- Email: [email protected]
Migrants in the Mexican north: Mobility, economy, and society in a colonial world
114
BOOK REVIEWS
pay made it necessary for black women to incur high labor force participation rates in both the North and the South. An added feature of economic survival in the North was the practice of taking in lodgers. The position assumed by the author in terms of the benefits accruing to migrants is that migrants experienced only nominal benefits if they experienced any at all. She takes the position that labor migration may convey benefits as an outgrowth of assimilation, return migration and the development of enclave economies. None of these benefits were demonstrated to have accrued to the participants in the Great Migration. It might well be that the author is employing the wrong indicators to ascertain if the experiment was a success. This constitutes a welcomed piece of work, but one that is not without shortcomings. The most glaring weakness is an attempt to have the findings fit within a preordained structural configuration. Nevertheless, the reader with a particular interest in this subject matter would surely wish to add it to their collection. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
HAROLDM. ROSE
MICHAELM. SWANN,Migrants in the Mexican North: Mobility, Economy, and Society in a Colonial World (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989. Pp. xv + 202. $28.50)
Swann’s monograph is the most recent in a growing list of titles on historical demographic themes in the Dellplain Latin American Studies series. Edited by D. J. Robinson, the series includes such key studies in historical population geography as: N. D. Cook’s work on the Colca Valley, Peru; B. L. Turner, II’s landmark study of lowland Maya terracing; and L. Newson’s account of Indian decline in colonial Honduras. The collective efforts of Robinson, his students, and collaborators in this series invite comparison with the “Berkeley School” of historical demography, as represented by the work of Borah, Cook, Sauer, Simpson and their associates in the Zbero-Americana series. Robinson’s enterprise carries forward the Berkeley emphasis on ecological and culturalhistorical explorations and reconstructions of population history, but also strikes off into geographical modernity, finding the models and methods of contemporary population geographers and spatial theorists applicable in certain instances. Swann’s book demonstrates how these two differing streams can be channeled to render with new clarity, the history of migration in one of colonial Latin America’s more dynamic and diverse regions. The author sets out two basic objectives in this study. He reconstructs patterns of inmigration that developed around selected settlements, illuminating basic patterns of free migration and the relationships governing them in colonial northern Mexico. Second, he considers the selective nature of migration as evidenced by socio-economic and demographic characteristics of individual migrants. Through this dual focus, Swann seeks to explicate the nature of the linkages between mobility and the social and economic changes that the region experienced in the late colonial period. In the first chapter Swann presents a brief overview of Latin American colonial migration with an emphasis on Mexico. He suggests that stock notions of stasis rather than mobility and deep-rooted localism rather than flexible allegiances to place and region are not well served by recent scholarship on late colonial Latin America. He supports his thesis with extensive citation of the appropriate literature. Swann offers further support with discussion and a seven-fold typology of migration in New Spain: from Europe, Africa, and other parts of the Hispanic Empire; native relocations; colonization of various frontiers; migration “bursts” triggered by conflicts over land or by disasters such as drought, famine, and disease; vagabondage in response to various unsettling forces; disequilibria in regional labor markets and resource distribution giving rise to seasonal and longer term labor circulations; and free migration linked to the expansion of wage labor and increased urbanization at the end of the colonial period. Swann also argues for looking beyond the aggregate forms of population movement to
BOOK REVIEWS
115
the individual patterns of mobility. Among other things, mobility viewed at this scale allows comparisons between different places and regions as to their degree of localism or immobility. For example, urban centers in the Bajio region of central Mexico, with relatively high Euro-persistent populations, registered high percentages of locally born residents over time. Some regions with largely indigenous populations such as the Yucatan experienced high degrees of mobility. This counters at least one facet of the facile image of European dynamism and indigenous rootedness. Not surprisingly the Mexican north as a protracted frontier provided contexts for high degrees of mobility in all of its aggregate and individual forms. In the second chapter the author surveys economic and ecological diversity in Mexico’s north discussing sources for estimating its highly mobile population. Using the padrones or censuses, and ecclesiastical records of baptisms, marriages, and burials, Swann reconstructs migration patterns for an ensemble of locales: four mining centers, four farming communities, and four mixed centers. From this comparative analysis he concludes that the society and economy of the region was governed by the mines, and that mobility as demonstrated within the twelve centers strongly reflected that industry’s impress. The following chapter elaborates these findings by sketching out migration fields or demographic hinterlands surrounding various communities. Using nativity data he shows that few families demonstrate fixity across generations in particular towns or villages. Nor can it be demonstrated that any one racial, ethnic or occupational subgroup could claim significantly greater rootedness than another. The social contexts of nativity and migration are considered in Chapter Four. The pulsations of ecology and economy helped set and keep in motion a sizable population of vagabonds for which it is difficult to extract specific data. Ample data exists for less mobile migrants and locals in various jurisdictions. Focusing on household heads, Swann is able to compile data on sex, age, civil status, race, occupational status, and occupational type in each of his 12 chosen jurisdictions. He is also able to measure migration distances for each of these socio-economic categories and jurisdictional types (mining, farming, and mixed locales). Once again the evidence points to a generalized mobility orchestrated by ecological and economic forces. Throughout, Swann’s key points are well represented in clear and appealing maps, charts, and tables. The final chapter offers summary remarks concerning the population patterns and rhythms of the region as a whole. Flexibility of movement was intensified by Bourbon reforms in the last half century of the colonial epoch. In sum, the volume is a valuable contribution to the historical population geography of a region that has attracted researchers of the calibre of Sauer, West, and Pennington. Swann casts a contemporary eye on persistent questions, showing how we might move the study of migration in colonial Latin America in new directions. Louisiana State University
KENTMATHEWSON
Other Studies 1~ S. DUNCAN, The City as Text: the Politics of La&cape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. xiv + 229. E35.00) Duncan has written the most important work on landscape interpretation since Dennis Cosgrove’s Social Formation and Symbolic La&cape (London 1984). His pretexts are explicit and appropriate. The heavy ballast of Sauer-influenced landscape study is to be cast overboard. Fully. No more avowedly atheoretical undertakings. No more innocent readings of the superficial and the artefactual. No more satisfied, naive claims that what you see is what you have. No more shunning of the human agency associated with
BOOK REVIEWS
pay made it necessary for black women to incur high labor force participation rates in both the North and the South. An added feature of economic survival in the North was the practice of taking in lodgers. The position assumed by the author in terms of the benefits accruing to migrants is that migrants experienced only nominal benefits if they experienced any at all. She takes the position that labor migration may convey benefits as an outgrowth of assimilation, return migration and the development of enclave economies. None of these benefits were demonstrated to have accrued to the participants in the Great Migration. It might well be that the author is employing the wrong indicators to ascertain if the experiment was a success. This constitutes a welcomed piece of work, but one that is not without shortcomings. The most glaring weakness is an attempt to have the findings fit within a preordained structural configuration. Nevertheless, the reader with a particular interest in this subject matter would surely wish to add it to their collection. University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
HAROLDM. ROSE
MICHAELM. SWANN,Migrants in the Mexican North: Mobility, Economy, and Society in a Colonial World (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989. Pp. xv + 202. $28.50)
Swann’s monograph is the most recent in a growing list of titles on historical demographic themes in the Dellplain Latin American Studies series. Edited by D. J. Robinson, the series includes such key studies in historical population geography as: N. D. Cook’s work on the Colca Valley, Peru; B. L. Turner, II’s landmark study of lowland Maya terracing; and L. Newson’s account of Indian decline in colonial Honduras. The collective efforts of Robinson, his students, and collaborators in this series invite comparison with the “Berkeley School” of historical demography, as represented by the work of Borah, Cook, Sauer, Simpson and their associates in the Zbero-Americana series. Robinson’s enterprise carries forward the Berkeley emphasis on ecological and culturalhistorical explorations and reconstructions of population history, but also strikes off into geographical modernity, finding the models and methods of contemporary population geographers and spatial theorists applicable in certain instances. Swann’s book demonstrates how these two differing streams can be channeled to render with new clarity, the history of migration in one of colonial Latin America’s more dynamic and diverse regions. The author sets out two basic objectives in this study. He reconstructs patterns of inmigration that developed around selected settlements, illuminating basic patterns of free migration and the relationships governing them in colonial northern Mexico. Second, he considers the selective nature of migration as evidenced by socio-economic and demographic characteristics of individual migrants. Through this dual focus, Swann seeks to explicate the nature of the linkages between mobility and the social and economic changes that the region experienced in the late colonial period. In the first chapter Swann presents a brief overview of Latin American colonial migration with an emphasis on Mexico. He suggests that stock notions of stasis rather than mobility and deep-rooted localism rather than flexible allegiances to place and region are not well served by recent scholarship on late colonial Latin America. He supports his thesis with extensive citation of the appropriate literature. Swann offers further support with discussion and a seven-fold typology of migration in New Spain: from Europe, Africa, and other parts of the Hispanic Empire; native relocations; colonization of various frontiers; migration “bursts” triggered by conflicts over land or by disasters such as drought, famine, and disease; vagabondage in response to various unsettling forces; disequilibria in regional labor markets and resource distribution giving rise to seasonal and longer term labor circulations; and free migration linked to the expansion of wage labor and increased urbanization at the end of the colonial period. Swann also argues for looking beyond the aggregate forms of population movement to
BOOK REVIEWS
115
the individual patterns of mobility. Among other things, mobility viewed at this scale allows comparisons between different places and regions as to their degree of localism or immobility. For example, urban centers in the Bajio region of central Mexico, with relatively high Euro-persistent populations, registered high percentages of locally born residents over time. Some regions with largely indigenous populations such as the Yucatan experienced high degrees of mobility. This counters at least one facet of the facile image of European dynamism and indigenous rootedness. Not surprisingly the Mexican north as a protracted frontier provided contexts for high degrees of mobility in all of its aggregate and individual forms. In the second chapter the author surveys economic and ecological diversity in Mexico’s north discussing sources for estimating its highly mobile population. Using the padrones or censuses, and ecclesiastical records of baptisms, marriages, and burials, Swann reconstructs migration patterns for an ensemble of locales: four mining centers, four farming communities, and four mixed centers. From this comparative analysis he concludes that the society and economy of the region was governed by the mines, and that mobility as demonstrated within the twelve centers strongly reflected that industry’s impress. The following chapter elaborates these findings by sketching out migration fields or demographic hinterlands surrounding various communities. Using nativity data he shows that few families demonstrate fixity across generations in particular towns or villages. Nor can it be demonstrated that any one racial, ethnic or occupational subgroup could claim significantly greater rootedness than another. The social contexts of nativity and migration are considered in Chapter Four. The pulsations of ecology and economy helped set and keep in motion a sizable population of vagabonds for which it is difficult to extract specific data. Ample data exists for less mobile migrants and locals in various jurisdictions. Focusing on household heads, Swann is able to compile data on sex, age, civil status, race, occupational status, and occupational type in each of his 12 chosen jurisdictions. He is also able to measure migration distances for each of these socio-economic categories and jurisdictional types (mining, farming, and mixed locales). Once again the evidence points to a generalized mobility orchestrated by ecological and economic forces. Throughout, Swann’s key points are well represented in clear and appealing maps, charts, and tables. The final chapter offers summary remarks concerning the population patterns and rhythms of the region as a whole. Flexibility of movement was intensified by Bourbon reforms in the last half century of the colonial epoch. In sum, the volume is a valuable contribution to the historical population geography of a region that has attracted researchers of the calibre of Sauer, West, and Pennington. Swann casts a contemporary eye on persistent questions, showing how we might move the study of migration in colonial Latin America in new directions. Louisiana State University
KENTMATHEWSON
Other Studies 1~ S. DUNCAN, The City as Text: the Politics of La&cape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. xiv + 229. E35.00) Duncan has written the most important work on landscape interpretation since Dennis Cosgrove’s Social Formation and Symbolic La&cape (London 1984). His pretexts are explicit and appropriate. The heavy ballast of Sauer-influenced landscape study is to be cast overboard. Fully. No more avowedly atheoretical undertakings. No more innocent readings of the superficial and the artefactual. No more satisfied, naive claims that what you see is what you have. No more shunning of the human agency associated with