Indian Population Decline: The Missions of Northwestern New Spain, 1687-1840 By Robert H. Jackson (review)

472 BOOK REVIEWS and theological currents. Three chapters draw heavily on two of the author's previously published articles. The narrative approach to intellectual history is a refreshing change from the present emphasis on socioeconomic statistical studies and merits praise for Fernando Cervantes, who was educated in Mexico and Great Britain and is now a lecturer at the University of Bristol. He is neither nostalgic about the loss of Mesoamerican religions nor overly patronizing toward poorly educated friars. At least twice, Cervantes notes that well educated ecclesiastics opposed superstition. He enhances our knowledge of folk Catholicism with information on Indians who appropriated and reinterpreted Christian elements, including the devil as well as saints. An analysis of the importance the Christian liturgy held for Indian communities is a major contribution. The author's distance from Mexican sources perhaps explains his decision to incorporate a sweeping survey of thinkers ranging from Origen to Voltaire. Time spent in Mexican archives, nevertheless, yielded significant findings, primarily on Inquisition cases concerning demonism. Cervantes detects a shift in the tribunal's attitude toward such questions and presents inferences, instead of evidence, to explain the change. He furnishes no data on the Inquisitors ' educational background and professional experience. Richard D. Greenleaf, Zumárraga and the Mexican Inquisition, 1536-1543 (Washington , D.C.: Academy of American Franciscan History, 1961), appears in the citations, but his The Mexican Inquisition of the Sixteenth Century (Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 1969), does not. Establishing intellectual antecedents for works written before the advent of mandatory documentation is difficult, and Cervantes sometimes evades the challenge. His thesis stressing the strong, lasting influence of Franciscan nominalism may be valid, yet it requires additional support with more specific links to Mexican individuals and events. It might be upheld or refuted by research on the courses of study seminarians and university students pursued and what texts they read. Discussions ofDescartes and Leibnitz are digressions because the author fails to connect them to the subject ofMexican diabolism. Although Cervantes errs in attempting to cover too many topics and too much time and space in a short book, he addresses issues which should be pursued from a narrower and deeper perspective in future monographs. Deixa M. Flusche Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti Indian Population Decline: TheMissions ofNorthwestern New Spain, 1687— 1840. By Robert H. Jackson. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1994. Pp. xii, 229. Î29.95.) Demography is one thing; history another. And demographic history is open to serious question when investigators assign causes to the decline of popu- BOOK REVIEWS 473 Iations. For eons man has tried to explain the problem of evil as retribution for "immoral" conduct whether the trashing of traditions or the smashing of the Ten Commandments. Jackson's foray into mission records emerges in his conclusions that the missionaries (read the Roman Catholic Church) intentionally congregated American Indians with an eye to population decimation. This study commences with Padre Eusebio Francisco Kino's arrival in the Pimería Alta, steps onto the peninsula of Baja California, where, if one is to believe and accept Miguel Venegas, the missions were uniquely adapted to the austerity of the environment, and terminates with the disappearance of mission communities in Alta California. The scant and incomplete records of baptisms, marriages, and burials is fair game for quantitative speculation, but it falls far short of assigning causes for decline exclusively attributable to mission life. Indians were experiencing disastrous epidemics long before the waters of baptism contaminated their lives. To apply the formulas of a computer program, Populate, to these records can be explained away, but how does this methodology divulge the purposes of the missionary program? Jackson has done a good service in accumulating these mission statistics and placing them in comparative tables. But major underlying factors shaping the mission systems are woefully missing. The congregation patterns ofwhich Jackson speaks were a policy of the Leyes de Indias, not the Church. The missionaries adapted their systems as best they could within the strictures of Spanish regulations, and frequently these systems reflected the life styles imposed by the ecological system. Not so in Alta California, however, where the Bourbon policy had so radically changed the organization and operation...