National Domesticity: The Home as Sacred and Contested Domain in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America

Unlike other papers in this panel that present case studies within particular colonies or nations, this paper takes a wider regional and chronological approach to the home in Latin American history.  In particular, it uses both archival evidence and secondary works to discuss how the home was a domain where power was negotiated and contested in the shift from colony to nation in Spanish America.  Nineteenth-century elites had various (often contradictory) views about the home, family, and nation.  On the one hand, domestic ideologies influenced laws that defined all women as outside of the political nation and kept them dependent on their husbands.  On the other hand, the idea of the home was both central to and controversial within nationalist discourses.  Nineteenth-century Liberals and Conservatives vied with each other for power and influence, each claiming to protect and advance the best interests of women and families.  Both parties claimed the home was a sacred space in the nation, and that mothers had a particularly important duty to raise the next generation of citizens.  They disagreed, however, on whether it was secular or Church authorities who should guide domestic life and protect women and children.  Meanwhile, political, scholarly, and judicial descriptions of indigenous or Afro-Latin American families reflected elite biases and reinforced racial hierarchies.  Over time, women of non-European descent faced increasing pressure to conform to state-sanctioned, elite notions about proper home life. Though offering some case study information, this paper focuses on broad historical and historiographical perspectives, using them to explain how gender dynamics of the nineteenth century served as a bridge between colonial and modern ideas about the home as a sacred domain in Latin America.