quiroga: a MEXICAN Minsricipio — brand 



71 



which had 155 or 44.5 percent of the 348 civil 

 marriages in the period 1939-45. The least fa- 

 vored months were September, June, August, and 

 July, which had S3 marriages or 23.8 percent of 

 the total. It is evident that the month of mar- 

 riage has very little to do with the month of 

 heaviest conception. 



CIVIL STATUS 



Although estado civil or civil status is not re- 

 corded as such in the civil register, it can be de- 

 rived from the records. Actually, the census gives 

 us the best picture of the situation. Since we did 

 not inquire into this matter, the following discus- 

 sion is based on the 1940 and other censuses. The 

 various civil statuses as listed in table 9 are: 

 Child (under 16 for a male and under 14 for a 

 female), single (unmarried males 16 or older, and 

 unmarried females 14 or older), widowed (wid- 

 ower and widow), divorced, and married (common 

 law, religious, civil, and civil-religious). 



Single males or bachelors have a median age of 

 20 years; the modal age is 18; and five-sixths of 

 the bachelors are between the ages of 16 and 25. 

 Single females or maids have a median age of 18 

 years; the modal age is 14; and 72 percent are 

 between the ages of 14 and 23. Widowers have a 

 median age of 58 and widows have a median age 

 of 54. There are more widows than widowers, 

 and both absolutely and proportionately the 

 widows are both younger and older than the 

 widowers. In general men are more apt to re- 

 marry after the death of a spouse than are women. 

 Many of the men listed as married have been 

 widowed one or more times, but this is rarely 

 true for the women. In the ranchos, and espec- 

 ially in Sanambo, the widows and widowers are 



more apt to remarry than in the town of Quiroga, 

 probably because of the larger families and the 

 farms that must be attended. Women past their 

 thirties tend to live longer than men, which wotild 

 explain the greater absolute and average age of the 

 widows in the oldest 20 percent. There are no 

 divorced men, probably because a greater onus 

 attaches to a divorced female than male, and it is 

 difficult for them to remarry. There are a total 

 of 1,347 married individuals (664 men and 683 

 women), who constitute 655 couples, 9 men whose 

 wives hve elsewhere, and 28 women whose hus- 

 bands live away from Quiroga. This accounts 

 for a total of 692 marriages or families. (If we 

 add the divorced and the widowed we obtain the 

 number of 892 theoretical families.) However, 

 half of the women whose husbands were not hv- 

 ing with them at the time of the 1940 census were 

 married in common law {union lihre) , and probably 

 they had been abandoned. In 1940 civil-religious 

 marriages accounted for 71 percent of the total. 

 It is noteworthy that while the mean age of men 

 who had civU-rehgious marriages was 36, and that 

 of their wives was 33 (actually about a difference 

 of 2% years rather than 3 years), the mean age of 

 men who had religious marriages was about 45 

 and that of their wives about 41. This would 

 indicate an increasing use of the civil marriage 

 ceremony. From the detailed statistics it would 

 appear that married women do not hve so long as 

 single, divorced, and widowed women. This is 

 probably because of the great drain entailed by 

 bearing and looking after children, preparing 

 meals, and doing the laundry. There were no 

 married males or females under 16 at the time of 

 the census. Evidently the marriage of girls of 

 14 and 15 is comparatively rare, but we wonder 

 what happened to the several girls of 14 and 15 

 who were married in Quii-oga in the 12 months just 

 preceding the census of March 6, 1940. Either 

 they moved away or else they aged rapidly after 

 marriage. 



THE FAMILY 



The family statistically, as derived from cen- 

 suses, is nothing more than the individuals of a 

 household. The tendency in Quiroga is patri- 

 local, so that quite often a household will contain, 

 for example, a man, his wife and children, a 

 younger brother with wife, a yet younger brother 

 or sister, and possibly the man's father or mother. 



