Climate and Society in Colonial Mexico: A Study in Vulnerability (review)

This is a penetrating analysis of the varied impacts of a range of the climatic hazards confronting colonial New Spain, based on a skillful use of both central (Mexico City) and a wide range of regional and local archival sources. The specific purpose of the research is stated clearly: "to explore the complex interaction between climate and society in historical perspective across Mexico…between 1521 and 1821." And to assist readers comprehend the many problems in interpreting the key term in the subtitle, the author provides a most useful discussion of the distinctive forms of vulnerability, correctly stressing its different meanings in the wide variety of temporal contexts that characterized colonial New Spain.

Prior to entering into details of the three case study regions selected a most valuable brief description of the types of documentation and the research methodology is provided, something often lacking in monographs of this type. In order of increasing levels of precipitation, from north to south, the three regions include the Conchos Basin in Chihuahua, the greater Guanajuato region in the Bajío, and the Valley of Oaxaca. Chapter two provides an overview of each of these regions' biophysical and socio-economic situations, an introduction that gives way to a description of how the Spanish colonization variously proceeded. Special attention is afforded the patterns of differential landholdings that developed through the colonial centuries, and the tensions between indigenous populations and the intruding Spanish. While in Oaxaca the so-called indios retained extensive communal holdings, in the Bajío many more privately-held estates became established by Spaniards and creoles; in the north incursions of hostile Indians into the settled valleys provided perpetual threats to sedentary agriculture. Dependence on subsistence crops varied by ethnic group, and soon poverty and precarious environmental locations became synonyms.

Next, readers are provided with a series of chapters that describe in detail the many adaptive strategies utilized by the different social groups in each of the case study regions. For some the most important threat came from flooding, thus dam building, and other water control measures became the dominant theme of operational response. For others it was the shortage of water, the drought hazard that plagued all the regions at one time or another. And in mentioning plagues, one may note the author's proper integration into the hazard scenario of the subtle but consistent relationship between marginal food supplies, the impact of both endemic and epidemic diseases, and weather and climatic conditions. Not for nothing were the major disaster years of 1785-86 called the "Año de Hambre".

The rich available archival documentation and repeated episodic natural disasters of the eighteenth century permit the author to suspend inter-regions comparisons to focus on this key temporal phase of New Spain's development (chapter 6). With the population doubling during this century meant that more of the underprivileged were made more marginal and vulnerable. Incessant disputes over land rights, ethnic identities, the competing roles of the church and imperial state—such continual eminently colonial contexts-- also had to suffer the dramatic onset of famines, social unrest, public protests, administrative reactions and reforms, and in the background the repeated weather crises of drought, dramatically depicted in lengthy Table 6.1. All three regional populations suffered, but the central core of the colony decidedly the most.

Such a superb account of what happened in colonial Mexico naturally raises more general questions: are there parallels between climatic events of Mexico and other parts of both Central and South America, or beyond in Europe and Africa, indeed globally? The author hesitates to use her details of colonial Mexico to make any firm associations with other, more contemporary, patterns of global warming or major climatic change, though readers will certainly consider such possibilities, given the fact that the bibliography gives ample evidence from lakebed borings and tree-ring dendrochronological data that...