Native American Population

In this post we will talk about the native American population after the arrival of the Europeans. So we are going to see the evolution of the population and the consequence of that arrival. We are also trying to understand the reasons that can explain it. We are going to use the following article: “The rate of Population Change in Central Mexico, 1550-1570”, which was written by Cook and Borah, and published in “The Hispanic American Historical Review”.

After Cook and Borah´s article the question of the demography of the colonization became international. But we have to say that the authors weren´t historians, they were professors at the Berkeley university of California, so we should not take this information as absolutely certain.

The main idea of the article is that after the conquest, the population of Mexico decreased, between 1550 and 1570, a 2-4 % every year, not only due to epidemics, also the deterioration on nutrition or the forced work. They are demographers, from USA. They need taxation records because they need mathematical and statistical dates in order to introduce them into equations. They are also accurate dates because the state was interested on it, so he could recollect taxes. But the records securely aren´t real because in a context of conquest they probably lie. They use this documentation thinking that is very accurate. (Sometimes the diseases arrive decades before the Spaniards arrive to a place). So those new proposed causes were voluntaries , not as the epidemics, other causes as overwork or killings.

·         In favor:

First of all, we are going to explain our point comparing the epidemics in Central mexico to the other ones epidemics in Europe and other countries, then, we are to explain the different causes and consequences that we consider that are interfering in the population decrease.

      What we are going to see here is a comparison between the consequences of the different epidemic diseases in another countries, and after analyzing  them, we can say that the epidemics are not enough to explain the decrease of the native population of America. So we have to include other facts, which are not so obvious.

We can divide the facts into two groups:

Main facts:

  “…disease; the systematic killing, ill-treatment, and overwork of the Indians; the disruption of Indian economies and societies caused by conquest and colonization, including its psychological impact; and miscegenation.”

-          Forced work/Overwork and systematic killing:

“The main porpoise of the Spaniards was to civilizate and Christianize them and to exploit them as sources of profit and labor.”

            The Spanish conquers established different kinds of forced works to obtain the most profits from the native population. At the first period, we have to talk about the encomienda, which was a work that natives have to do in exchange of being Christianised. Then, this system was substituted by the repartimiento. Another factor to take into account is the mita, the forced work which was used in the mines,

 “In most areas, the abolition of personal service under the encomienda was replaced by a system of forced labour, the repartimiento.”

“The repartimiento functioned best in Mexico and Peru, where it was more closely supervised and where large numbers of Indians were concentrated who could provide a labour force of reasonable size

“The Indians were reluctant to move into the missions, force was employed, and Indians were often killed.”

 “The mita constituted a large, cheap, dependable source of labour compared to free labour, which was poorly disciplined and difficult to attract”.

-          Disruption of Indian economies and societies psychological impact:

.

                                                                             

-          Miscegenation

       The colonos who arrived to America, were only men, and because of that they had to procreate with native women. This has two main social and demographic consequences: the first one, the indigenous could not procreate as it was before the conquest, consequently their demographic number was less and less numerous.

The second one, in a social aspect, the indigenous lost their own basic culture by the Christianization and the acculturation. 

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

COOK AND BORAH, "The rate of population change in Central Mexico, 1551-1570" in The Hispanic American Historical Review