Degrees of Bondage: Children's Tutelary Servitude in Modern Latin America

As new Latin American nation-states presided over the demise of legal slavery, they orchestrated the retention and reinvention of coercive labor forms ranging from personal service, indenture, and debt peonage, to conscription, penal labor, and impressment. In rethinking the interplay of slavery and emancipation, freedoms and unfreedoms, historians have yet to consider the specific ways children and childhood can illuminate these categories. This paper focuses on the practice of what I call tutelary servitude, the rearing of unrelated child dependents in the household, in order to suggest the ways that labor forms specifically associated with minority have bridged the transition from slavery to emancipation, complicating attempts to distinguish between the two. I define tutelary servitude as the rearing of children as servants in the households of patrones/patrões who provide their sustenance in exchange for labor. “Servitude” captures the relationship of subordination and labor exploitation that was at the heart of these arrangements. “Tutelary” conveys the ideas of protection and charity that were the defining ideological conceits of a practice that existed largely outside of commercial, juridical relations. In its more benign manifestations, tutelary servitude fed and clothed poor and orphaned children, inserting them into the patronage networks necessary to subaltern survival. In its less benign forms, it reinscribed patterns of extreme social and racial-ethnic subordination, producing and reproducing an underclass of dependent, unskilled, and often radically isolated individuals. While tutelary servitude was clearly common in the colonial period, I argue that it was not simply a vestigial “holdover” of institutional slavery or evidence of slavery's gradual, uneven, or incomplete demise. Rather, it was–and remains–a modality of bondage with a profile of its own, one that became increasingly significant in the nineteenth century and has been actively re-instantiated in modern Latin American social and juridical practice.