About this Event
The way we produce food and medicines today is leading plants and animals (and eventually humans) to extinction. In contrast, Indigenous peoples around the globe, such as the P’urhepecha from western Mexico, preserve world agrobiodiversity. This presentation studies the origin of global agrobiodiversity loss in the colonisation of the Americas in the early modern era by focusing on the colonial Spanish project to introduce monocrops such as sugar cane or wheat to colonial Mexico in the sixteenth century to the detriment of Indigenous land use. While this paper’s main focus is on early modern era, it also uses an ethnohistorical approach to study what early modern plants and landscapes are still in use today.
While current scholarship has focused on the consequences for human health and landscapes of the unprecedented introduction of animals, plants and bacteria to the Americas, this presentation focuses on Indigenous agrobiodiversity early in colonisation and how it is contested or preserved today. To study how P’urhepecha people have preserved and lost agrobiodiversity from early modern to modern era, this research analyses botanical and geographical records of an early-modern scientific expedition (Francisco Hernández’s Historia de las plantas de la Nueva España, 1570-7), colonial land titles, historical medicinal and environmental literature and interviews with P’urhepecha healers. Despite the many devastating consequences of colonization, Indigenous peoples maintained access to medical plants. To access lands and to produce food and medicine, P’urhepecha people used the colonial legal system to be granted lands. As Indigenous medics’ trade has relied on their access to plots, gardens and the forests, they became stewards of environment. As the current Indigenous self-government movement shows, the preservation of agrobiodiversity in Indigenous lands is a continuum across colonial and modern history.
Ricardo Aguilar-González is a postdoctoral fellow at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. In 2023 he completed his PhD in Latin American History at the University of Warwick, and his doctoral thesis received an honorable mention from the United Kingdom Latin American Historians Network (UKLAH) biennial awards. From 2023 to 2024, he was an Institute of Advanced Study Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick. He has co-authored a book on the 16th-century P’urhepecha nobleman Don Antonio Huitzimengari with art historian Angélica Afanador Pujol; edited a volume on regional history; and written various articles on the history of Mesoamerican foodways and the "Mesoamericanization" of Europe, as well as chapters on the regional history of western Mexico. Currently he is finalizing a book entitled Invincible Appetites: Food, Drink, Bodies and Landscapes in the Colonisation of Mesoamerica (1470-1600) (Cambridge University Press) and conducting postdoctoral research on the role of Nahua and P’urhepecha peoples in preserving food landscapes by combining the study of colonial documents with ethnography.
Event venue & nearby stays
Room 103, 51 Gordon Sq, 51 Gordon Square, London, United Kingdom
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