Very few historians of Latin America have the range of Rolando Mellafe. His early work treated the conquest, but this was followed by two books on black slavery in the Americas and then a series of provocative and often original articles not just on Chile, but Peru and Mexico as well. Several of these are reprinted here and constitute a kind of combats pour I’histoire. Like Lucien Febvre, Mellafe sees history as the mother discipline which both incorporates and exploits statistics, demography, psychology, and economics—or any other subdiscipline that might help create an analytical and yet more humane history. These essays also reflect the intellectual ferment present in Santiago in the 1960s, where, under the gentle directorship of Don Eugenio Pereira Salas at the Centro de Historia Americana, discussion of the work and ideas of such diverse people as Braudel, Borah, Romano, and Frank filled the air. Many of the country’s best graduate students, unable then to imagine their fate of repression and exile, were enthusiastic and valuable contributors.
Three essays treat colonial agriculture in a rather Braudelian, longue durée, geohistorical manner, drawing on Mexican and Peruvian history, seeking main themes, and trying various schemes of periodization. Three others deal with demography, reflecting the disconcerting impact of “L’École Berkeley’s” research on central Mexico in the ‘60s. Two more discuss the “function of the family” and “family size” in colonial Latin America. Mellafe was one of the pioneers of the history of the family in Latin America, but these essays and others were originally published in journals unfamiliar to many readers, so it is useful to have them here. Finally, there is an exploration of the “Chilean character,” an essay on mentalité.
Since these essays were originally published, some of their themes have been discarded and others developed. Mellafe’s observations and exhortations, which are often inspirational but sometimes rather breathless and excessively allusive, demonstrate not only some important stages in the development of social history in Latin America but also the intellectual trajectory of one of its foremost practitioners.
