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The Upper Classes and Their Upper Stories: Architecture and the Aftermath of the Lima Earthquake of 1746

2003; Duke University Press; Volume: 83; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-83-1-53

1527-1900

Charles F. Walker,

Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

On October 28, 1746, at 10:30 p.m., a massive earthquake struck Lima, the capital of the viceroyalty of Peru, and swamped the nearby port of Callao, shattering areas up and down the coast. One account claimed that if “the most astute man attempted to create the perfect calamity, he could not have imagined the horrors inflicted on Lima and Callao.”1 The earthquake damaged almost all of Lima’s houses, and shook to their foundations most of the city’s 74 churches and 14 monasteries as well as the public buildings that adorned the city’s central square, the Plaza de Armas. Estimates of the number of dead varied from 1,200 to 6,000, out of a population of 55,000. Callao fared even worse, as a tsunami killed almost all of its 10,000 inhabitants and leveled most of the buildings. In an anonymous report prepared for the viceroy, the writer observed, “of all [earthquakes] which have happened since their first Conquest, so far at least as hath come to our knowledge, we may with Truth affirm that none ever broke out with such astonishing violence, or hath been attended with so vast a Destruction as that which happened lately in this Capital.”2 In his long prologue, the English translator of this official account called the catastrophe “one of the most dreadful, perhaps, that ever befel this Earth since the general Deluge.”3The Marquis de Obando despairingly noticed that rumbles of the aftershocks drowned out the shouts of help from people buried under debris.4 Viceroy José Antonio Manso de Velasco compared Lima to a battle scene: “[P]ut to the sword and set to fire, its beautiful buildings have been turned into piles of dirt and stones.”5 The cathedral’s two towers toppled over, destroying much of the nave, and an arch with a statue of Philip V on the bridge over the Rimac River tumbled into the water. Bodies, timbers, and treasure swept away by the tidal wave washed up on Lima’s beaches for weeks afterward. Prisoners in the Inquisition dungeon nearly drowned when a ruptured channel poured water into their cells.6 Many people were injured during the earthquake, and in the following months sunstroke, tertian fever, bronchitis, dysentery, and gastrointestinal ailments took their toll. With supply ships sunk by the tidal wave and storage areas ruined, food was in short supply for weeks.7Viceroy Manso de Velasco had to rebuild Lima, Callao, and the port’s military infrastructure. Accounts of the catastrophe and its aftermath agree that his energetic efforts imposed social control, prevented looting, assured food supplies, and provided shelter—in order, ultimately, to reconstruct a safer city. As tribute to his success, in 1756 the Spanish crown granted him the title of Count “Over the Waves” or Superunda. Some regarded him as Lima’s “second founder.” The earthquake and Manso de Velasco’s ensuing reforms changed Lima architecture. Flat roofs, quincha (wattle and daub), and adobe increasingly replaced vaulted ceilings, stone arches, and higher, two-story buildings characteristic of baroque Lima.8 The changes went far beyond replacing fallen structures; the catastrophe gave the Bourbons the opportunity to transform the city. In the words of Richard Morse, the rebuilding of Lima and Callao provided the Bourbon rulers “a clean slate” to impose their vision of orderly urban society.9In contrast to Europe, where the tangled street pattern of medieval cities made efforts to create straight, uniform streets particularly difficult, the eighteenth-century Bourbons could build on the grid or checkerboard street layout established in Lima and the rest of Spanish America at its sixteenth-century foundation. This pattern fit Enlightenment notions of urban order, above all the call for precisely designed streets that facilitated supervision and the circulation of people, goods, and air.10 William Betagh, an Irish marine commander who was in Lima in 1719, noted that the city’s streets were so straight that one might cross the entire city “without turning a corner.”11 While planners sought to retain the block-by-block symmetry in the aftermath of the earthquake, they were more intent on creating the institutions and infrastructure for more orderly and controllable cities. Throughout Spanish America in the latter half of the eighteenth century, reformers did not radically alter the layout of cities, but instead modified political structures, tightened legislation, and encouraged architectural changes. Recognizing the growth of urban areas and thus the impossibility that a single town council (the cabildo) might govern such large and disparate populations, they decentralized urban rule in the second half of the eighteenth century. Lima was divided into four cuarteles and 40 neighborhoods. These changes responded to the growth of urban populations and changing notions of urban governance, but they also reflected the Bourbon desire to weaken the cabildo, a relatively autonomous institution that later became the center of many creole-led protests.12 Viceroys, visitadores, and other authorities cleaned up the cities and fine-tuned legislation regarding water, sanitation, festivities, architectural codes, burials, gambling, drinking, and other aspects of urban life. They changed the penal code to address the lower classes’ unruly behavior. These urban policies are a lesser-known yet vital aspect of the “Bourbon Reforms.”13The count of Superunda, however, was unable to impose his and the Bourbons’ view of urban society without opposition. Reconstruction prompted a series of conflicts that ultimately limited or even prevented reform. The case of eighteenth-century Lima confirms that natural disasters bring to the surface both old and new tensions and offer vivid insights into society.14 On one hand, fear of the lower classes shaped the viceroy’s actions. Concern about social chaos was so great that it affected debates about moving the city and technical decisions about the width of walls. The aftermath of the earthquake demonstrated how strongly anxiety about the disobedience of slaves and the unruliness of the plebe marked elite mentalities and even public policies. The difficulties in imposing absolutism and the Bourbon Reforms in Spanish America cannot be understood without taking into account the racialized and gendered fear and disdain of the colonial lower classes. The examination of the chaos and controversies after the earthquake takes us directly into the streets and courts, where these fears were aired and concomitant policies debated.On the other hand, upper-class groups opposed the measures affecting their property and directly fought the viceroy and his team of urban reformers. The viceroy could not work his will in Peru. These postearthquake struggles consequently bring to light power relations in late colonial Lima. While the church, the viceregal state, and the upper classes often collaborated—many members of Lima’s upper crust were clerics or held governmental positions— they also squabbled over their respective positions in society and the strength of the state. The viceregal state attempted to use the postearthquake rebuilding to foster its absolutist project of centralizing power, rationalizing the bureaucracy, and increasing income from taxes. The transition from a consen sus to an absolutist government, however, was slow, and Viceroy Manso de Velasco dealt gingerly with the upper classes and members of the church.15The postearthquake debates on appropriate architecture vividly and almost literally represent the upper classes’ notion of their place in the spatial and social hierarchy: high above the masses but somewhat distant from the interventionist Bourbon state. The battle against the viceroy’s reforms demonstrated the influence of Renaissance notions of urban grandeur and stratification in late colonial Peru.These tensions—apprehension about the lower classes and confrontations among the colonial elite (creoles and Spaniards), the church, and the viceregal state—remained constant in Peru until independence in the 1820s. In fact, the postearthquake struggles preview the controversies over the Bourbon Reforms in Peru, which most analysts date from the ascension of Charles III to the throne in 1759. This study shows that the Lima upper classes and the viceregal state clashed well before the full-scale implementation of the Bourbons’ absolutist project in the Americas.16 It also moves the analysis towards questions of space and status, contrasting different notions of how Lima should be rebuilt and who should live where, thus demonstrating the importance of architecture and the use of space as a key social and cultural marker.17 In sum, the analysis of the earthquake and its aftermath incorporates three key elements of revisionist work on European absolutism: longer time-frames that consider the first half of the eighteenth century before the rise of the more renowned “enlightened despots,” a close examination of the crown and the aristocracy that does not overlook other social groups, and the analysis of symbolic and cultural elements alongside the better-studied institutional components.18Founded in 1535, Lima was the capital of the Peruvian viceroyalty and the economic and political center of Spanish South America. Most of the viceroyalty’s commerce moved through the city and the adjacent port of Callao, while the viceroy, the courts, the church, and other key institutions maintained their offices in the “City of the Kings.” Upper-class groups tended to live in the blocks around the Plaza de Armas, while much of the Indian population lived in El Cercado to the east. However, the noise, smells, and bustle of the Plaza de Armas, which doubled as the central market, as well as the absence of vacant property, pushed the colonial elite outward, and by the mid–eighteenth century, many of Lima’s top families had residences a few blocks east of the Plaza, near the Plaza de la Inquisición, or towards the south. The viceroy himself complained of the odor and noise in the Plaza, where outdoor mass was held for more than a year after the earthquake.19 In January 1747 the cabildo put leading property owners in charge of assuring social control and helping with the rebuilding in two or three block areas (usually around their own residences), covering in this manner almost the entire core area south of the Rimac River and west of El Cercado. In other words, members of the elite resided throughout the core area. For example, don Alvaro de Bolaños oversaw the area near La Encarnación Monastery (“behind and next to his house”), six blocks south of the Plaza. In fact, several of the designated individuals had “their” blocks (what would be called jirones) named after them or their family. This was the case of Sr. Gregorio Nuñez, in charge of “su calle,” named after his ancestor Miguel Nuñez de Miagadas at the end of the seventeenth century.20 A single block would often have an ornate house of a distinguished member of the upper classes as well as the more simple and certainly more crowded houses and rooms of the lower orders.21 Other Lima neighborhoods demonstrated a great deal of racial mixing. For example, more than half of El Cercado, a neighborhood built expressly for the indigenous population, was by 1750 non-Indian.22The Lima aristocracy had re-created itself in the eighteenth century through commerce, a reflection of the opportunities presented by Lima’s virtual monopoly on overseas trade. Most merchants had diverse portfolios that included both overseas and inland trade. Many immigrants arrived from Spain in the eighteenth century, especially Basques, who often married into high Lima society and created family networks that stretched from Europe to Lima and into the hinterland. The acceptance of these immigrants and their integration into the already-established colonial elite tended to bridge over the Spaniard-creole divide, which now seems not so pronounced as previously believed.23 Leading merchants often bought governmental positions. The purchase of office not only facilitated their economic and political networks but also provided the crown with much-needed revenue. A list of judges (oidores) in the Lima audiencia, for example, provides almost a “Who’s Who” guide to late colonial Lima.24Yet the high officials of the colonial state were not necessarily synonymous with the colonial elite. Viceroys had their own courtly circles and retainers relatively autonomous from local society. Earlier in the century, Viceroy Marqués de Castell dos Rius, for example, had arrived in Lima with twelve advisors, two pages, two valets, a surgeon, three musicians, two butlers, four cooks, and five footmen.25 Viceroys and royal bureaucrats also recruited advisors, as Viceroy Manso de Velasco would do with Louis Godin, a French savant who played a prominent role in the rebuilding of Lima. He also counted on five key aides: Tomás Durán, Pedro José Bravo de Lagunas y Castillas, José de la Cuadra, Francisco Ramón de Herboso y Figueroa, and Antonio de Boza y Garcés.26 At the center of the Bourbon Reforms and absolutism in general was the attempt to shift political power away from local elites and towards the colonial state.In the eighteenth century the boundaries between different ethnic groups became increasingly blurred. Instead, a single distinction between “gente decente” (decent people) and the plebe took hold. Nonetheless, intellectuals discussed race almost obsessively in virtually every treatise or representation from the period.27 Lima was a multiethnic city. A 1700 census divided the inhabitants into four categories: 56 percent white, 12 percent Indian, 10 percent mulatto, and 22 percent black, in a total population of 34,724. A 1790 document further divided the population into nine ethnic groups. It calculated that Spaniards (“whites” in the 1700 census) made up 38 percent of the city’s population, blacks 18 percent, mulattos 12 percent, mestizos 9 percent, Indians 8 percent, zambos (Indian and black descent) 7 percent, and other groups less than 5 percent each. The population total was 49,443.28Lima’s different classes rubbed elbows on a daily basis. They met in the Plaza de Armas or other public areas and often shared roofs, if not living arrangements. Travelers noted, in many cases with dismay, the multiethnic nature and vibrant street culture of Lima, as well as the opulence of the city and its multihued, frequently truculent lower classes. Amédee Frezier, a naval captain, who, like other French (and English) travelers, emphasized the political weaknesses and the social excesses of the population of Spanish America, described sumptuous festivities such as the two blocks paved with silver for the entrance of Viceroy de la Palata in 1682.29 Frezier and other authors criticized the elite’s superficiality while condemning the licentiousness of the city’s lower classes and, often, of the female population. Months after the earthquake, in an attempt to placate divine wrath, the church drew up strict dress codes for women.30 Still later, an anonymous account of Lima, apparently written in the 1770s, claimed that blacks and mulattos made up more than half of the city’s population and contended that “it is impossible that there is another country in the world where these people are as licentious as here.”31 The 1746 earthquake literally threw Lima’s different people together, bringing to light deep social tensions.32The arid coastal strip of western South America, near the steep slopes of the Andes, did not provide Lima with easily available stone or wood for building. In fact, the wood-burning kilns used for making bricks led to the deforestation of the Lima hinterland by the seventeenth century. Ships brought stone from Panama and Arica and cedar and oak from Guayaquil, Nicaragua, and Chile.33 Colonial builders, consequently, relied on the prehispanic practice of using flexible materials such as adobes or wattle and daub made from mud plaster and bamboo or other reeds. In the absence of rain, houses had light roofs, a key explanation for the relatively small death toll in the earth quakes of 1687 and 1746. These calamities confirmed the advantage of light and flexible materials.34 Property owners often camouflaged these rustic materials by painting the walls with bright colors or giving them the appearance of stone. Ground seashells provided the paste for whitewash, while indigo and red ocher brightened walls.Churches and the houses of Lima’s affluent society counted on grandiose facades, high walls, and wooden balconies and doors to distinguish their structures from more humble ones that, in fact, were built of the same material and techniques. The San Francisco, La Merced, and San Agustín churches, built in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with stunningly elaborate facades, were marvelous examples of baroque architecture in Peru. Earlier, the Jesuit Bernabé Cobo contrasted the sumptuous furniture and fixtures of the residences of Lima’s upper classes with their barren outer walls, but by the eighteenth century property owners were everywhere commissioning ornate exteriors.35 In fact, Raúl Porras Barrenechea, a discerning student and enthusiast of colonial Peru, pointed out the similarities between eighteenth-century Lima and its elite inhabitants: elaborate and even cold on the outside yet warm and gracious inside.36 Intricate iron and bronze gates, windows, and inner doors gave work to the city’s artisans and shielded the homes of the upper classes in the eighteenth century. These structures concealed, in both the physical and social sense, the upper classes from the lower orders. Alberto Flores Galindo likens Havana, deemed by Alejo Carpentier “the city of columns,” to Lima, “the city of rejas” or gates and grilles.37 The rejas vividly reflected both the increasingly public and ostentatious expressions of wealth and power, and the fear of social upheaval in eighteenth-century Lima.Lima’s colonial houses followed the Mediterranean enclosed-courtyard style, with the sitting room (sala) and dining room (cuadra) off to the side of the first patio, and the bedrooms across from them on the far side of the patio. In the more luxurious houses, the kitchen and servant quarters were found in the back, off a second patio. Owners often rented out rooms with street access to petty merchants and shopkeepers, who lived in built-in lofts. Where houses had two stories, stairs were in the first patio, sometimes built into the sitting room. Oratorios or prayer rooms were also often found in the sitting room and served as important places of refuge and supplication during earthquakes.38The earthquake damaged virtually all of Lima’s residences and erased or weakened, at least temporarily, a number of other social markers. Although the houses of the elite initially fared better thanks to the stability of their wooden door and window frames, their heavy walls and facades often fell, causing great damage. In the immediate aftermath of the earthquake, members of Lima’s upper core camped in plazas and empty fields, put on any clothing that they could salvage, and hustled for food and water. In his memoirs, the viceroy himself described sleeping in a tent in the Plaza de Armas.39 The catastrophe also weakened social control. The danger of mass looting and even social chaos terrified the Lima population. The colonial state exerted every effort to impose order.People besieged Callao in pursuit of unprotected riches, digging for gold, silver, and other valuables, and stripping rings and other jewelry from cadavers. Others lined the beaches to gather the goods washed up on shore, while thieves took advantage of the smoke and chaos in Lima to ransack the tottering houses of the affluent. The viceroy formed three armed patrols “to repress the insolence of the people, principally that of blacks and slaves.”40 He also set up gallows in Lima and Callao, sent additional soldiers to patrol the city center and the beaches, ordered that the partially destroyed royal armory and royal mint be guarded carefully, and threatened that thieves would be hanged immediately.41 In addition, he named officials in different neighborhoods to super vise burials as well as to impose “quietud y buen orden” and commanded, in order to discourage looting, that food be distributed only in the Plaza de Armas.42 The Marquis de Obando bitterly noted, however, that “the utterly crude plebe robbed many people, and although our viceroy punished some thieves, he did not manage to intimidate them, since the houses of the most powerful were abandoned, and their owners dazed.”43Discussions of crime in colonial Peru inevitably entailed race, and discourse following the 1746 earthquake was no exception. José Eusebio Llano y Zapata, a leading intellectual who wrote several accounts of the earthquake, commented that thieves and looters abounded “above all in Peru in which the difference in nations has made a miscellany of colors and those less inclined to blush are more inclined to larceny and insults such as these damn rebels.”44 Every first-person account referred to the lower classes’ propensity to theft and the slaves’ penchant for fleeing their owners. The marquis de Obando claimed that in late November, blacks, in order to loot the city, had prompted thousands of people to scurry to the hills to the east by spreading rumors about an impending tidal wave.45 A 300-page memorandum about the controversies in rebuilding the city includes several passages about the ransacking of wood from destroyed or damaged homes. Although the houses surrounding the Plaza de Armas had initially fared better than most, they fell prey to ran-sackers who sold wood at inflated prices. The report claimed that the “licentious and uncontrollable” plebe had stolen all of the wood that had withstood the earthquake, grabbing pieces of timber from debris and tearing boards from standing houses. Because almost all of the city’s population—“nobles and plebes, large and small families”—found shelter in temporary huts with rustic wood frames, the thieves had no problem finding desperate buyers. Nothing could be done to stop trade in this valuable lumber.46 One unfortunate owner lamented that after the earthquake had snapped most of his house’s beams, thieves had taken all the wood that they could lay their hands on and in the following weeks walls collapsed.47 Nuns complained that thieves compounded the convents’ problems by stealing wood.48Descriptions of the earthquake made clear that only the determined measures taken by Viceroy Manso de Velasco prevented the complete breakdown of social control. The “Desolation of the city of Lima” depicted “Blacks and the slaves dedicating themselves to looting deserted ruins” and the “increasingly confident plebe” stealing unprotected goods.49 In the 1740s, just before and after the earthquake, the viceregal state faced the Juan Santos Atahualpa uprising in the central jungle east of Lima. Their difficulties in defeating Juan Santos in a region not too distant from Lima heightened their insecurity after the earthquake. Concern over a mass uprising shaped the policies and language of the colonial state. Viceroy Manso de Velasco enacted harsh measures to ensure social control, while local authors pointed out the danger of social chaos, portraying the lower classes as opportunists seizing on the chance to steal. No author invoked the threat of an uprising, but it was undoubtedly not very far from colonial minds.50After the initial measures taken to assure supplies of food and water and to restore social control, Viceroy Manso de Velasco and city council officials turned to the question of how to rebuild Lima. They surveyed the area east of Lima and discussed the possibility of moving the city.51 Those in favor emphasized that the present site would never be free of the danger of an earthquake, recalling the devastation of 1687 and many others.52 The viceroy rejected this plan, however, primarily because of its cost. He calculated that rebuilding elsewhere would require at least 300 million pesos, an enormous sum. Building a new cathedral alone would demand at least 7.5 million pesos, while repairing it would require only 1.1 million. He also mentioned the high cost of constructing walls around the city and the expense of a presidio to protect it.53 As would occur in Lisbon ten years later, authorities turned down a proposal to move the damaged city because of the high cost.54The city council also presented other arguments against a move. They began with the legalistic or formal point that the viceroy did not have the king’s permission and thus could not even begin to make a decision. They then emphasized the population’s opposition to the move. Among many other disadvantages, the authors stressed that the empty fields and buildings of the abandoned city would become a haven for thieves and vagrants. They worried that giving runaways such a prime place to relocate would further swell the ranks of maroons and weaken the institution of slavery. This image of blacks and other lower-class groups operating independently from a devastated Lima represented one of the primary fears, perhaps nightmares, of the city’s elite. Finally, they pointed out that the move would invalidate the array of obligations and loans (censos) between religious orders and property owners. Not only would this ruin the orders economically but it would be the “seed of endless conflicts and lawsuits.”55 By early 1747, authorities no longer considered moving Lima.Instead, the viceregal regime created an elaborate plan to rebuild the city in such a way as to minimize future damage from earthquakes. The French astronomer, mathematician, and architect Louis Godin oversaw the rebuilding efforts. A member of the Paris Academy of Sciences since 1725, Godin, together with Charles Marie de la Condamine and Pierre Bouguer and accompanied by the Spanish naval officers Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, led the 1735 scientific expedition to determine whether the earth flattened at the equator, as Jean Dominique Cassini contended, or at its poles, as Newton and his followers believed. While successful in scientific terms—they confirmed the oblateness of the earth—the expedition was beset by internal squabbles, harsh conditions, and economic problems.56 In 1744, Godin took the chair in mathematics at San Marcos University in Lima, where he stayed until 1751. In his efforts to rebuild Lima, Godin proved himself to be a technically sophisticated, forthright supporter of strict building codes, a trait that would earn him the enmity of many of the city’s leading families. Many saw him as an intruder arrogantly attempting to impose order on a unruly city, a view that paralleled the reaction many of the Spanish American elite had to the Enlightenment and the Bourbon Reforms.57Godin worked very quickly, presenting his report on November 10, 1746, less than two weeks after the earthquake. He recommended widening streets, limiting the height of buildings, prohibiting arched towers, replacing stone structures with wattle and daub (quincha), and assuring adequate plazas and public space to serve as refuge in case of disasters. He called for streets at least twelve varas wide (0.84 meters or a bit less than a yard) and outer walls no higher than four varas (which was increased to five varas). The walls would count on wide bases for support and taper as they rose. The plan prohibited tall, heavy structures and sought to assure ample space in the streets even if buildings fell. Because the plan prohibited second stories and thus decreased living space, he lobbied unsuccessfully for the demolition of Lima’s surround ing city walls in order that the city might expand outward. Godin warned against the dangers of high buildings and church towers, contending that rebuilding the latter was “to again dig graves.” These reforms were strikingly similar to the measures taken in Europe after the earthquakes in Sicily in 1693 and in Lisbon in 1755, where urban reformers also sought to widen streets and plazas in order to assure escape routes, hinder looting, and provide camping space. The disasters in Europe served as opportunity and pretext to implement the Renaissance ideal of wide, straight streets, in sharp contrast to the medieval pattern of narrow, twisted corridors.58 The debates in Lima resembled those of Lisbon a decade later.Some European urban reformers saw the widened streets not only as a means to rationalize movement and to control the dangerous classes but as a solution to the chaos, stasis, and inequalities of urban society. In other words, these urban reforms might have a utopian element. Key Enlightenment figures such as Rousseau and Voltaire were horrified by conditions in Paris, and Voltaire himself saw widening its streets as part of the solution to the plight of the lower classes. Numerous selections of Diderot’s Encyclopédie touted the advantages of the fluid circulation of air.59 In Peru, however, concerns over social control, particularly of rebellious slaves and the licentious plebe, molded a similar project. To justify his measures, Godin reiterated the threat of slaves fleeing and then settling into abandoned houses. In a supporting document, Viceroy Manso de Velasco described the challenges he faced in the aftermath of the earthquake as a consequence of slaves in and around Lima “disobeying their masters . . . taking over their houses and attempting to keep their belongings,” while the “plebe” robbed at will.60 He blamed Lima’s architecture, contending that the loss of property owners’ dwellings was the root cause of the chaos following the earthquake. In this lengthy document, Godin, the viceroy, and representatives of the cabildo repeatedly justified the drastic changes in building codes in the name of preventing opportunities for slaves to free t