In 1968 the governor of Michoacán issued a decree creating a new municipality. While this area may never have produced a noteworthy politician or general, as Luis González claims, it surely sent to the Colegio de México a skilled and innovative historian. This book contains elements of professional national historiography, a local chronicle written for local readers, and an anthropological study of Mexican settlements.

González presents to the anthropologist an analysis of one human “community” in temporal depth which he can compare to studies of other Mexican settlements. Like ecological anthropologists he never forgets the influence of natural environment on human population. In this volume he treats themes such as clerical leadership in community affairs and innovation, institutional differentiation and occupational specialization through time, and expansion of land ownership among men to whom land appears a principal symbol of status. Other subjects to which he gives attention are social conflict arising from agrarian reform measures, secularization resulting from highways, buses, and geographic mobility as well as from radio and television receivers, and political participation in pursuit of central government development aid despite disdain for it.

González presents to the historian an insider’s view of local history which illustrates that of the nation in the same way that an archaeological excavation helps to reconstruct the total image of a prehistoric civilization. Recognizing that a nation is more than a simple juxtaposition of parts, González offers the kind of parochial history upon which national historiography can be based. His regional microhistory analyzes a cell of national society a specific sample such as sociologists demand for the comparative science of rural life. Yet the most important motive that Gonzalez had in writing this tour de force, perhaps, was the great scope which it afforded him both in research methods and interpretation.

Without placing an identification tag on each theme, González writes so well that the reader readily recognizes his themes, aided by many a felicitous turn of phrase. Human pressure on natural resources stands out to this reviewer as the most important of many significant themes ably discussed. González records that cattle introduced by the Spaniards invaded a depopulated region early in the colonial period. Then little occurred for two centuries. He estimated no more than 150 residents in the 1730s and a doubled baptismal rate by the 1760s, with deliberate pioneer settlement after 1791. The number of huts doubled from the 1830s to the 1850s, with total population passing 2,000 during the 1870s. A priest inspired the people to found the town of San José de Gracia in 1888. Reaching 3,000 on the eve of the revolution, the total population then declined, but a demographic explosion followed 1943. The new municipality contains over 8,000 residents and has already exported many natives to cities. Revolutionary struggles aside, the first brake on headlong repopulation came when the birth rate dropped in 1967. According to Gonzalez, ten percent of the women of child bearing age took contraceptive pills in this congenitally Catholic population.

Is technological salvation too late? In this range country, one proprietor in 1812 became 721 in 1962. Yet rancor grows between landowners and the completely landless. Numbering hundreds of individuals, the latter continue to petition the national government for land where none is available for distribution. They grumble about the “rich.” González reports the poor (and young) to be less courteous, less willing to work in agriculture and servant status, yet less violent than their local ancestors.