The demise of the American Indios.

This symposium takes as its point of departure two books by Massimo Livi Bacci, Conquest and El Dorado in the Marshes, published in English in 2008 and 2010. Livi Bacci assesses widely varying estimates of the demographic dimensions of the collapse of the Native populations following their contact with Europeans and elucidates the proximate causes of that catastrophe. Drawing on models that combine production potential with demography, environment, and technology, Shripad Tuljapurkar discusses analogous historical experiences of the populations of Polynesia and the social transformation they entailed. David S. Reher argues that explanations of the estimated demographic dynamics need to take into account the negative fertility responses of the Indigenous population to the disruption of their traditional way of life. Focusing on the biological aspects of immunity to diseases such as smallpox, Andrew Noymer demonstrates that infectious diseases alone could not account for the Indios' population collapse. The contributions to this symposium are based on presentations at a session at the 2010 annual meeting of the Population Association of America, held in Dallas, Texas, that examined the demographic consequences of the Spanish conquest of the Caribbean region and of South America in light of the two books.

Social networks among Indigenous peoples in Mexico.

We examine the extent to which social networks among indigenous peoples in Mexico have a significant effect on a variety of human capital investment and economic activities, such as school attendance and work among teenage boys and girls, and migration, welfare participation, employment status, occupation, and sector of employment among adult males and females. Using data from the 10 percent population sample of the 2000 Population and Housing Census of Mexico and the empirical strategy that Bertrand, Luttmer, and Mullainathan (2000) propose, which allows us to take into account the role of municipality and language group fixed effects, we confirm empirically that social network effects play an important role in the economic decisions of indigenous people, especially in rural areas. Our analysis also provides evidence that better access to basic services such as water and electricity increases the size and strength of network effects in rural areas.

Guatemala's green revolution: synthetic fertilizer, public health, and economic autonomy in the Mayan highland.

Despite extensive literature both supporting and critiquing the Green Revolution, surprisingly little attention has been paid to synthetic fertilizers' health and environmental effects or indigenous farmers' perspectives. The introduction of agrochemicals in the mid-twentieth century was a watershed event for many Mayan farmers in Guatemala. While some Maya hailed synthetic fertilizers' immediate effectiveness as a relief from famines and migrant labor, other lamented the long-term deterioration of their public health, soil quality, and economic autonomy. Since the rising cost of agrochemicals compelled Maya to return to plantation labor in the 1970s, synthetic fertilizers simply shifted, rather than alleviated, Mayan dependency on the cash economy. By highlighting Mayan farmers' historical narratives and delineating the relationship between agricultural science and postwar geopolitics, the constraints on agriculturists' agency become clear. In the end, politics, more than technology or agricultural performance, influenced guatemala's shift toward the Green Revolution.

Internal migration and contraceptive knowledge and use in Guatemala.

CONTEXT: Levels of modern contraceptive knowledge and use among people living in rural areas of Guatemala differ substantially from those of people living in urban areas. Understanding the pace and extent of rural-to-urban migrants' adoption of urban contraceptive practices is important in determining if there is a strong need for migrant-focused reproductive health programs. METHODS: Bivariate and multivariate analyses of data on 971 married male and female respondents in the 1999 Guatemalan Migration and Reproductive Health Survey were used to examine how migration status and duration of residence in an urban area are associated with knowledge of modern contraceptive methods and current contraceptive use. RESULTS: Migrants' contraceptive knowledge was positively associated with the number of years they had lived in an urban area. Mayan migrants in Guatemala City did not accumulate contraceptive knowledge at the same rate as non-Mayan migrants, perhaps due to cultural and linguistic barriers to obtaining knowledge of and access to contraceptives. Rural-to-urban migrants eventually achieve a level of modern contraceptive use slightly below that of urban nonmigrants, with the level of contraceptive knowledge being an important factor associated with use of modern methods. CONCLUSIONS: Migrants possess limited knowledge of modern contraceptive methods and, therefore, may experience unmet need for contraception or may have a limited choice of modern contraceptive methods during their first years in an urban destination. Programs designed to raise contraceptive awareness and use should target recent migrants--particularly indigenous Mayans--in urban areas.

Sahagún's "Florentine codex," a little known Aztecan natural history of the Valley of Mexico.

Franciscan missionary Fray Bernardino de Sahagún arrived in New Spain (Mexico) in 1529 to proselytize Aztecs surviving the Conquest, begun by Hernán Cortés in 1519. About 1558 he commenced his huge opus "Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España" completed in Latin-Nahuatl manuscript in 1569. The best surviving version, the "Florentine Codex," 1579 in Spanish-Nahuatl, is the basis for the editions published since 1829. The first English translation was issued in 13 volumes between 1950 and 1982, and the first facsimile was published in 1979. Book 11, "Earthly things," is a comprehensive natural history of the Valley of Mexico based on pre-Cortésian Aztec knowledge. Sahagún's work, largely unknown among English-speaking biologists, is an untapped treasury of information about Aztecan natural history. It also establishes the Aztecs as the preeminent pioneering naturalists of North American, and Sahagún and his colleagues as their documentarians.