Introduction
This interview was conducted by representatives of two generations of students who worked with Woodrow Borah, one in the 1960s and one in the 1980s. To work with Borah was to be constantly involved in an implicitly intellectual duel wherein students sought to avoid Borah’s thrusts with parries and thrusts of their own. Elegance of statement and repartee highlighted Borah’s approach. Many history graduate students at Berkeley shied from these gruelling duels, and his seminar students often came from outside the Department of History. While undergraduate students remarked on his reputation as a severe grader, large numbers nevertheless filled his classes to enjoy his trenchant lectures.
Woodrow Borah trained in interdisciplinary studies during the 1930s, and belongs to that generation of scholars whose work in the post–World War II decades transformed the study of Latin American history. Taught by such prominent scholars as Carl O. Sauer and Lesley Byrd Simpson, he had made their approaches into a bridge for generations emerging from Berkeley in the 1960s and 1970s.
Within the general tradition of historical inquiry, Borah is an innovator in the use of source material and methodology. He pioneered, with Sherburne F. Cook, the use of time-series statistical documentation and methods of treating it. That he would initiate a revolution in methodology and spark much of the controversy that has occurred within Latin American scholarship during the last thirty years, surprises him. He sees his own work conservatively, stressing as he does the “fundamental continuity of scholarship” as well as the “fundamental continuity of Mexican history.”
Borah’s four major studies in economic history, Silk Raising in Colonial Mexico (1943), New Spain’s Century of Depression (1951), Early Colonial Trade and Navigation between Mexico and Peru (1954), and Price Trends of Some Basic Commodities in Central Mexico, 1551–1570 (with Sherburne F. Cook, 1958), illustrate his own meshing of institutional history with the study of economic and social matters through new sources and methodology.
Borah and Cook maintained a partnership for more than twenty years, until Cook’s death in 1974. Together they wrote twenty-one publications, many published in Ibero-Americana, which essentially came to be seen as the organ of what was to become known as the “Berkeley Demographic School.”
After Cook’s death, Borah abandoned their proposed essay to identify the epidemics that so devastated the Indian population of Central Mexico during the colonial period, but completed the remaining Essays in Population History, which he could write alone. With his retirement from Berkeley in 1980, Borah found himself at last free to return to a topic that Lesley Byrd Simpson had begun to study in Mexico in the 1930s: the General Indian Court. This resulted in the publication in 1983 of Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real, a monumental work dealing with comparative legal history as well as with the Mexican case. The book was awarded the Herbert Eugene Bolton Memorial Prize for 1984.
A professor of speech for fourteen years, Borah moved into the Berkeley Department of History in 1962; there he was awarded the Shepard Chair in 1974. He served as Director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Berkeley from 1973 to 1979. In 1967 he was elected Chair of the Conference on Latin American History; and in 1977-78 he served as President of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association.
The following interview represents only a sampling of the nearly eight hours of tape-recorded conversations that the interviewers held with Woodrow Borah in Berkeley and San Francisco (between November 29 and December 29, 1983). The interview was of course revised and edited as necessary to translate the spoken word (with its emphasis, intonation, and empathy) into the rather stark written word.
James W. Wilkie: Let us begin with your birth, and something of your family.
Woodrow Borah: I was born in 1912 in Utica, Mississippi, a small town in the Pearl River Valley, about 40 miles south-west of Jackson, in a highly rural environment. My family ran a general store. I really do not know how they got to Mississippi; this is one of the questions I never thought to ask, and now it is too late.
In 1914, when I was slightly more than a year old, my grandfather’s youngest son (my uncle) was murdered in a feud. The doctors told my grandfather that if he wished to preserve my grandmother’s sanity, he must leave the area. Not only did he and my grandmother move to New York, my father and mother, older brother, and I went with them. From 1914 to 1923 I lived in various boroughs of the city of New York. In 1923 my father, because of precarious health, was told to go either to California or to Florida. As it happened, the first train to leave when he got to the railroad station went to California.
He went to Los Angeles, and we followed later. I went through LeConte Junior High, Los Angeles High School, and the first years of college—undergraduate and the first year of graduate work in Los Angeles. Then I moved to the San Francisco Bay area, and have been there ever since except for the period of the Second World War and trips to various places.
JWW: How did your folks come to name you?
WB: Woodrow Wilson? I was the first white child born in Utica after the election of 1912, when a Democrat won the presidency for the first time in twenty years. My father would have been lynched if he hadn’t named me Woodrow Wilson.
JWW: Were you excited about moving to California?
WB: I was ten, and not terribly upset or impressed. I certainly enjoyed Los Angeles. Los Angeles High School at that time had a spectacular generation of teachers. There had been for a long time simply two high schools in the city: Los Angeles and Polytechnic. Among the teachers recruited in those early years, a number had Ph. D.’s: my Latin teacher had a Ph.D. from Berlin; my typing teacher had one from Heidelberg. These were scholarly teachers of a quality that mass education very soon destroyed. So I had an extraordinarily fine high school education, probably equivalent to a university undergraduate education today.
Rebecca Horn: Did you have particular subjects in which you were interested in high school?
WB: I was interested in English, Latin, and history. In college I was interested in practically everything; I remember my own distress when I finished my sophomore year and realized that I should have to stop taking breadth courses to enter a narrower universe.
I graduated from Los Angeles High in 1929. The family financial situation was such that I had to go to work instead of going to college. I worked at the May Company for three years in the accounting department and meantime went to night school. I completed my first year of college at night school. Then in 1932 I could go to UCLA, which had moved from its old campus (today’s L.A. City College) to Westwood, a big, raw area with some new buildings. I received my bachelor’s degree in 1935 with a major in history and then went on to graduate work in history, taking an M.A. in 1936. Because UCLA was 14 miles west of my home, when I went there, I stayed all day. That turned out to be a very fortunate thing because with so much spare time I went to the gymnasium to swim or for other exercise, and then went to the library to browse. I became a prodigious browser in the periodical room and other places. The university library was simply a revelation. It held the knowledge of mankind easily available. One could pick up a book and absorb some facet of it or go to a journal and very quickly see what was a growing tip of a subject. In fact, at one point I think I remarked that we students could dispense with the faculty if they would just leave us the library. It was not a remark the faculty appreciated.
RH: And were you already in the History Department at that time?
WB: I had already decided to major in history. Why, I’m not quite sure, because it was not a major that led easily to a career. I assumed that when I finished my B.A., I should be through, but I received a fellowship and was able to go on for the first graduate year. At that point I decided I should like to work toward a Ph.D. The History Department at UCLA was just then beginning graduate work; it was geared to careful teaching of a rather small group—they had thirty graduate students—so that we received a remarkable amount of attention. But toward the end of my first graduate year, my graduate advisor called me in and said, “You know the ropes here too well. You’re not really learning as much as you should. You ought to leave when you finish this year.” I said to him, “Where do I go?” His answer was: “There are two good institutions in the field you seem to want to specialize in, Latin American history. It is either Berkeley or Harvard.” Harvard was out of the question because of cost, and so in the summer of 1936 I transferred to Berkeley.
RH: What prompted your initial interest in Latin American history?
WB: I think that may have arisen out of History 8 (History of the Americas) and Geography. There was a very good man in geography who was writing at that point a study of the agrarian problem in Chile.
JWW: Was that George M. McBride?
WB: Yes. I had gotten acquainted with him and actually read some of his manuscript on Chile. I don’t remember the circumstances, but he was very kind and very encouraging. When I came to Berkeley, I intended to major in geography because of that, but I continued in history. When I began to talk to Herbert E. Bolton about study, he suggested that I make the acquaintance of Carl Sauer. I went across the ravine, talked to Sauer, who, after testing me a little, decided to let me into his seminar. I stayed in that seminar all the time that I was a student and a year or two afterward. The seminar provided an enormous amount of stimulus. Bolton had a huge seminar that dealt with the Southwest and Latin America. The students were probably of the same caliber as Sauer’s, but Bolton treated them very gently, and he did not challenge them or drive them as Sauer did. Many students who could not stand Sauer’s treatment left. Those who stayed got a great deal out of study with him. Sauer had a broadly ranging mind that would bring up new and stimulating questions—they were revelations—and force the students to start thinking about them. Bolton was far more traditional; he let me have my head and do what I wanted, as he let others, by and large, but there was not the same excitement and stimulation that one got in Sauer’s seminar.
JWW: What did Bolton think of your being off in geography with Sauer most of the time?
WB: He encouraged me, and in fact, was delighted. He was a very generous man who was not bothered in the slightest, apparently. So long as I was in his seminar and he was chairman of my thesis committee, he asked no more. He recognized that I was getting a great deal of enrichment and stimulation.
RH: Was the emphasis within the History Department primarily United States and European history?
WB: No, with Bolton there was a heavy emphasis on Latin American history, and upon California and the Southwest. There was probably more interest in this regional history than in Latin America.
RH: Who was on your examination and thesis committee?
WB: I had Bolton, Herbert I. Priestley, Howard M. Smyth, for European; Paul B. Schaeffer for Medieval; Sanford Mosk, Lesley B. Simpson, and Sauer. The latter two gave me an extraordinarily difficult time: Simpson and Sauer, who were called the unheavenly twins in the History Department, had been put on the committee, as they were put on all committees examining anyone who planned to specialize in Latin American history, because the examinations had become rather lax. It was the dean’s way of providing a corrective.
Sauer tried a series of traps and, when these did not work (I would detect the trap), he finally asked me what I thought about the accuracy of Las Casas’s reporting. Well, there I was, caught between Sauer and Simpson: Simpson, who thought Las Casas exaggerated terribly and was most unreliable; and Sauer, who thought he was rather accurate. I had read a good deal of Las Casas by then and thought on the whole he was probably accurate. I decided that I might as well go down fighting for what I thought right, so I answered accordingly. Just as Simpson was preparing to spring, Sauer said: “I guess that’s about right. I’ve new documents that seem to demonstrate it.” And Simpson relaxed.
For my dissertation I had wanted to study a colonial industry; and my examination committee proposed the silk industry in colonial Mexico. After discovering that there was a great deal of material available, I informed Bolton that I would accept the committee’s suggestion.
Thus I spent fourteen months in Mexico. The archive was then in the National Palace. It was a wonderful time. Foreign-owned oil properties had just been expropriated; Mexico was in the fervor of the Cárdenas regime; I was twenty-six. I went to Oaxaca to secure entry into the cathedral archive, where I might find tithe records because I had decided this was the only way I could get some idea of the amount of silk that had been produced. What I did, really, was explore regional archives: Oaxaca, Puebla, Veracruz, all along the railroad lines. On the way out of Mexico at the end of the fourteen months, I did the same along the West Coast route. Apparently getting into regional archives was something of a new idea. In Oaxaca I went into the Mixteca Alta to see if I could find town records and parish archives there. What I found was not of use to me at that time, although it became very important later on. Using the tithe records had occurred to me because of my work in medieval history, which gave me the idea of studying the structure of government and its operations. I had to know how governmental information was gathered, for what purpose, and where the records were deposited. It was an elementary approach in medieval history.
JWW: Did you have an idea of what kind of historian you wanted to be? Did you say “I am a social historian” or “I am an economic or institutional historian”?
WB: I knew that I basically wanted to work in socioeconomic history. I did not want to work in political history, but institutional history was another matter. On that first trip I found the material in the Cortés records that forms the core of the book on early trade and navigation, the records of the voyages to Peru. I also found a list of foreigners held in obrajes and other places in Puebla, a list I published later.
JWW: Were you in much contact with academia in Mexico at that time?
WB: The University of Mexico was then near the Zócalo and Edmundo O’Gorman was underdirector of the archive. He and his family were fabulously kind to me (as well as to Phil Powell, who was also then in Mexico). I met people like Rafael García Granados, Manuel Toussaint, Justino Fernández. These were the people who were heading the new academic institutes that were just beginning to appear in Latin America. The learned world was small, and one could know most of it. Mexican scholars were extraordinarily cordial and hospitable to visiting foreigners and even to graduate students.
RH: How do you account for your interest in the industry of colonial Mexico?
WB: The colonial period was much more studied at that time than the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, primarily because United States historians of Latin America, to a great extent, were interested in origins. They traced the origins of settlement and of towns in the United States back into the Borderlands and into Mexico. In addition, the quality of work on the colonial period was far better than that on the postindependence period. The wish to study an industry was my own preference for economic history. Beyond my readings of economic material in medieval and ancient history, it had seemed to me that the kind of political study that was being done at the time (the life and administration of a viceroy, the founding of a town, the history of an expedition) had really reached a temporary plateau; the stimulation from it would not be great. I have never regretted my decision, I may add.
JWW: What contribution did you feel that you made with your work on silk?
WB: There are two studies in that book. One is a conventional, but careful, study of an industry. The second contribution in the thesis is the chapter on wild silk, which was a somewhat anthropological essay. Actually, I think that was the thing that got the attention of a number of other people.
RH: And another contribution was your moving into provincial, or regional, archives?
WB: Charles Gibson has remarked that that was the beginning of many things. It is true that getting into provincial archives was unusual at that time, but doing so was simply my attempt to equal the exploits of the graduate students in geography, who set out into the field with great joy and disappeared from view for many months. I, being more timid, went to centers that had archives, and also happened to have hotels. People hadn’t done it before very much, and this was the first time that the riches of the local archives in Mexico began to be suspected.
JWW: You went back to Berkeley to write your dissertation.
WB: Yes, it took a year. Of course, there were no jobs, so the following year I lived in Berkeley, rewriting my thesis for publication, drafting an article on tithe history, and doing a series of other things. Priestley gave me a part-time job in the Bancroft Library, putting its transcripts in order, and that provided my livelihood. I had to read the transcripts, and I got many ideas out of them. From reading the correspondence of Luis de Velasco II, I got the germ of the idea that became New Spain’s Century of Depression.
JWW: Tell us about your first teaching post.
WB: In the fall of 1941, Princeton unexpectedly had a one-year position. The person the university had hired as an instructor for Latin American history went off to fight for the British. I was offered the job, took it, and stayed in Princeton until after Pearl Harbor. Then I was called to Washington to work in the Office of Strategic Services beginning April 1, 1942.
RH: What sort of work did you do with the OSS?
WB: I was in one of the open branches (Research and Analysis), helping to assess information on Latin America. One of my functions was to examine those who were being recruited for work on Latin America.
In 1944, I was sent to the United Kingdom and to the Continent to help set up documents teams searching for Axis records. Each team included a person skilled in Latin American matters. My job was to get such a person on each team and to train him to the extent possible. I went on the last team sent out. I traveled through a good part of Germany, particularly the zone that was going to come under Soviet control. I was in Leipzig, for instance, for some weeks in 1945. After a stopover in the United Kingdom, I returned to Washington in the summer of 1945.
RH: You lived in Washington until you finished your work with the OSS?
WB: Yes. Shortly thereafter the OSS was dissolved. I left the State Department in 1947. Then Jacobus ten-Broek, who came to Washington from Berkeley, needed someone to assist him in the Library of Congress. (He was blind.) A mutual friend asked me if I would work with tenBroek, and I agreed. So we worked together, and it turned out that he was interested in recruiting members for the Berkeley Speech Department. He had the idea for a speech department that would bring together a collection of able people from varied disciplines who would teach speech but follow their own bent in research. He broached the idea to me, and I said, “If a job comes up, I’ll certainly take it. It would mean I could return to Berkeley, where I could continue work on the things that interest me.” A job opened quite unexpectedly in the summer of 1948, and the Speech Department asked me if I’d be interested. I started teaching in September.
JWW: Bolton hadn’t offered you anything at UC-Berkeley.
WB: No, there was nothing there. While the Second World War was on, vacancies developed, but he had chosen as his successors in Latin American history George P. Hammond, Engel Sluiter, and Jim King. Lawrence Kinnaird had taken over work on California and the Southwest.
JWW: Did Bolton ever talk to you about the possibility of coming back?
WB: No, it was very clear to me that I would not be invited to teach here. He wanted to get me a good job elsewhere. Bolton warned me very frankly that as a Jew I would have a great deal of trouble getting a job at any college or university, and I met a certain amount of that. Berkeley itself had a good deal of anti-Semitism in the History Department until the early 1950s.
JWW: How about Princeton?
WB: Princeton hired me, knowing that I am Jewish. It was their gesture at tolerance; they were very proud of it.
JWW: You had been brought up in the Jewish tradition?
WB: My father was an atheist, but certainly I was brought up in Jewish culture and ethnicity. If I made a move toward a religious focus, my father intervened to stop it; but afterward I did join a Jewish congregation.
JWW: When did you become interested and how?
WB: I had always been interested in things Jewish, and Jewish culture can exist beyond Jewish religion. In 1945, Terry and I were wed in a Jewish ceremony. When we had children, of course, we wanted them reared as Jews.
JWW: How was your life as a teacher of speech?
WB: I enjoyed teaching speech because a course in technique still has to have content and I could choose the content; I chose current problems and enjoyed very stimulating exchanges between teacher and class. I learned a great deal, and was sufficiently respected that I attained the rank of full professor in eleven years. There was, however, so much dissension in the department that it was a drain on my time and energy. I finally decided that I must leave the department and so informed the dean. He took down a list of the possible departments I could go to and said he would do what he could. Others, including Jacobus tenBroek and Leo Lowenthal, shared the problem. Ultimately I was transferred to history, which had been wanting me anyway.
JWW: Still, in the Speech Department you had found a way to teach Latin America.
WB: Yes, I taught one course that dealt with speeches by Latin Americans on great issues. We would analyze the circumstances and the issues.
JWW: You were also at one point an editor of the Western Journal of Speech?
WB: For a two-year period Don Geiger was the editor and I, associate editor. We divided the subject matter of the field between us. On any paper that came in, we would go to the library and re-do the research and write the author a note suggesting improvement, listing sources that might be consulted, and so forth. It was an interesting business.
RH: What were you doing with your own research?
WB: About 1950 I finally wrote New Spain’s Century of Depression, which started as a paper I read in 1949 at Mills College. Cook and Simpson had published their monograph on Indian population, and I put together the ideas that I got there as well as some from the Bancroft Library transcripts. I had transcribed the Cortés records that I had filmed in 1939 and I started analyzing them: that was the beginning of Early Colonial Trade and Navigation, which came out in 1954. I was also beginning a mammoth study of the Mixteca Alta, which was to cover it from prehistory to the present. Fragments of it have been completed but nothing more.
RH: What led to your approaching Cook in the mid-1950s with the idea of doing population studies?
WB: I had realized that to do a proper population study of the Mixteca Alta, a topic I worked on as time permitted, I needed someone trained in the sciences and with a better knowledge of statistics than I had; so I asked Cook if he were interested in collaboration. Our joint venture began as a meeting several times a week in the afternoons. The sessions became more and more intense and interesting as we went along. Clearing the obstacles to the study of the Mixteca Alta took us a long time and many monographs. Then, we had controversy before our first article was published. The HAHR sent it to the Princeton population group to appraise, and someone there took exception not to the general method or to the conclusion, but rather to the statistical calculations. We had used the newer K method of exponential calculation; they were still using the older method. The K method is based on the die-away rate of radioactive elements. Calculation either way gets you to the same place. Most of our trouble related to that very peculiar point.
RH: Not the twenty-five million figure that you were coming to so early.
WB: I doubt they knew the meaning of it or the fuss it would cause—just as well.
JWW: You were a young scholar making all these assertions that were coming under broad attack. Didn’t this disturb you at all?
WB: Not particularly. First, I was insulated from it by being in the Speech Department. Second, I was insulated from it by being on the West Coast. When I submitted New Spain’s Century of Depression for publication, there was a big fight over that as well. It seems to have made a sensation, but for fifteen years I was unaware of it and was rather surprised when I found out.
JWW: You were criticized rather severely in some quarters. Was the criticism that you were propagating a Black or White Legend?
WB: I was reproached with creating the blackest legend of all. I responded, “I go where the data take me.” As for the Black Legend, if it is held to state that Spain was worse than any European country, that is incorrect; but if the White Legend is held to state that Spain was better than any European country, that, too, is incorrect. I recognized that all conquests and all empires are accomplished at costs, that empire and conquest can bring, very often do bring, benefits as well. The Roman empire cost heavily in lives, in suffering. The Spanish empire did, too, but it did bring benefits, just as the Roman empire brought benefits. Whether one outweighs the other is a highly intricate calculation.
JWW: If anything, you were whitening the Spanish image by blaming things on disease rather than on the cruelty of Spaniards.
WB: Disease was the crucial factor, but there were others. Spaniards undoubtedly killed Indians in war; they undoubtedly killed them by overwork, by changing their environment, by moving lowland people into the uplands and upland people into the lowlands, and by having them work waist deep in water.
RH: How do you feel about controversy itself? Do you feel that there is some inherent value in creating controversy to advance knowledge?
WB: My impression of controversy is that 98 percent of it is heat, and 2 percent may be useful. Very often controversy is irrelevant because it is not focused broadly enough or precisely enough. Cook and I were not going to write anything in terms of polemic. The nearest we came to it was in 1966 with a probing of evidence to see where the margin of error lay. We simply went ahead on the basis of finding evidence and analyzing it.
JWW: Were you much aware of what was going on elsewhere, as with the Annales school, for example?
WB: I read the Annales. I had become aware of the school in 1951-52 in Mexico through François Chevalier. He had been a student of Marc Bloch, who had been killed by the Germans for his part in the Resistance movement. When I returned to Berkeley, I got hold of Bloch’s works and read them: two volumes in the Evolution of Humanity series, his lectures of 1928 in Oslo on the origins of French rural society; and subsequently I obtained republications of his articles. A very great man. I discovered that most of these ideas I had already absorbed through Sauer, Simpson, and Cook, who really held the same ideas but with a stronger base in the sciences and perhaps less attention to economics.
RH: What was the influence, if any, on you of the later Annales authors’ demographic work? Were you already in touch with them?
WB: We had already begun demographic studies at Berkeley. We are aware of each other’s work, I would say, but I do not think there has been an influence back and forth. In 1960 I met Louis Henry, who was then just beginning to publicize his family reconstitution. Cook and I looked into it, but decided it was inapplicable to Indian families in colonial Latin America. There are not enough surnames for tracing Indian families.
JWW: Then does the label “Berkeley School” refer to the serial study, the quantitative approach to history?
WB: I think that that is just part of it. What we were doing was hunting for appropriate methods of analysis to pursue our interests. I think the term “Berkeley School” was coined by Pierre Chaunu back in the late 1950s or early 1960s.
JWW: In your own writings, can you pick out the nugget of what you think is new in your major works?
WB: The kind of work I did for my thesis is the sort that would be regarded as perfectly obvious and normal if one were doing the same kind of study in medieval European history. In demography, I was much more influenced by the sciences than most historical demographers have been, and this is one of the differences between the Annales group and the people in Berkeley. We owe much more to botany, physiology, zoology, and so forth, than they do; and in some ways we are closer to anthropology. The fact that we ranged across fields in our experience and in reading, may have given an illusion of originality in our work, whereas, really, we were bringing to bear ideas and techniques of other fields.
RH: Don’t you consider the methods that you used in your demographic studies new in the sense that you were dealing with sources, of which many were not available, say, for demography in Europe?
WB: Yes, but the methods of treating them are not that strange. We used the methods applied to fiscal records in Europe. Of course, we had to adapt them. Perhaps this is originality, but it is not the sort of creation from nothing that some people seem to regard as originality. I would, on the whole, maintain that most advances in technique tend to come in very slow increments. In my view, the blinding Promethean breakthrough is very rare indeed. Many writers are saluted as having this quality, but they build on work that has been done by dozens or hundreds of others.
I have been accused of belittling the great men of the field, I think, because I have made this point a number of times. But it seems to be a highly valid one and a very encouraging one because it suggests that mankind, in some ways, at least in the writing of history, has less need of genius than one might suppose. What we need is a remarkable number of industrious ants, and some tolerance.
JWW: You do not accept Thomas Kuhn’s theory that has shaken the American Historical Association in the past decade? He argues against the idea that knowledge is incremental. He argues that scholars can hardly keep up with the new methods and new ideas without harming their long-term investment in libraries and labs. As a group who holds the power, they set the terms of debate, fail each other’s students if they don’t learn the old terms of debate. Such holders of power have to be overthrown from time to time because they simply will not make way for new discoveries, discoveries that require a revolution in thought.
WB: These revolutions are usually bloodless and they take place more by the abdication of the old than anything else. There are generational changes. In science, medicine, there may be other ways of operating—there may be no room for the old that is manifestly unworkable or far less efficient; but in the humanities there is no such thing as manifest inefficiency. There is simply volubility, elegance, and qualities like those. Everything can survive simultaneously.
RH: You seem to argue that different traditions of historical writing can coexist and even serve one another. Do you find that sort of cooperation in your own work, which has continued the tradition of writing administrative history or institutional history, but also extends to new kinds of economic and social history?
WB: I have done all of these and I have never felt that there is conflict. What bothers me at all times is: have I mastered the knowledge necessary to deal with a subject? Do I have the necessary comparative background? For instance, for my recent book on the General Indian Court, I spent much time reading in the history of civil law in Europe and on the ways in which Spanish, particularly Castilian courts, operated. I have gone through provincial records to see how Mexican courts—provincial, national, state, and colonial—functioned.
RH: Do you think that there is any artificiality in dividing the writing of history into different specialities?
WB: There is a broader question than that. History, if it is to mean anything, is the study of the past of man. Man has operated in technology, in science, in law, in philosophy; he has constructed societies and associations; and he has earned his living. In the meantime, the planet did things to affect man’s actions and thoughts. All of this is presumably history. When an individual starts out to write a history, he obviously selects what he can handle. Now, that means a drastic narrowing down. But if he narrows too far, and if he disregards matters of importance within the treatment of his own theme, then he is in trouble; and unfortunately, this happens very often. I think all these barriers are artificial. One is forced to create them simply to be able to handle the topic. This shows up as a very serious series of defects in our own graduate training, not to mention in our own faculties, because our students increasingly do not have the foreign languages that they need; increasingly do not read in other fields; and they do not often read in their own field as widely as they should. Part of the problem, of course, is the enormous increase in scholarly output, which makes such breadth difficult. Nevertheless, achievement of breadth is still incumbent on us. It may mean that we will come to the rule so often urged by Carl Sauer, “Young scholars should read widely and write little.”
RH: You are making an argument against extreme specialization.
WB: Extreme specialization brings its reward in great penetration. It carries its penalty in the loss of a great many highly important considerations.
RH: But do you not need a combination of specialization and general approach?
WB: I should say it is better to write less and to do a great deal more thinking and reading. God knows I’ve written a great deal, perhaps too much, but of course I acquired a good deal of the breadth I needed by working with another person—I had a knowledge of aspects of the social sciences and humanities. Cook had a far greater knowledge of aspects of the sciences and statistics so that we could put these together.
RH: Because of the proliferation of material, do you see a trend toward increasing teamwork?
WB: One would think so, and yet the efforts to date have been very feeble. There are a few instances of such teamwork—for example, Mark Burkholder and D.S. Chandler are obviously a team. I have heard of others. But this is rare in the historical profession. Although collaboration is very difficult to establish and maintain, it is truly valuable. Whether it can be done with, say, groups of six or eight people, I do not know.
RH: If collaboration is so difficult, how do you account for the success of your collaboration with Cook?
WB: My collaboration with Cook came about after we had known each other for nearly two decades. We liked each other; we had desks near each other in the Bancroft Library; we had had a series of discussions, so that we knew each other’s views. It still took a great deal of patience and tact on both sides, because there were things we disagreed on and we sometimes had quite heated disagreements. But they never moved beyond the bounds of friendship. Our article in the Armales, “Quelle fut la stratification sociale au centre du Mexique durant la première moitié du XVIe siècle?,” came about because Cook and I had been working together for nearly ten years and had never realized that we disagreed upon a fundamental aspect of what we were studying. It was only in a quite casual discussion that we became aware of this. Instead of coming to blows, we simply decided to do the research, to find out who was right. As it happened, both were right and both were wrong. That is in a sense the way to settle things: but I would say, in history, collaboration requires a deep basis of friendship and certain agreements on essentials.
JWW: You said that you learned from the sciences. For you history is not a science?
WB: History can be a science, it can be a humanity, it can be anything, or it can be nothing. It is multifaceted. It is hardly a science, usually. It can be pursued in a scientific fashion, but that is another matter.
JWW: Given that statement, can history be written in a scientific manner?
WB: In the end, all history is a form of intellectual activity, because one brings schemes developed within one’s mind to the shaping and organizing of material. On the other hand, when it comes to investigating material, assessing it, one is pretty much a positivist. The only history I know of that can escape these limitations is intellectual history. The historian’s beliefs, views, ideas of what is significant, zest in searching out evidence, disinclination to search out other data that might upset him—these all enter into play.
JWW: When you write, are you consciously guided by hypotheses?
WB: More unconsciously. I regard them as systems that will assist me in hunting for and locating material. The organization of that material again obviously is going to be guided by hypotheses, but I trust that I will revise my hypothesis if I meet an inconvenient fact. That is always the historian’s problem: the inconvenient fact.
JWW: You are not like Robert Redfield, who went to Tepoztlan wearing blinders?
WB: I trust not. No, here I would follow Sauer’s advice which was to go into a village and to hunker down with the inhabitants, drink with them, and spend a long time at it. This, by the way, is where women have an advantage, because there are areas of local life into which no man can penetrate. Three generations of anthropologists and scholars moved through and stayed in Tejupan without finding out that the barrios in that town are divided into moieties. It was when an art historian, Joyce Baily, went there, lived with a family, and went to a tea that the parish priest gave in her honor for the local women that in the conversation it emerged, quite by accident, that those barrios are divided into moieties. This is a preconquest Mesoamerican system. Again, for instance, women in town studies are able to enter into dimensions that men just cannot. There are, of course, also areas of male activity into which women cannot enter. I should guess that one probably needs a couple operating as a team to do a genuine study. Who knows? Perhaps they ought to have children, ages 8 to 12, to get into another layer of the population that may not communicate fully with adults.
JWW: I recall back in the 1960s talking to you about a new course that had been introduced at Berkeley entitled “Social History of Latin America.” You made a comment wondering what that course contained, suggesting perhaps that social history does not exist.
WB: Social history is so encompassing and so diffuse a concept that it is very difficult to separate it from religious history, economic history, intellectual history, the forms of government and law. By the time you get through with it, you need a five-year course in social history.
JWW: You said earlier that we have to set up what might be called artificial fields. Isn’t there a consensus now about what social history has come to mean?
WB: I actually belong to the Social Science History Association. I may be wrong, but I still find a remarkable vagueness. Social historians do many things that they firmly announce as social history, but I am not convinced that there is a general area that by agreement we leave to people who call themselves social historians. When you touch matters like the family, it is social history; it is also demographic history. When you get to religious topics, these too are disputed among two or three different subfields. If one looks at one of the most successful historical studies by sociologists, the life of medieval English villagers by George Caspar Homans, for example, one can ask: “Is this social history”? Yes. But it can also be economic history and it can be other things.
JWW: Many large departments divide themselves up into what you call subfields.
WB: I understand that, but let me point out first that the very concept of the department is merely a budgetary convenience. Each department is a more-or-less chaotic aggregation of highly disparate sub-fields, many of which could be moved into other departments with no great perception of eccentricity. Within the departments the only real harmony is that they all want to share the budget. Will a person specializing in, let us say, the history of slavery in the United States get along so easily with someone who is specializing in the history of anarchist associations in Europe? Do they have much in common? You will find that large numbers of United States historians shy from reading studies in foreign languages even though they are directly and essentially important to their fields. I have noticed this again and again. The comparative dimension is largely lost. Europeanists on the whole shy from looking at Latin American history, or Asiatic or African history; these are beyond the pale. There is a very significant line that runs through history departments—people in ancient and medieval history will consider kinds of materials and deal with them in ways that people in earlier African, colonial Latin American history, and Asia before, say, the sixteenth century, are also willing to do. Since their materials are sparse, they use what they must and they range widely. For later periods, scholars will not do this. They get narrower and narrower in their searches, and more insistent on a rigid selection of materials that fits a definition they create.
RH: One of the issues that you raise in “Discontinuity and Continuity in Mexican History” (your presidential address to the AHA Pacific Coast Branch) is this topic of the artificiality of barriers and the idea that instruction at universities and the length of the school term influence the periodization of Mexican history.
WB: I was challenging, much as I had in 1962, the division of Latin American history at the Wars of Independence because the preparation for those struggles came earlier, with, for example, the change in intellectual outlook (not merely in elite thinking but perhaps in much popular thinking as well). The economic change and the change in political ideas took place earlier. In effect, the Wars of Independence represent, to some extent, the consummation of the first stage of a process that started at least in the middle of the eighteenth century, and that is still under way.
RH: On the other hand, in the same article yon argue for continuity. In Mexican history, in particular, you see this continuous movement out from the center, and increasing consolidation and centralization?
WB: Mexico is undergoing the same process as all humanity. All mankind is increasingly coming within the grip of what increasingly is an all-encompassing state. In effect, the present-day welfare state imposes a bargain on its citizens. It takes better care of them but demands their bodies and their souls. In this sense, the state is becoming the devourer of mankind.
RH: You say in “Discontinuity and Continuity” that one basic continuity in Mexican history involves populations, that the outward migration of people of European culture from the center transcends political boundaries, as in current migration to the United States.
WB: These are imperatives that lie in peoples’ being in state structures. The Spanish inherited the Aztec state structure. They changed it greatly, but they too had the same urges to expand to bring people within the compass of the state, into a uniform and centralized organization. The Aztecs had not gone very far, as they obviously would have in the end; the Spanish simply continued the process and speeded it up. As for dealing with the Chichimeca, this again was an Aztec problem that the Spanish came nearer to solving. Mexico has not yet solved the problem of the Gran Chichimeca, which is the United States. There is still this remarkable symbiotic relation of stimulation, provocation, and frustration.
JWW: Also, with regard to continuity in history, you have often said that we are seeing the same things in the Mexico of today that are seen in the colonial period.
WB: That is in some ways a Marxist interpretation, that one kind of colonialism has been substituted for another. There is an element of truth there. It is also true that in Mexico there is a substantial continuation of older attitudes and modes of behavior.
JWW: Let’s go back to your periodization of Mexican history. It can be argued that the real break came between 1821 and 1910—an era of liberalism that did away with much state power that existed before and that has existed subsequently. Do you see that break?
WB: If one wants to have a break in the nineteenth century, I think it would be better seen as falling in the 1870s when the Porfiriato pretty fundamentally recast the nature of property, the holding of property, and the nature of local institutions. The Porfiriato was not discarded or broken in 1911; after a period of turbulence, it was reestablished. It is now called the PRI. That there was a period of liberalism that actually discouraged government intervention in economic and social life, I question. I think politicians talked about it a great deal, but they did not do it. The government was in everything; the government continues to be in everything.
I think there is a vast continuity from the Porfiriato to the present, a continuity broken by a period of turbulence from 1913 to 1917. There is a continuity in the kind of methods used by the government, the overriding of legal protections when people within the government wish to exercise that option. The intervention of government in economic, social, religious life continues unabated. The techniques are not so different.
JWW: Let us return to your own writing. What would you say to those who have criticized you for not bringing your ideas to a full conclusion, for writing almost in shorthand?
WB: If I, or Cook and I, had spelled out our ideas at great length, instead of chapters we should have written volumes; instead of volumes we should have written shelves. There simply are limits. Each of us, in addition to our collaborative work, wrote on other topics.
RH: You have written a number of essays that are synthesizing: New Spain’s Century of Depression, “Discontinuity and Continuity in Mexican History,” “Race and Class in Colonial Mexico.” Yet you never really give a synthesizing conclusion or pulling together of all your work in demographic history. How do you account for the difference?
WB: For one thing, William H. McNeill’s Plagues and People performed this function, so there was no great need for us to do it. The volumes on which Cook and I collaborated usually publish the data and the treatment of the data; our articles give the conclusions to be drawn from books. But an article or volume dealing with the Americas in general, we did not write. We still lacked analysis of too many regions to move to a general study.
Cook and I point the way in demography to others. There is no lack of scholars to continue the ways we have indicated. In “Discontinuity and Continuity each sentence in effect opens a whole range of research directions; it is a highly suggestive and allusive essay. I should have to write volumes to spell out the things suggested there. Let others do that. In the end, I am one human being.
JWW: For you, who is the ideal scholar?
WB: If you ask for models, I suppose I should mention a composite of Carl Sauer, Lesley Byrd Simpson, and perhaps Arturo Torres Río-Seco, taking the best qualities of each. There are many around the world who are thoughtful, able scholars and teachers. In France, among others, François Chevalier and Pierre Chaunu; in Chile, Mario Góngora, and a Benedictine monk who has turned out to be one of the great scholars of our generation, Gabriel Guarda; in Argentina, Jorge Enrique Hardoy, who has claims as a man of great stimulation in studies and as a scholar in his own right. He is torn between changing the world around him and studying the world of the past. One impedes the other, but he has managed to do both. For Peru there are many people; the most prominent has been John Murra, who has greatly changed Indian studies.
In Mexico, one might mention a number of people: Alfonso Caso. Oddly enough, he was not an effective indigenista (in the sense that he really-changed the treatment of Indians by the Mexican government or was able to preserve Indian values), but he was an extraordinarily fine ethnohistorian. Silvio Zavala insists on collecting data and not doing as much as he should in analyzing them; yet he has made a genuine contribution. Edmundo O’Gorman is wayward, willful, capricious, and yet a very brilliant writer who is now doing extraordinary work in textual criticism. José Miranda, who migrated from Spain, should also be mentioned.
In the United States, Charles Gibson has been one of the fertile minds of our generation. Lewis Hanke and I have had a small quarrel about social justice, a term, which, I think, he defines in ways the sixteenth century did not understand. Nevertheless, he has certainly stimulated a whole range of inquiry.
I think to point to individual people, however, is perhaps a mistake. Our field and most other fields develop by the accretion of rather small increments of effort in which, however badly people do their work, they do tend to make some kind of contribution. This all permits another scholar to come along and synthesize it. The synthesizer arrives after a great deal of preliminary work, much of which looks negligible. If one synthesizer does not come along, another one will. The process involves a collective effort, which is what is most important.
JWW: You sound optimistic now, in relation to some of your earlier thoughts about the doom of the profession.
WB: Not the doom of the profession: the failure of the profession to fulfill more efficiently a very real promise. We shall muddle along at lower levels and with much more error and trouble.
JWW: To change the subject again, what is your philosophy of teaching? Your view on the role of the teacher’s relationship with students. . .?
WB: That is a rather complicated subject. At the undergraduate level, it is the teacher’s task to present to the class a comprehensive summary that takes in, as far as possible, the latest developments in the field. It is the teacher’s obligation to be abreast of his field and to communicate it in ways that the student can understand.
At the graduate level, the teacher’s task is to be at the cutting edge of his field and to guide the graduate students, who are really junior colleagues, to assist in developing the field. They are to be brought to fulfill the potential that lies within them. A teacher at this level really fulfills himself when he has brought his students to realize their potential.
JWW: Of the students who worked under you, did any of them follow patterns that you offered?
WB: Oh, I don’t think so and I never tried to make them do it. If graduate work means anything (and undergraduate work, for that matter), the function of the teacher is to assist the student to discover his own inclinations, then to form in the student the potential to develop himself along the lines that he wants to follow. The idea that the student somehow is to be a feudal vassal who is to do whatever the teacher bids him to in order to contribute to the teacher’s genius, is the negation of genuine teaching. Our function is to create colleagues, self-propelled people developed according to their own bents.
JWW: In looking at the students who have done graduate work under you, do you see a common methodological or topical bond?
WB: They are working on social and economic history, although I should not have scorned any other topic, say in intellectual history or textual criticism, which are also perfectly valid. I would say that what I have done for students has been to assist them to a certain vigor and care; in general, my students are both well trained and well developed.
JWW: You were demanding.
WB: The standards that I enforced are the standards of about 1962. I did not vary, and in 1980, I was still enforcing those standards. There was a general inflation of credit and dropping of work load and demand in the quarter system on the Berkeley campus—and elsewhere, I suspect. We gave, in effect, five units instead of four and a half, which would have been the semester equivalent. Further, we demanded less work, less knowledge, less performance. My colleagues graded far too generously, and this is why there has been such an upward movement of grades.
JWW: Did you try to re-create Sauer’s style of seminar, which had so influenced your graduate years?
WB: No. I tried to create my own based on other topics and fields but with the same kind of range. Certainly I tried to lead students to come to the same kind of broad preparation and alertness. I organized each seminar as an editorial committee and put the students through writing reviews and rewriting each other’s reviews as though they were part of an editorial staff, assessing and preparing each other’s papers for publication. Then I not only read the papers and talked about the value of the different papers, I talked about the way in which the other students had criticized these papers and the way they had helped the writer to achieve his goal or to redefine his goal so it could be achieved and was worth achieving. This I think is a very important technique.
RH: Would you propose changing graduate studies in history?
WB: I think we get students who are ill prepared to do reasonably adult work. We need to change the period of study so that they could make up these deficiencies; to increase the requirement of foreign language; to require them to read far more widely. Examinations, which are now too lax, should be genuine examinations. The oral examination for the doctorate should be a testing to determine what the student has read, how he has thought, the extent to which he has put information together, and his potential. We are entering a period in which the humanities will have less opportunity for employment. Accordingly, what we need is fewer, but far better trained, graduate students as well as fewer, far better trained, faculty members.
We now have with us the students of the 1960s and 1970s as faculty members. I see a range of problems because many are more interested in politics than research and they substitute ideology for any careful thinking. Their classes are basically indoctrinations, preaching to their students. This is the negation of the idea of the university.
JWW: You came out of the Depression and into academia at a very inauspicious time, yet later you lived through the so-called Golden Age of academia.
WB: I came of age in a period when we had no choice but to live in austerity. We were content with little. The kind of facilities we were given at the university were to us paradise. We had a gymnasium for exercise. We had a library; we had classes; fees were low; living expenses were moderate. All we had to do somehow was feed and clothe ourselves. We had enormous amounts of spare time and we had very little to do but spend it in the libraries. Graduate students in a later period have incomes and cars; whereas three of us might share a room, three or fewer of them share an apartment. Affluence has created a whole set of wants and consumption patterns that conflict with the kind of dedication and learning that existed in my generation. We lived the way we did because we had no choice, but it was very good for us.
The attempt now is to shorten the period of tutelage. That is desirable except that students come from a secondary school system and an elementary school system that no longer give adequate preparation. Only a favored few who have gone to very special schools come well equipped to the university. Most students have to mend their formation at the university, and this means added years. Yet we do not insist that they spend those years profitably.
JWW: In living through the golden era of academia,. . .
WB: It was a golden era only in the sense of being a period of relative budgetary plenty and of great expansion. It was only about 1960 that expansion really began in Latin American history. As a result of plenty, two undesirable phenomena took place. Many people crowded into the field, attracted by easy money. The people who came in for an easy profession wrote shoddy monographs, by and large, and went in for shoddy teaching. The so-called social scientists who came in with their specious pleas that they would solve the hemisphere’s problems (if only they were given generous funding) did even more harm.
JWW: Until the 1960s there was an academic Black Legend about Latin America: that it was an inferior subject for inferior minds.
WB: That continues, and, alas, it is partly justified because, relative to some other fields of history, there is a higher proportion of shoddy work. Shoddy work is most prominent in studies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, less in those of the colonial period. I should admit that the charge is biased in the sense that it is very often leveled by people who ignore the shoddy work in their own field.
JWW: How did you view the attempts after the 1960s to establish women’s studies, Chicano studies, Black studies?
WB: The first movement was toward student-dominated studies. The students were to choose their teacher and direct what he should do. It did not seem to me that students knew enough to direct their teachers, and I resisted that movement. There was also a movement for ethnic studies, which was of the same nature. Each ethnicity was to be the only judge of what it should study and how it should study. No person from outside that ethnicity would be able to have a voice in it. It happened that at Berkeley there had been long experience in the development of interdisciplinary programs. There was a great reservoir of knowledge in the faculty, which was apparently absolutely unwanted.
Ethnic studies at Berkeley started as an independent group outside of the College of Letters and Science, attached directly to the Chancellor. Bather slowly, the programs are now being revised and brought to proper academic standards. Black studies is now a department in the College of Letters and Science. Sooner or later, the other programs must follow.
JWW: You haven’t belonged to that group which says that only women can write women’s history, and only Blacks can write Black history.
WB: That would be to deny the possibility of the communication of knowledge. I regard such people as living in outermost darkness and trying to drag us into it. Women’s history has great value, but not in the way that the people engaging in it have conceived of it. Women’s history has opened a whole new series of topics that should be pursued both for men and for women. Here Natalie Davis, who has made this point, is absolutely right. Women who pursue women’s history dedicated only to studying how women thought or behaved in familial situations are ruthlessly cutting things in half and saying that this is the whole.
JWW: In your courses, did you talk about what directions Latin American history is headed and where Latin America itself is headed?
WB: A little. For Latin America I see great turmoil (as I see for the entire world) until there arises a political unification, which, when it comes, will be effective. Here the analogy is to the unification of the Mediterranean basin under the Romans with its great benefits but also its very high cost and the development of the monarchical system of the later Roman world.
JWW: Some historians were predicting that Latin America would starve itself to death by 1980. That didn’t happen.
WB: Were these historians? These were prophets. It is the nature of most prophets to be false. Carl Sauer in the 1930s predicted that the world would be entering a period of food shortages and probably trouble in the middle 1970s. I must say he predicted well. Today the world is just barely able to feed itself.
JWW: We still need an answer to the question of where Latin American history is headed and where it is now.
WB: The pursuit of Latin American history in the United States expanded very greatly during the 1960s and 1970s. It has now, I think, reached about the limit of expansion for some years to come, perhaps even some decades. Since it depends to a great extent on public money, and public money is not going to be funneled to it in any greater measure in terms of real value for a long time, I think future growth is circumscribed. That kind of limitation is very good for the field because it will create competition for the jobs that exist. That in the end will raise the quality of the work being done. I do not see the Latin American field as an area of genuine innovation in the near future. Basically, what we now have is an act of translation, so to speak, wherein techniques are developed elsewhere and adopted to our field with highly beneficial effects.
Latin American history in Latin America is basically a series of historias patrias, with the pressure of state considerations as to findings. There has also been an enormous expansion of Latin American universities and institutes, as well as the entrance of many new people into scholarly work, so that there is an ample number of people working in the field. The problem really is to bring them to good standards of performance, to dissuade them from an endless chewing over of old fat. How many pages have been written on Martí? Or on Bolívar, San Martín, Hidalgo, Morelos? It is a patriotic endeavor for people to write on the próceres, but they seldom have anything new to say. In Latin America, too, with competition and a desperate scrambling for budgetary allocation, standards may well rise. Oddly enough, in Peru John Murra has been a remarkable stimulator and beneficial presence who has led to very good work in Peruvian history and anthropology, both by non-Peruvians and Peruvians. That influence may spread. Within Mexico there is a kind of struggle going on as the official ideology is being questioned, and to some extent undermined, by scholars coming to methods and standards of work learned in Europe and the United States.
RH: In general, what topics do you think Latin American history is moving toward?
WB: It seems to me that demographic history is certainly here now and needs to he cultivated. Economic history invites much more work. One of the kinds of treatment that has yielded great results in Europe, prosopography, has only been applied slightly for Latin America: the study of careers and their interlocking. Business history as we know it is just beginning, particularly for the colonial period. I think that in the notarial archives there will be found much material such as contracts, wills, estate records, accountings of executors with full figures on the operations of businesses. Questions of social structure and the relation of classes, though much discussed, have been little analyzed. A great deal of structural, political, and institutional history remains to be written. Religious history is, to a great extent, a vast unknown, except for a sort of present-day hagiography. The kind of study Robert Ricard wrote could be redone with vastly more material, vastly more insight. It is a topic that for countries other than Mexico is open to similar treatment. In fact, the only topic I should regard as largely exhausted for the present is the study of the lives of the próceres. For the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we do not really have perception of trends and inner workings. This will come as more perspective is gained.
RH: Do you think there will be a continuation of transit from macro studies to micro studies?
WB: I think all of these come together. We need both, and both will be carried out. After a period of micro studies, someone will put many together into a macro study. There are now so many people in the field of Latin American history that there will be an enormous amount of work done, some of it astonishingly bad, most of it mediocre, but some of it increasingly good. These are the proportions we have had in the past.
JWW: What are your current and future projects?
WB: At the moment I am still cleaning up commitments. I have written a paper for a symposium to be published in América Indígena on the juridical status of the Indian in New Spain. I have prepared a paper on archives for a conference in Minnesota. I have a large amount of data on sale of tribute commodities in Nueva Galicia, which I’ve had since 1959; now I should like to analyze these data and write a piece that might parallel the Ibero-Americana study entitled Price Trends of Some Basic Commodities in Central Mexico that Cook and I did jointly in 1958. The study of population is now being carried on by scholars with more sophisticated techniques, and a great many people are rushing into the subfield; I could continue there, but the yield from new work by me would be distinctly less. Normal demographic work on vital rates, family structures, and so on would take more time than I am prepared to put into it.
For the future, I could go in the direction of the book now in press in Mexico City (of which I am part author) on the ways of provincial government in colonial Mexico—in effect, picking up topics for which I wrote summaries and expand these summaries into fuller treatment. This would be a very useful contribution. Another possible route is crime and punishment in colonial Mexico. William Taylor has dealt with sociological aspects, very sophisticated ones. I should not want to compete with him and I am not sure that I could. I think rather of determining the proportions of crime and what was done to criminals once they were convicted. What other things may emerge, I do not know. As one starts to work on one topic, others emerge. I have an enormous amount of material on the Mixteca Alta: a great deal has been published on its archaeology and pre-Columbian society, such as the work of Ronald Spores and a number of Mexicans. Rodolfo Pastor at El Colegio de México wrote an excellent doctoral thesis on the colonial history of the Mixteca Alta, so that much of the topic has already been explored. There are, nevertheless, still gaps into which I can fit. Beyond that, I may write an occasional interpretive essay on some aspect of Latin American history. Latin America’s history changes as new technology develops, new ideas come to bear, and the possibilities increase. In general, except for a few patriotic topics, one can put one’s spade in anywhere and find rich ore.
