Ranchers and Indians on the Southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec: Economic Change and Indigenous Survival in Colonial Mexico
F OR anthropologists and social historians, one of the most intriguing and enigmatic social consequences of the Spanish conquest is the persistence to the present day of large, culturally distinctive Indian populations in mainland Latin America. The greatest part of those populations is to be found within the geographic boundaries once occupied by the so-called "high civilizations" of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and the Central Andes. Native groups in these areas were spared the rapid extinction suffered by their Antillean cousins, at least in part because of higher aboriginal population densities and the prevalence of socioeconomic structures preadapted to the labor and tribute demands of a European conquest state. In recent years, scholars have drawn attention to the considerable variation that existed among Mesoamerican and Andean populations in the success of their response to both newly introduced pathogens and the colonial institutions which preyed on them. Although demographic losses could be staggeringly high, local social, economic, and ecological factors might alter or exacerbate the course of epidemic disease in different parts of the colonized mainland to create varying patterns of demographic decline.' Among those ethnic groups which did manage to survive the impact