Communications

Peter Guardino's paper on the 1840S peasant wars in present-day Guerrero (HAHR 75:2, May 1995) significantly advances our understanding of these events.The paper perpetuates one commonly held misconception, however.Guardino echoes other researchers of late colonial and nineteenth-century Mexico in stating that "By the late eighteenth century, population growth was squeezing peasant agrarian resources" (p.188).No specific citations are offered, but presumably he has drawn this inference from the increased number of lawsuits and other records involving land disputes in the Chilapa region in the late colonial period.Some of these documents are offered in evidence by John Mason Hart (see citations in HAHR 75A, Nov. 1995, p. 749) to support his argument that any "squeeze" on peasants was a result of the expansion of commercial agricultural estates into territories once held by native villages.Guardino challenges Hart on the issue of commercial agriculture and estate expansion, arguing that private holdings were small and posed a comparatively small threat to peasant communities (ibid., p. 752).But both agree that in the decades leading up to the 1840S conflagrations some sort of imbalance had developed between population and the available agricultural resources.peasants to the edge of economic viability, as Guardino also suggests.Rather, peasants in the Chilapa region were economically secure and were in a strong position to defend themselves against outside interference.They demonstrated this by plunging the region into chaos, effectively calling the elites' bluff

Computer Science · Historical Studies in Latin America · Latin American history and culture · Politics and Society in Latin America