One wonders, while reading this bulky book, whether the Mexican financial crisis ever affected the publishing industry. Common sense would have called for more radical surgery and some editing. Instead of an indigestible, wordy dissertation, we might have had a tightly woven and sharply focused study of a Mexican region over almost two centuries.
Pastor tackles an all-embracing ethnohistorical issue: how Indians, forced to adapt to political centralization and mercantilism, altered their institutions as well as their relationships to the economy and the society, within and without the family and the community. This is “total history” as he claims in the foreword. There is something about everything, but integration is inconsistent. The lack of a conclusion is thus even more regrettable.
The book consists of three parts. The author devotes nearly a third of it to preconquest Mixteca and changes that ensued in the economic and social realms during the first two hundred years of Spanish rule. There are few new findings to be gleaned in this section. We would have expected more, in view of the 16 codices mentioned in the bibliography. The hurried reader should concentrate on the second part, which carries the analysis through the eighteenth century. Using local church and judiciary archives, Pastor reconstructs the evolution of land-holding and agriculture, social stratification, community political structure, and cultural norms. It is worth the reading. One follows the political demise of the Indian nobility, as many commoners work their way up into the highest community offices. Spurred by new market opportunities, members encroach on collective land rights. Communities seem to get poorer, while some members grow richer and shy away from collective obligations. Then the story goes on until the reform laws remove a major obstacle to private ownership for ladinos. Liberalism had already paved the way to the degradation of town life for most villages and to a stronger ladino presence. The book deserves good marks, among other reasons, for the lively capsules which depict property and personal belongings of individuals drawn from every layer of the social stratification. Several pages (343ff) deal nicely with inequality and cohesion within the community.
Unfortunately, however, the book has too many shortcomings. How can we trust the interpretation when the flaws in the statistical data are never acknowledged, or the data are haphazardly arranged into figures and graphs replete with errors? There is, for example, neither a discussion of the reliability of tithe records for Indian production nor a word on the colonial measures cited in the book. Many graphs lack scale and source; age pyramids are not drawn to scale (e.g., p. 570). There is no map of Mixteca nor a description of what that region encompassed physically and ethnically. The lengthy passage on adultery (pp. 382-391) is grounded less on facts than on the author’s views. How can one pretend that most Mixtecos did not get married in church before the nineteenth century? Finally, references to other works are scant, as if most of the book were written in a historiographical vacuum. The reader feels, on closing this massive book, that despite long research many opportunities to write a major study on the Mixtéeos have been missed.
