Variation on a Theme: Demographic Patterns of Nuestra Señora de los Reyes Yapeyú Mission (Corrientes, Argentina)

Abstract

Several generations of scholars have accepted general assumptions about indigenous demographic patterns in the Americas after 1492 suggested by scholars such as Alfred Crosby and Henry Dobyns. According to this model, waves of epidemics spread across the Americas in outbreaks that claimed the lives of millions of people, but over time the indigenous populations built up immunities to pathogens such as smallpox and recovered. The analysis of demographic patterns of the Jesuit missions among the Guaraní challenges these assumptions. The mission populations experienced catastrophic mortality, which in some cases was more than 50 percent of the population of a given community several centuries following first sustained contact, and epidemics occurred about once a generation after there was a large enough pool of potentially susceptible hosts born since the previous outbreak. The case study ofYapeyú mission highlights the reality of considerable variation in levels of epidemic mortality between communities. For some 50 years, the mission did not suffer catastrophic epidemic mortality, as did neighboring mission communities.