The third edition of La población de América Latina provides a good “state of the art” in historical demography and a useful review of the relevant primary sources. The first two editions in Spanish (1973, 1977) extended to the year 2000; the newest edition carries the author’s predictive treatment of the future forward an additional quarter-century. For each successive edition, Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz has updated the bibliography. The latest printing takes into account the literature published before 1992, emphasizing titles in Spanish. Although the content is substantially the same as in earlier editions, the author has modified the organization of the chapters. The final chapter, “El año 2025,” was completely rewritten, and some of the charts and tables were changed. In this edition, furthermore, Sánchez-Albornoz takes note of frontier studies of the U.S.-Mexico border concerning binational immigration.
This work summarizes efficiently the principal themes and arguments that have become conventionally accepted over the past half-century of scholarship in the field of historical demography. Citing both monographs and collections of interpretive essays, Sánchez-Albornoz presents an accurate statement of the current debates concerning the aboriginal population thresholds of different Latin American regions on the eve of European conquest, the devastating impact of Eurasian diseases, and the assumed correlation between population densities and sociopolitical complexity. He synthesizes the work of well-known scholars on Indian population decline and successive epidemic crises, including a discussion of contraception, infanticide, and abortion as native responses to the severity of colonialism.
The author does not, however, offer new or surprising conclusions. His synthetic treatment of more than four centuries of population history is generally balanced, although he presents colonial demographic phenomena in somewhat greater detail than those of the national and modern periods. Turning to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he relies more heavily on national and UN censuses. Thus the thematic content of these chapters (“Gobernar es poblar,” “La explosión demográfica”) reflects global issues, particularly the late twentieth-century demographic transition.
Sánchez-Albornoz does not take account of some of the revisionist works published around the Quincentennial events of 1992-93 that pertain to his theme. Recent archaeological studies support hypotheses concerning a preconquest disease environment in the Americas that was more rigorous than heretofore generally believed; for example, Disease and Demography in the Americas, edited by John W. Verano and Douglas H. Ubelaker (1992). In addition, his coverage of ecological studies that bear on demographic phenomena is weak, excluding works by scholars like Arij Ouweneel and Elinor Melville, who have published monographs and articles on central Mexico. These omissions notwithstanding, an enduring virtue of Sánchez-Albornoz’ scholarly synthesis is his placement of demographic observations of fecundity, mortality, population densities, and the like in the context of economic and social processes that have marked the course of Latin American history.
