But they are heavily dependent on pass-through tourist sales. All it took to cripple a village was for the federal government to build a highway around the town. This happened to Tzintzuntzan some years ago and its ceramics industry lost much of its vitality. More than half the village's residents now live in Mexico City, Santa Ana, or Tacoma. Tzintzuntzan has been an exemplary case study in American ethnography.
Tzintzuntzan data offer a unique opportunity to connect demography with quantitative anthropology.
In our current network study, we test the hypothesis that kinship has had a tremendous influence on population dynamics in developing countries. Landholding in rural Mexico has been shown to be associated with migration and can be hypothesized to have an impact on nuptiality and fertility. Therefore our project aims to draw and draw upon a structural analysis of the kinship network of Tzintzuntzan area.