Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Demographic Changes in the Mining Community of Muzo after the Plague of 1629

1967; Duke University Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-47.3.338

1527-1900

Juán Friede,

Cuban History and Society

A S WE KNOW, rapid decline in aboriginal Lpopulation of Indies resulting from Spanish occupation alarmed authorities. Though government attempted to halt it by means of a long series of legal measures, these evidently had little effect. Chroniclers and informants, for their part, tried to explain away decline with a theory, that is, epidemics which periodically descended on New World and particularly affected Indians. Even today many authors subscribe to plague theory. One declared recently that the amazing mortality rate [of native peoples] has been nature's means of eliminating those individuals who were genetically and constitutionally liable to contract diseases from which they were unable to recover.'1 To him medieval notion of a plague visited on human race as a divine punishment becomes a modern technique used by wise Mother Nature to exterminate certain groups while others are preserved. Some historians who do not accept this deterministic attitude nevertheless consider plagues to be principal cause, or at least an important factor, in dwindling of aboriginal population, although they must be aware that invasion by a colonial power creates in a primitive society conditions under which subjugated individuals are more suseeptible to disease and even minor infections.2 'This is not to say that colonial America was free of epidemics. But objective historian should not accept colonial reports of their frequency, endemic nature, and destructive role without looking for supporting evidence. Real epidemics leave many documentary traces. One might expect, 'for instance, that census of a given period