No one has published more on mission populations than Robert H. Jackson. Here, as the subtitle indicates, he seeks to compare a region in South America with one on the north Mexican frontier in terms of environmental, economic, and political impacts and sociocultural variations. Jackson presents a chronology of mission building in each of his study areas, then comments in the following chapter. Unfortunately, his writing is choppy and frequently confusing, contributing to the unevenness of this book.
Jackson concludes that missionaries who tried to implement Mediterranean-style agriculture in the New World had to modify their approach to semitropical, tropical, semiarid, and arid environments, but this is already well known. He is on firmer ground discussing the differing mortality rates between the Guarani Indians in present-day Paraguay and Indians in northern Mexico. The Guarani population was much larger than other mission populations, and they practiced sedentary agriculture. Their populations remained...
