Essays in Population History, Volume Three: Mexico and California

By Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1979.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520334649

Sherburne F. Cook

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Essays in Population History

Essays

in Population History: Mexico and California

Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah

Volume Three

University of California Press

Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

Copyright © 1979 by

The Regents of the University of California

ISBN: 0-520-03560-7

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 75-123626

Printed in the United States of America

Preface and

Acknowledgements

This is the last volume of Cook and Borah Essays, for Sherburne F. Cook died on November 7, 1974. His death necessarily forced changes in our plans. By the fall of 1974 we had brought one essay near completion; it is Chapter I of this volume. For two more essays, we were in the middle of the inquiry and discussions that over the years we found mutually stimulating and creative. I have completed them—although one, on the California mission records, has been considerably reduced from the scope of our original project. These are Chapters II and III. A fourth inquiry, to identify the epidemics that so devastated the Indian population of central Mexico during the colonial period, we had planned but not begun; that I have abandoned. Implementation would require my collaboration with a scholar trained in physiology or medicine—in short, an intellectual partnership would have to be developed anew.

Accordingly, our third volume has three essays. Chapter I locates the low point of the Indian population of central Mexico at the end of the long decline unleashed by the Spanish Conquest. With that point finally in place, we are able to sketch a reasonably complete outline of the course of Mexican population since 1518 and to demonstrate that the destructive forces introduced by the Europeans brought the Indian population of central Mexico within a century to approximately 3 percent of its 1518 value. The document which furnished the basic data also gave much information on the royal fiscal system, which we have analyzed in the same chapter.

Our second chapter, on food production and nutrition in central Mexico during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, reopens inquiries that had deeply interested a generation of anthropologists in the 1930’s and 1940’s. So much has come to light since those years that we thought the topic worthy of new attention. Our tentative reopening took the form of a paper read at the symposium on socio-economic history at the XLII International Congress of Americanists, held in Mexico City in September 1974. Although that paper excited considerable interest, it was not published in the proceedings because shortage of funds led the secretariat of the Congress to omit all symposium papers. The content of that paper, here included in a considerably extended essay, revises views we had published earlier: We propose a theory of sustained undernutrition as the lot of the bulk of the population of central Mexico in late aboriginal times.

Chapter III, on the registers of eight northern California missions, moves our focus from central Mexico and the Caribbean to California. The shift was not a departure from our central concern with the impact of the coming of the Europeans upon the Indians of Mexico, but rather an extension of that concern. For Sherburne Cook, further, it meant returning to the territory of many of his earlier studies. He had long wished to apply to the California mission registers the kinds of analysis we had learned for Mexican materials. When we found that the research funds available to us—modest indeed by present standards for demographic or social science research, but generous by any terms we had had before—would cover the costs, we agreed to collect data to analyze the registers of the California missions. Our plan was to start with those among the Costanoan Indians and widen our scope gradually to include those of the rest of the state. We also hoped to complement materials from the California missions with study of one or two comparable groups elsewhere in the Southwest of the United States and the North of Mexico. At the time of Sherburne Cook’s death, we had collected data for seven northern California missions, were drawing off data on Mission Santa Clara, and were about to begin negotiations for access to the registers of the other northern California missions. Chapter III in this volume thus represents a truncated implementation of our project; it covers the eight missions for which we had collected or were collecting data. Now that we have shown what can be done, others may carry out similar, and perhaps better, work on the other missions. Our essay indicates need for considerably more examination of the functioning of the California missions; the potential for new insight is far from exhausted.

In preparing the essays of this volume, as for those of the earlier ones, we have had much help and kindness, which we should want remembered. Film and permission freely to use the document basic to Chapter I, we owe to the gracious understanding of His Excellency, the Duque del Infantado; to the good offices of his sister, the Reverend Mother Cristina de la Cruz de Arteaga; and to the disinterested and generous wish to further scholarly inquiry of E. William Jowdy, then a graduate student working in the archives of Madrid. In the preparation of Chapter II, we have needed and have had much advice and help from colleagues on the various campuses of the University of California. They are, among others, Martin Baumhoff, Lincoln Constance, Robert Heizer, Jonathan Sauer, and John M. Tucker. For access to materials and assistance of other kinds for Chapter III, we are indebted to the officials of the diocesan archive of the Monterey-Salinas diocese; to the library of the University of Santa Clara; to the good will toward all scholars of Father Norman Martin, S.J., of the University of Santa Clara, and to the librarians and archivists, past and present, of that institution; to the Genealogical Society of Utah through its branch in Oakland, California; and to Father Stafford Poole, C.M. Finally, our work on California missions has been greatly aided by the assistance of Thomas Workman Temple III, Dr. Maria C. Puerta, and Dr. Harry Cross. Dr. Cross has served not merely as research assistant but also as statistical aide. His help has been indispensable in reducing a mass of data into comprehensive parallel tables. Finally, let me record my deep personal gratitude to my co-author for a quarter of a century of warm and stimulating partnership. WOODROW BORAH

Contents 1

Contents 1

Abbreviations Used in Citations

Chapter I Royal Revenues and Indian Population in New Spain, ca. 1620-1646

Chapter II Indian Food Production and Consumption in Central Mexico Before and After the Conquest (1500-1650)

Chapter III Mission Registers as Sources of Vital Statistics: Eight Missions of Northern California

Works Cited or Consulted

Index

Abbreviations Used in Citations

A NOTE ON MONEY

Colonial Mexican money (silver pesos of 8 reales, each real of 12 granos) is written as in the old English system: 1/3/11. If there are no granos, the third grouping is omitted, but there is always a notation for the peso, as 1/ and 0/7.

Chapter I

Royal Revenues and Indian Population in

New Spain, ca. 1620-1646

1. INTRODUCTION

In a series of earlier studies, we examined materials on the Indian population of central Mexico and made calculations of numbers based upon our analysis of those materials. We have thus been able to present estimates for various years in the sixteenth and the first decade of the seventeenth centuries. For the convenience of the reader we list them:

These are based upon samples whose extent and ease of interpretation vary considerably. The estimate for 1568, the most firmly based, derives from a sample of perhaps 90% of the towns in central Mexico, which were newly counted in terms of a reformed and relatively uniform classification of tributaries and half-tributaries. That for 1605 is based upon a small sample of towns whose populations had shrunk so badly that they were relocated in new larger towns under the policy of congregación.1

At the other end of the colonial period, calculations of Indian population are comparatively simple for various years of the eighteenth century, since tribute counts for that century are frequent and careful, and the viceregal administration was making the first attempts at general civil censuses. So for the eighteenth century, scholars have abundant material, subject to the new problems that arise from the increasing number of racial mixtures in the population and the growing confusion in the application of social and racial criteria to them.2

The span of years from 1610 to perhaps 1700, in contrast, has presented a gap in evidence. Yet those years contain the point at which the Indian population of central Mexico reached its nadir and began to recover from the long decline unleashed by the European Conquest. Our difficulty, like that of other students, has been to find materials that under treatment could provide evidence. In recent years a number of papers have appeared that offer partial or regional approaches to the problem. In August 1962, in a paper read at the XXXV International Congress of Americanists in Mexico City, José Miranda presented comparisons of prevailing tribute assessments for a number of towns in the bishoprics of Mexico, Puebla, and Micho- acán for two periods in the seventeenth century: 1644-1657 and 1692—1698. He found them in accounts of the half-real for cathedral construction (medio real de fábrica) levied annually on every Indian tributary and directly convertible to the prevailing tribute assessment. There was no indication of the precise year when the assessments were made. Miranda’s material showed a substantial increase in Indian population, on the order of 28%, between assessments in force in 1644-1657 and in 1692-1698. He conjectured that the low point of the Indian population came in the 1620’s or 1630’s.3

Subsequently, in our study of the historical demography of one small region in central Mexico, the Mixteca Alta, published in 1968, we made use of the Montemayor y Cordova de Cuenca count of that region in 1661, found in the Archivo General de Indias, in Seville. Analysis of the count indicated that the nadir of Indian population in the Mixteca Alta probably came in the decades 1600-1620 at a value of from 20% to 25% of the population in 1569, and as little as 3% or 4% of the pre-Con quest level. The Montemayor y Cordova de Cuenca report also gave the dates of the previous counts and so provided the first clear evidence of the extent to which prevailing accounts should be adjusted to an average year some time back.4

Another study, which we published in 1971, of the population of west-central Mexico, 1548—1960, indicates-that the low point of Indian numbers in that region occurred around 1650, with a value of slightly over 12% of that for 1548 and 33% of that for 1570.5 Much of west-central Mexico, however, was conquered and settled later than central Mexico. Moreover, it remained essentially a frontier area until late in the colonial period. Accordingly, the experience of west-central Mexico cannot be extrapolated directly, without adjustment, to central Mexico.

More recently, a study by Günter Vollmer on Indian towns in southern Puebla sets the low point of the Indian population at approximately 1650, when he estimates it to have been 27% of the value for 1570.6 Another study, by Claude Morin, of Santa Inés Zacatelco in the Puebla basin suggests also that the low point of population in central Mexico occurred around 1650, with perhaps 816,000 Indians.7 A more general study of central Mexico in the seventeenth century, by J. I. Israel, holds that the Indian population of central Mexico, having fallen to a level of between 1% and 2 million in 1607, continued to decline at least until the middle of the century. Increase did not become manifest until 1671.8 So the effort to fill the gap has continued, with fair agreement that the low point of the Indian population came in the seventeenth century, although there has been no agreement on a more exact placing of the point within that span of years nor on the value to be assigned to the Indian population at that point. Our own two studies, it will be noticed, differ on placement of the point, admittedly for two very different regions.

Clearly the resolution of this question required more data in the form of counts of Indian population in the early and middle decades of the seventeenth century. Since there had been available as yet almost no tribute counts for that period, we turned to another possible source of information in the records of the pastoral inspections of bishops, some of them published, others unpublished but available in manuscripts. Unfortunately, those for the seventeenth century did not give adequate information on numbers of Indian tributaries, total population, or some group in the population that would give a clue to total number.9 So this attempt met a dead end.

Ideally, we wanted a set of counts taken in a relatively short period of time and covering all of central Mexico, either like the Montemayor y Cordova de Cuenca count for the Mixteca Alta or those of the tribute reform of the 1560’s. In the absence of the ideal, we could use a statement of prevailing assessments, like those in the encomenderos’ petition of 1597, but would have to understand that the data referred to the time when each count was made and that an average year should be calculated to adjust for the lag in the set as a whole. In 1958-59 Woodrow Borah spent a sabbatical year in Spain for the purpose inter alia of hunting for just such material. The search turned up the Cordova de Cuenca count and a great deal of eighteenth-century data, but only a few scattered town counts for the rest of central Mexico. After that and searches in Mexico, we häd decided that the hunt would have to be left to the next generation of scholars exploring as yet ill-known reaches of the Archivo General de Indias, the bodega of the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City, or the largely unknown private archives of Spanish noble families, few of which in 1958-59 were open to scholars. Then, literally out of the blue, an airgram dated October 24, 1971, came to Woodrow Borah from E. William Jowdy, then a graduate student at the University of Michigan and doctoral candidate under the guidance of Charles

Gibson, doing archival research in Madrid. Jowdy reported finding a document in the archive of the Duques del Infantado which gave much information on royal revenues and tribute assessments in the Audiencia of Mexico in 1646. A reply by return mail indicating that the find might be very important brought a generous offer to try to secure a film copy for our use. Jowdy brought the matter to the attention of the Duque del Infantado through the good offices of the latter’s sister, the Reverend Mother Cristina de la Cruz de Arteaga, whereupon the duke graciously gave full permission to film the document and use it in any way.

The document of thirty-three folios is found among the papers of the Conde de Salvatierra, viceroy of New Spain from November 1642 to May 1648, when he moved to Peru. It forms folios 148—180 in volume 54 of the archive, the entire volume being correspondence and reports of various kinds of the Conde de Salvatierra for the years 1645-46.10 The document consists of a one-folio letter of transmittal and thirty-two folios of report, both dated at Mexico City 4 September 1646, and signed by Juan de Cervantes Casaus, Contador Mayor of the Tribunal de Cuentas.11 It is addressed merely to an excelentísimo señor, who could be either the viceroy or the visitador- general, Juan de Palafox y Mendoza, but since the closing paragraph of the report states that it was prepared at the express command of the visitador-general, it seems probable that the report and covering letter are addressed to him. On the other hand, since the document is among the Salvatierra papers, it may be that we deal here with a second clean, signed copy prepared for the viceroy as well. The personal papers of both men have become part of the archive of the Duques del Infantado.

It is worth recalling here that the Palafox visita, a remarkably stormy one, occurred during years of unusual strain for the monarchy in Spain—continuation of the Thirty Years’ War, the dissolution of the Crown Union with Portugal, and the revolts

of Catalonia and Naples—and of perhaps the low point of decay and inefficiency in royal administration in New Spain. The royal government was in ever greater need of funds just when the treasury in the Audiencia of Mexico found that local costs absorbed almost all local revenues. New taxes, such as stamped paper, were imposed, but were just coming into yield in 1646. On royal command Palafox removed one viceroy, the Marqués de Villena, a relative of the Duke of Braganza and new King of Portugal, through fear of disloyalty, and governed the colony until the arrival of the Conde de Salvatierra. In the end, the political storms arising from attempts at church reform delayed attempts at reforming civil administration, despite the cooperation of Salvatierra and Palafox in finding funds for remittance to Spain. Salvatierra was promoted to be viceroy of Peru; Palafox was recalled to Spain shortly afterward and left Mexico in June 1649.12 A normal element in any general inspection would have been a review of the royal finances; in the special circumstances of the Castilian monarchy in the 1640’s, one was especially necessary and incumbent upon both visitador-general and viceroy. The report of 1646 was at least part of such a review.

The closing paragraph of the report clearly states that the review was ordered by Palafox, at what date we have no clear indication. The covering letter asks pardon for delay in preparing the report, blaming the delay upon burden of work and upon the difficulty of obtaining precise figures, since collections of royal revenues in the provinces (alcaldías mayores) were sometimes placed in charge of the governors and sometimes entrusted to others at the decision of the Comptroller of Tributes and Sales Tax. The report, therefore, must have been asked for some months or even years before the date it bears. Preparation, even in terms of the leisurely processes of that period, was delayed and made difficult by the complex subdivision of administration of royal finance, which defeated any attempt at centralized supervision and accounting. The amounts due as royal tribute, one of the principal sources of revenue, could be ascertained by consulting the assessments of the Indian towns; but, without resort to the Comptroller of Tributes and Sales Tax, there was no way of determining amounts paid and in arrears, the latter a considerable sum. The yield of taxes leased out could be ascertained easily, and averages estimated for some revenues of variable yield, directly administered by the Crown, such as the state monopoly of mercury and other taxes upon mining. Even so, the clerks collecting the material worked with surprising negligence, since, as we shall see, they passed over the folios of tribute assessments for a large number of Indian towns. The report is a substantial sample rather than a full statement. It is, nevertheless, a remarkable view of the royal finances in the Audiencia of Mexico for what were probably the years of most corrupt and inefficient fiscal administration during the entire colonial period. In the 1650‘s there was a drastic overhaul of the administration of Indian tributes and the royal monopoly of mercury after a quarter-century of virtual paralysis.

We now discuss the report under the rubrics of data on Indian population and the royal fiscal system.

2. INDIAN POPULATION

The initial determinations that must be made are how complete is the coverage of the data on Indian tributaries—i.e., how many towns are represented in the report and what is their proportion to the total number in the Audiencia of Mexico at the time; and further, what year should be set as the average date for the counts on which the assessments were based, since all of them must have been made some time before the formal tribute was set and an even longer interval before the listing in the report. Let us start with the second matter.

In terms of mid-sixteenth-century town boundaries, there are approximately 740 towns in the 1646 list. The statements of tribute for towns held by the Crown give the amounts due under the standard tribute assessment of money, maize, cacao, cotton cloth, etc.; the amount of money due as servicio real, an additional tax of four reales per tributary; and usually an additional statement on the number of tributaries found at the count on which the assessment was based. For example, the statement on Atoyac finishes respecto de tener ciento y quarenta y tres tributarios [since it has 143 tributaries]. For towns held partly by the Crown and partly by an encomendero, the statement of