Woodrow Borah

Borah was named for President Woodrow Wilson. As the first white child born in Utica, Mississippi following Wilson's becoming president, Borah said in a wide-ranging 2001 interview that "My father would have been lynched if he hadn't named me Woodrow Wilson."[3] He came from a family of Jewish businessmen. He did not know how his parents and extended family came to be in Mississippi, but they moved to New York when Borah was young, then relocated to Los Angeles when he was an adolescent. He attended high school in Los Angeles, which he remembered fondly for its rigorous teachers. He enrolled at University of California, Los Angeles, graduating with a B.A. in history; he went on to earn a Master's in history there. He began doctoral studies at UCLA, but his mentor urged him to go elsewhere since "You know the ropes here too well.You're not really learning as much as you should"[4] He then transferred to UC Berkeley for his Ph.D., studying with Herbert E. Bolton, Carl O. Sauer, and Lesley Byrd Simpson, who had established Berkeley as a major center for Latin American studies. In 1945, he married his wife Terry, with the union producing two children, Jonathan and Ruth. Borah was raised a secular Jew, but he joined a congregation, had a religious wedding, and raised his children as Jews. He spoke openly about the discrimination he encountered early in his career, advised by his mentor Bolton that he was unlikely to find an academic job because he was a Jew. "Berkeley itself had a good deal of anti-Semitism in the History Department until the early 1950s."[5] He spent the majority of his academic career at University of California, Berkeley, retiring in 1980.

Borah was not interested in political history, and his Berkeley doctoral committee suggested that he pursue a dissertation on silk-raising in colonial Mexico, which he completed in 1940 and published in 1943. In 1941, he unexpectedly got an offer to teach at Princeton for one year. During World War II, he was recruited in 1942 to the Office of Strategic Services, analyzing information on Latin America that might be useful for the war effort. His supervisor was Maurice Halperin, who was at the time a secret member of the Communist Party.[6] Borah remained with the OSS until 1947. In 1948 he returned to UC Berkeley,[7] hired by the Speech Department, where he remained for 14 years.[1] He was a Guggenheim Fellow for the academic years 1951–1952 and 1958–1959.[8] In 1962, he moved to the History Department, becoming the Shepard Professor of History, where he remained until his retirement in 1980. Following the invasion of the Dominican Republic by the United States in 1965, Borah added his name to a letter signed by 103 Latin Americanists to President Lyndon Johnson, condemning the invasion.[9]

Borah began collaborating with Sherburne F. Cook on the demography of indigenous populations in the Americas after the two had known each other for nearly 20 years.[10] Their research interests carried them from Berkeley's Bancroft Library to Mexican archives and travels on mule back. The two published a series of monographs on the pre-Hispanic and colonial demography, The population of Central Mexico in 1548: an Analysis of the Suma de visitas de pueblos (1960); The Indian Population of Central Mexico on the Eve of the Spanish Conquest (1963); The Population of the Mixteca Alta, 1520-1960(1968).and Essays in Population History: Mexico and the Caribbean (3 vols., 1971–79). They concluded that they preconquest Indian population living in central Mexico totaled over 25 million. Their unexpected high numbers implied that natives died by the millions or tens of millions when the Spanish arrived, igniting a fierce debate among scholars. Essays in Population History applied a similar methodology to other areas in Latin America. In Hispaniola they estimated a population of 4 - 8 million. They attributed the dramatic collapse in the Indian population to excessive hard labor imposed by the Spanish and the disruption of traditional society, as well as new European diseases.[11]

Borah also published important studies on economic history, including New Spain's Century of Depression, positing a downturn in the economy due to the decimation of the indigenous populations. He examined the economic links in Spanish America in Early Colonial Trade and Navigation between Mexico and Peru (1954). His last major monograph was Justice by Insurance: The General Indian Court of Colonial Mexico and the Legal Aides of the Half-Real (1983), which won the Conference of Latin American History's Herbert E. Bolton Prize for the best book in English on Latin America.[12]

In 1979, the Conference on Latin American History conferred on Borah its highest honor, the Distinguished Service Award.[13] He was asked by the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) to hold the Alfonso Caso Memorial Chair in 1981–82.[14] As President of the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Association, Borah laid out his broad views in "Discontinuity and Continuity in Mexican History,"[15]

Borah was well known for his biting wit and frank judgments. He "wielded a scathing and even eviscerating verbal style that might unnerve all but the most confident graduate student or thick-skinned colleague" but he also had a "fundamental, if often concealed, kindness."[16]