It is simply untrue as far as we can yet tell that there was ever a time or place where the complex family was the universal background to the ordinary lives of ordinary people.
--Laslett and Wall (1972:xi)

"Y nican icha ytoca... [Here is the home of one named]" is a common refrain in the amazingly complete, but little known, sixteenth century household censuses of ancient Mexico. Written on fig-bark paper by native speakers of the lingua franca of prehispanic Mesoamerica, the Nahuatl censuses must rank among the most detailed in the world for that era. In 1993, a polished, nuanced English translation by the ethnohistorian and philologist S.L. Cline was published for two villages, Huitzillan and Quauhchichinollan, near Cuernavaca, Morelos (Cline, 1993). Reporting a combined population of some 2,500 people grouped in 315 households, these surprisingly detailed documents provide intriguing data on rural Nahua families and households during the first decades of Spanish conquest and colonization. While the Morelos lists do not satisfy all of the basic requirements of a modern census--age for example is not specified for ever-married adults, sex must be determined from naming conventions, and young children are undercounted--these lists are priceless for understanding Nahua society, particularly marriage, residence, and family or household patterns. The Morelos lists also offer unexpected insights on the long-running debate among family historians regarding the frequency of complex households in the past and the principal detriments to household complexity--whether in premodern times the greatest obstacles to the formation of extended families were high death rates, delayed marriage or neolocal residence rules (Levy, 1965; Coale, 1965; Laslett and Wall, 1972; Kertzer, 1989; Hareven, 1991; Smith, 1993; Ruggles, 1994).

Household H38, diagrammed in Figure 1, provides a reliable guide to Nahua rules about marriage, residence, and household headship. Here, we find no unmarried individuals above fifteen years of age. Surprisingly few unmarried older teenagers appear in these listings. Household H38 also reveals the remarkably aggregative character of Nahua households, incorporating large numbers of both consanguineal and affinal kin. Headship rests not with the oldest generation in the household, of which there are three conjugal units represented here, but with the middle generation, the only married male with a resident son. The head was the son of a solitary mother, widowed "ten years ago." The head is also the only married male with a son present, a seven-year-old. The head has a daughter born last year, but the presence of a female child was less important in determining headship. The only other never-married resident is a fifteen-year-old male, son of the widowed sister of the head's uncle's wife. These kinds of complex kin links are common among the Nahuas because married couples often remained in the households of parents or other kin, unlike in Western Europe, where marriage often lead to the formation of new households.

The Morelos censuses were undertaken for the Spanish Crown because of a dispute with Hernán Cortes' administrators over tax collections. Although the tribute question was the sole purpose of this enumeration, systematic data were also collected on the inhabitants of each household, including information on relationship to the conjugal family or household head. The actual date of these documents was unrecorded, but Cline places it between 1531 and the mid-1540s. Just as Spanish colonialism engulfed the western hemisphere, native scribes adapted old glyphic traditions of portraying household tax obligations to the Roman alphabetic script introduced by Christian friars, producing an extraordinarily detailed account of the household dynamics of the ancient Nahuas (Cline, 1993:3).

Other sets of Nahua censuses, of differing character and quality, have been studied by ethnohistorians (Carrasco, 1964, 1976; Hinz, Hartau, and Heimann-Koenen, 1983; Harvey, 1986; see Cline, 1993, 5-8). The Santa María Asunción Codex, for example, resembles a population register, depicting births, deaths, marriages and migration over a half century or more, although the dating of events went unrecorded. Because the register is made up entirely of glyphs, precise kin relationships cannot be determined beyond the nuclear family (Harvey 1986). These ethnohistorical studies offer valuable insights into the workings of indigenous households, Nahuatl linguistics, and the peculiarities of Nahua censuses. I use the amazingly complete census lists translated by Cline because these provide systematic information on almost all individuals enumerated. I reject the household approach of anthropologists and family historians of the Laslett/Wall school. Instead I, like most population historians, recognize the individual as a more congenial unit for estimating rates, ratios and other common demographic measures (Ruggles, 1994). Moreover, as we shall see below, Nahua households were highly dynamic, and their boundaries extremely fluid.

What we find in the Morelos censuses are native patterns of marriage and household residence. The "spiritual conquest" was just beginning in this region. Only one Christian marriage appears in the lists. Five men were reported in polygynous unions, involving sixteen women. Nine of these were listed as concubines, four of whom were baptized. This means that a polygynist's concubines were more likely to be baptized than a monogamist's wife because missionaries courted the native elite and readily overlooked their transgressions to win strategic converts. Later, church officials fought hard to exterminate polygamy, but in the first moments of conversion, moderation was often the rule. In any case Christian penetration in this region was minimal. Christian names were recorded for 7% of the population, or 164 individuals. Another fifteen were noted as "not yet baptized."

It seems likely that for the conquest generation, with its elites not fully coopted, neither Spanish overlords (encomenderos) nor Catholic priests concerned themselves with such intimate details as age at marriage or coupling. In any case, the Morelos censuses are authentically Nahua in form and content. Kin terms are quintessentially Nahuatl, following indigenous principles of social organization, which were almost wholly alien to the European or Spanish mind. Kin ties were expressed from the reference point of ego, here, either the head of the household or conjugal family unit. The form of expression was always possessive instead of absolutive; thus, in the above example, we read "Cuilol's uncle" instead of "Matlalihuitl, uncle". The possessive case appears for almost every individual mentioned in the document, aside from household heads. While the occasional reference that a brother or sister was younger or older would not strike an odd chord in the ears of native speakers of any European language, the systematic usage of such terms, instead of age, would. Identification of individuals by sex was common to both cultures, but only among the Nahua did the expression of sex for unmarried minors seem incongruous and therefore went unrecorded in the document (Lockhart, 1992:73-80).

Cline is convinced, and I concur, that these documents faithfully reflect native society, virtually untouched by the reformist zeal of Europeans. The censuses show that Christian marriage was almost unknown in this region. Among almost 700 couples, there was a single case of Christian marriage, noted as follows: "Mexicatl's second younger sibling is named Nicolás; his old-style name is Teuctlamacazqui. His wife is named Magdalena Tlaco. They were married in the church last year" (Cline, 1993:143). Mexicatl's first younger sibling, unmarried, was 20 years old, so the Christian groom must have married in his teens. His wife's age was unrecorded, but it seems likely that she was younger than the groom. Her recently widowed aunt, also present in the household, was accompanied by two of her own children aged seven and eight years.

If Christian marriage was almost wholly absent from this census, Nahua marriageways, including concubinage, were ubiquitous. The censuses show that marriage frequently occurred in what we would today call "childhood." If historians agree about anything on the subject of age at marriage among the Nahua, it is that for the sixteenth century there is little firm evidence. For females, estimates range from close to fifteen years (Carrasco, 1964; McCaa, 1994), to the late teens (Clendinnen, 1991:160), and even to the mid-twenties (Gruzinski, 1991:119). Gibson thought that the Nahuas probably married at younger ages than the Spaniards, but he declined to put a figure on it (Gibson, 1964:151). Other historians descry the Black Legend in Native American marriage patterns, subscribing to the notion that with conquest greedy European priests and encomenderos forced natives to abandon pre-Columbian sobriety for the debauchery that came with colonial rule. It is argued that with conquest marriage age was forced down to the early teens to increase income from tribute and parish fees, but there is little contemporary evidence for this view (see McCaa, 1994:34, n16). In fact, I argue the contrary. With Spanish colonization, marriage age probably rose rather than fell, if for no other reason than because, to the extent that natives accepted Catholic marriage, priests would have refused to wed girls who had not attained the age of reason (twelve years) and thus were considered incapable of voluntarily taking the nuptial vows.

Over the last several decades evidence for early marriage among the Nahua has accumulated steadily, thanks to the work of ethnohistorians. When taken as a whole and analyzed from a demographic perspective, these data lead to the inescapable conclusion, it seems to me, that most girls probably married before their sixteenth birthday. In the Codex Mendoza native artists used pictographs to portray the life stages of males and females from birth to death. At age thirteen we see a girl at work on the metate, grinding corn for tortillas (boys carry loads and paddle canoes), and then at age 14, the girl is weaving with a backstrap loom, while the boy fishes. For girls the next scene is marriage, although boys are shown receiving additional instruction in the arts of life. Accompanying the marriage scene are glyphs which show marriage occurring at age twenty, but this may be interpreted as pertaining to the groom because ages in the series are depicted in the male's section of each panel (Berdan and Anawalt, 1992, 2:127-29; and Calnek, 1992, 3:87).

Contemporary Spanish texts on marriage are often viewed skeptically by historians, but the obvious exaggeration of a letter written in 1577 by the Viceroy Martin Enriquez points in the right direction, at least for rural Morelos. He informs his successor that before Christianity was introduced girls married almost at birth because none reached age twelve without marrying (Archivo General de Indias, Mexico, vol. 20, exp. 1: "siendo costumbre en t[iem]po de su infidelidad casarse casi en naciendo porq[ue] no llegava muchacha a doze años q[ue] no se casase").

Source: computed from translated census lists extracted from Cline, 1993.

Note: "Married" includes one abandoned woman. Five women and two men were noted as "no longer married." The document rarely reports ages for the ever-married.

The Morelos censuses offer the most conclusive evidence available on marriage age, and my analysis of these data points to younger ages than previously suspected (Carrasco, 1964:206; Cline, 1993:31-2, 54). It seems that most females were married by age twelve, indeed, many at age ten. The demographic proof comes from a detailed examination of census data on age, sex, and marital status (Table 1). Three rather straight-forward assumptions help make this clear. If we assume that all married females were at least ten years old, that adulthood began at age ten, and that age declarations were roughly correct, then unmarried children less than ten years of age can be excluded from consideration. The result is that the ever-married account for 90% of "adult" females ten years of age and over. If "adult" is defined instead as beginning at age fifteen, the percent of ever-married females tops 95%, twenty-five percentage points greater than the figure for medieval England and forty points above Hajnal's ceiling for the Western European marriage pattern (Hajnal, 1965:119).

While the Nahua ages should not be taken literally, neither should one think that "10" was nothing more than a symbol for coming of age or for puberty. The Nahua knew how to count and reckon ages. An eight year old Quauhtemoc (namesake perhaps of the Aztec emperor, martyred defender of Tenochtitlan against Cortes) was characterized as "a little child, not yet big...now eight years old" (Cline, 1993:119).

Internal evidence confirms this analysis. Consider the totals in table 2, which accompany the household lists for the community of Quauhchichinollan (Cline, 1993:219). These contemporary summaries report 287 currently married women (135 in primary families and 152 "not yet in their own separate residences"), 357 ever-married, and 24 unmarried. Converting to percentages, we find 94% of adult women of Quauhchichinollan were ever-married--that is, married, widowed, or abandoned. The corresponding figure for Huitzillan district is 96%.

Source: Cline, 1993:219.

At what age did a rural Nahua female become an adult? In the Quauhchichinollan portion of the census I tallied almost 300 married women, but only 18 unmarried females above the age of ten. To arrive at a figure of 24, the total in the document itself, exactly half of the ten year olds would have to be counted as "unmarried young women." Errors in inferring sex could not explain away this finding (although there was one unmarried twenty year old whose sex I could not determine). The same problem exists with males. I inferred that there were 77 unmarried males 11 years of age and older. My total falls three short of that found in the original document (Table 2). Both the internal evidence and inferences from the raw data point to substantial pre-teen marriage for both sexes, as early as ten years for girls and eleven for boys.

Cline describes two cases of extremely young, married girls--an eight-year old who had been married four years and a nine-year old married last year--suggesting that these may be due to scribal error or that age may have been noted to highlight the unusual youthfulness of these unions (1993:31-32). She cautiously concludes that "marriage may have occurred early" among the Nahua (1993:54). It seems to me that a systematic examination of the data on age, sex and marital status proves such caution to be unwarranted. Before the necessary three-way table can be constructed, the sex of each unmarried individual must be inferred, often solely on the basis of the Nahuatl name. The ethnohistorian's inclination is to remain faithful to the text. Since the Nahuatl does not indicate sex of minor children, to infer sex would violate a canon of the discipline. For the demographic historian such information, even if it must be inferred, is essential to clarify the question of age at marriage. If unmarried females are not distinguished from males, the extreme precocity of marriage is not readily discernible. Marriage is so fundamental to Nahua household structure that I deliberately pursued an aggressive strategy, inferring the sex of almost all unmarried individuals. Sexing was accomplished solely upon the basis of names in Cline's transcription (I used whole names and suffixes), but without reference to partial totals accompanying the lists. I was genuinely surprised to find close agreement between my inferences and the internal partial totals recorded in the document (as in Table 2 above) because it did not occur to me to make this check until several weeks after the sexing of names was finished, the three-way table of marital status by age and sex prepared, and my argument about child marriage nearly complete. From the close correspondence between summary totals in the document and my inferences, I conclude that the exercise was a success.

The lack of ages for married and widowed women prevents any straightforward demographic analysis. To satisfy readers who prefer conventional categories, I constructed a hypothetical age distribution from a model life table, assuming life expectancy at birth of 17.5 years and crude rates of 65 births and 60 deaths per thousand population, or an average annual growth rate of 0.5% (my computations were based on region South). Under these conditions 71% of the female population would be 10 years of age or more. Since the census lists reveal 90% of females aged 10 and over as ever-married, this translates into almost 64% of the entire female population. The breakdown for five-year age groups is reported in Table 3, along with the likely fractions ever-married at specific ages required to reach the total for the female population aged 10 years and over. For individual age groups, this would require that 50% of those aged 10-14 to be married or widowed, rising to 90% for those aged 15-19, 95% at ages 20-24, and almost all women older than 24. The exercise helps to understand raw totals computed from the lists in terms of conventional age groups and proportions married. The fraction of female children who were married between age ten and fourteen could not have been less than one-third and probably exceeded one-half, rising to nine-tenths for the age group 15-19. This is convincing evidence that widespread child marriage was a fact in this population decades before Christian missionaries could root out polygamy or impose European marriageways.

Note: In this hypothetical population with high mortality (life expectancy at birth of 17.5 years), moderate natural increase (0.5% per annum) and extremely precocious marriage (90% of population aged 10 years or more married), the ever-married (including widowed and abandoned) would have constituted 64.2% of the entire female population.

Linguistic evidence in the census also points to the expectation of early marriage. For the first 89 households enumerated in Huitzillan community, there were only twelve unmarried females more than ten years of age. The census taker noted "not yet married" for seven of these. Of eleven ten year olds, one was so noted. Thus, marriage was expected to take place soon for most of the few remaining unmarried girls above age 10.

Perhaps the most convincing evidence of child marriage can be found in the sex ratios of children and young adults (Table 1). The overall sex ratio of the population is almost perfectly balanced at 104 males per hundred females, and, at 106, nearly balanced for children under ten years of age. For the never-married, the ratio jumps to 150, and for the never-married aged ten years and over, to 287. At age 15 and above there were almost four unmarried males for each never-married female. The number of excess unmarried males at age 10 itself is almost exactly identical to all never-married females aged 11 or more. At age ten and above there were twice as many never-married males as females, rising to three times at age 15, and more than four at age 20 (74:17). Beyond age 20, there were 11 never-married males, but only two females in the same condition. These imbalances cannot be restored by the slight surplus of women in polygynous unions. Instead, it is the excess number of widows (152) when compared with widowers (14) that restores the balance in these lop-sided ratios.

Child brides (and grooms) should have high rates of infertility due to sexual immaturity, and this is exactly what we find in the census. Many recently married couples are reported as infertile. "They have not yet had children" was a common phrase in the document. 94 couples "married last year" were recorded as not having children. We do not know how many others were married last year but who nonetheless had already born children because for fertile couples length of union was rarely indicated. Moreover childlessness was a social concept rather than a biological or demographic one, referring to the absense of children in the household. Thus, numbers on childlessness should perhaps be halved to allow for mortality. As the length of union increased, the number of childless couples tailed off, but it remained substantial at all durations: 40 childless couples after two years of marriage, 24 at three, and still 15 with five years of marriage. If we assume a generous crude marriage rate of 20 per thousand population per year, we should expect 50 marriages annually. Even if as much as half the childlessness was due to mortality, this would mean that still some 15% of couples remained infertile after five years of union. It seems likely that the high rate of infertility in the first years following marriage was due to the fact that most brides were not yet pubescent. In addition to evidence of temporary infertility, enumerators also noted sterility or impotence. Three married males were reported as impotent, but length of these unions went unrecorded, perhaps because there was no expectation of any amelioration with time (Cline, 1993:56).

Nahua Males married at older ages than females. A substantial age gap between spouses must have characterized many unions, although the lack of data on the ages of married couples defeats any attempt to directly measure the size of the gap. The median age of the unmarried above eight years old is strikingly low, 10.7 years for females and 15.2 for males, or an age-gap of 4.5 years. "Not yet married" or "not yet taken a wife" was noted for 29 males in 89 households in Huitzillan. Of those aged 10-19 25% were deemed to be dawdling, rising to 60% for unmarried males aged 20 years or more. Brothers-in-law were highly likely to be characterized in this manner. Of 18 in these households, 12 were already married. Of the remaining six, four were listed as "not-yet-married", aged 10, 15, 20, and 30 years compared with two aged 10 and 12 who were "not-married" or whose marital status was not mentioned.

Remarriage rates are difficult to estimate, but almost all widowed males apparently remarried quickly whereas widowed females remarried much more slowly, if at all. Of 14 widowers enumerated, more than half had been widowed for less than one year. Only four were widowed for more than two years. The median interval of widowhood for males was "200 days" versus four years for females.

Historians of the family recognize three restraints on the formation of complex households: mortality, marriage, and rules of residence. As we have seen, for Nahuas marriage was no restraint at all. On the contrary, such youthful marriages required co-residency with other adults, at least until the age of maturity was reached. Mortality, on the other hand, severely restricted multigenerational families among the Nahuas. Consider household H38 noted above (Figure 1). With only nine individuals in the household, there were four conjugal family units of which two were already broken by the deaths of husbands, the head's father and his uncle's spouse's brother-in-law.

By shifting the perspective from households to individuals, to children and their rates of orphanhood, we can directly weigh the effects of mortality and exclude noise or nuisance factors (Ruggles, 1994:115-7). While the census specifically lists only three children as complete orphans, that is, with no other kin present, other orphans can be inferred by searching for parents within the immediate household. For children under five years of age, 2.5% were complete orphans, lacking both father and mother (7/280). For 5-9 year olds the figure rises to 6.9% (18/261). It is clear from the enumerators' de jure method of listing that unmarried children were placed in the households of their parents when these were alive. Table 4 shows that for children under 5 years of age, excluding the few abandoned and illegitimate, the fathers of almost 10% were already dead, rising above 15% for those aged 5-9. Maternal orphans occurred less frequently, only 4% and 9%, respectively, but these are minima because widowers rapidly remarried and the text does not distinguish step- from biological mothers.

Source: Observed orphanhood computed from census lists in Cline, 1993; model data from Coale and Demeny, 1983.

Note: Models assume mean age of childbearing of 30 years for fathers and 27 for mothers. Model proportions orphaned were computed from figures for Region South Level 1 (life expectancy at birth of 20 years) using conventional methods for estimating single year rates. Actual conditions were probably worse than those of Level 1. Observed proportions of paternal orphans are based on 275 children aged 0-4 and 257 aged 5-9; for maternal orphans, totals are 280 and 261, respectively. Nine abandoned or illegitimate children are excluded in computing orphanhood. In the observed data, maternal orphanhood is understated because step-mothers were rarely noted and widowers re-married with little delay.

The orphanhood evidence points to a demographic hell--life expectancies below the worst conditions found in standard model life tables (Table 4). This finding is in agreement with the fact that one-fifth of ever-married women were widows at the time of the census. Encountering such high levels of mortality should not be surprising since two virgin soil epidemics probably passed through this region in the decades before the census was taken. The smallpox epidemic of 1520-21 is widely recognized as one of the three most devastating epidemics to strike sixteenth century Mexico. Measles erupted in 1531, and smallpox returned in 1538, but we do not know whether the villages studied here succumbed to any of these tragedies (McCaa, 1995).

Even in pre-Columbian times, Mesoamerica was no demographic paradise. Both the bioarchaeological and pictographic evidence point to severe nutritional stress and extremely high mortality before Spanish conquest and colonization began (McCaa, 1993). There is just one study with mortality estimates from the late postclassic through colonial times for any region in the Central Mexican Basin (Hayward, 1986). The author uses skeletal and archival evidence to estimate remaining life expectancy from age 15. For the postclassic period Hayward places the figure at 34 years (e15=19), rising in the last half of the seventeenth century to 44 years (e15=29). Her highest estimate is still some 5 years below that for level 1 in standard model life tables (Coale and Demeny, 1983). Unfortunately, for the first century of Spanish conquest and colonization, there is insufficient evidence to estimate life expectancies of any kind (Hayward, 1986:221-22). The Morelos censuses reveal the workings of a high pressure demographic system, where chronically high levels of mortality and morbidity were overcome by what I call the Amerindian mode of reproduction: early, universal marriage with few restraints on fertility (McCaa, 1994:14).

"Family" or "relative" never occurs in the census document, yet kin ties are ubiquitous. Lockhart's conclusion that among the Nahuas "inclusiveness is emphasized over precise descent" is amply confirmed in these lists (Lockhart, 1992:76). Rather than parentage or lineage, the key to social linkages was coresidence, home, or "cemithualtin," those belonging to a yard or patio (Carrasco, 1976:58; Burkhart, 1992:27). Lockhart argues that there was no commonly used Nahuatl term for family or household. Instead there was a series of "words that emphasize the setting in which a joint life takes place, not the origin of the relationships between those living together." A household consisted of "those in one house," "those in one patio," or "people who live together in one house" (Lockhart, 1992:59). The household compound was often made up of several structures facing each other on two or more sides of a patio. Housing structures were much less integrated than buildings in Western Europe or Spain (Lockhart, 1992:61).

If servants and other outsiders amounted to scarcely 1% of the population, relatives of the household head--but who were not part of the head's conjugal family--accounted for almost half of the population (47.7%). When no other kin tie could be remembered, "distant cousin" resolved the quandary, as in "Here are two distant younger siblings (cousins)..." (Cline, 1993:245).

Nahua rules of household formation were simple to an extreme, allowing a profusion of coresidence possibilities. The most inflexible rule was that only married males could be heads as was the case in 311 households. Of the four exceptions, three were cases of recently widowed mothers with offspring of marriageable ages, but not yet married or recently widowed themselves. In household H#49, the head's husband "died last year." Her daughter's husband died "three years ago." This female head was accompanied by a 6 year old grandchild and two unmarried offspring, a son aged 20 and a 15 year old daughter. When either of these married, headship would likely devolve to the son or son-in-law. In household H#115 the female head also lost her husband the previous year. Her household included three unmarried sons, aged 20, 15 and 3 years, a widowed sister and two unmarried nieces, aged 15 and 10. The last household in the document, H#139, is an anomaly. The head was also a woman, but she was married and her husband was present, but not listed as head. The case reads (Cline, 1993:311):

Here is (a goodly maiden??) named Tecapan. She is married. Her husband is named Tlalli, not baptized. She has one child, named Coatl, not baptized, born last year. Here is her field: 5 matl. They all (just) came. They pay no tribute yet. Three are included in one house. They have just assumed tribute duty.

Among males, marital status and age determined headship, with few exceptions. In only four instances were married fathers displaced from headship by their sons: Q13, Q70, H#43, and H#137 (Figure 2). Q13, the solitary case of a four generation household, shows a married son as head accompanied by two probably younger married brothers--one married last year and the other with one male child ten years of age and not yet married--as well as the married father, whose own widowed mother, "just a little old woman," was also present. The son seems to have gained headship status because of his mature age, the fact that he also had a son who "married last year" and that his own father was elderly. The presence of the head's mother's niece, "who has not yet taken a husband, born 20 years ago," apparently required no further explanation.

In Q70 the father was "just a little old man, he no longer works irrigated fields, he just accompanies Tolnahuacatl [his son]," yet he "has two children, just little children," one aged six and the other born last year. In household H#43 the father was still married and accompanied by a ten-year-old son and a daughter "born last year." Although there was no indication that he had retired, his married son, who had a young daughter, was recorded as head. In the last case, H#137, the father was retired ("just a little old man," widowed). His only married son was head, displacing a brother who was widowed "twenty years ago." Two married sisters were also present in the household. A brother-in-law with two sons, aged 10 and 8, was probably a viable candidate for headship, should the son of the head die or leave the household at marriage. The fluidity of household arrangements and the absence of strict patri- or matrilineal transmission of household headship or land-use rights maximized flexibility. Whether it minimized tensions between potential heads is an unanswered question.

As these examples show, brothers of the head were found in many households. Given the extremely young marriage age and the universality of marriage, it should not be surprising to learn that brothers were usually married. Of 135 brothers more than 10 years of age, 98 were married and two were recently widowed. Age also determined headship among brothers, with 90 older brothers listed as heads, but only eight younger ones. Six younger-brother heads had the eldest male child or more children than their older married brothers. There was a single instance of a brother who had a married child, but was not listed as household head. While headship status could be earned by reproductive achievement and perhaps by means of criteria other than marital status and age, this rarely happened. Instead, in such cases, the married younger brother probably abandoned the paternal household, often entering the parental home of his wife.

It should be readily apparent that marriage for the Nahua did not require the formation of a new household (Carrasco, 1964:189). In Huitzillan and Quauhchichinollan, we find three-fourths of all households containing two or more married couples. Many newlyweds were simply too young to carry on the work, biological or physical, of an independent existence. Married daughters were twice as likely to remain in the paternal household as sons (76:36). This is partially explained by the later age at marriage of sons, but preferences are reflected here as well. While the father was still alive, a son who married was more likely to enter an affinal household and become head of his wife's family than remain in or become head in his father's house. There were ten households in which fathers-in-law were displaced from headship. In three of these, the father-in-law was described as "just a little old man." While there were 26 mothers living in households in which their sons were heads, there were 40 living with their sons-in-law as heads. It seems unlikely that the age gap between spouses fully explains these differences. The more important principle is the ready acceptance of in-laws into households. One-fifth of the population lived in households in which their kin ties were affinal. The most far-fetched relationship reconstructed from any household is that of an in-law (household H#87, Figure 3), a brother-in-law's cousin's (by marriage) daughter's child. In classic fashion, the head is the married male with the most living (male) children. The household has two conjugal families and two widows. The first, the head's sister-in-law, was recently widowed, her spouse having died last year. The second, widowed for ten years, is the sister-in-law of the first widow's brother-in-law. The Nahuatl handles these relationships easily through the possessive and the fact that kin ties are expressed outward from the household head, rather than as an absolute condition of an individual's residence. The inclusiveness of Nahuatl kin connections contrasts with the exclusiveness of English and other Western European languages.

Source: My inferences from census lists in Cline, 1993.

Table 5 illustrates the extraordinarily complex kin ties that can arise in a community in which child marriage is common and where there are few restraints on kin coresidency. By connecting kin terms back to the household head, I have constructed 146 distinct types of kin connections in only 315 households containing 2,503 individuals. A few kin relationships were probably fictive, but instances of doubt or confusion rarely occurred in the record. Most of the kin branchings were neatly constructed via conjugal family ties that were well-understood by the enumerator and his informants. This conclusion can be sustained with conviction because the Morelos censuses are more than simply lists of names.

Here, we see amazingly complex households constituting the social context of the daily lives of ordinary people. Here, people are portrayed together--eating, living, working the land, and paying taxes in complex kin groupings. Lockhart emphasizes that the logic of Nahua households was existential rather than purposive: "as a last reminder of the pervasiveness of the Nahua emphasis on household, on the fact of being together rather than the rationale for being together, let it be said that the predominant term for `relative' in Nahuatl is -huanyolque, `those who live with one'" (Lockhart, 1992:72). Yet, Nahua kin groupings had consciously delineated boundaries. Almost every household ends with a phrase like one of the following:

Since the mid-sixties, family historians and others have argued that in pre-modern times high mortality meant that large, complex households were relatively rare (Levy, 1965; Laslett and Wall, 1972; Segalen, 1986). While high death rates were certainly a constraint, historians allowed themselves to be mislead by the unusually late age-at-marriage and neolocal residence which prevailed in much of Western Europe. The relative scarcity of three generation households in early modern times was probably more a matter of late marriage and neolocal residence rules (Smith, 1992) than high mortality (Flandrin, 1979:70-72; Mitterauer Sieder, 1982:27; Hareven, 1991:101). For the Nahua, extremely high mortality was no obstacle to complex families. On the contrary, it is likely that early marriage, complex households, and communal usufruct of land on which coresidence was based were defenses against the vagaries of severe mortality. Households were extremely fluid and in constant flux. Headship and household composition shifted rapidly because marriage and death occurred at what must have been a dizzying pace. Yet, neither the enumerators nor their informants register much surprise about the demographic contexts of the daily lives of these ordinary people.

Works Cited