Emotional norms in Central American mobility. Moral order, family ideal and emotional community in eighteenth-century El Salvador

Abstract

This article studies the moral and sexual conduct of the inhabitants of present-day El Salvador during the eighteenth century, a period of remarkable geographical and social mobility. Its hypothesis is the existence of a set of ad hoc emotional norms based on the geographical, economic and social realities of the region. Because of a lack of research in this area, sources are mainly primary, while the theoretical corpus covers family, mobility and emotions, seen from the perspective of Latin American social history. Methodologically, the primary information considered from this angle reveals the mechanisms at work in the emotional communities of the past in Central America and shows how social survival was achieved through mobility.