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The Fertility of Maya and Ladino Women

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

John Holian
John Holian*
Affiliation:
Cuyahoga Community College, Cleveland
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Second only to the Quechua-speaking peoples of the Andes, the Maya of southeastern Mexico and Guatemala constitute the “most impressive surviving American culture in the Western Hemisphere” (Vogt 1969a, 21). In Mexico the main division within the Maya falls between the highland population living in the state of Chiapas and the lowland group residing in the Yucatán Peninsula (Vogt 1969b). People of mixed Spanish and Indian ancestry, known locally as ladinos, make up most of the remaining population. Inspired by the well-known series of investigations of Indian and mestizo fertility in the Andean region, the present study seeks to describe within Mexico the fertility differences between the highland and lowland Maya and their ladino neighbors and, within the limits of the data, to account for the observed differentials.

Type
Research Reports and Notes
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , 1985 , pp. 87 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © 1985 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

∗

The author wishes to thank Eduardo Cordero for permission to use the data, Julio Ortuzar and Arthur Conning for providing the data, Bruce Rose for computer programming, and Roger Avery, James Cramer, Gary Deimling, Gail Holian, Arthur G. Neal, Edward Stockwell, Richard Zeller, and three anonymous LARR reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

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