Called to say a few words on this saddest of occasions I cannot of course fulfill the almost impossible task of displaying before you in three to five minutes what Woodrow Borah meant not only to me, but to his colleagues and students in the academic community at Berkeley, and to the larger community of Latin American scholars.

Other speakers will talk better than I possibly can of Woodrow as colleague and teacher; what he meant to me and to my family at the personal level I cannot even begin to say; renouncing to try it here, let me only state that since I was called to Berkeley by his initiative I found in him a permanent example of unflinching integrity of thought and action, that made me ever more grateful for having won both the professional approval and the personal friendship of this supremely severe judge of humans and scholars.

His approval appeared to me even more precious because it came from the intellectual leader of a world-known scholarly current that in France was called l'ecole de Berkeley and in Italy la scuola di Berkeley, but of whose very existence -as I was soon to discover- Berkeley was blissfully ignorant. The school of Berkeley were really three colleagues at the Berkeley campus, Lesley Byrd Simpson, a literary scholar who had already pioneered in the early history of Mexico and the Caribbean, and was soon to offer in his Many Mexicos a delightful overview of the course of Mexican history that is full of original and persuasive insights, Sherburne Cook, a biologist, and Woodrow Borah, who led them in the quixotic project of reconstructing the population curve of central Mexico from the eve of the conquest to the late colony, and in the process changed forever the contours of Spanish American history.

He and his colleagues achieved that result by throwing light for the first time on the demographic catastrophe that followed the Spanish conquest, the true dimensions of which had been ignored until then; for that purpose they were not only to collect a vast mass of heterogenous and unwieldy sources, but to develop new methodological approaches that would allow these sources to yield the relevant data, and even to extend the exploration to pre- conquest times, for which, in the absence of written documents, they were forced to have recourse to even more novel lines of - research. Unavoidably, their conclusions were to be seen as potentially dangerous weapons in the ideologically-inspired disputes around the legacy of Spain in America that were at their most intense at the time, and there were many who went to battle against them with all the zeal of warriors in a holy war. Their efforts were to prove vain, and today -- while the precise figures proposed by Borah and Cook have in the meantime been the object of less extreme, but also less futile, challenges - the conclusion that the conquest brought about in Central Mexico a fall of at least 80% and probably above 90% of the original population appears solidly established.

While this conclusion was to change the course of demographic history, and not only for the New World, I suspect that Woodrow was more interested in what it said about Mexico: in 1951 he explored the ramified consequences it had on its colonial history in the compressed masterwork that is New Spain's Century of Depression; but, looking beyond and before the colony, he touched the Mexican ungenerous nature, knowing in advance that they couldn't win, and ready nevertheless to rejoin battle after the most devastating defeats: in that millennial history the catastrophe brought about by the conquest found its place as the most extreme in a succession of malthusian cycles that reached into the remote times of Teotihuacan. In their own way, the sober figures advanced by the school of Berkeley reflected the historical experience that underlay the view of the world powerfully evocated by Inga Clendinnen in her recent Aztecs. Woodrow was aware of it, and I suppose that his affinity with a pessimism that couldn't be more extreme, but refused to become an argument to accept defeat, played an important role in his love of Mexico. Because Woodrow had an intense love for Mexico; a country that he was ready to accept as it was; and Mexicans found it easy to reciprocate an affection devoid of the illusions that they find as contemptible as Woodrow did. Sometimes I felt that the mordant wit that Woodrow displayed in his exercises in incisive and deadly accurate criticism hid a secret ambition to be loved against himself. If this was the case, he certainly did succeed with the Mexicans, as he succeeded with me.