Panama’s authorities identified and combatted unmarried cohabitation or "amancebamiento" as a threat to the social order. This chapter discusses marriage’s lack of popularity on the isthmus, due to non-Catholic cultural traditions as well as the convenience and potential advantages of “living in sin.” In particular, it notes a proliferation of young widows described as “single” but free from paternal and conjugal authority. Alongside legal and fiscal measures to promote marriage, cases for marital separation or annulment provide insights into gendered obligations associated with the sacrament. Such cases’ success at court depended upon family support and alleged compliance with gender obligations. Other women turned to magic to shape their marital, affective, and economic relations. Inquisitorial trails, recorded in the summaries sent from Lima or Cartagena to Madrid, detail the experiences of Afro-descendants whose amatory and divinatory techniques garnered them prominent clienteles or merged with indigenous traditions in nocturnal revelries. Finally, Portugal’s separation from the crown of Castile disrupted the slave trade more than Portuguese residents in Panama.

Panama’s most important festivity, the annual Corpus Christi processions, featured the performance of gender and ethnicity. Celebrations involved Congo, Biafara, Bran, and other Black confraternities, as well as a longstanding dispute for precedence between members of the ship-builders’ and the stocking-makers’ guilds, who struggled for proximity to the monstrance. The most dramatic dispute in the Cathedral, however, entailed a battle for precedence between the wives of the city councilors and the spouses of the royal judges. Controversy over seating arrangements enabled the judges and city councilors to submit conflicts over their respective status to the king, who eventually allowed the judges’ wives, and even their mothers, to receive communion in the main chapel.

The Body of Christ and the Immaculate Conception involved diverse groups of Africans, Indigenous Americans, Europeans, and their descendants in dynamic, often contested, roles and positions within the Hispanic Monarchy. Deliberately incorporating women and men of different ethnicities or “nations,” the crown and church needed them. The Empire, understood as a long-distance framework for government, communication, exchange, evangelization, and profit, depended upon the far-flung populations that informed and transformed it. Origins, gender roles, legal status, relations, and experience shaped, without determining, interactions, rootedness, and mobility.

Like the body of Christ, the Virgin Mary’s purity became a matter of social inclusion and cohesion. Until the late sixteenth century, the absence of a female religious community made marriage or migration the most “respectable” alternatives for women of means in Panama. The foundation of the Convent of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception in 1597 created another option for women with economic resources and administrative capabilities. Accompanied by slaves and servants, these women successfully opposed a royally appointed bishop in the 1620s. Led by doña Ana de Ribera and Sor Beatriz de la Cruz, also known as doña Beatriz de Isásiga, the community secured donations in order to construct a water reservoir. A high-quality supply of fresh water enabled the nuns to increase their community’s income and avoid the city’s most important health hazards, while demonstrating its purity.

Sixteenth-century efforts to abolish indigenous slavery informed precedents for Africans and their descendants seeking freedom on the isthmus. The monarchy’s efforts to combat maroonage by establishing free indigenous and African settlements highlight plural and shifting affiliations. At the same time, migrants from Nicaragua and Peru joined others from the Rivers of Guinea (many described as Zape, Biafara, or Bran) and a growing population of “Angola”, between slavery and freedom. Bureaucratic efforts to differentiate groups revealed cultural and biological mixture among them. Although some Spaniards made provisions for their children with Indigenous and African women to travel to Castile, many marriageable offspring of mixed unions chose to remain in Panama, where they could to draw upon maternal as well as paternal kinship networks. Some of these women entered a first-generation colonial elite that did not present itself as mixed. In this sense, “disappearance” of the area’s indigenous population belied the incorporation of some of its members and their descendants into the local oligarchy.

The ruins of Panamá Viejo’s Cathedral, with a tower symbolizing the national past, provide a popular site for weddings and other events during the “dry season” from January through April. In 2017, however, such celebrations took place elsewhere. With support from the European Research Council (ERC CoG 648535) and the Patronato Panamá Viejo, local workers, university students, archaeologists, and bioanthropologists undertook research-driven excavations in the Cathedral nave. The results, meticulously recovered and analyzed, proved even more surprising than the team’s bottom-up approach to the first European settlement on America’s Pacific Ocean (see Map I.1 and Figure I.1).

According to most accounts, the Spanish conquest decimated and nearly obliterated the region’s Indigenous populations. Genetic evidence from the isthmus, nevertheless, has pointed to an 80% indigenous maternal legacy in Panama’s present-day population. While common in Central and South America, sex-biased admixture led to the legal exportation of enslaved indigenous males but not females from the isthmus, reflecting and reinforcing the invaders’ dependency on local women’s labor and knowledge. Further evidence that the indigenous or Cueva population did not simply disappear comes from historical records of indigenous women’s unions with Spanish and African men. When consensual, such alliances provided newcomers pursuing “the secrets of the land” commercial and military aid. While relying upon such support, Spanish rarely recorded the importance of marriage, warfare, and trade for affirming legitimacy in the region, and even more rarely acknowledged the value of polygamy, polyandry, and matrilineal inheritance in the societies they encountered.

Merchants and travelers sought food, lodging, entertainment, care, and other services in Nombre de Dios, Panama and Portobello, as well as at the inns punctuating the land and water routes between them. Sometimes accompanied by husbands and more often by slaves, enterprising women of diverse ancestry offered a range of services across the isthmus. In contrast to Seville or Malaga, Panama’s authorities, like those of New Spain, avoided regulating prostitution. Instead, they protested the unlicensed migration of unattached women from Castile and the sexual abuse of enslaved women. Sources described prostitution, like debt or enslavement, as a temporary misfortune.