ABSTRACT

Boys navigated their way around colonial Mexico City in ways related to their status. It was, for the times, a huge and complex city with extremes of wealth and poverty alike. Unlike girls, boys were expected to be out and about in the city; their comparative freedom, however, was constrained by the emotional control they were expected to develop. Street urchins begged and stole; other boys worked with their fathers or were apprenticed to a master craftsman; those fortunate enough went to school; and the very wealthy came to know their place in society both at home and in institutions of higher learning. All these various boys had to learn how to negotiate their place within a very hierarchical society in which they were expected to show obedience and deference, submission and respect. 1 One of the fundamental experiences that these boys shared – irrespective of status – was their insertion into networks of family and community and their acceptance of their place in the social rankings. 2 Their reactions to this process of indoctrination and the emotions that it evoked are harder to discern. Mexican men from this period did not leave journals or memoirs of their boyhood. Etiquette and morals manuals provided an image of the ideal to which young men were supposed to aspire, but those outside the literate classes learned more from the examples around them than from books. Although Mexico was highly stratified, with a small aristocratic rank; a slightly larger middle group composed of professionals, business owners and artisans; and a larger lower caste of labourers, many of the ideas about emotional containment crossed these class boundaries.