To Be or To Look Alike…Tribulations and Peripeteia of a Portuguese Front of Kinship in 18th Century Tucumán

Abstract

The new political conditions generated by the separation of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns —which took place in 1640 and resulted in selective forced deportations and inquisitorial persecution in the native Portuguese population settled in the Spanish colonies— forced both the families seated in different locations and the members of local and regional social networks to build-up strategies to avoid the consequences of such provisions. Through a case analysis, this paper seeks to showcase and analyze some of the main relational trends and reproductive patterns that were developed by a discrete family originally settled in San Salvador de Jujuy, but whose residence and heritage extended itself to the cities of Cordoba and Buenos Aires. We focused our research on the characteristics, endeavors, and consequences derived from family bonds and network construction with the purpose of revealing how a family of suspected new Christian origin could built notability and maintain a social position that reached the independence hero Martín Miguel de Güemes Goyechea.