Ethnicity, Caste, and Rulership in Mixquiahuala, México

Appendix 3. "The 1737 Matlazahuatl Epidemic in Mixquiahuala and Tecpatepec, México."
By: Alexander F. Christensen, Rutgers University-Camden, Camden, NJ 08102

Abstract submitted for the 2003 annual meeting of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, Tempe, AZ.

Estimates of the magnitude of early colonial indigenous population decline in Mesoamerica range from 25% to 90%. Because detailed mortality reports do not exist for sixteenth-century epidemics, scholars rely upon general descriptions of their extent, as well as modern epidemiological accounts of the diseases that may have been responsible.

Eighteenth-century epidemics can be studied in greater detail. One of the most destructive was the matlazahuatl epidemic which raged across México between 1736 and 1738. Contemporary accounts report 40,000 deaths in México City alone. The name matlazahuatl was also used to describe an earlier pandemic in 1576-1580. What pathogen was responsible? Typhus, plague, smallpox, and most recently an arenaviral hemorrhagic fever have been proposed.

The parish records of Mixquiahuala and Tecpatepec, Hidalgo, México include burial records from 1737-1738, which can be tied to a 1718 nominal census as well as birth and marriage registers. Family reconstruction indicates that the causative agent was regularly spread by interpersonal contact between immediate family members. Over the 15 month span of the epidemic in these towns, 218 people were buried in Mixquiahuala and 380 in Tecpatepec. If we assume no change in population size between 1718 and 1737, this indicates a mortality of 53% and 57%. In Mixquiahuala, 95 unmarried and 123 married individuals died, equivalent to 52% and 54% of the 1718 population in each category, and in Tecpatepec 194 and 186 died, or 54% and 61%. The high mortality and familial transmission suggest that neither typhus nor a zoonotic hemorrhagic fever was responsible.

Previous Page  |  Table of Contents

Return to top of page