Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nara B. Milanich is Assistant Professor of History at Barnard College.

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""Children of Fate" is truly original, with an extraordinary level of insight and analysis. Nara B. Milanich shows how class identity was manipulated by the liberal state in a way that maintained hierarchies, and she illustrates her arguments with rich examples gleaned from extensive archival research. A brilliant, first-rate book."--Elizabeth Kuznesof, author of "Household Economy and Urban Development: Sao Paulo, 1765 to 1836"

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CHILDREN OF FATE

Duke University Press

Contents

Illustrations and Tables.....................................................................ixAcknowledgments..............................................................................xiINTRODUCTION State, Class Society, and Children in Chile....................................11. The Civil Code and the Liberalization of Kinship..........................................412. Paternity, Childhood, and the Making of Class.............................................703. Kindred and Kinless: The People without History...........................................1034. Birthrights: Natal Dispossession and the State............................................1285. Vernacular Kinships in the Shadow of the State............................................1576. Child Bondage in the Liberal Republic.....................................................183EPILOGUE: YOUNG MARGINALS AT THE CENTENARY One Hundred Years of Huachos.....................216Appendix.....................................................................................239Abbreviations................................................................................245Glossary.....................................................................................247Notes........................................................................................249Bibliography.................................................................................309Index........................................................................................333

Chapter One

The Cook, the Seamstress, and the Baby

For one witness, the proof of paternity lay in the booties. Alejandro D'Huique had given the wet nurse eight reales to buy them for the baby Clarisa del Carmen. Now Clarisa's paternity was in dispute in a Santiago court. In her petition for economic support from D'Huique, Clarisa's mother, Mercedes Campos, provided details of a romance gone sour. The couple had met four years before, in 1847, in the household where they both worked, she as a seamstress and he as a chef. Campos, according to witnesses, was poor but from "a very decent and honorable family." But as her lawyer explained, "as a result of a misfortune of which no woman is free," his client had "ceded to the seductions of Don Alejandro," who turned out to be married in his native France. Witnesses were summoned in support of her claim. A midwife declared that D'Huique had paid her for assisting in Clarisa's birth. The wet nurse recounted how in regular visits the alleged father was affectionate with the baby and gave money for her care, once arranging a meeting in the Plaza de Armas to do so. And, of course, there were the booties.

As for Don Alejandro himself, he vociferously denied the allegation. If he had given Campos money, it was as "alms" because she was sick. Noting that she had placed her baby for a time in the city's orphanage, he questioned whether her suit was motivated by maternal sentiment or crass "speculation." Finally, calling attention to the fact that his legitimate wife and children had recently arrived from France, D'Huique argued that adulterous offspring had no right to parental support anyway.

Paternity suits like this one were routine in midcentury Chilean courts, and contemporaries would have been familiar with several recent high-profile suits. The year before, a suit filed against the estate of a wealthy English merchant had featured the testimony of Manuel Montt, who had since become president of the republic. And a few years prior, Santiago had been scandalized when a congressman was murdered by the father of a young woman with whom he was having an affair. His death sparked a spate of paternity suits filed by various children he had fathered with different women. Of course D'Huique did not approach the stature of these men, though in later years he would become a well-known chef and restaurauteur at the Hotel Santiago, where men of their rank would dine on his famed pudding Nesselrode.

All of these suits occurred on the cusp of a major legal shift that would dramatically remake kinship in republican Chile. For almost a half-century after independence, medieval Iberian and colonial Spanish legal codes continued to govern civil (and criminal) law, including that pertaining to family and succession. The Chilean Civil Code, promulgated in 1855 and effective from 1857, would sweep away this older legal structure. It reflected the broad trend of codification, a process taking place across nineteenth-century Europe and Latin America that aimed to systematize and rationalize law as a basis for new and consolidating nation-states.

The Chilean Code's impact on cases like that between Campos and D'Huique was particularly direct: it outlawed them. In abolishing paternity suits, the Code revolutionized the gender, generational, and class dynamics of filiation. This chapter charts this transformation by mapping first the older law and legal culture of the 1840s and early 1850s and then the reforms introduced by the Code. Because many of the changes enacted in Chile had been or soon would be implemented across continental Europe and Latin America, this is not a specifically Chilean story. It is a case study of a transformation of family law that occurred on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Chilean Code consisted of over 2,500 articles governing the status of individuals in the family and nation, the dominion and transfer of property, succession, and contracts. It was, and still is, considered a legal tour-de-force, the most influential exemplar of codification in Latin America, and a culminating opus in the prolific career of Andr Bello, one of nineteenth-century South America's most famous men of letters. A jurist, statesman, philosopher, and humanist, Bello was a native of Venezuela and a naturalized Chilean who spent more than a decade crafting the Code. He drew inspiration from contemporary French, Spanish, and English sources, but his was a unique creation based, in his words, on "our country's peculiar circumstances." The product of a transnational legal milieu, Bello's opus was also an internationally influential document in its own right. The Chilean Civil Code was adopted wholesale by a number of Latin American nations (including Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) and would serve as a model for codes in other countries (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay), leading one jurist to assert that its influence in the Americas was comparable to that of the Napoleonic Code in Europe. The Chilean Code is thus of comparative significance not only as an iteration of broad trends in civil law but for its direct impact on legal structures governing gender and family across modern Latin America.

A central challenge for the architects of postcolonial Latin American societies was the establishment of viable nation-states and structures of political authority in the wake of the Spanish empire's collapse. These contested processes were much in evidence in Chile in the 1840s and 1850s, as the conflict between conservatives and liberals that framed Chilean politics in the nineteenth century reached fever pitch. In the very months the court was scrutinizing Clarisa del Carmen's...