The family that never was, and what has changed

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Ro­drigo Ibar­rola

Ac­cord­ing to its third mean­ing, “tra­di­tion” is -ac­cord­ing to the RAE- the doc­trine, cus­tom pre­served in a peo­ple by trans­mis­sion from par­ents to chil­dren or, if we re­fer to re­li­gions -fourth mean­ing-, each of the teach­ings or doc­trines trans­mit­ted orally or in writ­ing since an­cient times. There­fore, the tra­di­tional fam­ily would be that which mod­els Paraguayan homes ac­cord­ing to the ideas, norms, or cus­toms of the past. In this dis­qui­si­tion, two ques­tions im­me­di­ately arise: first, what is the struc­ture of the tra­di­tional fam­ily and, sec­ond, when does this tra­di­tion be­gin?

If we go back to our Guarani an­ces­tors, we find that the fam­ily, al­though pa­tri­lin­eal, was of­ten ma­trilo­cal, that is, the male moved into the wom­an’s house. They were, for the most part, monog­a­mous, al­though the chiefs had the priv­i­lege of polygamy, even though this did not cre­ate a dif­fer­ence be­tween the kuña and the tem­bireko (among the Guayakí, polyandry was fre­quent). The union con­sisted of a sim­ple pub­lic act in which the cou­ple left for the for­est and on their re­turn, they were mar­ried or de­clared them­selves mar­ried when they de­cided to set­tle to­gether in the same house. Al­though rare with chil­dren in be­tween, the “di­vorce” con­sisted of a sim­ple sep­a­ra­tion where each one takes his own: the work uten­sils, such as the shovel, the hook and the ar­rows re­main with the man, the kitchen uten­sils with the woman. Mar­riage or mat­ri­mo­nial union was not a de­fined in­sti­tu­tion.

The fam­i­lies, in turn, lived in com­mu­nal houses where sev­eral other fam­i­lies were housed in kin­ship ties. This ex­tended fam­ily struc­ture had its so­cioe­co­nomic func­tion: more hands for farm­ing, and de­fense against pos­si­ble wars. This ex­tended unit, which could be com­posed of more than a hun­dred peo­ple, also had the pur­pose of help­ing each other in dif­fi­cult times, and the rais­ing of the off­spring fell within the com­mu­nal re­spon­si­bil­ity. There was no real sense of own­er­ship, nei­ther of hu­man re­la­tions nor of prop­erty. The in­sti­tu­tion of parental au­thor­ity was un­known to them. Al­though in­ter­sex­ual dif­fer­ences in tasks were pre­sent, they were not based on re­la­tions of dom­i­na­tion, nor was there any other form of ex­ploita­tion. Re­la­tions of dom­i­na­tion and sub­or­di­na­tion would come later, with the Spaniards.

The mis­sion­ar­ies who ac­com­pa­nied the newly ar­rived Eu­ro­peans did not ac­cept the Guarani con­cept of union, so they im­posed monogamy, the nu­clear fam­ily model and pro­hib­ited di­vorce. How­ever, the tra­di­tional im­age of the Eu­ro­pean woman and fam­ily was un­re­al­is­tic, even among the aris­toc­racy of the time. The en­comendero lived sur­rounded by women: the le­git­i­mate wife or not and gen­er­ally a se­ries of con­cu­bines –yana­conas or maid­ser­vants- plus the chil­dren they bore him, rel­a­tives and male yana­conas. The moral­ity pro­moted by the re­li­gious was dif­fi­cult for the in­dige­nous peo­ple to un­der­stand, since it was not com­plied with even by the prelates them­selves. Oc­ca­sional re­la­tion­ships and con­cu­bi­nage be­came the rule and most mes­ti­zos were born out of wed­lock. The re­la­tion­ships es­tab­lished in this pe­riod would mark the sex­ual habits of the ur­ban fam­i­lies, which used the women of the do­mes­tic ser­vice as sex­ual ini­tia­tor of the son or as an ob­ject of plea­sure for the boss.

Dr. Fran­ci­a’s de­cree, which re­stricted the mar­riage of for­eign­ers with white criol­las, only in­creased con­sen­sual unions. Thus, con­cu­bi­nage, preg­nancy and out-of-wed­lock births car­ried no stigma even in the high­est strata of so­ci­ety. Al­though the elite, which be­came so­cially ac­tive dur­ing the time of Don Car­los A. López, re­spected Catholic moral­ity to a greater ex­tent, it was too small to in­flu­ence the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion. López was not even suc­cess­ful with his sons, Be­nigno and Fran­cisco. This is re­flected, for ex­am­ple, in the data col­lected by Bar­bara Pot­thast in 1846 which in­di­cates that there were only 16 mar­riages in the parish of La En­car­nación (cap­i­tal), with a pop­u­la­tion of 9668 peo­ple. In ad­di­tion, his­to­rian Ana Bar­reto in­di­cates that ap­prox­i­mately half of Paraguayan house­holds were headed by a cou­ple – ei­ther mar­ried or not – while the other half had only one per­son, usu­ally a woman, as head of house­hold. How­ever, most of them were not wid­owed, but sin­gle. On the other hand, the Sta­tis­ti­cal Year­book of 1886 recorded 115 mar­riages in a pop­u­la­tion of 263 thou­sand in­hab­i­tants for the whole coun­try, about 0.4 mar­riages per 1000 in­hab­i­tants (a value that in 2021 is at 2.68). There is a dis­con­nec­tion be­tween mar­riage and fam­ily, and the lat­ter does not need the for­mer to sub­sist.

Mil­i­tary ser­vice and the con­di­tions of yerba mate pro­duc­tion caused long ab­sences of men from home (with un­cer­tain re­turn), so the in­sti­tu­tion of mar­riage lim­ited the ac­tion of women in their civil­ian life by pre­vent­ing them from en­gag­ing in com­merce, fil­ing law­suits, or dis­pos­ing of their prop­erty. Ba­si­cally, it was a bond. Given the un­cer­tainty, women of­ten es­tab­lished an­other re­la­tion­ship or left for the city in search of work in the homes of other fam­i­lies to do wash­ing, iron­ing, or car­ing for the em­ploy­er’s chil­dren, or as live-in maid The slav­ery of the mensú in the yerba fields would con­tinue un­til the mid­dle of the 20th cen­tury. Thus, re­turn­ing to our days, we find that the re­al­ity has not changed much, only 37% of the heads of house­hold are made up of a mar­ried cou­ple in the third quar­ter of 2022, ac­cord­ing to the Per­ma­nent House­hold Sur­vey.

The traditional marriage that was for five thousand years the primary means of transferring property, occupational status, personal contacts, money, tools, livestock and women between generations and kinship groups was finally overthrown. But it was not gays or lesbians who did it, but heterosexuals themselves who brought about this revolution.

Our Con­sti­tu­tion, al­though it speaks of fam­ily, does not of­fer what should be un­der­stood by it. Nev­er­the­less, the col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion still main­tains the nu­clear fam­ily model of fa­ther, mother, and chil­dren, united in a re­li­gious cer­e­mony -even bet­ter if it is Catholic- as the ideal. How­ever, it is not that to­day the re­al­ity is dif­fer­ent, but rather that it has been the rule for decades, but not al­ways ac­cepted. In Graph 1, it can be clearly seen that the pro­por­tion of nu­clear fam­i­lies (cou­ple and chil­dren) in the pop­u­la­tion has re­mained rel­a­tively con­stant over the last 30 years, reach­ing a lit­tle less than half of all fam­i­lies. The pro­por­tion of fam­i­lies in which only one par­ent is pre­sent (in­com­plete nu­clear) and peo­ple liv­ing alone (uniper­sonal) has in­creased slightly, while the num­ber of ex­tended fam­i­lies (nu­clear plus other rel­a­tives) and com­pound fam­i­lies (nu­clear or ex­tended plus other peo­ple not re­lated to the head of the fam­ily) has de­creased.

Dis­tri­b­u­tion of house­holds by type

Source: STP/​DGEEC. Na­tional Pop­u­la­tion and Hous­ing Cen­sus. Years 1992, 2002 and 2012.

In prac­tice, mar­riage is not what is ide­al­ized. Mar­ried peo­ple di­vorce and many chil­dren are born out of wed­lock. The law has had to adapt to the new forms (de facto unions). One in­dex that re­flects this is the pro­por­tion of chil­dren reg­is­tered as born out of wed­lock, which is shown in Table 1, show­ing the in­crease over time.

Table 1. Live births reg­is­tered by fil­i­a­tion

Source: Velázquez Seifer­held, D. (2022). The fam­ily in Paraguay: his­tor­i­cal frag­ments (Part I). El Na­cional; STP/​DGEEC. (2016). Vi­tal Sta­tis­tics; INE. (2021).

Di­vorce and un­wed par­ent­hood were com­mon in many so­ci­eties in the past, but al­most never co­ex­isted with wom­en’s right to ini­ti­ate di­vorce, or the abil­ity of so many sin­gle women to sup­port them­selves and their chil­dren (see Fig­ure 2). As women gained more le­gal rights and greater job op­por­tu­ni­ties, the in­flu­ence of the mar­riage cul­ture weak­ened. Young peo­ple be­gan to de­lay mar­riage. Pre­mar­i­tal sex and co­hab­i­ta­tion lost their stigma.

Fig­ure 2. Evo­lu­tion of the fe­male house­hold head­ship rate

Source: STP/​DGEEC. Na­tional Pop­u­la­tion and Hous­ing Cen­sus, 1982, 1992, 2002 and 2012 and Per­ma­nent House­hold Sur­vey 2021.

There is a grow­ing pro­por­tion of mar­ried peo­ple to­day who will never have chil­dren, not be­cause of in­fer­til­ity, but by choice. This is a big change from the past, when child­less­ness was an eco­nomic dis­as­ter and of­ten led to di­vorce, even when the cou­ple would have pre­ferred to stay to­gether.

The tra­di­tional mar­riage that was for five thou­sand years the pri­mary means of trans­fer­ring prop­erty, oc­cu­pa­tional sta­tus, per­sonal con­tacts, money, tools, live­stock and women be­tween gen­er­a­tions and kin­ship groups was fi­nally over­thrown. But it was not gays or les­bians who did it, but het­ero­sex­u­als them­selves who brought about this rev­o­lu­tion.

The se­ries of in­ter­re­lated po­lit­i­cal, eco­nomic, and cul­tural changes in the 17th cen­tury be­gan to erode the an­cient func­tions of mar­riage and chal­lenged the right of par­ents, lo­cal elites and gov­ern­ment to limit in­di­vid­ual au­ton­omy in per­sonal life, in­clud­ing mar­riage. The rev­o­lu­tion­ary new ideal of love mar­riage was born, chang­ing thou­sands of years of his­tory. Sud­denly, cou­ples were to in­vest more of their emo­tional en­ergy in each other and their chil­dren than in their na­tal fam­i­lies, their rel­a­tives, their friends, and their spon­sors.

Those same val­ues that we now con­sider tra­di­tional, which in­vest mar­riage with great emo­tional weight in peo­ple’s lives, have an in­her­ent ten­dency to un­der­mine the sta­bil­ity of mar­riage as an in­sti­tu­tion.

Fi­nally, the de­mand by gays and les­bians for le­gal recog­ni­tion of their unions is a symp­tom, not the cause, of how much and how ir­re­versibly mar­riage has changed.

Cover im­age: Crónica.