62 



INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY — PUBLICATION NO. 1 1 



THE PEOPLE 



Always, in the study of the cultural geography 

 of an area, of greatest importance and interest are 

 the people themselves. They can be studied, 

 analyzed, and reported upon from many points of 

 view. In this section we will consider the in- 

 habitants of the Quiroga area demographically; 

 that is, along statistical lines concerned primarily 

 with the data commonly found in population 

 censuses and in vital statistics. 



POPULATION CENSUSES 



Immediately after the conquest of the Pdtzcuaro 

 Basin and Michoac^n, the Spaniards were con- 

 cerned with making use of the conquered Indians 

 and with converting them to Christianity. Groups 

 of Indians, described in terms of village units and 

 areas, were entrusted to conquerors and their 

 relatives (encomenderos) , to the representatives of 

 the crown (corregidores and alcaldes may ores), and 

 to the priests of the missionary orders. All con- 

 quered Indians, with a few exceptions, had to 

 provide a certain amount of tribute or tax, in the 

 form of work, food, precious metals, firewood, 

 manufactiu'es of fibers, wood, metal, stone, and 

 terra cotta, etc. The Spanish Crown, through 

 its Council of the Indies and audiencies and 

 viceroys, made many regulations concerning such 

 tribute. Periodically surveys were made of the 

 tributary population in order to determine its 

 capacity to pay. Such surveys constitute the 

 first censuses for our area. 



In 1522 when the Pdtzcuaro region was con- 

 quered by Olid for Cortez, modern Quiroga was 

 the little Tarascan village of Cocupa or Cocupao 

 and several other neighboring small villages. 

 This group of villages, together with all the other 

 villages and towns of the lake basin, were con- 

 sidered to be parts or barrios of the capital city 

 of Tzintzuntzan (also known as Michoacdn). As 

 late as 1581 the city of Michoacdn (which by that 

 time had moved its administrative center from 

 Tzintzuntzan to the barrio known as Pdtzcuaro) 

 included 73 barrios, 15 within Pdtzcuaro city and 

 the remainder scattered over the basin and even 

 outside at distances from 1 to 10 leagues. Each 

 of the 58 outside barrios was termed a pueblo. 

 None of the sixteenth-century censuses, grants to 

 encomenderos, or lists of barrios or pueblos, pub- 

 lished to date mentions Cocupao by name. We 



know that the Quiroga area was within the lands 

 held by Cortez 1522-28/29, and after that it was 

 held in the name of the Crown and in part by the 

 encomendero Juan Infante and members of the 

 family of the last cazonci — but this is merely indi- 

 cated by the context of limits of grants and of 

 enumerated pueblos. Consequently, we obtained 

 no specific information as to population from the 

 various visitas, encuestas, iasaciones de indios, and 

 tributos de pueblos de indios. There may exist 

 such information in the archives — in the divisions 

 of Tierras, Indios, Mercedes, Congregaciones, and 

 the hke, but our brief examinations of the archives 

 in Mexico City did not turn up such material. 



POPULATION 1742-1822 



From the title or titulo of the ancient Repiiblica 

 de Indios del Pueblo de San Diego de Cocupa and 

 accompanying documents, and from manuscripts 

 pertaLuing to congregations in Michoacdn, we 

 know that Cocupao was formed or reformed by 

 congregating several small villages in 1534 or 

 earlier, and that there was a later congregation in 

 1603 which brought in the populations of several 

 other villages. But we do not know the names 

 of all the constituent villages, nor do we have 

 population data. By implication, what is now 

 Quiroga was a small unimportant village until the 

 end of the colonial period and the early part of 

 the 19th century. The earliest figures are provided 

 by Villasenor y Sanchez (1746-48) (cosmographer 

 for New Spain, and a native of Michoacdn) who 

 gives the figures of 30 families of Spaniards, 60 

 famihes of mestizos and mulattoes, and 70 families 

 of Indians, for the Pueblo of San Diego Cocupa 

 in 1742. By elimination of other pueblos men- 

 tioned in the area (e. g., Tzintzuntzan, Santa Fe, 

 Teremendo, Capula), Cocupa of 1742 embraced 

 essentially the area of this report. (For discus- 

 sions of the compass of the entities known as 

 Cocupao and Quiroga, see the sections on Land 

 Settlement, pp. 13-14, 23-25; Government, pp. 

 97-102; and Religion, pp. 200-201.) If we 

 arbitrarily assign five individuals to the family, 

 as is commonly done in converting family figiu-es 

 to total population in colonial Mexico, we obtaiu 

 a population figure of 800 for 1742. Various 

 surveys and censuses were taken in the period 

 1766-86 to provide basic data for the adminis- 

 trative reforms that culminated in the establish- 



