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Disappearance of the Dowry. Women, Families, and Social Change in São Paulo, Brazil (1600-1900). Stanford University Press - 01/01/1991 de ( registros)
The alliance between two families created by a marriage did not disappear with the demise of the daughter who had been the link between the families. For example, in 1610 when Clemente Alveres escaped after committing a crime, the municipal council warned his second wife not to heed his request that she send him his forge, while similarly warning Braz Goncalves, the father of Clemente’s first wife, that neither he nor his sons should take it to Clemente.
Tradução: A aliança entre duas famílias criada pelo casamento não desapareceu com o falecimento da filha que era o elo entre as famílias. Por exemplo, em 1610, quando Clemente Alveres escapou após cometer um crime, o conselho municipal alertou a sua segunda esposa para não atender ao seu pedido de que ela lhe enviasse a sua forja, ao mesmo tempo que avisou Braz Gonçalves, o pai da primeira esposa de Clemente, que nem ele nem seus filhos deveriam levá-lo para Clemente.
Patriarchs were represented in their business dealings not only by sons and sons-in-law but also by their wives. Despite the fact that most women proprietors in seventeenth-century Sao Paulo were illiterate, they frequently substituted for their husbands. For instance, on many occasions it was the wife who received or made payments.” On other occasions, wives made major decisions independently, such as Anna Tenoria, who married off and endowed her eldest daughter while her husband was on a bandeira.” Wives’ roles as their husbands’ representatives were recognized by the authorities.
Tradução: Os patriarcas eram representados nos seus negócios não apenas pelos filhos e genros, mas também pelas suas esposas. Apesar de a maioria das mulheres proprietárias na São Paulo do século XVII serem analfabetas, elas frequentemente substituíam os maridos. Por exemplo, em muitas ocasiões era a esposa quem recebia ou fazia os pagamentos.” Em outras ocasiões, as esposas tomavam decisões importantes de forma independente, como Anna Tenoria, que casou e doou a filha mais velha enquanto o marido estava na bandeira.” O papel das esposas como representantes dos seus maridos foi reconhecido pelas autoridades. [p. 6]
auxiliaries. For example, the widow Maria Vitoria declared in her will thatshe had outfitted her unmarried son, Gervazio de Vitoria, when he went tothe sertao with the understanding that the Indians he brought back would behalf hers and half his.*’ Francisco Borges said the same in his will, stating thathis sons should only receive half the captives they brought back because hehad invested in their expedition and they were still filhos-familia and underhis control.** Likewise, some of Catharina do Prado’s heirs insisted that theIndians brought beck from the sertao by two of her sons while they still livedwith her were not theirs, as they claimed, but belonged to her estate andshould be divided among all heirs.”Raphael de Ol veira, however, seems not to have believed he had theright to as many of the Indians his single sons brought back as was customary.In his will he was careful to differentiate between the Indians who belongedto him and those he had allowed his sons to retain as their personal propertybecause, as he saic., they had risked their lives in procuring them. He statedthat he felt it was only while he had been young enough and healthy enoughto go himself to the sertao that he should receive a cut of the captives. Nevertheless, Raphael felt the need to enumerate the ways in which his sons hadotherwise contributed to the growth of his estate so as to justify his decisionto deprive his other heirs by allowing these sons to keep the Indians they hadcaptured. *°
Besides marrying a woman with a dowry, joining a bandeira was therefore the other way a young man could commence to accumulate independent means. Not only sons or sons-in-law could receive a cut of the captives. A young male orphan raised in the home of Clemente Alveres returned from the wilderness after the latter’s death with a large contingent of Indians. He demanded and received two of the new captives as his reward—or payment—because he had risked his life alongside the Indian auxiliaries provided by Clemente.
Tradução Além de casar com uma mulher com dote, filiar-se a uma bandeira era, portanto, a outra forma de um jovem começar a acumular meios independentes. Não apenas os filhos ou genros poderiam receber uma parte dos cativos. Um jovem órfão criado na casa de Clemente Alveres retornou do sertão após a morte deste com um grande contingente de índios. Ele exigiu e recebeu dois dos novos cativos como recompensa – ou pagamento – porque havia arriscado a vida ao lado dos auxiliares índios fornecidos por Clemente.
Once Indian captives were brought back from the wilderness, they enteredthe family’s pool of property and were transmitted by inheritance or dowry.As any asset, Indians could be kept for income or sold for immediate profit.They provided income by working to sustain themselves and their owner’sfamily, and by growing crops or raising pigs, sheep, or cattle that were commercialized to provide their masters with the wherewithal to buy the costlyPortuguese imports, such as clothes, that symbolized their status, and to paythe tithes owed to the crown as representative of the church (see Table 1 forthe diversity of production).** Indians became weavers, carpenters, shoemakers, sailmakers, goldsmiths, silversmiths, or blacksmiths, thereby processing primary products to increase their resale value.*” They were also theporters who carried the commodities to Santos over the steep mountain range [p. 9]
explain why throughout colonial times the surname chosen for many of afamily’s children was as likely to be the mother’s name as the father’s. (The useof different surnames for the different children of the same married couple wasan old Portuguese custom.) In Sao Paulo 45 percent of all daughters and 23percent of all sons in the seventeenth-century sample carried their mother’sinstead of their father’s surname. The frequent use of the mother’s surnamemay well have been because, despite claims by eighteenth-century Paulistagenealogists, most seventeenth-century Portuguese newcomers brought noclaim to distinction with them, while their wives belonged to the powerfulfamilies of Séo Paulo and had contributed most of the couple’s property.”OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS OF SONS-IN-LAW -Since only a trickle of Portuguese men reached Sao Paulo in the seventeenth century, most Paulista families had to marry their daughters to otherPaulistas. Many married them to relatives, thereby consolidating propertywithin the immediate family. Some married nieces to uncles.*° Some married ,their children to their childrens’ cousins. Others, like Raphael de Oliveira,married children from their first marriage to children from their second wife’sfirst marriage.*! At other times the children of one family married the children of a neighboring family. For example, in 1652 Domingos Fernandesstated in his will that three of his six children (two daughters and one son)married three children of Domingos Dias 0 moco.” Three of Antonio Bicudo’s sons married three daughters of Francisco de Alvarenga and LuziaLeme.”® And Domingos Cordeiro married his two daughters to two sons of Raphael de Oliveira.* ,
Other families chose their sons-in-law for their abilities, or their sons-inlaw chose to marry the daughter because of the resources and expertise the family held. When a son-in-law fit in with the kind of ventures his father-inlaw was interested in, it was doubly advantageous. Captain Martim Rodrigues Tenério, for example, combined bandeirante activity with commerce and showed a strong interest in metallurgy, which correlates with the interests of his sons-in-law. When Martim died in 1612, two of his sons-in-law were Clemente Alveres and Cornelio de Arzão, who both had metallurgical expertise. Besides being a prominent bandeirante, Clemente Alveres owned a forge and operated it with the labor of his Indians. He also discovered four-teen gold and iron mines around Sao Paulo in as many years. The other sonin-law, Cornelio de Arzão, came to Sao Paulo with D. Francisco de Souza in 1599 for the express purpose of building foundries (see Figure 2).
Tradução: Outras famílias escolheram os genros pelas suas capacidades, ou os genros optaram por casar com a filha devido aos recursos e conhecimentos que a família possuía. Quando um genro se adaptava ao tipo de empreendimento que interessava ao sogro, isso era duplamente vantajoso. O capitão Martim Rodrigues Tenério, por exemplo, combinou a atividade bandeirante com o comércio e demonstrou forte interesse pela metalurgia, o que se correlaciona com os interesses dos seus genros. Quando Martim morreu, em 1612, dois dos seus genros eram Clemente Alveres e Cornélio de Arzão, ambos com experiência em metalurgia. Além de bandeirante de destaque, Clemente Alveres era dono de uma forja e a operava com mão de obra de seus índios. Ele também descobriu quatorze minas de ouro e ferro nos arredores de São Paulo em alguns anos. O outro genro, Cornélio de Arzão, veio para São Paulo com D. Francisco de Souza em 1599 com o propósito expresso de construir fundições.
The complementarity of Martim Rodrigues’s sons-in-law’s abilities suggestsparental strategy. Martim must have had a strong interest in mines and the future of ironworks. In 1607 he recorded the opening of a foundry in his bookof accounts, and some historians have inferred it was his, although it was notlisted as his property when he died in 1612.** Whether the foundry belongedspecifically to Martim Rodrigues or not, it at least belonged to his family, forhalf the foundry was owned in 1628 by his daughter Elvira Rodrigues and herhusband, Cornelio, when the Inquisition confiscated her husband’s share oftheir property.” The other half of the foundry was owned in 1628 by AnnaTenoria, Martim’s granddaughter (daughter of Clemente Alveres), with herhusband, Luis Fernandes, who was a smelter by profession and made tools.*Luis fit the family preference for sons-in-law with metallurgical expertise.®And Anna Tenoria’s brother continued operating their father’s forge with thehelp of Indians trained as blacksmiths.” (See Figure 2.)Thus, for a man in seventeenth-century Sdo Paulo, marriage was much [p. 34 e 35]
DISAPPEARANCE OF THE DOWRY. WOMEN, FAMILIES, AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN SAO PAULO, BRAZIL (1600-1900)
