|
Missing millions: the human cost of the Mexican Revolution
© 2001 Robert McCaa, University of Minnesota Population Center
| ||
The human cost of the Mexican Revolution
(1910-1920) was enormous, but there is little agreement on the magnitude,
causes or components of the disaster.
Published census figures for 1910 and 1921 understate the magnitude of
the catastrophe because the 1921 count was without doubt the worst conducted in
Mexico in the twentieth century. The
“official” loss from a comparison of crude census figures for these years (15.2
million for the former and 14.3 for the latter) is almost one million, around
six percent of the population in 1910.
The loss triples when the demographic growth of the decade preceding the
outbreak of war is added to the equation. Losses can be
decomposed into excess deaths, lost births, epidemics, emigration and census
error. A new demographic method, inverse projection, is used to read the demographic
history of Mexico for the decade of revolution from the age and sex structure of the population in the 1930
censuses of Mexico and the United States.
The best fitting model reveals an undercount in the 1921 census of one
million and a total demographic loss from 1910 to 1921 of 2.1 million. Excess deaths accounted for two-thirds of
the missing millions (900 thousand males and 500 thousand females), lost births
one-fourth and emigration considerably less than one-tenth of the total (100
thousand male and 75,000 female net persisting emigrant refugees). These fractions are not original, having
been proposed by one or another researcher over the past three-quarters of a
century. What makes them unique, in
addition to the breakout by sex, is how they are combined and how they were
derived. For the first time two
demographic equations, one for each sex, are tested. As a final test, results
from the inverse projection method are compared with those from conventional
cohort component projections. The
conventional method permits a rough assessment of the losses in Morelos (where
Emiliano Zapata was most active) and for other states of Mexico. | ||
| Continue | ||