¹ One example might be the outcome of the debate between Herskovits and Malinowski in the 1930s about the preservation of indigenous institutions.

² The term ‘structural duration’ is borrowed from Professer Gluckman, M., ‘The Utility of the Equilibrium Model’, American Anthropologist, 70 (1968).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³ Ley de Desamortización, 25 June 1856, introduced by Lerdo de Tejada under the presidency of Comonfort.

⁴ Tannenbaum, Frank, Mexico, The Struggle for Peace and Bread (New York, 1954), p. 137Google Scholar; Núñez, Mendieta y, Efectos Sociales de la Reforma Agraria en tres comunidades ejidales (Mexico, UNAM, 1960), pp. 20–1.Google Scholar

⁵ Núñez, Mendieta y, loc. cit., pp. 22–4.Google Scholar

⁶ Gamio, M., ‘Introduction, Synthesis and Conclusions’, The Population of the Valley of Teotihuacán (Mexico, 1922), pp. xii–xiv.Google Scholar

⁷ Lewis, Oscar, Life in a Mexican Village: Tepoztlán Restudied (University of Illinois Press, 1951), p. 116.Google Scholar

⁸ Redfield, R., The Little Community, and Peasant Society and Culture (Chicago, Phoenix Books, 1960), p. 135.Google Scholar

⁹ Ibid., p. 73.

¹⁰ Lewis, Oscar, ‘Some of My Best Friends are Peasants’, Human Organisation, 19 (1960), 179.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹¹ See Paddock, J., ‘Oscar Lewis's Mexico’, Anthropological Quarterly, 34–35 (1962), 136.Google Scholar

¹² Redfield, , The Little Community, p. 143.Google Scholar

¹³ Lewis, , ‘Some of My Best Friends are Peasants’, p. 179.Google Scholar

¹⁴ When this paper was in its final stages, my attention was drawn to Eric Wolf's interesting hypothesis which postulates the waxing and waning of the prestige and vigour of the Indian village in response to periods of the respectively weak and powerful influence of the metropolis. Paddock, J., ‘Oscar Lewis's Mexico’, Mesoamerican Notes, 6 (1965), 16–17Google Scholar. While my period of ‘structural duration’ for Tepoztlán is obviously different from Professor Wolf's, the general thesis that economic and demographic changes affect social behaviour still holds, in my opinion.

¹⁵ Redfield, , The Little Community, pp. 134–5Google Scholar, cf. Lewis, , Life in a Mexican Village, p. 431.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ibid., p. xi, note 6.

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 431, note 6.

¹⁸ Lewis, Oscar, ‘Children of Sánchez, Pedro Martínez, and La Vida’, Current Anthropology, 8 (1967), 499.Google Scholar

¹⁹ Lewis, , Life in a Mexican Village, pp. 30–1.Google Scholar

²⁰ Population figures from Dirección General de Estadística, VIII Censo General de Población. Estado de México (Mexico, 1960), Cuadro No. 7.Google Scholar

²¹ Lewis, , Life in a Mexican Village, p. 30Google Scholar. But Lewis gives no satisfactory explanation of the difference in the sizes of male and female age-groups after 1920. Again, one must go to the adjacent state for elucidation. A similar manifestation of demographic ‘disappearance’, or diminution of the female cohorts, in the population pyramids for San Juan Teotihuacan evokes biological and sociological explanations from the investigator. Armas, M. Nolasco, ‘La tenencia de la tierra en el muncipio de San Juan Teotihuacán’, Acta Antropológica, Epoca 2, 2, No. 3 (1962) 37–9Google Scholar. More cogent than the biological one (that the life-crises of puberty and maternity arc causes of high female mortality) is the social explanation: the latter is supported by evidence which suggests that many young women go into service in the national capital and do not return.

Returning to the Tepoztlán pyramid, we may postulate, therefore, that the shortening of the female cohort of 20–24-year-olds G may partly be duc to migration in the direction of nearby Cuernavaca. This cohort may also have been affected by the typhoid epidemic in 1940, which is mentioned by Lewis, but it is curious that a similar indentation occurs in the pyramid around 20 years earlier H.

²² Flores, Edmundo, ‘The significance of land-use changes in the economic development of Mexico’, Land Economics, 35, No. 2 (1959), 117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²³ Lewis, , Life in a Mexican Village, p. 32.Google Scholar

²⁴ Ibid., p. 116.

²⁵ Ibid., p. 31.

²⁶ The Agrarian Code is the administrative expression of Article 27 of Mexico's Constitution of 1917 which authorized the distribution of land to villages which needed it. Laws of land distribution pre-date the 1917 Constitution, the first being the Law of 6 January 1915. The first serious attempt at agrarian legislation, according to Núñez, Mendieta y, Efectos Sociales de la Reforma Agraria, p. 40Google Scholar, was by Bassols, Narciso, author of the ‘Law of endowment and restitution of land and (irrigation) water’ of 23 04 1927Google Scholar. The articles in the present paper refer to the Agrarian Code currently in force, which was signed by President Avila Camacho on 31 Dec. 1942, and appeared in the Diario Oficio of 27 April 1943.

²⁷ In 1923, the decree of 2 August by President Alvaro Obregón had specified 18 years as the minimum age for the acquisition of ‘national or uncultivated’ land.

²⁸ Lewis, , Life in a Mexican Village, pp. 116–17.Google Scholar

²⁹ Caso, Alfonso, ‘La tenencia de la tierra entre los antiguos Mexicanos’, Memoria del Colegio Nacional, Tomo 4, Num. 2 (1959), 38–47.Google Scholar

³⁰ Lewis, , Life in a Mexican Village, p. xxvi.Google Scholar

³¹ Ibid., p. 115.

³² Ibid., p. 125.

³³ Coy, P. E. B., ‘Justice for the Indian in Eightecnth Century Mexico’, American Journal of Legal History, 12 (1968).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

³⁴ Flores, , ‘The significance of land-use changes’, p. 121.Google Scholar

³⁵ Núñez, Mendieta y, Efectos Sociales de la Reforma Agraria, p. 42.Google Scholar

³⁶ de Oca, G. Fabila Montes, Los Ejidos del Estado de Mexico (Toluca, 1958), p. xx.Google Scholar

³⁷ Ibid., p. xix.

³⁸ Ibid., pp. xxvi–xxvii.

³⁹ Ibid., p. xxxiii.

⁴⁰ Ibid., p. xlix.

⁴¹ Ibid., p. 1.

⁴² Malinowski, B. and de la Fuente, J., ‘La Economía de un Sistema de Mercados en México’, Acta Antropológica, Epoca 2, 1, No. 2 (1957), p. 87.Google Scholar

⁴³ Here, one should note that, in a much wider context and as part of a discussion of ‘Interpersonal Relations in Peasant Society’, Professer C. Jayawardene ascribes contrasting, but coincidental, behaviour patterns to the ‘distinct Systems of relations determining peasant social life—that of the local community and that of the total society’. ‘Ideology and Conflict in Lower Class Communities’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 10, No. 4 (1968), p. 441.

⁴⁴ The presidencies of the period were those of Obregón, Alvaro, 1 12 1920 to 30 11 1924Google Scholar, and Calles, Plutarco Elías, from 1 12 1924 to 30 11 1929.Google Scholar

⁴⁵ Fabila, , Los Ejidos, p. xxv.Google Scholar