Environmental History

The Hijuelas project is a multi-domain international collaboration that makes available in digital form a large and valuable source on nineteenth-century indigenous history––the so-called libros de hijuelas or deed books recording the statewide privatization of indigenous lands in Michoacán, Mexico. These deed books, 194 in total, have been digitized and described over a two-year period by a team of History students from Michoacán’s state university, the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás Hidalgo (UMSNH), trained by and working under the supervision of archivists of the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies-Benson Latin American Collection of (LLILAS Benson) of the University of Texas at Austin. Additional logistical support has been provided by the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (CIESAS) as a partner institution in Mexico of the University of Texas at Austin and by the state government of Michoacán via the Archivo General e Histórico del Poder Ejecutivo de Michoacán (AGHPEM), which is custodian of the hijuelas books. The project was generously funded by the British Library through its Endangered Archives Programme (EAP 931, “Conserving Indigenous Memories of Land Privatization in Mexico: Michoacán’s Libros de Hijuelas, 1719–1929”).

The project seeks to be innovative in two ways. As a post-custodial archiving project, first and foremost, it uses digital methods to make easily accessible to historians, anthropologists, and indigenous communities the only consolidated state-level record of the land privatizations (reparto de tierras) affecting Mexican indigenous communities in the 19th century. It therefore projects digitally a key source for historians and one that possesses clear identitarian and agrarian importance for indigenous communities. It also makes widely available a source that is becoming physically unstable and inaccessible because of the difficult public security conditions affecting Michoacán. As a collaboration involving diverse institutional actors, furthermore, the project brings together institutions from three different countries and is an example of what may be achieved through equitable international collaborations.

Conservation, in broad terms, has been a dynamic and nuanced practice throughout Mexican history. Nature conservation and protection include individual practices such as planting trees to protect watersheds, seasonal hunting bans, land set-asides such as national parks, and the ideas and values that shape these actions. Three broad eras are analyzed to provide a kaleidoscopic view of how some people living in Mexican territory have understood and acted for nature conservation. The first era, stretching from the pre-Columbian through the colonial eras, was characterized by an abundance of nature relative to people using it. The reasons for conservation were infrequent but did emerge, particularly in urban settings. The second era, the administrative era from the 1820s to the 1980s, included early national claims, revolutionary policies, and the reach of global institutions into domestic conservation policy. Nature’s limitations became apparent due to overuse and development which inspired formal responses to limit exploitation. The third era, from 1982 to the present, involves an age of abstraction where conservation has been reimagined for various purposes by a culture increasingly removed from an appreciation of the practical and aesthetic qualities of nature.

The onset of Spanish imperial rule in Mexico in 1521 had profound consequences well beyond the political and cultural spheres. It also altered Mexico’s environment, reconstituting the region’s ecology as new fauna, flora, and microorganisms were added and as the population dynamics of native Mexican biota fluctuated in response to Old World arrivals. While the consequences of myriad interactions between native and non-native species were vast and complex, it was the decimation of indigenous persons by pathogens that was one of the first biological consequences of colonization (in fact, occurring first in 1520, one year before the fall of the Aztec state) and one of the most important. Mexican human populations were reduced by 80 to 90 percent, effecting cascading ecological consequences across the physical and biological geography of Mexico. Forests regenerated, terraced slopes degraded, and much of the Mexican landscape lost its anthropogenic aspect. Simultaneously, ungulate introductions transformed Mexican flora and likely initiated soil erosion in some regions that, when transported to fluvial environments, disrupted the flow of rivers. On the other hand, pigs, sheep, goats, horses, and other ungulates altered plant communities through selective seed dispersion. New economic pursuits such as brick making and silver mining increased demand for heat energy that, in an unprecedented manner, encouraged intensive forest usage and, probably, regional deforestation, although empirical data on historical forest cover are still lacking.

Severe climate variability, of a scale not experienced for at least five hundred years and perhaps many millennia, occurred simultaneously with colonial-induced ecological change. A significant conquest-era drought was followed by one of the coolest and wettest periods of the Holocene; a strong pluvial in the Mexican context lasted from 1540 to around 1620. Subsequent anomalies of both temperature (cold) and precipitation (either wet or dry) occurred in the 1640s and 1650s, and from the 1690s until about 1705. Together, these climate anomalies are known as the core Little Ice Age, and initiated agrarian transitions, hazardous flooding, prolonged droughts, epidemics, epizootics, and recurring agrarian crises that destabilized human health and spurred high rates of mortality. Soil degradation and suppressed forest cover are also likely outcomes of this process. Although debate abounds regarding the timing, extent, and causes of soil and water degradation, there is little doubt that extensive degradation occurred and destabilized late-colonial and early-Republic societies.

From the 1950s to the 1970s, numerous academics and non-governmental organizations based in the United States generated alarm about political and ecological threats posed by human population growth. During the first half of the 20th century, improvements in nutrition, sanitation, and medical therapies had dramatically reduced infant mortality and contributed to increased life expectancy in many parts of the world. In the context of the Cold War, many leaders of Western industrialized nations viewed the rapid growth of poor Asian, African, and Latin American populations as a potential source of political instability. They feared that these poor masses would become fodder for revolutionary political movements, particularly communism. Combined with eugenicist views rooted in colonial racism, new understanding of ecological systems, and growing concern about overtaxing earth’s resources, these fears led many American and European scholars and activists to promote population reduction in the newly designated “Third World.” In Latin America, such efforts to curb human increase were met with skepticism or outright opposition by both Catholic Church leaders and many left-wing nationalists who saw the promotion of birth control as a form of racist imperialism. Although some physicians and even liberal priests viewed decreasing family size as important for public health and family welfare, the involvement of North American capitalists (such as the Rockefellers), U.S. government agencies, and former eugenicists in efforts to distribute contraceptive technologies made them deeply suspect in the eyes of many Latin Americans.

Agrarian transformations in Andean Peru, subject to larger sociopolitical and economic processes, entailed major material, environmental, and biological changes. The long history of sheep introduction in Andean environments, its specific impact on the central highlands, and the making of an Andean breed of sheep—the oveja Junín—illustrate how such transformations shaped rural Peru as a societal space. Following larger environmental patters in Latin America, sheep became the dominant animal of the upper Andean regions, populating depleted landscapes and refashioning otherwise hostile environments as areas of agrarian productivity. Many of the transformations that occurred during colonial times, particularly the consolidation of the hacienda system and the rise of sheepherding as a form of peonage, served manifold purposes in the transition to the national period. While the 19th-century liberal obliteration of corporate identities and property obscured the legacy of indigenous communities, sheep continued to thrive and set the conditions for the incorporation of the Peruvian countryside into the global world economy. In the 20th century, with the parallel arrival of state and capital governance, transforming sheep and sheepherding from vernacular expressions of livelihood into advanced forms of modern agrarian industrialism merged together scientific and veterinarian knowledge with local understandings, producing the oveja Junín as the ultimate result. As sheepherding modernized based on efficient husbandry, sheep modernity efficiently nurtured rural developmentalism, bringing together communal and capitalist interests in unprecedented ways. The state-sponsored project of granjas comunales devoted to capital-intensive grazing economies reveals how husbandry and modern grazing activities both reinforced and transformed societal organization within indigenous communities, sanctioning existing differences while providing a vocabulary of capital for recasting their internal social relations of production. When the state envisioned the centralization of otherwise profitable communal grazing economies, through the allegedly empowering language of agrarian reform, the cooperativization of land, labor, and animals led to communal, family, and individual disenfranchisement. Indigenous community members, turned into campesinos, sought new battlegrounds for resisting state intromission. Eventually, the very biology of the oveja Junín as an exclusive domain of state and capital became the target of campesino sabotage. As the agrarian reform collapsed and revolution engulfed the countryside, rural livelihoods—sheep included—faced their ultimate demise, often with severe degrees of violence. In this entire trajectory, sheep—and the oveja Junín—ruled the upper regions of the Andes like no political power ever did.

In February 1943, a small but powerful volcano emerged from a cornfield in the vicinity of Uruapan, Michoacán, México. A stunned farmer, Dionisio Pulido, alerted the nearby town of San Juan Parangaricutiro, and a group of villagers went to investigate the growing mound in Pulido’s field. The new volcano, named Parícutin by Mexican scientist Dr. Ezequiel Ordóñez, emitted smoke, ash, and lava until 1952. The ash fall and lava flows severely changed life in five of the surrounding villages. Most villagers in the affected areas were reluctant to move, but the ash fall made it nearly impossible to cultivate their crops, polluted the air and water sources, and made their animals sick. In the end, two villages completely evacuated with the help of the national government.

A few days after the volcano emerged, scientists from México and the United States flocked to the area for the unique opportunity to study a volcano from its birth. They recorded lava flows, eruption patterns, ash fall, and damage to the surrounding agricultural land. A significant relationship blossomed between a U.S. Geological Survey scientist, Carl Fries Jr., and a local Purépecha man, Celedonio Gutiérrez. Although Gutiérrez had only a minimal education, his knowledge of the environment and the local people proved essential to foreign academics studying the volcano. Working together, the two men published at least eight scientific articles in the U.S. weekly magazine Eos, based on daily observations of the volcano.

Parícutin fascinated people from México and the United States since the moment it grew into a cinder cone. Artists such as Dr. Atl used the volcano for inspiration, producing countless sketches and paintings, some of which were published. Reporters, tourists, and artists from around the world visited Parícutin, excited at the possibility of seeing an active volcano up close. Authors and illustrators also expressed the fascinating story of the volcano and the affected Purépecha community in children’s stories. In the 21st century, Parícutin remains a popular tourist destination.

A half-buried church in what was San Juan Parangaricutiro is all that remains of a once lively village and stands as a testament to the strength and reach of Parícutin. Despite the destruction, the eruption serves as a reminder of the importance of volcanoes in Mexican culture and provides a lens to examine the long-established relationship between people and volcanoes. The study of Parícutin fits into the wider scholarship of Latin American environmental history because it highlights the connections between culture and environment. This story demonstrates the interplay between the perspectives different groups of people had of the volcano and how landscape affects the social and cultural history of a place and its people.

Since the early 19th century, a number of Latin American countries have had active interests in the Antarctic continent. These interests began to accelerate in the early 20th century, and during the 1930s and 1940s, Argentina and Chile formalized sovereignty claims to the Antarctic Peninsula region. These claims overlapped not only with each other, but also with Great Britain’s claim to the “Falkland Islands Dependencies.” The two Latin American claims tended to be framed in the language of anti-imperialism, and for a while at least the idea of a “South American Antarctica” emerged to suggest a common front against the British Empire. Rivalry between Argentina and Chile, however, remained strong, and the alliance against imperialism never developed into a lasting agreement. In 1959, Argentina and Chile joined with ten other nations—including Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—in signing the Antarctic Treaty. This Treaty suspended sovereignty claims and created a “continent dedicated to peace and science.” Following the ratification of the Treaty in 1961, Argentina and Chile lessened their hostility to the imperial strategy of using scientific research as a justification for political claims, and came to be enthusiastic members of what some outsiders labeled an “exclusive club.” During the 1980s and early 1990s, four other Latin American nations—Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, and Ecuador—became full members of the Antarctic Treaty, attracted, in part, by the prospect of sharing in a potential minerals bonanza in the southern continent. This expected economic boom never came, however, and instead the Antarctic continent became one of the most protected environments anywhere on the planet by the terms of the 1991 Madrid Environmental Protocol.

Agrarian societies in Latin America and the Caribbean have accomplished some of the most important and influential innovations in agricultural knowledge and practice in world history—both ancient and modern. These enabled indigenous civilizations in Mesoamerica and the Andes to attain some of the highest population densities and levels of cultural accomplishment of the premodern world. During the colonial era, produce from the region’s haciendas, plantations, and smallholdings provided an essential ecological underpinning for the development of the world’s first truly global networks of trade. From the 18th to the early 20th century, the transnational activities of agricultural improvers helped turn the region into one of the world’s primary exporters of agricultural commodities. This was one of the most tangible outcomes of the Enlightenment and early state-building efforts in the hemisphere. During the second half of the 20th century, the region provided a prime testing ground for input-intensive farming practices associated with the Green Revolution, which developed in close relation with import-substituting industrialization and technocratic forms of governance. The ability of farmers and ranchers to intensify production from the land using new cultivars, technologies, and techniques was critical to all of these accomplishments, but often occurred at the cost of irreversible environmental transformation and violent social conflict. Manure was often central to these histories of intensification because of its importance to the cycling of nutrients. The history of the extraction and use of guano as a fertilizer profoundly shaped the globalization of input-intensive agricultural practices around the globe, and exemplifies often-overlooked connectivities reaching across regional boundaries and between terrestrial and aquatic environments.