| Resumo: | This text analyzes the patriarchal network of Tomás Ruiz de Apodaca, a merchant from Cadiz, in order to examine strategies of upward mobility, political influence and bureaucratic intervention in the Spanish colonies. Access to employment, an old subject for institutional historiography, is enriched with an analysis of the complex ties of reciprocity, loyalty and protection offered by Ruiz de Apodaca in order to weave the network of relationships needed to allow him to operate over a wide geographic area and at a variety of levels of power and bureaucratic decision-making. By examining ethnic background, kinship (both consanguineous and by affinity), the coordinated actions of professional intermediaries and corruption, we can see how the networks and bureaucratic institutions of the old regime were articulated through informal decision-making mechanisms based around information, favors and trust.
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