The Mexican government recently proposed as a medium-term objective that the minimum rate of economic growth should be twice the rate of population growth (Mexico, Presidencia de la República 1988). This proposal may indicate a renewed interest in Mexico in linking demographic variables to the economic and development issues of the country. In proposing such a target, the Mexican government seems to be suggesting that its long-term development plans will hinge on criteria that depart radically from those recently used to assess the performance of these plans. The proposal seems particularly revealing because it came from President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who is an economist himself.

Jacaltenango is a forlorn, unkempt-looking town lying in the tierra templada toward the western edge of the Cuchumatán highlands of Guatemala. It is perhaps best known to the academic world as a stop on the route taken by Frans Blom and Oliver La Farge (1926, 1927) in their pioneering reconnaissance of Mesoamerica earlier this century, a place to which the latter returned with Douglas Byers to document an intriguing array of Maya cultural survivals (La Farge and Byers 1931). More recently, one of its native sons has given local lore and storytelling eloquent written form, as well as documenting the town's painful experience during counterinsurgency operations in the early 1980s (Montejo 1984, 1987).