A comment on "Mexico: A History"

I have been reading Mexico: A History by Robert Ryal Miller. I have read several chapters that deal with the pre-Columbian indigenous society, the conquest by the Spanish, and the colonial period. I have been enjoying the book as it is full of interesting detail. I have spent a total of several months in Mexico, having visited it many times over many decades, and the book helps to both bring back a lot of experiences and to put them into a larger context.


However, it seems to miss the most important point. The Mexican population was estimated to be more than 25 million in 1520, and had been cut to just over one million in 1605. The Spanish had brought with them not only European crops and livestock, but also European diseases which ravaged the indigenous (and immigrant) population. As the population plummeted and the Spanish imposed their institutions on the indigenous population, all sorts of systems and institutions must have failed adding to the crisis.


Think about what it would mean to have a 96 percent cut in population. Think of the U.S. population cut from 300 million to 12 million in less than a century. I live in the Washington DC metropolitan area, which currently has a population of some 8.2 million people. Were that cut by 96 percent, there would be some 330 thousand people left in the region. They would be living amidst the ruins of cities built for far larger populations. I bet the remaining population could not or would not support the infrastructure of roads, aqueducts, sewerage, and electrical supply, and people would be living in a far more primitive state. So too the economy would be far less complex and far less able to provide a high standard of living for the remaining people.


Think of Rome in the depth of the Middle Ages or Constantinople when it fell to the Turks, ruined remains of great civilizations in which a few survivors sought to survive.


Now think of an American remnant population trying to deal with a Chinese speaking government, under the influence of a foreign religion, and subjected to a system of peonage.


I suspect that we tend to think of Mexican history from the point of view of the European invaders, who are after all the ones who left most of the records (although there are some from Europeanized Aztecs or mestizos who were of the upper class). The point of view of the peasant survivors of a once great civilization would have been more desperate, angry and depressed.