ABSTRACT
In early June of 1772, Mariano Cabrera, a creole Spaniard from the town of Cadereita, filed a petition with the court of the Archdiocese of Mexico in which he pleaded for dispensation from the incest bond that prohibited him from marrying Juana de Olvera, a distant cousin to whom he claimed relation of the third degree of consanguinity.1 Cabrera asserted that as a poor orphan, it would be difficult for Olvera to secure another match, and that in any case, marriage without dispensation would be difficult for both him and his intended under any circumstances ‘because we are related to everybody in this region’. In later testimony, both he and Olvera attested that, in their ‘misery and fragility’, they had engaged in carnal relations with one another. Four days after Cabrera filed his petition, Bernabé Loredo, a sculptor and distant relative of the couple, appeared before the local ecclesiastical judge, parish priest Mariano del Villar, ‘to unburden his conscience’. Loredo declared that he had discussed the proposed match at length with the labourers and herdsmen with whom he worked, and all had confirmed that it was ‘public and notorious’ that Olvera was the illegitimate daughter of Cabrera’s aunt. The couple were thus first cousins related to one another by the second degree of consanguinity rather than the third. After hearing the testimony of several witnesses, Mariano del Villar wrote Manuel Barrientos, Vicar General and acting Archbishop of Mexico, in support of the couple’s application and echoing all the arguments Cabrera had himself made. A few days later, Barrientos granted the couple a routine dispensation of the consanguinity impediment and allowed them to proceed with their marriage.2
