Students of Latin American demographic history wait for the Dellplain Series to appear—looking for suggestive ideas, fresh methodological applications, as well as for substantive findings. A new collection of ten essays, edited by Robinson, brings under a single cover revised papers already presented at professional meetings or specially commissioned for this book. These papers appear only two years after they were discussed, which by current publication standards is fast. Credit should be given for this to the editor of the series.
These essays stretch over Spanish America and span the entire colonial period. Geographically and chronologically disparate as they are, four major themes seem to run through the book. A basic concern among historians over what source they rely on can be first found. Lombardi looks at the demographic data not for what they tell about the population itself, but from the viewpoint of why and how the imperial state generated these records. B. Evans then offers a glimpse of his pending study of one of the major censuses taken in the seventeenth century, the numeration general of Peru by Viceroy la Plata. Taken at a crucial moment, and also because of its wide coverage and the controversies it then stirred, the numeración still requires a thorough appraisal. The J. and J. Villamarín team discusses in particular the annual (late seventeenth to eighteenth centuries) tributary count, of Bogotá they found. Although tributaries may not be representative in a fixed degree of the overall population, nevertheless, demographic short variations and local trends clearly come out of these summaries. One wonders with hope if similar counts exist for other parts of the Viceroyalty of Peru.
Temporal sequences elsewhere are also studied in the book. Central America is the subject of three chapters dealing with such issues. L. Newson describes how the aboriginal population declined in Honduras after the conquest. G. Levell gives a general step-by-step profile of the population of the Cuchumatan Highlands and G. Lutz provides a locally disaggregated overview of the Quinizalapa Valley, both in Guatemala. N. Cook instead relies on parish registers to trace demographic change in an Indian town in eighteenth-century Collaguas, southern Peru.
A third theme focuses on interaction within local populations. L. Greenow deals with interparish and interracial marriages in late colonial Nueva Galicia; Robinson extracts from eighteenth-century marriage records of Yucatán migration patterns over time and across districts. Migration and miscegenation are again a partial concern of Cook’s article.
Finally, J. Chance describes residential patterns of Oaxaca City by 1792, and Evans, the aboriginal distribution in Upper Peru.
Thematically, as for the approaches used and for the narrower size of the samples now covered, these essays reflect the current trends in the field. Beautifully drawn graphs and maps, not so generously displayed elsewhere, enhance the analyses and texts.