. Given the missing data of 1810, it should be noted that cuarteles designated by numbers 3 and 12 did not contain as much of the city's population as the older and more densely populated southern cuarteles. Cuarteles 3 and 12 later experienced growth and gentrification, but only after midcentury, when they became the hub of the highly regarded Barrio Norte. On this topic, see James R. Scobie, Buenos Aires: From Plaza to Suburb, 1870–1910 (New York, 1974), chaps. 1–2. In sum, underenumeration is not an issue with the censuses employed here. All the folios were first ordered in sequence of pagination and then in the order of street name and house number that each enumerator followed when completing the assigned route, manzana by manzana. As a result of this procedure, a number of folios and libretas were found to be out of sequence and thus placed within inappropriate cuarteles. Analyses were made of the enumerators' routes and of the populations inscribed; if any underenumeration occurred, it appears to have been consistent, suggesting that the variations found over time are reliable indicators of change. In the end, the complete populations of the four wards were gathered, thereby obviating the concern for statistical significance. These procedures yielded a selective universe with a data base of 6,310 households, the basic units of analysis, which contained 28,579 men, women, and children.

11. Reid Andrews, The Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires, 1800–1900 (Madison, 1980), 80.

12. The statistical results of the tables employing the city sample are significant to the .05 level. The sampling technique employed a table of random numbers and yielded a total of 1,149 households, or 383 households enumerated in each of the three census years. The population of these households comprised the records of 6,020 individuals. The sample size of 383 households per census year is appropriate for the largest population of greater Buenos Aires considered by this article, which by 1855 amounted to ninety thousand persons, and for achieving the desired 95 percent confidence level and the .05 level of significance. See J. Dennis Willigan and Katherine Lynch, Sources and Methods of Historical Demography (New York, 1982), 199–200; Des Raj, The Design of Sample Surveys (New York, 1972), 59; Diego G. de la Fuente, Primer censo de la República Argentina… (1869) (Buenos Aires, 1872), 20; and Herbert Arkin and Raymond R. Colton, Tables for Statisticians (New York, 1963), 145.

13. “Those may be presumed married who are of opposite sex, appear first and second in the household and have the same surname [allowing for the retention of maiden names in the Hispanic tradition]. This presumption is strengthened if those following the first two have the same surname and/or are described as children. Those may also be presumed married who appear later in the household, i.e., not first and second, but who have the same surname and are followed in the household by those who have the same surname and/or are described as children…. An individual may be presumed widowed who is described as either mother or father of the head or other member of the household (a spouse not being present) or … the head of a household containing either or both a married couple and children (so described) with the same surname.” From Household and Family in Past Time, edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall (Cambridge, 1972), 88. The censuses that were used facilitated greatly the determination of household relationships. In 1810 respondents and enumerators usually listed relationships. The 1855 census contained the question, “What is your relationship to the head of the household?” Finally, the inference rules of the Cambridge Group were invoked when necessary in cases involving the census of 1827.

14. Sample data.

15. Alfredo E. Lattes, “Las migraciones en la Argentina,” 854.

16. Sample data.

17. Goldberg, “La población negra y mulata,” 86.

18. Andrews, The Afro-Argentines, 52–53.

19. Andrews, The Afro-Argentines, 115, 113–37 passim.

20. El Censor, 3 October 1816.

21. Juan Manuel Beruti, “Memorias curiosas,” Senado de la Nación, Biblioteca de Mayo: diarios y crónicas, vol. 4 (Buenos Aires, 1960), p. 3703.

22. Ibid., 3703–6.

23. El Lucero, 5 July 1830.

24. Teatro de la Opinión, 13 June 1823.

25. Sample data.

26. Computed from John Hajnal, “Age at Marriage and Proportions Marrying,” Population Studies 7 (Nov. 1953):111–36.

27. Michael Mitterauer and Reinhard Sieder, The European Family (Chicago, 1982), 36–37; John Hajnal, “European Marriage Patterns in Perspective,” in Population in History: Essays in Historical Demography, edited by D. V. Glass and D. E. C. Eversley (London, 1965), 101–43.

28. Cases where the occupations of the heads of the households were unknown were not included.

29. Sample data.

30. Sample data.

31. Sample data.

32. Lawrence Stone, “Family History in the 1980s: Past Achievements and Future Trends,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 12 (Summer 1981):60; Roger Schofield, “Age-Specific Mobility in an Eighteenth-Century Rural English Parish,” Annates de Démographie Historique (1970):261–74; Rudolf Braun, “Early Industrialization and Demographic Change in the Canton of Zurich,” in Historical Studies of Changing Fertility, edited by Charles Tilly (Princeton, 1978), 291, 320; Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York, 1977), 26–28; Mitterauer and Sieder, The European Family, 41–43.

33. Cynthia Little, “The Society of Beneficence in Buenos Aires, 1823–1900,” Ph.D. diss., Temple University, 97–98.

34. AGN, X-17-2-7, Registros parroquiales, 1840; and AGN, X-16-10-7, Defunciones y matrimonios en Buenos Aires. The abandonment rates, although high, correspond to a generalized picture of high levels of illegitimacy. For the period between 1826 and 1831, the urban parishes witnessed illegitimacy rates of 33 percent for whites and 88 percent for persons of color. These figures come from baptismal information that recorded children of common-law marriages as naturales. See Goldberg, “La población negra,” 86.

35. Susan M. Socolow, “Marriage, Birth, and Inheritance: The Merchants of Eighteenth-Century Buenos Aires,” Hispanic American Historical Review 60, no. 3 (Aug. 1980):392; Bernard Farber, Guardians of Virtue: Salem Families in 1800 (New York, 1972), 46.

36. Diana Balmori and Robert Oppenheimer, “Family Clusters: Generational Nucleation in Nineteenth-Century Argentina and Chile,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 21 (Apr. 1979):241.

37. Farber, Guardians of Virtue, 46.

38. Sample data.

39. Goldberg, “La población negra,” 90.

40. The concern is generalized throughout the periodical literature of the period. For example, see Halperín Donghi, Revolución y guerra, passim.

41. The new regulations were to be applied to the urban militia by royal declaration in 1767. Their specific application came by way of the Reglamento para las milicias de infantería y caballería de la isla de Cuba, promulgated on 19 Jan. 1769, and extended to the rest of the American possessions by the Gálvez Circular of 11 June 1769. Juan M. Manferini, “La historia militar durante los siglos XVII y XVII,” in Historia de la nación argentina, edited by Ricardo Levene, 2d ed. (Buenos Aires, 1961), 4:253. For reviews of the development and consequences of military reforms of this period, see Allan J. Kuethe, “The Development of the Cuban Military as a Sociopolitical Elite, 1763–1783,” Hispanic American Historical Review 61, no. 4 (Nov. 1981):695–704; Chris-ton J. Archer, The Army in Bourbon Mexico, 1760–1810 (Albuquerque, 1977); Allan J. Kuethe, Military Reform and Society in New Granada, 1773–1808 (Gainesville, 1978); and Lyle McAlister, The Fuero Militar in New Spain, 1764–1800 (Gainesville, 1952).

42. Tulio Halperín Donghi, “Revolutionary Militarization in Buenos Aires, 1806–1815,” Past and Present 40 (July 1968):87.

43. Halperín Donghi, “Revolutionary Militarization,” 101–2.

44. Beruti, “Memorias curiosas,” 3683–84.

45. See Recopilación de las leyes y decretos promulgados en Buenos Aires desde el 25 de Mayo de 1810 hasta el 31 de Diciembre de 1835, first part (Buenos Aires, 1836), pp. 353–54, 365–66, 379–83; and Registro nacional (Buenos Aires, 1879), 1:28, 42.

46. See the considerando of the government's decree of 8 Jan. 1830 in El Lucero, 8 Jan. 1830, and the decree itself in the Recopilación, p. 1034.

47. Szuchman, “Disorder and Social Control,” 90–91.

48. Crónica Política y Literaria, 8 Aug. 1827 (emphasis in original); AGN, X-43-7-5, Polida, 1830–1838, 1850–1859; Serenos.

49. See the police edict of 21 Aug. 1827 in Crónica Política y Literaria, 22 August 1827.

50. Halperín Donghi, Guerra y finanzas, 159.

51. Beruti, “Memorias curiosas,” 3990.

52. Both of the circumstances can be found in the dialogue that took place on 8 October 1812 between leaders of the coup about to depose the revolutionary junta and the junta's members. The text of these exchanges can be found in Museo Histórico Nacional, Acta del cabildo de Buenos Aires (8 de Octubre de 1812) (Buenos Aires, 1912), unnumbered.

53. Halperín Donghi, “Revolutionary Militarization,” 96–97.

54. Museo Histórico Nacional, Acta del cabildo.

55. Emilio Ravignani, “EL congreso nacional de 1824–1827: la convención nacional de 1828–1829,” in Historia de la nación argentina, edited by Levene, 2nd ed., 7:113–14.

56. Circular del 20 de Agosto de 1827 en respuesta al mensaje del Gobierno del 14 de Septiembre de 1827, precedida del mensaje mismo y de una circular a las Provincias (Buenos Aires, 1827), pp. 1–2, cited in Ricardo Piccirilli, Rivadavia y su tiempo (Buenos Aires, 1943), 2:470–71.

57. See, for example, The British Packet, 1 Sept. 1827.

58. Halperín Donghi, Guerra y finanzas, 155.

59. Lynch, Argentine Dictator, 36.

60. Ibid., 133.

61. See Miron Burgin, The Economic Aspects of Argentine Federalism, 1820–1852 (New York, 1971), 249–81, for a review of the contradictions inherent in Rosas's economic policies.

62. For a discussion on desertion, see Andrews, The Afro-Argentines, 124–25.

63. Halperín Donghi, “Revolutionary Militarization,” 106.

64. Halperín Donghi, Guerra y finanzas, 222–23.

65. British Foreign Office, 6/152, Southern to Palmerston, 19 Oct. 1850, quoted in Lynch, Argentine Dictator, 313.

66. British Foreign Office, 6/167, Gore to Palmerston, 2 Feb. 1852, quoted in Lynch, Argentine Dictator, 324; and James R. Scobie, La lucha por la consolidación de la nacionalidad argentina, 1852–1862 (Buenos Aires, 1964), 18.

67. For an excellent description of public sentiments in the city immediately after the battle of Caseros, see Scobie, La lucha por la consolidación, 17–26.

68. Lynch, Argentine Dictator, 100.

69. Ricardo Levene, El proceso histórico de Lavalle a Rosas (La Plata, 1950), 146.

70. El Lucero, 19 Sept. 1829, emphasis in the original.

71. Halperín Donghi, Revolución y guerra, passim.

72. Some of the best social science literature discussing the varied abilities of Latin American families to forge widespread economic and political networks can be found in these works: Maurice Zeitlin and Richard Earl Ratcliff, “Research Methods for the Analysis of the Internal Structure of Dominant Classes: The Case of Landlords and Capitalists in Chile,” LARR 10, no. 3 (1975):5–61; Jorge Balán, Harley L. Browning, and Elizabeth Jelin, Men in a Developing Society: Geographic and Social Mobility in Monterrey, Mexico (Austin, 1973); Larissa Lomnitz, “Migration and Network in Latin America,” in Current Perspectives in Latin American Urban Research, edited by Alejandro Portes and Harley L. Browning (Austin, 1976), 133–50; Arnold Strickon, “Carlos Felipe: Kinsman, Patron and Friend,” in Structure and Process in Latin America, edited by Arnold Strickon and Sidney M. Greenfield (Albuquerque, 1972), 43–69; and Larissa Lomnitz and Marisol Pérez Lisaur, “The History of a Mexican Urban Family,” Journal of Family History 3 (Winter 1978):392–409.

73. Sample data.

74. Sample data.

75. Sample data.

76. Sample data.

77. The cornerstone of the model rests on Pierre G. F. Le Play, L'Organisation de la famille (Paris, 1871). Fuller discussions of industrialization and family solidarities can be found in Anthony Wrigley, “Reflections on the History of the Family,” Daedalus 106 (Spring 1977):71–85; and William J. Goode, World Revolution and Family Patterns (New York, 1970), 10–26.

78. David Herlihy, The Family in Renaissance Italy (St. Charles, Mo., 1974), 5; Christiane Klapisch, “Household and Family in Tuscany in 1427,” in Household and Family in Past Time, edited by Peter Laslett and Richard Wall (Cambridge, 1972), 278–81.

79. Sample data.

80. The elasticity of the family structure based on functional need has been demonstrated elsewhere. See Howard P. Chudacoff, “Newlyweds and Family Extension: The First Stage of the Family Cycle in Providence, Rhode Island, 1864–1865 and 1879–1880,” in Family and Population in Nineteenth-Century America, edited by Tamara K. Hareven and Maris A. Vinovskis (Princeton, 1978), 169–205.

81. Peter Laslett, “The Family as a Knot of Individual Interests,” in Households: Comparative and Historical Studies of the Domestic Group, edited by Robert M. Netting, Richard R. Wilk, and Eric J. Arnould (Berkeley, 1984), 358–59.

82. E. A. Wrigley, Population and History (New York, 1974), 68–69.

83. Andrews, The Afro-Argentines, 64–77.

84. Quoted in Fermín Chávez, La cultura en la época de Rosas (Buenos Aires, 1973), 105–6.

85. Domingo F. Sarmiento, Obras completas de D. F. Sarmiento, vol. 6, Política arjentina, 1841–1851 (Paris, 1909), 123.

86. Juan B. Alberdi, La República Argentina, treinta y siete años después de su revolución (Santiago, 25 May 1847), a pamphlet quoted in Lynch, Argentine Dictator, 306.

87. Juan B. Alberdi, Cartas quillotanas (Buenos Aires, 1916), 85–86.

88. Harold E. Davis, Latin American Social Thought, 2nd ed. (Washington, D.C., 1966), 148. Davis was discussing Latin American political liberalism and the Mexican liberal José María Luis Mora.

89. For an overview of the transactional and cultural models of social processes, see Raymond T. Smith, “Introduction,” in Kinship Ideology and Practice in Latin America (Chapel Hill, 1984), 5–14.

90. Stone, “Family History,” 56.

91. For a good example of the difficulties of measuring changing attitudes and mentalities, see the recent debates on female sexual attitudes among Edward Shorter, Louise Tilly, Joan Scott, and Miriam Cohen, Cissie Fairchilds, and Jean-Louis Flandrin, among others. This literature is as fascinating as it is illustrative of the rich complexity that the historical literature can gain from such debates. See Edward Shorter, “Illegitimacy, Sexual Revolution, and Social Change in Modern Europe,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2 (Autumn 1971):237–72, and his “Female Emancipation, Birth Control, and Fertility in European History,” American Historical Review 78 (June 1973):605–40; Louise A. Tilly, Joan W. Scott, and Miriam Cohen, “Women's Work and European Fertility Patterns,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6 (Winter 1976): 447–76; Cissie Fairchilds, “Female Sexual Attitudes and the Rise of Illegitimacy,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (Spring 1978):627–67; and Jean-Louis Flandrin, “A Case of Naiveté in the Use of Statistics,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 9 (Autumn 1978):316–21.

92. Social historians may understand more fully their own problems in establishing proof as resulting from inherent limitations of evidence and can draw comparisons with the burden of proof encountered by other social scientists. See, for example, Stephen Ullman, “Semantic Universais,” in Universais of Language, edited by J. H. Greenberg, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1973), 217–61.

93. Stone, “Family History,” 72–73.

94. Laslett, “The Family as a Knot,” 369.

95. For an overview of relations between blacks and Rosas, see Andrews, The Afro-Argentines, chaps. 6 and 8; for Rosas's relations with estancieros, see Lynch, Argentine Dictator, chaps. 2–3.

96. Lewis Coser, The Functions of Social Conflict (New York, 1956), 151.