Elite matchmaking in Petare Venezuela

Jhonder Leonel Cádiz Fernández (born 29 July ) is a Venezuelan professional footballer A product of Deportivo Petare's youth system, Cádiz made his professional On 23 May , Cádiz was called up to the senior Venezuela national football team for a friendly match against El Salvador, but he did not play.
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Many of the same individuals participated in the successive creation of El Tocuyo , Barquisimeto , Valencia , and finally Caracas The peripatetic behavior of these settler—adventurers demonstrates that the ambition of many of them was greater than the resources of the hinterland of towns they founded, but the fact that the towns survived, their native populations divided into encomiendas, indicates that the era of simple exploitation of the Welser period, of Indian slavery and gold hunting, had begun to give way to more permanent colonization.

Located closer to the sea than the residents of other central Venezuelan towns, and with a moderate force of Indian labor, the first permanent settlers of Caracas soon found a place for themselves in a simple commercial network. Linked to the east with Margarita, still a source of pearls and merchandise brought from Spain, Caracas residents traded these items with the interior settlements of tierra adentro , where rough cotton cloth lienzo , ham-. Caracas contributed directly to the exchange with certain foodstuffs that were easily grown or raised in the valley's favorable environment: wheat, maize, pork, beef, and cheese.

Yet this modest trade could satisfy only a very few traders, agriculturalists, and ranchers, and until the s the permanent population of the town remained small.

Matchmaker Petare

Sent from Spain to collect the silver of Peru, the fleet waited at Cartagena, the best fortress on the Caribbean coast of South America, until Peruvian silver could be brought up the Atlantic Coast and across the Panamanian Isthmus to Portobelo. Once the silver was in place, the great fair could take place at Portobelo, but that hot and unhealthy site remained occupied only for as long as it took to trade for the silver with the merchandise of Europe. The fleet arrived there ready to depart quickly for Havana and home, having already made repairs and taken on provisions during its stay at Cartagena.

In the s, stimulated by the sharply increasing price of wheat in peninsular Spain, Caracas owners of wheat farms known as estancias began to expand production and to transport bread and flour to Cartagena for consumption by the sailors of the silver fleet. Almost insignificant in comparison to the frenzied exchange of Peruvian silver for European commodities on which it depended, the wheat trade to Cartagena nevertheless brought Caracas directly into the commercial world of Spain's American empire, and in the process substantially transformed the character of social relations in the town.

For more than thirty years after , wheat, and an occasional shipment of tobacco or cattle hides, provided Caracas residents with profitable exports. The market for Caracas cacao proved to be vast, and the cacao trade across the Caribbean early and permanently fixed Caracas as a colony of the silver-rich and economically powerful viceroyalty of New Spain.

The cacao trade was directly responsible for the transformation of the labor base in the Caracas province from Indian encomienda to African slavery. Alone of Spain's American. Sustained for several generations by steadily expanding sales of cacao, slavery had a profound effect on the character of Caracas society. The combined impact of earthquake, crop blight, and reorganization of the silver economy in New Spain caused the Caracas economy to slump from the late s through the s.

Profitable exports resumed in the s, and a surging, booming business in cacao production and commerce followed, expanding virtually without a pause until the s. Before the end of the seventeenth century the original cacao groves of most of the coastal valleys had been expanded to the physical limits of those valleys, and the vigorous planting of new haciendas shifted south and east of Caracas to the fertile valleys of the Tuy River and its several tributary streams.

The Tuy boom attracted both established planters, who sent their younger and stronger slaves there to plant new haciendas, and more humble Spanish immigrants, especially Canary Islanders, who came to the colony looking to follow the pattern of the earlier settlers and become hacienda owners and slave masters themselves.

The cacao prosperity of Caracas also finally attracted the attention of the Bourbon state. Ignored by the crown for more than a century, beginning in the late s the colony was subject to new and comprehensive policies which were designed to increase royal revenues and to acquire much greater quantities of cacao for Spanish and European consumers and markets. The Company was not supposed to compete for cacao car-. Rather, as the Basques who advocated the monopoly had argued in their initial request for a royal charter, Company profits were to come from two other sources: a substantial increase in cacao production, which would naturally follow the commercial stimulus provided by the Company, and a sharp reduction in cacao smuggling, which Company proponents claimed was widespread.

To prevent the illicit trade, which would channel cacao by way of the royal monopoly into the legal and taxable market, the crown charged the Company with the responsibility of creating an effective coast guard. In the event, the Guipuzcoana Company did not cause cacao production to increase substantially and, in an effort to increase their portion of cacao exports, aggressive Company factors did interfere with the traditional trade to Mexico.

Discontent reached a crisis in , when Canary Islander cacao farmers, supported surreptitiously by members of the provincial elite, left their fledgling haciendas in the Tuy Valley and marched to Caracas to protest. Although it was not their intention, the protesters became rebels against the authority of the king when the governor fled in fear of the mob and took refuge in the fort at La Guaira. The royal reaction to this threat was swift and the king's justice did not equivocate. First crown troops from both Santo Domingo and Spain overwhelmed the rebels and punished the ringleaders, and then, during the s, a series of military governors established the firm presence of the king in Caracas.

Before the end of the decade a brigade of soldiers was permanently quartered in the town, taxation was revamped, and a myriad of lesser policies were enforced to make royal authority more immediately evident. These significant changes, which have until now gone unnoticed by historians, constitute the first steps in what would become a comprehensive effort by the Spanish monarchy to strengthen control of its American empire. That the Bourbon Reforms were originally implemented in the wake of a popular uprising in Caracas in the s, and not in Havana after the English occupation a decade later, is an important new discovery that suggests the need to reconsider more.

The rebellion of and its aftermath mark the end of a distinct epoch in the history of early Caracas. Cacao would continue to be the motor force of the provincial economy until the end of the colonial period, but after midcentury agricultural expansion would be at a much slower pace. The century-long cacao boom was over, and the particular features of Caracas society which such sustained growth had fostered would undergo substantial adjustments.

One of these features, in my opinion the most distinctive aspect of colonial Caracas society, was the continuation in status and wealth of many of its elite families from one generation to the next without decline.


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It has become conventional wisdom to regard elite status in Spanish America as a volatile condition characterized by "a high rate of change in the composition of the elites on individual and, to some extent, family levels. Equally problematic for longer-term status maintenance, wealth rarely survived the passing of the generations.

Castilian inheritance law did not allow primogeniture, and those individuals who died wealthy were obliged to divide their estates more or less equally among their often many heirs. Yet many families of the Caracas gentry were able to preserve their wealth and elite status for, in a good number of cases, as many as six and seven generations. The success of the Caracas gentry depended directly on the steadily expanding demand for cacao in two very distinct markets, Mexico and Europe. Also of essential importance was the regular supply to Caracas of African slaves, which, with intermittent but short interruptions, was constant to the late s.

The steady demand for cacao and constant supply of slave labor coincided with an abundance of land suitable for cacao haciendas. The combined benefits of cacao markets, slaves, and available land sustained a score of families in local elite status from the middle of the seventeeth century through the first several decades of the eigh-. The collapse of the slave trade in and the control over cacao commerce exercised by the Guipuzcoana Company in the s and s brought the prolonged cacao boom to a standstill.

The first phase of these adjustments, which included cooperation with both the Guipuzcoana Company and a forceful royal authority in exchange for assistance in forging a free-labor replacement for slavery, is discussed in the last section of this book. The research for Early Caracas was done in Caracas archives, in particular the little-used depository of notarial records, the Archivo del Registro Principal, and in the Archivo General de Indias in Seville.

The method of analysis is for most part traditional as well, formed usually by a close reading of discrete documents in an effort to come to an understanding of the particular problem at hand. In one detail, however, the methodology is sufficiently innovative to merit a comment here. One obviously distinctive characteristic of colonial Caracas was the fact that the same elite families were able to counter the effects of bipartible inheritance male and female heirs received an equal share of the estate; no primogeniture and to thereby retain both wealth and political power for many generations.

An understanding of how this longevity was accomplished seemed central to the internal dynamics of this society; therefore, to allow me to follow the Caracas elite over the course of several generations, all the families identified as having been of high status and influence were reconstituted from the first immigrant ancestor who arrived in Caracas in the sixteenth or early seventeenth century to his or her descendants who lived in the city at the turn of the nineteenth century. These family histories confirmed genealogical linkages,.

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Studied in isolation, this collective genealogical history of Caracas elite families made it possible to examine such facets of elite social life as strategies of marriage including nonmarriage. The rapidly expanding literature on colonial elites emphasizes the importance of marriage in the maintenance of elite status. Much is made of the value of marriages of prominent creole women to peninsular Spaniards, who brought both prestige and new commercial contacts to the family. In addition, patriarchal authority is almost universally credited with the direction of family marriage strategies.

The several clans that made up the Caracas gentry were decidedly self-contained with regard to marriage. It is clear that marriage between first cousins was common among prominent families, and that strict endogamy increased as a proportion of all elite marriages during the course of the eighteenth century. It is also evident that elite Caracas fathers, because they typically married in their late thirties and died in their middle fifties, were not often alive when their children married.

Because mothers did survive to witness the weddings of their children, and for a number of other reasons discussed in the text, it would seem that elite women played a more instrumental part than men in arranging marriages and in several ways directing and determining the membership of the family, or rather the lineage, from one generation to the next.

This study attempts to link these patterns to the general course of Caracas economic and social history. Studied in conjunction with other materials, such as the censuses of haciendas made in , , and , and the household census of Caracas taken in , the reconstituted family data allowed me to trace the generational transfer of agricultural wealth and to make some observations about the matrix of kinship and residence for Caracas elites at midcentury. The results of this form of inquiry appear throughout part II of the text, dealing with the eighteenth century.

As an example of the way elite family reconstruction can be used to inform the general history of Caracas society, it is my understanding that many of the Caracas elite were particularly desperate to end the Guipuzcoana Company monopoly by the s because the number of living individuals by. Those elites who were most vociferous in their opposition to the Company usually belonged to large and rapidly expanding families whose members, on a per capita basis, owned fewer cacao trees in than their parents had held a quarter-century earlier.

Unable to provide for their children as they had been provided for, they protested, and some, surreptitiously, even backed the rebellion of the lower classes in The terminal date for this history of early Caracas is It is not entirely satisfactory as an ending point in that no particularly significant event occurred in that year which might be used to mark the end of a precise epoch or a clearly delimited phase in the history of the town and province.

Yet it was chosen to suggest that the first two centuries after the foundation of Caracas can be seen as a coherent period. In , after twenty years of protest and repression, elite young men took the opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the newly emphatic authority of the Bourbon monarchy, and joined the Company of Noble Adventurers, an honorary king's militia of cavalry created in that year.

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By that time the elite had come to terms with the Guipuzcoana Company, for more than a decade they had been paying new taxes without protest in support of the contingent of regular army troops quartered in the plaza, and they had begun to make adjustments to the end of the long, often remarkably dynamic, boom in cacao agriculture and commerce.

As an example of this adjustment, a long hiatus in slave imports—there was virtually no trade at all from the end of the English asiento in until the s—obliged elite hacendados to turn increasingly to wage laborers to work their cacao estates. By the middle of the eighteenth century Caracas had experienced a fundamental change for the middling class of Hispanic residents as well for the elite.

For several generations Caracas had been a true frontier where wealth and slaveholder's status awaited the ambitious immigrant, but failure of the revolt signaled the end of the long bonanza and the closing of opportunity for those who were not already well established as slave and hacienda owners. The reforms of the s, including the vagrancy laws that served to help elites in their search for an alternative to slave labor, provided the mechanisms needed to enforce the new order, which would last for another fifty years.


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Finally, the history of revolutionary Caracas lies beyond the scope of this book, but it is worth noting that most of the colony's leaders in the movement for independence were members of families whose elite status of nearly two centuries had not been diminished by the crisis of and its aftermath. At that time the Caracas elite established a modus vivendi with the Bourbon regime which allowed them two more generations of profit from their haciendas and, along with the profit, significant local prestige and authority. This arrangement lasted until the end of the century, when the markets of the empire once again became inadequate to fulfill the needs and aspirations of the colony's foremost families.

From the perspective of the internal dynamics of early Caracas, the primary impetus for independence seems to have come from elites who were again desperate to preserve their traditional place in the local society. Needless to say, the second crisis of the Caracas elite, that of , was resolved in a manner very different from that of the first. By way of definition: the concept of elite used in this book is based on families, or more exactly family lineages, rather than on individuals. Granted that certain individuals, governors and bishops for example, were given elite status from the moment of their arrival in Caracas, but the primary interest here is the resident, permanent, planter and slaveholding elite.

Therefore, an elite individual, a mantuano as he or she would have been referred to in eighteenth-century Caracas, was someone whose paternal and maternal ancestors in most cases had been in Caracas since the middle of the seventeenth century or earlier, whose male relatives and ancestors served and had served on the town council, and whose family members appear on lists of cacao haciendas taken in , , and It is my belief that all those colonials who would have been considered mantuanos by their contemporaries have been included in the analyses that are presented in these pages.

Caracas evidently either failed to fulfill the ambitions of these men or they had no intention of giving up the conquistador's freebooting lifestyle, for only 18 of the men who accompanied Losada were still present in the town in At that time there were some Indian tributaries divided into forty encomiendas, more native labor than was available in any other Venezuelan town at that time, but, significantly, this was only about one-third the number of Indians who had inhabited the region just ten years earlier.

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With little besides shrinking encomiendas to offer, it is not surprising that Caracas did not excite many imaginations in Spain. To the end of the sixteenth century Venezuela continued to be the least popular destination for Spaniards who crossed the Atlantic. Dreams of El Dorado were for many the only tolerable alternative to the poverty of early Caracas.

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Of course, neither grand illusions nor the bold exploits of those who actually looked for fabled Indian cities in the Guayana jungles would alter the barrenness of this land that seemed to betray the promise of the Indies. On several occasions the first generation of Caracas vecinos , permanent residents who had not moved on to seek their fortunes elsewhere, sallied out from the town in search of Indians much in the same way that a century earlier their countrymen had gone out to raid Muslim villages from wooden fortalezas on the Barbary and Atlantic coasts of Africa. Such slave hunting was illegal, but in Caracas these forays were disguised as defensive expeditions made to protect existing settlements.

They were appealing, both for the slaves that could be made of Indians who resisted in such supposedly "just" wars, and for the royal favors that could be claimed, such as the grant of a vacated encomienda, on the basis of military services rendered. In these circumstances the urban functions of Caracas remained little different from the primitive ones of an armed camp.

Since fully forty of the settlement's sixty vecinos held at least a small Indian labor grant in , encomendero status was not a primary social distinction or a source of local influence. Indian raids, on the other hand, held the hope of increasing that wealth, the only such hope for about two decades after Even so, they did not produce much profit, for there were simply not many Indians available for capture.

But the raids were imbued with social meaning retained from. In the late s, a fortuitous combination of climatic, geographic, and economic factors brought Caracas belatedly into Spain's New World empire. The much quicker pace of the commercial world of the sixteenth century brought noticeable changes to the once-rustic, thatch-roofed village. As producers and exporters of wheat grain and flour, newly prosperous Caracas vecinos added tile roofs and second storys to their churches, homes, and community buildings.

With new wealth to administer and an increased opportunity to govern, the cabildo replaced the cabalgada as the town's most important political institution.

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Coming of age as a colonial town created new tensions and conflict, however, and the controversies that emerged at this time of transition provide a revealing look at the social relations of the powerful and not-so-powerful farmers and traders of early Caracas. The value of Spain's Atlantic shipping more than doubled during the first fifteen years following the foundation of Caracas, and during this time, with the world's richest commercial highway passing just behind the narrow range of mountains to the north, the town's enterprising vecinos discovered profitable alternatives to hit-and-run Indian raids.