Mexico’s native population collapsed from 25 million to about one million in nine decades

Evidence

Within nine decades “diseases, wars, relocations, and the ecological changes wrought by Spanish settlement and control” and (it should be added) slave labor had reduced the number of indigenous inhabitants to an estimated 1,075,000. … As early as the 1514 census, according to C. O. Sauer, the repartimiento records of natives on Santo Domingo, working land seized for the crown, indicated an average of less than one child per family. Las Casas had indicated that in the period immediately prior to the Conquest, Indian women had averaged between three and five children each. Elsewhere, “Jaramillo Uribe remarks that at the beginning of the seventeenth century it was common in New Granada to find that half the Indian couples had no children. On the average they had only two children, and the family with four offspring was exceptional.” Sanchez-Albornoz concludes: “It is evident that the Indians decreased not only on account of deaths, but also partially because they did not ensure the normal replacement of the generations.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 628

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The collapse is not only from death but from a dramatic fertility collapse — the colonized stop reproducing children — which points at a social-psychic rupture as profound as physical extermination.
• XREF: Connects to demographic arguments in works on settler colonialism; also echoes the pattern Robinson will trace into the slave trade demand. — connects to: Hispaniola’s native population collapsed within decades of Spanish conquest; Hispaniola’s indigenous population collapsed from 750,000 to 29,000 within two decades; Precolonial Mexico had thirty million people — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 46 (+3 more)
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 628

Broader Connections

• Hispaniola’s indigenous population collapsed from 750,000 to 29,000 within two decades #exemplifies (0.80)
• Mexico’s pre-conquest population exceeded twenty-five million #corroborates (0.75)
• Precolonial Mexico had thirty million people #corroborates (0.70) — Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the…, 46
• Hispaniola’s native population collapsed from 100,000 to a few hundred by 1570. #exemplifies (0.70) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1899