The Anonymous Lima Census of 1860

In 1860, during the waning years of the Ramón Castilla regime and midway through an economically robust era in Peru thanks to the guano industry, a new census of the capital city of Lima was undertaken. The empadronadores (census takers) approached the task systematically, enumerating the population according to existing administrative districts — and not according to church parishes, as had earlier censuses. As they moved methodically along, the interviewers noted the name of each street and then ventured into each formal building’s address, recording its house number. Next they entered individual dwelling spaces (presumably invited) and asked the residents a series of predetermined questions, carefully recording the responses. Data gathered from residents of buildings that lined the streets and boasted formal street numbers provide few surprises for a historian. These residents leave the initial impression that the urban citizenry was similar to the population one would expect to find in any city in the Atlantic world of that time. Census takers also proceeded methodically in tallying and describing the residents of the informal domiciles constructed in callejones (alleyways) and the interior dwelling places (cuartos) within those alleyway residential corridors. Here one found Lima’s arguably distinctive contribution to the mid-nineteenth-century urban milieu. Each callejón was numbered, and the separate dwelling spaces within them were individually surveyed in exactly the same way as formal homes facing full-fledged streets. The result is a demographic historian’s dream, although it comes with some necessary caution.Unlike the better-known censuses carried out both earlier and later, this 1860 count was never published, and its ciphers never were aggregated or interpreted. The data are raw and untouched. It was discovered not long ago, its four octavo-sized, consecutively numbered volumes lying on a bottom shelf in the archive of the Biblioteca Municipal de Lima. The apochryphal tale of its rediscovery has it that one of the few scholars allowed to ruminate through this cryptlike repository (secured like a bank vault) tripped over the edge of one of the volumes that was protruding slightly from a lower bookshelf. Hoisting the huge volume up and glancing at the pages hurriedly, the scholar realized that a treasured resource had been overlooked, perhaps for some time. As word of its existence inevitably spread, the census became the object of investigation by specialists from a variety of fields who hoped to satiate their curiosity about several poorly known aspects of Lima’s early republican culture.The addresses recorded in 1860 provide a sort of “Google Earth” view of the city. Most of Lima’s streets were lined with single-family townhouses, interspersed with occasional shops of various kinds: hatmakers, pulperías, chinganas, and so on. Every so often, streets emptied into plazuelas, whose roundabout configuration interrupted the steady block-by-block march of house numbers. The census records enough unusual addresses to provide complex yet colorful street identifications. To illustrate, in Cuartel Four, District Seven, the street named Callejón de la Recoleta, which apparently ended in the Plazuela de la Recoleta, consisted of only two small houses and, strangely, a callejón of its own, all numbered in the upper 200s. The plazuela was bounded on one side by District Eight’s Calle de la Pileta de Santa Catalina, with dwellings numbered in the upper 190s, and on the other by the same district’s Calle de la Pileta de la Chacarilla, whose houses numbered in the lower 100s and ran in the opposite direction. Between callejones and plazuelas, the task of mapping house numbers and street names was no doubt daunting.1The rich character of the data enumerated in this manuscript census is evident in the relatively precise categories the census takers recorded and the detail with which they gathered the information in each household. The census records a diversity of space usage in this mid-nineteenth-century capital city. The homes of the poor were recorded alongside those of the wealthy. Prestigious residences, including that of General Ramón Castilla, the president of the country, and those of the most powerful and influential families, are described in contemporary usage as “casas grandes,” “casas principales,” and “solares” (this last one a term used by Lima’s founders in the sixteenth century to describe their newly established urban palaces). It is an urban truism that space is at a premium, and mid-nineteenth-century Lima was no different. As the wealthy moved to quieter and balmier neighborhoods beyond the city wall — Magdalena del Mar, for example — they often sold or rented their former town homes. Many of these older homes, often two stories high, were intricately divided into smaller living quarters, and a single house number offered no clue as to a building’s real use. The size of these subdivisions seems to have varied with the rapaciousness of the owner or manager: intense use of space predictably created intensely cramped living quarters. In nearly every district, every conceivable quadrangle was diced up and occupied by some individual or household group. The frequent enumeration of humble types of living spaces offers a hint about the limited housing available to the growing urban population. Yet the labels are not always precisely descriptive. One common descriptor is “vivienda,” a frequently used but frustratingly vague term. Many other labels provide some sort of visual image of the living quarters carved out of what were originally single-family residences — patio, traspatio, alto, altillo, and cuarto — in a pattern of usage similar to the Buenos Aires conventillos that have been the focus of extended study and debate.2 Some of the living quarters described offer evidence of the intense crowding in these old buildings and the search for privacy and security within small spaces. It should come as no surprise that people lived in or above a tienda, but one might be puzzled to learn that several people might occupy a cochera. New callejones, the infamous alleyways located behind the mansions and modest houses that lined the city streets chock-a-block, took up the overflow from houses and other conventional residences. These shanties were arranged in the areas behind the houses visible from the street, accessed through entranceways cut through the walls that often fronted the main thoroughfare. Lined up along both sides of the narrow corridor of the callejón were as many as ten or more rooms, each separated by flimsy walls and covered in some makeshift fashion at the front. At the foot of the alleyway might stand a trench that served as a common waste dump for the residents. With good reason, the impoverished sectors of the population made life difficult for census takers by changing residences often.3What is most obviously striking in a quick reading of the 1860 manuscript census is the struggle for space in this rapidly changing, midcentury walled city. The contest pitted a number of actors against one another in a vicious game of musical chairs: individuals who sought housing, property owners and managers who sought to maximize rental income, and a city government that was responsible for regulating both private and public spaces (plumbing and trash disposal, but also loitering, public drunkenness, and so on). The competition for housing was not necessarily a function of high birth rates or lowered mortality; it may also have been an indicator of rising wealth, better diet, and improved access to health care. Internal migration and immigration also factored in, although the latter was a mere trickle compared to Argentina and Brazil. Indeed, internal migration, as Manuel A. Fuentes observed, was not simply a matter of country-to-city movement but may also have included movement within the city, a phenomenon that exasperated landlords and statisticians in equal measure.4Race descriptors figure prominently; census takers must have insisted on great precision in this column of data, which contains many continuities from the colonial period. Racial labels include blanca, mestiza, india, zamba, and negra, among others. The universe of terms suggests the significant weight of African descent in the system of racial categories: negra and zamba are followed by mulata, morena, parda, and cuarterona. Other labels round out the image of a very divided, carefully parsed population: chino, chinocholo, and cholo.5 It will be interesting to see what these labels can contribute to our understanding of Lima’s social structure in the early years following the abolition of African slavery and the introduction of Asian laborers.Census takers also gathered information on age, sex, education, religion, nationality, place of residence, and employment. This last label provides a quick view of how many people were formally engaged in work and also suggests how many households might try to survive on a single form of labor. Along with the racial categories, employment data might yield clues to Lima’s changing social hierarchies.The census has its limitations. One category prominently unrecorded — and one that, had the information been sought, might have doomed the project to failure — is the cost of rent. This is unfortunate for researchers; data on rents are scarce for this period, and official discussions of the popular uprisings that took place in this era provide little information on the expenses of city living. It is almost as if the cost of living was an incidental sidebar in contemporary discourse to such important matters as the right of revelers to party in the street at night, the availability of pianos for city concerts, and the problem of animal carcasses rotting in the muddy streets unattended.6 To study rents requires a degree of speculation, and the subject is correspondingly fraught with difficulties. Price analysts Paul Gootenberg and Alfonso Quiroz have carried out the most exhaustive group of studies available on prices in mid-nineteenth-century Peru. Their careful conclusions, together with the census data found here, suggest that scholars interested in the cost of living might find it possible to spin out further nuanced ideas about the relations among individuals and groups in the capital’s neighborhoods. Combining residential occupation patterns with data on the cost of renting a room may, for example, provide further descriptive evidence of the workings of inflation on the city’s denizens and throw more light on the perennially dazzling relationship between wages, prices, and social protest. Those trying to track down rent and wage figures might ask: which social sectors were most damaged by guano inflation, and which appear to have benefited most by building real estate wealth?7It is possible that public discussion of residential rent prices might have been considered an embarrassing intrusion into private matters. Social attitudes in Lima concerning the public and the private in all likelihood reflected the waning moments of an aristocratic era. It was still possible to find aristocratic couples dressed in high fashion walking the streets of the city center in the late evening hours. Night watchmen could yet be found whistling their warnings on the street corners until dawn and discreetly escorting the occasional wayward drunk aristocrat toward his doorstep. Even in the years after the War of the Pacific, street vendors continued to hawk their wares on every block, giving the city — said iconic writer Ricardo Palma — its rhythmic pulse.8Social attitudes that privileged public behavior and costume over economic and financial disclosure would not encourage residents to mention incomes and rents in public venues. Although this census was apparently a private venture, discussions of the cost of living at any level of society between virtual strangers might be seen as the ultimate indignity. Interestingly, residential space was not advertised in newspapers, leaving the impression that rental agents relied upon word of mouth to find tenants. What few rental advertisements did appear rarely listed the actual rent for the space. Social expectations no doubt further reinforced such attitudes. Although Peru had left the era of African slavery and the indigenous head tax, public discussion of rental prices would not take place until there emerged an industrial labor movement bent on improving wages and living conditions.9 Of course, we should also allow for the possibility that rents were so standardized that it was not necessary to discuss them. Studies that take this census into account may help to resolve the issue.A cursory reading of the 1860 census raises a host of other questions of interest to historians of nineteenth-century Lima. The meaning of family and the operation of households is an age-old subject that has stirred vigorous debate among demographers and historians. Some years ago, the definition of the classic “northwestern European” model of the family — particularly its marriage habits — stirred heated debate among the colleagues and students of Peter Laslett. Researchers using census data to understand families and households in Latin America questioned the applicability of the Laslett-Cambridge model in this non-European region.10 Scholars interested in the formation and identification of families, their relation to households, and the functioning of such units in cities will find in the 1860 census much grist for their mills. For example, one could analyze age at marriage and what this might mean for wealth and social development. At the same time, it is important to historicize the census data. If historians focus on the internal structure of Lima’s population and fail to put this information in its historical context, they may not adequately address an important question: how typical were households and families in midcentury Lima, in the years following abolition? Historians will have to set these data in the context of other urban censuses that may have been carried out in Peru, as well as the national census that followed it almost two decades later.11Internally, the census can yield significant data that may shed light on some intriguing questions regarding the second generation of urban republicans. What were the housing habits of various social sectors, above all the poorest inhabitants of the most meager dwellings? Little is yet known about the survival strategies of women with children in midcentury Peru. How did the gender composition of households, as well as child-rearing practices, vary across class or racial lines in the urban milieu? Combining the census data with information from the pamphlet and periodical literature of the day will provide preliminary insights into the struggles of urban workers to avoid starvation as Peru emerged from economic dependence on African slaves and indigenous tribute. Reading the census data alongside contemporary administrative and periodical sources will also contribute to our understanding of struggles to contain or control urban growth. And examining these data together with diaries, memoirs, publications, and other public documents might enrich analyses of race, gender, and power in reading of the census data could also contribute to studies of the of some sectors of this city’s population to real those sectors the city’s its and the 1860 census a label of or until some evidence comes we can only about who it and who carried it This has for the of the yet the precision with which the data were and in these four volumes little room for doubt about its to At this it that city carried out the If they the official would have been and the volumes of data would have been by documents the with the names of who had the data at various and — if not the — as well as at the of Manuel the of precise and the of several such might have the Fuentes had the General de Lima and and the of the de la del Peru. and the important del de la de la de Lima de de Fuentes was not to of his If had been to the 1860 census we can be that it would have been at some in the census has in another the only scholar to to it is and at that, his was a single in his of the with to the Asian and African population in the must not be that, Peru has not any immigration slavery was about years the immigration has not is as as to the existence of the Lima census of the one that can be made from the intriguing of from the 1860 census is that it was not a public including would have from above and would have been to to those same The was the only public in midcentury Peru that could with such and of The church was from its financial and following but it still private financial its with its or that of any Internal evidence suggests that the census was by the church — for example, some of the racial labels colonial and marriage The data with place of birth and race, and of and in the same use a similar of the of former could they for The church was the most in and the last of the all other of had them. Lima’s which in the and could not by to the of the and to the streets by the an informal colonial relationship of and dependence between the church and the the poor of Lima in of Peru emerged in the of abolition and of its to the newly population. The was in the to the urban poor — beyond the newly — who were out of the guano The between and of access to would not for another one government to on the of the How can a account for the social between wealth and during the guano The census of 1860 is a good place to the population figures provide of data on the that well access to is The study of children in Latin America is in its and this census can help to the subject in the Scholars will find this census they to what of the Lima population at this was considered and that definition for all aspects of as well as labor. in terms of a labor a in the of the and how did the of the meaning of and wages, among other the of for the 1860 census further suggests that the church the If the the task to and an enumeration of the newly and newly church might simply not have to of those with a count not for public Of course, if the did the one is still left to how a church made its way into Lima’s One also the census takers the task according to districts and not church of has yet emerged from the of the has any been found the and of this from the of the to the archive of the Biblioteca Municipal de the of the 1860 Lima census from the of this resource on mid-nineteenth-century urban life in Peru. Lima’s archive has access for and is a new these will many scholars to use of the 1860 census data, as well as the other of this a the data found with the censuses made in the earlier years of the will enrich our understanding of the of the city of Lima. Some of the of this would have been The 1860 census can and form to its how many cities we of that through as a of only much to be if as a

Census · Genealogy · Geography · Population · Sociology · Demography · History · Latin American history and culture

• Demographic Knowledge and Nation‐Building

  Open Access•Raúl Necochea López•Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschicht…•2010

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