Alms for the Rich: Impoverished Spanish Women in Pursuit of Making a Living in Late Colonial Lima

Abstract

This article establishes the role white women played in shaping the urban labor force and the economy in late colonial times in Lima, roughly from 1790 to 1822. It focuses on the impoverished elite women who, by the end of the colonial period, had to ask for alms to avoid working with their own hands. An important part of the Limeño elites could not respond to the twofold challenge: the negative consequences of the economic and administrative reforms of the Bourbons, and the relative flexibilization of the social order in Lima by the end of the eighteenth century. Instead of adapting to new conditions, the Spanish elites generated a social discourse that reaffirmed status and ethnicity as a means to distinguish themselves from the “vicious” plebeian sectors. More than one thousand applications to Church relief programs serve as the main foundation of this article; they are made up of at least one fifth of the white female population of the city in 1806. The article enters into dialogue with studies on socio-labor practices and the history of gender and ethnicity by engaging with concrete experiences of poor elite women in a city considered to be the opulent center of the Spanish colonial power.

Introduction

[Although she belonged to] a well-to-do family with brightness and splendor in the past, the Divine Hand, which gives and takes back what is convenient to his creatures, condescended to bring her family into misery and call to his Saintly Glory her parents and husband, and with this absence begun her tragedy and scarcity. [While she enjoyed good health, she] obtained the natural and daily bread for herself and her two children working with the aguja [needlework] the only one industry of her sex and [social] quality.

—Doña María Magdalena de Echarri y Javier in her petition to the archbishop of Lima in 1806²

The personal story above is reflective of a common situation where many former economically and socially powerful families became poor due to changes in the economic and administrative structure of the colony in the aftermath of the Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century. The situation was especially complicated because most Limeño elite households were based upon a fragile economic foundation: commerce and bureaucracy. Those affected by the reforms, women of all statuses—single, orphaned, widowed, married, or abandoned—faced the challenge of finding new ways of obtaining the means of subsistence.³

Spanish women from better-off social groups failed to adapt to the new circumstances. The spokesmen for the elites, and many women themselves, insisted on considering sexual behavior and the kind of labor they could perform as the most important ways of acquiring social credit and reputation, instead of acknowledging that work and socialization play a role. Therefore, they maintained that questions of honor prevented them, despite whatever necessity they experienced, from working outside the home in menial occupations. As a result, self-respecting women considered only a few laboring alternatives: making cigars and limpiones (masses of tobacco that were used to clean the teeth), clothing manufacture (textiles), and teaching girls.⁴

Hence, in a still patriarchal, hierarchical, and racialized society, these impoverished white women had only two options to survive and avoid social shame: undertake work at home or declare themselves pobres de solemnidad (solemn or shamefaced poor).⁵

To be sure, white working-class women did work outside their houses. Actually, despite what the anti-Spanish “black legend” says about the rejection of work by the Spaniards, we find that nonelite Spanish women worked in all urban and rural economic activities, even in the first huge industrial center of the city—the tobacco factory—in the second half of the eighteenth century. Hence, focusing on the two above-mentioned laboring options, this article looks at the role elite Spanish women played in shaping the urban labor force in late colonial times in Lima.⁶

Two related circumstances generated the need for elite groups to identify themselves anew. First, late colonial Lima society was undergoing a slow but sustained process of change. Far from still being a small face-to-face city, Lima had become home to both a very considerable permanent and temporary population. Second, in this larger city, new social actors emerged and, to a certain extent, questioned the statutory and caste order in place. It is also important to take into account the fear of the popular sectors (especially the indigenous population) following the rebellions of 1750 (in Lima and Huarochirí), the 1780–83 Tupac Amaru and Katari uprisings (in the southern Andes), and the revolutions in France and Haiti. In this context, the social elites saw the changes as a serious threat to their status; consequently, they reaffirmed the traditional discourse that ratified their superiority in society: they pointed to the “vices of the lower classes” as a social self-definition as the virtuous part of society.⁷

Significantly, in 1794 when the “enlightened” intelligentsia of Lima gathered around the Mercurio Peruano received the proposal to eliminate the juridical separation into two “republics” (of Spaniards and of Indians), in order to “form a single and indistinct body of nation,” the Mercuristas denied this possibility arguing that the separation into two “republics” was considered central to maintaining order in a society as divided as Peru.⁸

According to canon law (No. 529), almsgiving is a religious precept of charity, which, as a theological virtue, is exercised both by individual parishioners and by religious entities. Based on love of God and neighbor, material aid was to be destined for the truly miserable (miserabiles personae), and the Church was the main institution responsible for collecting and allocating resources to the poor, afflicted, sick, and abandoned. The parish priests, in general, were to care for the needy by distributing the alms collected in their churches, while bishops and archbishops were in charge of the needy belonging to the social elites. Numerous files used for this study mention sporadic and voluntary financial support given to the now poor elite members by powerful personalities and priests (generally their confessors). However, at the end of the eighteenth century, charity was no longer sufficient to cover the needs of the most deprived social sectors. Following secular and regalist principles, the colonial state sought to take charge of social assistance by opening numerous charitable institutions (hospices, poorhouses, homes for abandoned women, etc.), but the Church continued to be in charge of most of them.

To explain this phenomenon, the following analysis first presents the changes that affected the social elites of Peru and of Lima in particular. Second, it offers a picture of the city in the aftermath of the changes that occurred during the last three decades of colonial rule, emphasizing the laboring activities of the population, specifically those of elite women who saw their conditions worsened. Third, it addresses in detail the cases that motivate this study: the solemn poor in search of ecclesiastical help to avoid begging, social and labor degradation, or prostitution. To do this, the study employs a multilateral social approach: women of the impoverished elite are discussed within the context of their gender and socio-economic and cultural conditions in the historical context of late colonial Lima. Finally, a case-by-case analysis of the many applications these women made for poor relief reveals that a colonial capital city that was considered opulent was in fact beset with serious difficulties for sustaining the elite on the eve of its independence.

Lima, Social Changes, and the Impoverishing Reforms

Although very slowly and moderately, the society of Lima (as well as that of the other great cities of the Americas) underwent changes throughout the eighteenth century as a result of the autonomous economic growth and demographic recovery the city experienced during that time. The “inward” growth boosted the economic activities of the viceroyalty, and this also benefited the capital city. The rigidity of the tenure of large urban lots in Lima, however, meant that, at least following the end of the seventeenth century, the city's new inhabitants lacked sufficient space for their homes. The two great earthquakes of 1687 and 1746 led to important transformations of the living conditions of the elite since the rich and the poor had to share spaces, even in a city as large as Lima, which lacked special boroughs for different social and ethnic groups. Indeed, numerous urban owners in financial trouble designated parts of their houses for renting to propertyless new dwellers (merchants, craftsmen, clerks, and officials of middle ranks), while the traditional interior patios were transformed into corralones and, later, into callejones for poor new residents. In fact, during the time period this study examines, most Limeño lived in such precarious conditions. Physical coexistence of the rich and the poor was far from egalitarian but helped to erase some of the differences in treatment between castes and social groups.⁹

Under these new economic conditions, people from lower socio-economic sectors had more doors opened to them thanks to growing industries such as manufacturing and craft, as well as the services industry. The city's connections to internal and external markets allowed for some improvement in economic conditions for small- and medium-sized entrepreneurs. Those who accessed the traditional medical trades (surgeons and barbers) and new university professions also improved their situation, as well as the first echelons of the civil administration, ecclesiastical posts, and military hierarchy (in the urban militias and the garrison of the Callao port).

The other source of changes during this time was the Bourbon reformism. In the case of Hispanic America, these reforms sought to reverse the situation that since the mid-seventeenth century had widely favored the so-called Creoles elites (proprietors and local bureaucrats). The relative autonomy enjoyed by the colonial “kingdoms” began to be drastically curtailed by the reforms. The main measures were issued beginning in 1760, during the governments of Carlos III and Carlos IV. The economy and finances of the colonies were restructured, but also church-state relations, social hierarchies, public morals, and the place of spouses in the family, all of which are central to our discussion.

As to be expected, measures of the Bourbon reformism affected the different Peruvian economic and social groups unevenly. Some local entrepreneurs and officials were even able to take advantage of the new conditions by adapting their businesses and loyalties to the new rules. The modification of the commercial monopoly (the famous “free trade”) meant the multiplication of products exported from or through the peninsula to the colonies and the control of foreign and domestic trade by large Spanish trading firms. In addition, tax collection was reformed to better control colonial revenues. The counterpart of the reforms should have been the incentive for the local production of raw materials of agricultural and mineral origin for the metropolitan industry. Yet, the Peruvian viceroyalty did not have spectacular results in the diversification of its economy. Indeed, beyond the production of silver that reached important levels, Peru did not see new large productive activities as other colonies did with cacao, tobacco, indigo, cotton, leather, copper, etc. Even the old and large textile manufacturing centers (obrajes) gave way to the so-called chorrillos (medium-sized and small rural workshops). Thus, Peru's late colonial economy generated mostly middling local fortunes that were widespread in all productive branches both in the countryside and the cities. The really rich people were few, and they were mainly foreign merchants.¹⁰

Political and administrative reforms also impacted the Creole elites. Important territorial cuts with the creation of new viceroyalties in South America reduced Peru's population and economic resources. New institutions aimed at controlling economic activities and the shift in preferences for colonial administrative offices in favor of peninsulars (Spaniards) affected the positions and expectations of the property-owning families and local bureaucrats who were partly displaced from their positions of control in the most important political, administrative, and judicial institutions. The university, Church, urban militias, army, and the navy were among the few institutions that allowed, at least partially, the Creoles to climb the short social ladder.¹¹

It should not be surprising, therefore, that by the end of the eighteenth century the spokesmen for the Limeño elites put the social question on the table, seeking to reaffirm their superior social condition and presenting the social situation as one of reigning “chaos” that turned things upside down. To redefine themselves in terms opposed to the popular sectors, they described social hierarchies using corporate categories of castes and estates in speeches, an intellectual field that they controlled and that allowed them to reaffirm themselves as superiors without having to recognize the changes in society that, although limited, must have loomed heavily in times of rebellions and revolutions. To a great extent, Hipólito Unanue, José Baquíjano, José Ignacio de Lequanda, José Rossi y Rubí, Jaime Bausate y Mesa, and Juan Antonio de Olavarrieta, authors of articles in the Diario de Lima (1790–91), the Seminario crítico (1791), and the Mercurio peruano (1791–95), marked clear differences between the ancient and virtuous elite and the vicious popular groups (including the emerging social sectors). Significantly, the Semanario crítico was the first periodical dedicated to women's education in Spanish South America, and female honor and labor would be among its most important topics.

Honor, Women, Welfare, and Poverty in Late Colonial Lima

All available studies about women and gender have shown that the Hispanic American colonial society generated a discourse about women based on the virtues of honor that established what their social behavior principles should be: obedience, honesty, fidelity, piety, prudence, modesty, demureness, respectability, industriousness, and recogimiento.¹²

However, this is insufficient for understanding how relationships between persons and social groups worked in a city like Lima at the end of the colonial period. There are aspects of the city that have not received enough attention in the historiography. In particular, it should be considered that late colonial Limeño society had a complex social hierarchical order based on social, ethnic, and socioeconomic identities. Thus, in addition to dividing into genders and ages, society recognized “states” or sectors of the population that shared characteristics of social status (nobles and commoners at different levels), ethnic-cultural castes (Spanish, indigenous, Black, mestizo, etc.), and social and economic conditions (owners at different levels, small- and medium-sized entrepreneurs, dependent and independent workers, enslaved in various circumstances, unemployed). These criteria were not exclusive. Hence, the relative social mobility and urban population increase of the late eighteenth century threw into question the nominal rigidity of traditional social norms. Indeed, for the purposes of this study, social mobility was twofold. On the one hand, Spanish women lost social and economic status, and ended up in the poor house, acknowledging their condition as solemnly poor, or they went voluntarily to work at the tobacco factory (which actually had more Spanish men and women than other castes). On the other hand, the relative social flexibility allowed men and women from other social sectors to pretend to consider themselves as part of the elite by imitating the refinement, customs, attire, and ornament of those higher up in the social scale.¹³

Two concrete and interrelated issues are central to understanding the argument of this article on the precariousness and vulnerability of impoverished elite women and the job options they had in late colonial Lima: widowhood and social welfare in a premodern and colonial society. A Limeño household might have been very powerful and very fragile at the same time. A large group of relatives could share a household and live at the expense of the patriarch, giving him large numbers of subordinates and considerable control over them. The stability and continuity of the group depended on its political relationships and economic bases in trade, land, and/or bureaucratic positions. However, part of the social elite was exposed to abrupt changes when unforeseen circumstances occurred, especially in times of crisis. The fragility of the family group became evident when the provider of resources lost his job, fell ill, deserted the household, or died. Property-less families and their retinues were left at risk if there were no other family members ready to support them. The cases were especially dramatic if the new head of the household was a widow with no source of income, including the lack or insufficiency of the dowry given at the time of marriage. Widows were a large portion of the applicants to Church relief programs; this shows the increasing vulnerability of their condition.¹⁴

Their helplessness was intensified in a society with a premodern welfare system based primarily in religious charity. Thus, the other issue deals with the capacity of society to face the increasing problem of urban poverty. Catholic charity implies the necessary and interdependent coexistence of the poor with the rich. Hence, in addition to the church hospitals and the old orphanage for the poor (founded in 1603), the colonial state established in 1770 the Hospicio de Pobres, or foundling house, with a textile workshop in the indigenous neighborhood of El Cercado. Clearly, this was not enough to solve the problem.¹⁵

Therefore, the social policy of the epoch relied on private philanthropy and the Church. While the Church attended to the needs of the broader society, private philanthropy of well-to-do social sectors attended their own needy acquaintances. Notwithstanding, the upper hierarchy of the Church assumed the relief of the impoverished members of the social elite in a context of the economic crises of the late colonial period. In a society with no relief system for the elderly (welfare), only high-ranking military officers had a montepío (pension) that provided resources to their widows and daughters. In general, retirement is a scarcely studied issue in colonial times.¹⁶

The Rich and the Pauper

This section seeks to characterize the Limeño society of the time based on population censuses and descriptions of contemporaries. Lima during the last decades of colonial times reserved its preeminent political, administrative, and residential functions for the economic, social, and cultural elites of the viceroyalty. Contemporary observers are aiming to help historians determine whether or not the city was in decline during this period.

The summary of the 1790 census provides useful information on the activities of the population. Of a total of 52,627 inhabitants, 4,831 (almost 10 percent) resided in communities (monasteries, colleges, hospitals, hospices, and prisons). Despite the obvious inaccuracies in the data, the occupations of 16,791 people are known—that is, almost all the adults. There were registered, among others, 90 landowners, 393 merchants, 308 farmers, 363 day laborers, 1,027 artisans, 60 manufacturers, 48 bakers, 287 grocery stores, 474 white servants, 2,903 caste servants, and 5,063 male and 4,166 female enslaved people. Nonetheless, there are important gaps in information about the popular sectors of the city. Especially, about female commoners.¹⁷

Lima was one of the largest cities in the colonial Americas. It was a redistributive commercial center and a good market for its own and imported products. The city was home to large manufacturing workshops using vicuña wool (hats), leather (saddles, sword scabbards, and especially footwear), and tallow (candle and lard shops), as well as wheat mills, but it had not developed a textile industry based on the cotton that the coastal valleys could easily supply, or the abundant sheep wool from the adjacent mountainous regions. The accountant José Ignacio de Lequanda referred to the absence in Lima of factories and added that Spanish women had few resources to subsist in the city because they lacked the spinning wheel and the loom:

“[S]ewing does not bring them enough utility because this branch is short, both because of the few works that are offered to them, and because they all [Spanish women] attend it as the only exercise, since most of the works come from Spain, they lack pabulum for their entertainment and profits.”¹⁸

Instead of large workshops, the city had a highly developed system of home work fed by commercial interests (disseminated manufacturing). A good part of the population lived in rented rooms in houses and in callejones (slums, hovels) where they worked with the raw materials provided by merchants or fellow organizers of production (wool, fabrics, leather, metals, wax). Plebeian women made or mended garments in their rooms (seamstresses) and twisted and tied tobacco at home or in the tobacco factory.¹⁹

Owners of the large haciendas and plantations in the surrounding areas resided in Lima. However, the valleys of the capital city were narrow and, even then, they were crowded with more than two hundred properties. For this reason, in reality, most of the landowners were small and medium farmers (chacareros). The services industry employed another large sector of the population. The majority of inhabitants were porters, bleeders, and water carriers, but above all street vendors and servants. A portion of the servants worked in a dependent manner in private homes and institutions, but it's possible the majority worked independently, offering their work in a very competitive market due to the abundance of the enslaved and free jornaleros or day laborers. The most common activities of commoner women were domestic service, sewing for the market, and doing laundry for elite households.

The white Limeño elite was related to bureaucratic and commercial functions. In addition to rural and urban landowners, the city was home to large numbers of civil, military, and ecclesiastical officials who lived on fragile incomes, often with large families that were further inflated by in-laws, servants, other persons with spiritual ties, and widowed daughters who returned home with their own families.²⁰

Travelers and residents agreed that late colonial Lima had few families with large, accumulated capital. Especially if compared to Mexico City. In Lima, only a few families were reputed to be millionaires, and no private house in the city was built at costs above 300,000 pesos, nor were there families with more than thirty servants in their urban home as there were in Mexico. Lima did surpass Mexico City in titled aristocracy and nobility, though. The number of titles of Castile was greater in Peru, and, for the most part, those people resided in the capital. Peru had at least 105 noble titles, which included one duke, 58 marquises, 45 counts, and one viscount, while in New Spain there were only 63 titles.²¹

The last decades of the eighteenth century show a city with changes to its composition, but not a city in crisis. Now, the city had fewer rich people, but more persons with medium fortunes. However, what Lima did have was growing poverty, which was more evident from the mid-1790s forward. Indeed, in his famous essay on the population of the city of Lima, contemporary essayist José Rossi y Rubí described the old merchant oligarchy which did not dominate the trade anymore and had “just short profits because incomes are [now] distributed among more people.” Moreover, he stated that the commercial activity was thriving in ways that favored the middle sectors of the citizens, the artisans, the petit merchants, the journeymen, and the vendors.²²

This statement might have been right for the time Rossi y Rubí was writing (the early 1790s), but not accurate in the following years, when the negative outcomes of the reforms for Limeño economy became more apparent. In a well-known essay on Limeño vagrants and the ways to overcome their situation, the accountant José Ignacio de Lequanda, for instance, held an opposite opinion in the pages of the same publication only three years later. Although also a fellow at the Sociedad de Amantes del País, Lequanda denied what Rossi y Rubí had affirmed, pointing out that the old opulence had turned into scarcity and even misery. Lequanda's aim was to discuss how to deal with the increasing poverty and vagrancy in the city, a problem he viewed through a social approach that employed ethnic and statutory categories typical of an estate and corporate perspective.

The explanation given by Lequanda must have fully satisfied the city's white elites. In a city that already had serious social difficulties, the elite saw the problem from a corporate perspective, which allowed them to establish sharp differences between themselves and the popular sectors while reaffirming the need to return to the traditional mechanisms of social control that had worked so well for centuries: the statute and caste social order.

Lequanda's view is important for this study. He described a portion of the elites as lacking of occupations because they were part of large households. Indeed, he stated that impoverished Spaniards did have a disposition for work, whether male or female, but they could not practice crafts because these activities were already in the hands of “inferior” ethnic groups, and therefore they were involuntary unemployed. An unemployed Spaniard who lived honestly in his household was, in his view, not to be considered a vagrant. Actual vagrants were those who were able but lived at the expense of charity, and those males who exercised activities considered fitting for females. As a result, he estimated the number of idlers in the city by simply subtracting the numbers of Spaniards, Indians, and Blacks from the total population. That is to say, he attributed to all mestizos and castes the condition of lazy (more than half of the total inhabitants of the city).

Still, he ended his social analysis with a call to help “the other sex that lacks a useful and honest application.” In his vision, Spanish women were miserable (worthy of support) and urgently required help “to avoid the disorder that necessity brings in itself” (in a veiled reference to prostitution) and to achieve the “fixing of old bad habits” with a “good order,” and from there “the advances of the mechanical and liberal arts will also be born.” An additional result would be, for Lequanda, that with fewer idlers, there would also be fewer sins, and consequently, “the punishments with which providence afflicts the ravaged peoples will not be so repeated.” This last statement is a reference to the explanation in force at the time placing the origins of earthquakes in “public sins,” especially women's immoralities.²³

A decade later, the Spanish scientist, Hipólito Ruiz, depicted the character of the Limeño Creoles more plainly but in the same negative terms. According to him, the Spanish Limeños were “adorned” by all imaginable defects but not the Limeñas. Ruiz mentioned the sopa de convento [convent soup], without which, he stated, “several people would starve.” Following Lequanda, he attributes poverty to the lack of occupations for white persons because the castes monopolized the trades and, more importantly for our purposes, the fact that white women abandoned the needlework that they used to do in the past due to increased imports of thrift, cloths, and embroidery.²⁴

There were two types of speech. One aimed at elite women, referring to the ideal behavior of the Spanish woman in accordance to the concepts of honor of the household and the family in general, combining traditional and modern argumentations.²⁵

In the hierarchical system of the time, women from popular sectors lacked honor, had all imaginable depravities and, therefore, did not possess any virtues. However, through imitation they tried to appropriate the elitist discourse in order to be accepted as persons of honor. Court cases of transgressions (or attempted transgressions) show common women claiming the noble particle doña and demanding to be heard in lawsuits about female honor in society. These cases speak to claims of social equality that often were manifested as “whitening.” For this reason, it was especially important to highlight the vices of the plebeian sectors, by contrast, to underscore the exclusive virtues of the women of the social elites.²⁶

The other type of discourse deployed notions of hygiene and the modernization of social manners. The reforms sought to change the customs related to personal hygiene and health as bases of the modern femininity, reduce the use of wet nurses, and establish the role of elite women in the education of future citizens whose main objective was the political transformation of society.²⁷

The Noble Businesswoman

By the second part of the 1790s, Lima must have been a city full of anxieties for the elites who saw their privileged situation jeopardized. The women who kept some resources resorted to a small range of economic activities as entrepreneurs to continue to live “nobly” from their secure rents: supply (candle shops, bakeries), loans, purchase of enslaved people to generate daily wages (jornaleros), etc.²⁸

One of the ways to avoid falling into ruin and, hence, poverty is quite clear from the movement of capital from trade to productive activities under the protection of state and/or municipal institutions. Certainly, entrepreneurs at risk looked to be protected by political entities through special licenses to practice under exclusive monopolistic conditions. Indeed, affected by the reforms, merchants and officeholders relocated their remaining resources into secure mass-consumption manufacturing activities such as candle making and bakeries. Thus, among the fifty-one applicants to open candle shops in Lima from 1799 to 1822, there were fourteen women (eleven of them doñas); likewise, among the thirty-two applicants to open bakeries and pastry shops in Lima from 1756 to 1822, there were four women (three of them doñas).²⁹

On the other hand, an “honest” way of obtaining, maximizing, or preserving resources was to invest in buying enslaved workers to secure a living through a wage regime known as “jornal.” Limeño enslaved wage earners (jornaleros) had to provide their slave holders a daily rent equivalent to one real per each hundred pesos of his or her current market price (0.125 percent). In actuality, the vast majority of the ten thousand enslaved people in the city in the eighteenth century labored under this regime that allowed both male and female enslaved people to lead a life of semi-liberty, as long as they earned enough money to pay the rent (jornal) to his or her master, and also take over all his or her personal and family's expenses (room, food, clothing, health). Among the owners of enslaved wage winners were several widows and single women living from what their enslaved gave them every day. The precariousness of this activity can be seen in frequent situations where one to three enslaved jornaleros provided the sustenance for the whole family of the master and, in fact, the family depended thoroughly on the control over enslaved jornaleros. The fragility of the rent then was also related to potential illness, death, or flight of the wage earner, or simply delays in the payment of daily wages. The alternative variant of this system was to rent out the enslaved, for in this case the owner maintains control of the enslaved by collecting the wages him- or herself, but the master must still provide a job to his or her enslaved worker. In contrast, the jornalero looked for his work by him- or herself and was responsible for paying the rent even on the days he or she could not get a job.³⁰

Shamefaced Elite Women at Work

According to the proposals made by the Creole elites, the main labor issues for Spanish women were the social stigmatization of menial work and the necessity to find activities according to their social status and prestige to preserve their honor and avoid falling into prostitution.³¹ Those women who lacked resources faced a more desperate situation because their social condition did not allow them to leave home to work or go to the large factory in Lima at that time. Despite the Bourbon declaration of the honorability of work in 1783, elite women had to take on work in their own houses (or the houses of peers), enter the poor house, or ask the archbishop for help by declaring themselves in either of these last two cases poor of solemnity.

Sewing was an activity shared by women of all castes and social groups. However, it was carried out under different conditions. Women of the popular sectors had no social impediment to work with their hands in public with the needle, the batea (pan, washing vessel), as vendors in the marketplace, or even as laborers in workshops and factories. In contrast, sewing was practically the only honorable way of working for women of the social elite. They were engaged in the work of sewing and embroidering garments to help with their domestic economy and fill their lives with an interesting and profitable activity, which for them was not a menial trade but an “art” done inside their homes. However, when the Bourbon changes affected the economy of the household and/or the male breadwinner disappeared, this activity went on to become the main way to obtain resources for the household. Indeed, as we are arguing in relation to social restrictions for the labor of white elite women, it depended on the activity and on the workplace because there were activities that they could perform only in private settings, inside their houses.

Thus, there were few laboring alternatives for impoverished elite women. In addition to the activities proscribed because they were proper for men or for women of the popular sectors, the main restriction for upper-class women was the workplace. The fear of losing the social consideration they enjoyed prevented them from working outside the familiar household. Therefore, certain income generating work was “hidden” in the private sphere of the household, in the interior rooms far from view from the street and unexpected visitors. They worked along with other girls and female adults of the same condition (relatives, neighbors, friends), but also maids and servants. The logic of paternalistic protection included the extended use of skilled but unpaid labor of servants and other persons aggregated to the household for the benefit of the family. Thus, to have a populated seignorial house (casa poblada) was not only synonymous with economic and social status, but it also meant the possibility to add members of the extended family to the productive market-oriented activities developed in the interior of the house. To be sure, the Limeño urban household was far from being an obraje or a large textile workshop. It almost always had, notwithstanding, some wheels and looms.³²

Tobacco in Female Hands

The increased consumption of tobacco throughout the eighteenth century favored the establishment of cigarette shops in Lima to create products to export to various cities in South America. Around 1747, there were sixty-one small- and medium-sized cigar workshops, with an average of five workers, although one of them had twenty, all men. Five years later, in 1752, the colonial government established the state monopoly on tobacco sales, acquiring the raw material from one of the sixteen tobacco shops. The production of cigars and limpiones spread to grocery stores and private houses of rich and poor people. By 1780, there were 121 workers across all the cigar shops.

But in 1780, things changed when the colonial state assumed both the production and sale of cigars, thus preventing the work of numerous people in their own houses and cigar shops. The state monopoly founded tobacco factories in the cities of Lima and Trujillo. The Lima factory accepted workers from the previous cigar shops and four years later it already had 150, and three more years later, 442 more, both men and women. At the beginning, Lima factory did not have many female workers and until 1784 there were only 39 white, older women enrolled at the poorhouse but also from the beggars that used to be in front of the numerous churches of the city; in 1787, there were, however, 155 female workers (114 Spanish, 28 mestizas, and 13 mulattas) and 287 male workers. Finally, in 1790, the number of female workers rose to 216, in one factory that also housed 347 male workers.³³

That last year, viceroy Gil de Taboada Lemos closed the factory as a result of the protest of high- and middle-class families. However, at the same time the colonial government established fixed prices inaccessible to the poor. The end of the factory and the liberation of tobacco, then, affected the truly poor of the city who did not have the resources to buy bundles of tobacco in the tobacconists. But it benefited the families of the elites who returned to produce cigars and limpiones.³⁴

The Creole scientist Hipólito Unanue stressed in 1792 that the monopoly (estanco) of tobacco took economic activities from the poor and, especially, from women. Despite his references to the “poor,” in reality, Unanue advocated elite families who obtained important resources thanks to their own domestic work and that of their servants. He said that,

“All know that Peru is one of the countries on the world with least resources for the subsistence of poor people. Since from Europe come manufactured from shoes to cap, it remains very little to do in industrial matters for the Peruleros [Peruvians]. Tobacco used to provide livelihood to numerous families not just in Lima but throughout the kingdom. A needy head of household obtained some tobacco for just a short price and transformed it into cigars with the help of his children finding in its sale the means of subsistence.”³⁵

After the closure of the tobacco factory, then, the families of the social elite in economic difficulties faced the situation thanks to the expansion of cigars, sewing, and embroidery. However, these activities encountered problems due to competition among the same families (disproportionate supply) and market saturation due to textile imports.

Vivimos de la aguja³⁶

Needlework and embroidery were the most important occupations of white women working at home. To some extent, needlework was synonymous with female work (for upper-class women). Initially a noneconomic, domestic activity for well-to-do women, by the second half of the eighteenth century, working as a seamstress was increasingly used as a complement to other income for the household. In this line of work, the workers did not receive wages. Rather, they were paid by the piece as the product was sold. The pieces were sold both within a wide network of kin and friendship locally, and also out of the city when the merchants were involved in the business providing raw materials and paying for the final products. Women who earned a living through this activity were still considered honorable women. Orphaned Spanish girls were taught sewing as part of their apprenticeship so that they would be prepared to earn an honest living.³⁷

Thanks to the information in the applications to ecclesiastical charities, we get important details of these activities that left almost no other historical records. Many of the applicants (or their representatives) state that sewing was the only means they had to survive: “live by the needle”; “live in the shadow of the needle”; “supports herself with this personal work”; “supported by the work of her weary hands”; “supports herself only by her sewing”; and the like.³⁸

At the same time, the applications manifested social, ethnic, and gender criteria. Sewing was considered a female activity (trabajo mujeril). Reaffirming this, the widow doña María Zavala said that she belongs to “the weak and useless sex,” as it is argued that their social status does not allow them to do any other activity than the “sad seam” (“triste costura”), that their honor as women of the white elite is not undermined by el ingenio de coser (the “wit of sewing”), and that sewing is the only thing a woman can aspire to as “proper trade of the sexso” (sic). Doña Jacoba Bardales, widow of don Juan González, pointed out that “there would be other means accessible to survive had she not dedicated to sewing, which is the only entertainment allowed for [her] sex in the country,” but what she actually obtained was barely enough “to not lose her life because of [its] necessity and bitterness.” On her side, doña Andrea Fructoso, a native of Guayaquil, pointed out that when she was abandoned in this city after the death of her son, she had “to support herself (…) [with] the very short utility that sewing could afford her, and other occupations typical of a lady of honor and recollection.” Very expressive was the widow doña María de la Maza when she pointed out that she had been left “heiress of nothing” when her husband died.³⁹

Yet, needlework was far from being an activity that provided sufficient earnings for making a living by the end of the colonial period in Lima. For example, in 1807, while living in the poorhouse, Dorotea and Jacinta Ferrer stated that they sought in vain a job as seamstresses in private houses, although “as it is evident women's work is not enough and cannot provide for subsistence in such an expensive city as Lima.” Doña Bernardina del Castillo y Lozada was even more direct and eloquent in pointing out that, her parents having dived, she dedicated her time to sewing to support herself, but that at the time of writing the petition it was impossible for her to continue doing so because there are no orders due to the great poverty that existed in the city, and that all the impoverished women were dedicated to sewing.⁴⁰

Thus, numerous elite women declared that they used to be seamstresses, but now this activity did not provide a living wage, and this was enough reason for them to justify their request to various charities.

Lima, a Large Textile Factory

Given this situation, the attempt to establish large-scale textile factories by important merchants and landowners, belonging to the highest colonial nobility, was a way of solving many of the problems that afflicted them as entrepreneurs and, especially, the city impoverished elites. These cases have a very close relationship with the main theme of this study, because the improvised businessmen resorted to the euphemism of charity in favor of the social sectors disadvantaged by fortune. The idea was to enable the houses or hospices for the poor to be used as textile factories.

Various efforts were made in late colonial Lima to establish textile factories disguised as poorhouses. These were places where genteel white women of aristocratic but poor families could spin cotton, weave wool, and sew clothes. The poorhouse established in 1760 by the philanthropist don Diego Ladrón de Guevara, was administered by the archdiocese.⁴¹

This circumstance restricted the use of the poorhouse as a factory. But the noblemen and merchants of Lima looked for an alternative and, perhaps in their despair, they decided to pursue an even larger enterprise. Indeed, in the last year of the eighteenth century, a group of noble merchants and landowners in Lima who had lost important positions with the commercial reforms, devised a way to compensate for the losses through the start-up of a textile factory. For this purpose, in February 1799, they asked permission of viceroy Ambrosio O'Higgins for establishing a textile factory of significant proportions, which, to avoid colonial restrictions and prohibitions, they presented as a charitable project for the poor. In fact, the formal intention was to found “schools of spinning cotton, linen and hemp” to help the poor white women who sewed and spun in their own houses because their elevated social status prevented them from working outside. To be sure, the elite Limeño entrepreneurs considered vagrants of all social and ethnic origins as potential workers of the newly created Sociedad de Beneficencia Pública, a “political patriotic instructional project” (as the business was euphemistically called). The noble Limeño merchants justified their singular request indicating that:

“[B]ecause of the large number of poor vecinos [citizens], especially the women, who without leaving their homes suffer from the greatest rigor of misery … the majority are of ability and who, despite their good wishes, regret their sad situation because in this capital there is no work that they can perform. The fact is quite notorious and it rises to the point that we recollect that when the factory of cigars was practiced on behalf of the king, women came in droves to be preferred in this kind of work. It would take too long to refer the cases referred to with the experience in which they persistently request, especially those of the Spanish class, to dedicate themselves to sewing even without yielding them even for what is precise.”

The two alternatives at hand were to establish a centralized factory in the Foundling House in the indigenous borough of El Cercado, or to transform the whole city into a decentralized factory based on the domestic labor of women and children in a classical output system. In fact, the enterprise used both alternatives. The factory began to produce immediately in the Foundling House and in numerous houses of the city, while the project was sent to Spain for what they thought it must be its final approval. This project—the biggest and the most sophisticated entrepreneurial initiative of the Limeño aristocracy of Amantes del país—however, was to last only a short time because in September 1803, the Royal Council of the Indies rejected it and ordered the viceroy to close the factory.⁴²

It is interesting to note that in terms of industrial training and productive incentives in Spain, neither came to fruition. Following the guidelines of the adviser of the reforms, the count of Campomanes, Spanish crown encouraged the creation of escuelas-talleres (schools-workshops) where girls and women would learn trades related to clothing. The schools-workshops managed to create a very large group of specialists in Spanish cities at the end of the eighteenth century.⁴³

The failure of the Limeño factory, then, put people of all sorts in a more difficult situation. Precariousness would be the norm for the living conditions of the genteel families, a good share of them headed solely by women. Now they must have to rely on other kinds of work for living, and this was precisely what elite members considered shameful. It may not be surprising that the alternative was now to ask for alms to the archdiocese, although the aid was very small and this obliged them to declare themselves publicly “solemnly poor.” In a city that claimed to be white and noble, this decision was very difficult, as can be seen in the applications submitted and, in particular, those that have been preserved in the archive. Proud elite women were forced to resort to poor relief.

Claimants for Meager Alms

The solemnly poor constituted a special group that claimed help by virtue of certain conditions that they held mainly due to their social position (“quality”) and also to their gender. The dishonor did not originate in poverty but in dedicating themselves to some activities that, due to their social status, were off limits to them. For this reason, in the petitions, they were grateful that the Church granted aid for poor people of quality in such confused times to alleviate the situation of “the poor shamefaced ladies who confidently trust in the liberal and pious hand of your honor,” as they referred to the archbishop. In times of acute crisis for them, to be on the archbishop's poor list was the only way to face the economic constraints of poverty without losing decency.⁴⁴

The aid granted not only benefited the claimants, the entire family group was also to be helped. However, the assistance provided by the Church was very modest, and a former well-to-do person must have had to be in great need of aid to publicly declare himself or herself to be shamefaced and poor, and to go to the convents and monasteries for the meager ration of soup distributed there for charity.

In reality, from the few cases where amounts of money are mentioned, we know that the alms were only two to three pesos a month, an amount that could help to just barely avoid starvation. At best the ecclesiastical alms were similar to the amount of money formally received by an indigenous compulsory worker called a mitayo for his work in mines, textile workshops (obrajes), haciendas, or other activities under enforced conditions. For example, doña Rosa de León, widow of don Melchor del Solar, received from the former archbishop González de la Reguera a monthly pension of two pesos. Because she was not able to sew any more, she asked for a higher amount. In another example, three pesos was the allowance received during three years by the widow doña Melchora León de Isla Albu. The widow doña Evarista Pino received also three pesos per month.⁴⁵

Neither poverty nor physical handicap were enough to make one eligible for aid. Eligibility depended on noneconomic factors too. In addition to economic difficulties, destitute women had to demonstrate that they deserved the aid. One of the unavoidable and specific conditions to get the aid was recato, or demureness. Female applicants must be doncellas (virgins, maiden) and reserved if single, and in general de estado honesto (of honorable status). Indeed, except for ten cases, all supplicants used the “doña” noble prefix to their names even when it may not have applied to them.⁴⁶

Virtually all petitions to be declared solemnly poor and receive the ecclesiastical allowance include a statement of having a demure lifestyle. Appropriate sexual behavior was considered a guarantee of correctness according to the social rules and therefore was among the requirements of eligibility for relief. Two examples about these conditions (single maiden and widow) may illustrate the situation of applicants. Doña Carmen Ruiz, a fifteen-year-old maiden, pointed out that she had lost her father six years before, and since then, she and her mother had lived in poverty. She told the archbishop that, despite the hardships, she had maintained a demure behavior, she attended mass in the parish of San Sebastián, and requested the help “to be able to subsist in her honorable life and state.” On her side, doña Juana León, a “modest widow” who lived in the Casa de las Pobres, wrote to the new archbishop asking him to “count her among the shameful ones who should deserve this benefit from your lordship.⁴⁷

To be sure, virtuous behavior was not the heritage only of Spanish and Creole women. Indigenous, free Black, and mestizo or caste women assumed the model, although they were not expected to comply with it. The model was based on the ideal of recogimiento that women should maintain, which was not possible for women from popular sectors, whose economic and labor circumstances forced them to have continuous contact with public life.

Applicants had to impact the ecclesiastical authorities. Their speech had to be convincing. Thus, the claimants show their lived experiences, probably with exaggerations but not enough to consider them fictional or unauthentic. In the end, the declaration of the parish priests and other ecclesiastical officials was fundamental in the acceptance or rejection of the petition because they knew each of the applicants personally.⁴⁸

The Cases

The analysis of the more than one thousand applications for archiepiscopal aid made by impoverished elite women of Lima provides a general picture of the conditions under which an important part of the city elite lived by the end of the colonial period. The applications were submitted in November and December of 1806, when the new archbishop of Lima, Bartolomé María de las Heras (1806–21) was inaugurated and wanted to verify the real necessity of the new supplicants as well as those persons helped by his predecessor Juan Domingo González de la Reguera (1788–1805).

In fact, the already impressive figure of 1,066 applications for financial help does not show the complete picture. To begin with, the file includes the applications of the new requests and of those who understood that they should be ratified because they were listed with the previous archbishop. The second part of the file is a simple list with no text of the argumentation.

Interestingly, only six applications were made by men, which could be explained by the social embarrassment for a man to declare himself a pauper in a patriarchal order.⁴⁹

All in all, there were 1,066 applications (one appears twice). This figure includes 478 widows, 516 maidens (doncellas, including 51 older single women), 53 married women, 18 women with children but with no specification about being married, and one divorced. In addition, applications were made by one person but on behalf of a family group or institution. Generally, an elderly single woman, a widow, or an abandoned or orphaned woman asked for alms for herself and her sons and daughters, and/or young single sisters and brothers, or equally needy elderly parents. Thus, the 1,060 women and six men involved other persons: 287 single daughters, 283 minor sons, seven granddaughters, two grandsons, 24 sisters, three aunts, 46 mothers, fourteen fathers, two godmothers, eight nieces, one goddaughter, two stepdaughters, and two servant girls. In sum, there were 1,448 women and 305 males, or 1,753 persons in total in need belonging to the upper and middle social groups.

In addition, to that huge figure, we must add five cases referring in general about “daughters,” 17 cases mentioning in general “sons,” and 83 cases alluding to “children” with no specifications about their number or sex. That is to say, 105 applications (about 10 percent of all requests), include an unspecified number of children and therefore the actual amount is even higher than the 1,753 people registered. Moreover, the application of sister María Catalina was made on behalf of the whole Franciscan community of nuns.⁵⁰

If taking into account only women, the figures disclose an unknown social reality of Lima in the late colonial period: between one-forth and one-fifth of the white female population declared themselves officially poor.

The main source of this study talks about a different structure of families and households in late colonial Lima, shown in demographic censuses. It reveals the often-overlooked household alternative to the male-breadwinner model: a female-headed family unit. The nuclear family unit was far from being the standard of the rich in the city; common households included several relative persons with real and spiritual bonds, organized around a female head. However, occupation information for women is not common in demographic censuses, where most women appear labelled only as housewives.

Among the claimants were wives, daughters, and widows of noblemen and members of military orders or lawyers, judges, bureaucrats, merchants, etc. For instance, doña Alberta Encalada, widow of the Count of Casa Dávalos, was among those who requested the help of the archbishop. As well as doña Manuela Torres y Ramos, legitimate daughter of the Marquis of Casa Torres and doña María Ramos, who in her petition indicated that she was poor and “without any help due to the lack of powers” (that is, resources) to which her family had been reduced, although her lineage is so clear that she is different from those women who may publicly beg. Doña María Magdalena de Echarri y Javier recalled in her request that her family had been one of “honor” in the capital city, that in another time had “brightness and splendor.” After the death of her husband and her father, and the death of her two daughter's husbands, she received the help of her cousin, the Marquis of Salinas. When the marquis died, five years before her petition, she had been left in absolute poverty, unable to provide for her daughters or keep her two sons in college. Now lacking good health, she was no longer able to work with the aguja (needlework) “the only one industry of her sex and [social] quality” to provide for her family. Doña Josefa, doña Manuela Paula and doña Micaela Damiana de Arrese were the legitimate daughters of don Joaquín José de Arrese, knight of the order of Santiago, and doña Manuela Martín de Laiseca. They asked for help because their parents had died, and their two brothers had incomes of 800 and 500 pesos only and their own families to support. Don Manuel de Aragón e Ibáñez, retired officer assistant to the Real Felipe fortress in port El Callao, requested the help of the archbishop because he was blind and unable to work and must support his “large and honest family.” The report in his support written by the city council for the king, emphasizes that don Manuel was of a “distinguished extraction and illustrious family.”⁵¹

The poor of the plebeian sector were expected to be able to live on alms, while the poor of the elite had to take care of their social prestige. This situation prevented them from asking for alms directly in the streets or at the door of a church and during processions. Consistent with this, social status is presented by several petitioners as a sufficient argument to obtaining financial aid. Petitioners from the social elites only stated that due to their social status (“quality”) they deserved the help of the archbishop. For example, the petition of doña Antonia Landaburu, widow of don Felipe Manzanilla, and of her daughter doña Gertrudis Manzanilla, underlined her widowhood and her obligation to take care of her family as the reasons why she had economic necessities that her “class and person” cannot permit being met by requesting food from door to door as “people of inferior quality” do, because they are “reduced to this kind of life.” In another example, doña Petronila Pasarin supported her request “because of my notorious quality and continuous suffering” that prevented her from finding another resource to be able to live honestly.

The case of the sisters doña Manuela and doña Felipa Márquez leads to a related issue of great importance in the Lima of those years: the poverty of the rich. In the first instance, they indicated that they had remained maidens, and next explained the cause of their poverty: over the years they had spent the goods they inherited from their parents. This situation had become more serious as a result of the death of some relatives who helped them, leaving them “reduced to the greatest poverty imaginable, since they have absolutely nothing to eat, finding themselves in the need (despite their distinguished class) asking for help from some persons to be able to sustain their lives with much affliction and anguish.”⁵²

Being a maiden was one of the basic conditions to be considered decent and, therefore, their belonging to the social elites was validated. Women from the popular sectors could be single, but this did not ensure that they were considered demure or decent in the social terms of the moment. Therefore, it is not surprising that women who, being neither married nor widowed, sought to avail themselves of archiepiscopal aid by presenting themselves as “maidens and virgins.” Almost half of the 1,060 applicants for ecclesiastical charity in 1806 were celibate women. Some examples highlight this situation. The main arguments presented by doña Gertrudis Manzanilla were that she was a maiden, orphaned, and had a “privileged and respectable status,” hoping to convince the archbishop to grant her help. For her part, doña Paula Cabezas, widow of don Juan Segundo Valencia, a colonial official, pointed out that she had enjoyed an allowance given by the previous archbishop for having kept “that honesty and recogimiento that Christian life demands, living (…) with that example resulting from the upbringing and doctrine with which she was educated.” Doña Bernardina del Castillo y Lozada also presented herself as “a maiden poor girl, daughter of honest parents and of a more than regular birth.” Her parents, as she explained, had died, leaving her only debts and “good customs in which she was raised, in which she remains to this day exercising virtue and living in the holy fear of God.” She also pointed out that she had reached such an extreme level of poverty that in order to hear Mass she had to wait for a loan of somebody else's dress (saya), which is why she could not attend Christian obligations as she wanted. For her part, doña María de Oyague y Sarmiento pointed out that she was a “helpless and honest widow” unable to support a maiden daughter.⁵³

Doña Paula Cabezas and doña Bernardina del Castillo draw our attention because they mention the religious issue. Despite going to church and, in certain cases, mentioning their priest or spiritual fathers, very few applicants emphasized being good Christians. Perhaps this is because the Christian practice was not a merit among non-indigenous people. Moreover, even the urban indigenous population was considered to be already Christianized by that time. An exception is that of the maiden doña Petronila Gárate, who declared herself a “collected and avid mystic.” Not all the letters of support and endorsement made by the parish priests and other ecclesiastic made reference to the religiosity of the applicants. For example, Father Villavicencio of the San Felipe Neri congregation focuses on how poor doña Manuela de Orellana was, without alluding to her pious practices.⁵⁴

Several female applicants actually had a male at home: a husband and/or father. To be sure, this statement meant acknowledging that husbands and fathers had failed in their role as protector and provider. The arguments they presented were that their men were impeded from being the protectors and providers because they were sick or physically handicapped. Only some indicated that their men were also solemnly poor. For example, doña Mariana Vásquez y Montenegro requested assistance for herself and her daughters, doña Juana and doña Gregoria Coronel. Doña Mariana, despite the fact that her husband was alive, was on the list of shameful poor since the time of the previous archbishop. The aid had been granted to her because her husband, don Vicente Coronel, had lost his job in the Royal Court and also suffered from various illnesses, and hence, they were in total abandonment, as what she and her daughters earned from sewing was not sufficient.⁵⁵

A new important topic is also evident from the files: the risk of falling into prostitution in late colonial Lima. Doña María Clavijo, a maiden from Lima, pointed out that since 1795, when her father, don José Clavijo, senior official of the tobacco estanco in Lima, died, she was left in misery. But, “although the needs that she has experienced could have caused her to deviate from the path of virtue, raising her hopes to God our Lord, she has subsisted and continues to the present in the frequentation of the sacraments (…) [and] she has comported herself with the honor corresponding to the nobility of her parents.” What doña María insinuated is that she was able to overcome the temptation of prostitution thanks to the nobility of her family and her religious practices. More explicit was an orphan maiden, María Faustina Rodríguez, who declared that she had to beg because it was impossible for her to make a living from the needle and, on the other hand she did not want to lose her virginity. In part, through providing this financial aid, the authorities showed that they were interested in restricting prostitution among middle-class, white women.⁵⁶

Numerous female applicants had been wealthy, but they were not nobles. That is to say, they had material goods (including real estate) or they had enjoyed an appreciable mercantile capital, but now they did not have money to pay for daily needs, which is known now as monetary poverty. Some cases illustrate these conditions. “Of proportions,” that is, a well-to-do family, was that of don Mateo de la Torre, but now his widow, doña Francisca García y Cavero, had no means to make a living. Doña Luisa Montalvo, the widow of a high militia officer, had three single daughters (one of them mad and blind). Doña Manuela Barahona was the daughter of a captain of the navy and widow of a high officer of the colonial army who had to sustain herself, her widowed daughter, and her orphaned grandson, begging in the streets. Doña Clara and doña Micaela Carrión y Tagle were daughters of the late don Alfonso Carrión, lawyer of the Real Audiencia. Their two brothers were clerics but they did not receive any aid from them. Three legitimate daughters of the late don Joaquín José de Arrese, member of the military order of Santiago, had no share of the meager rent left by their father to his two sons. As a result, doña Josefa, doña Manuela Paula, and doña Micaela Damiana de Arrese had to work with their hands to make a living. Doña María Dionisia Ramos y Panadero had no means of subsistence when her father, don Francisco Ramos, lawyer of the Real Audiencia of Lima died. Her sister, doña Tomasa Ramos y Panadero, suffered a similar fate when her husband, don Simón Dans Rojas, abandoned the city “with no hope to see him again,” with three single daughters and two sons. Doña Luisa Dubois had five sons and was the widow of don Camilo Montes, administrator of the customs of the northern port of Guayaquil, while doña Teodora Guerrero was the widow of the impoverished merchant don Fernando Salvatierra, and doña María Josefa González Buendía became extremely poor when the resources of her late husband, the merchant don Santiago Fano, were confiscated for unpaid debts. A similar case is that of doña María Teresa de Arozarena, wife of don José Antonio Ocharán. This couple, in accordance with doña María Teresa's request, had five sons and three maidens whom they had nothing to feed because her husband was absent “with notorious delays stemming not from ill will but from contrasts of luck,” (…) “and cannot contribute to their more precise subsistence.” In some cases, the cause of poverty, especially for women, stemmed from the fact that they had spent their fortune to live off their income. In other cases, poverty is associated with the loss of property in lawsuits and bad deals. In some other cases, coming from another region was listed as the cause of the extreme poverty, especially for women. Women had come to the city thinking that the situation would improve there, but they found themselves in even greater poverty. Doña María Josefa Salgado, for example, pointed out that because she and her two daughters were foreigners, despite being virtuous, their fate was dark in the city.⁵⁷

That not all the supplicants were elite women is clear from the case of doña Matea Cañoli y Sumarán, widow of captain don José Callejón. The surnames speak to their Black or mulatto origins and, most probably, the late husband was captain of the battalion of militia of pardos (colored). Another example is that of doña Josefa Pereyra, who asked for ecclesiastic help because she had to toil along with her husband and five sons on an orchard in the outskirts of the city. Perhaps these and other cases also show the tendency of ordinary people to claim the benefits of the elite. The documentation do not state the decision of the archbishop, but barely the Church changed its mind about the social status of the needy.⁵⁸

The request of archiepiscopal aid, then, was the alternative used by impoverished elite women of Lima to cope with the economic and social crisis of the late colonial period. Those were women who in the past had been involved in the economy through their labor with the aguja (needle). Being a personal strategy, it reflects a societal problem of great proportion, since the 1,066 applications involved more than 2,000 women, approximately one-fifth to one-fourth of the female white population of the city, which was estimated around 9,000 in 1790 and 11,000 in 1813. That is to say, a good share of the Limeño social elite joined lower sectors of the population to complete a grim picture of the labor-force in late colonial Lima.

…

As a result of the Bourbon changes and certain social transformations during the last decades of the colonial period, the middle and emerging sectors questioned the archaic social order in force in the viceroyalty and, in particular, in the city of Lima. Although limited, social mobility in its imitation and identification of behavioral patterns a way of social assimilation, claiming to belong to the generic category of “Spaniards.” The response of the elites to this “chaos” was to reaffirm themselves in that order while refusing to adapt to the new social conditions. The description of the popular and middle sectors as vicious and lacking honor allowed them to present themselves as the correct sector of society and, consequently, maintain statutory and caste distinctions in social relations. Although, the elites appropriated the moralistic and hygienist discourse of the Enlightenment regarding the role of women in modern society, pretending to be considered part of the global modernizing trend. Both discourses, which support conflicting and almost contradictory identities, can be seen in the reports and essays of the spokespersons of the social elites, published in the Lima press of the 1790s (Mercurio peruano, Diario de Lima and Seminario crítico).

Labor is a propitious ground to evaluate these attitudes and procedures. The deterioration of the economic situation of a good share of the formerly wealthy sectors forced the elites to review their convictions about their role in the world of work in the city. In fact, many Spanish women faced the problem and sought to solve it by working in the productive activities of the city and, especially, in the tobacco factory and the large manufacturing project based on the textile production of those years. However, most of the elite women preferred to stay within the framework of traditional labor forms: home work.

As we have seen in the analysis of the impressive documentation available, trades and economic activities made the difference among Limeño women's social status. Although sewing was shared by elite and plebeian women, its exercise was conducted differently in each case. In contrast to plebeian women, a noble woman was unable to exercise a trade outside the household as it was considered to be vile. The option to receive financial aid from the Church was real but insufficient. Receiving only two to three pesos a month, a family of a high social level faced real economic necessity and exposure to public shame asking for such amounts of money.

The cases under study are telling. The information analyzed shows how vulnerable an important part of the social elites could be in a city traditionally considered powerful. The wealthy sectors related to commerce and the bureaucracy depended on political ties to maintain their social and economic status. The reforms altered their living conditions to such an extent that adverse personal or family circumstances such as widowhood or orphanhood, illness, disability, or abandonment left families in conditions of monetary poverty with few alternatives at their disposal.

The opulent city of Lima, the Ciudad de los Reyes or The City of the Kings, was actually in part the City of the Poor by the end of the colonial period.