Abstract

The rules and values associated with the genres in colonial Chile are outlined, reviewing their possible changes in time and how these identities acquire particularities in agreement with their application with the other social hierarchy systems. For this account, a joint of family and society studies in colonial Chile are reviewed. There is a description of the general features of the constitution of the new societies since the Conquest, analyzing then the articulation of the ethnic and genre hierarchies after the establishment of the colonization. The relative rules of family and marriage, the problems brought by the tension among the social norms, a rigid religiousness and a society under construction originated a distance between rules and practices, frequently expressed as transgressive behaviors and a certain amount of social tolerance to them. There is a revision as well of sexual division of labor and their specificities by class.