Compadrazgo

Pronounced kom-pa-DRAS-go. Plainly: the ritual sponsorship at a baptism, a confirmation or a wedding, and the permanent kinship claim it creates.

The godparent relationship in Spanish Catholic practice is not primarily between the sponsor and the child. It is between the sponsor and the parents, who become compadres and comadres to one another. The tie is lifelong, it is socially binding, and it can be entered by agreement between adults who were not related before.

That is why it belongs in a course about systems rather than in a course about religion. Under Spain, access to a post or to standing generally ran through the favour of an official or a friar. Compadrazgo supplied the instrument for converting a useful stranger into kin, and therefore for moving him from ibang-tao to hindi ibang-tao without waiting for a relationship to develop on its own.

The colony installed both halves of one machine: an office that made a sponsor necessary, and a sacrament that let you acquire one.

Source: Global Informality Project, “Padrino System (Philippines),” which traces the fusion of the Spanish-period sponsorship requirement with the imported Catholic co-parenthood ritual. Free reference-work entry, used here for origin and definition rather than for any claim about prevalence. The administrative half of the story, the office that made a sponsor necessary, is documented through the Blair and Robertson material used in Lesson 1.2.

First used in: 2.2 · One of us, or not one of us