Compadrazgo, co-parenthood, names the Latin American Catholic institution that extends the relationship between a child's parents and the godparents chosen at baptism, confirmation or marriage into a durable and socially significant bond, compadre and comadre, joining the two sets of adults themselves as much as it joins godparent to godchild. The institution grows out of the Catholic sacramental practice of baptismal sponsorship, in which godparents formally undertake responsibility for a child's religious upbringing should the parents be unable to provide it, but Latin American compadrazgo elaborated this canonical religious role into a much broader social relationship carrying its own etiquette, mutual obligations and forms of address that operate independently of whether the religious duty is ever actually invoked.
Selecting godparents became, across many Latin American communities, a significant social decision in its own right, often used deliberately to formalize and strengthen a friendship, a professional relationship, or a bond across different social or economic strata within a community. The term itself, compadre, derives from the Latin cum pater, with the father, marking the relationship linguistically as a form of co-parenthood rather than a simple friendship, even where the religious content of the original sponsorship has faded into the background of daily practice.