| Summary: | The marriage market of Mexico City in the eighteenth century evidenced unique characteristics: a marked disproportion between the male and female populations of marriageable age, strong socioethnic restrictions and considerable tendencies toward racial endogamy. These factors as a whole generated a nuptiality pattern characterized by older males and relatively young females at marriage; at the same time, they favored the rise of a considerable "black" marriage market, as reflected in the high rates of illegitimacy.During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in the evolution of these patterns on can observe a gradual hardening of the system and very few possibilities for the creation of a free marriage market for all inhabitants.
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