Cynthia Radding - Crafting Landscapes in the Iberian Borderlands

Crafting Landscapes in the Iberian Borderlands of the Americas
Crafting Landscapes in the Iberian Borderlands of the

Americas
Cynthia Radding
The [Oxford] Handbook of Borderlands of the Iberian World
Edited by Danna A. Levin Rojo and Cynthia Radding
Print Publication Date: Dec 2019 Subject: History, European History

Online Publication Date: Nov 2019 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199341771.013.26
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter takes its inspiration from environmental history and cultural geography,
bringing together the scholarship to date on the changing environments of North and
South America. Its point of departure is the production of social space, in the Lefebvrian
sense, and the cultural crafting of landscapes by both indigenous and colonial societies.
Human societies in the Americas confronted a multitude of contrasting environments in
deserts, forests, grasslands, river valleys, and mountainous slopes; over centuries,
through different modes of appropriation and production, distinct cultures and communi
ties altered those environments, creating new versions of “nature” in the landscapes of
their fabrication and renewal. Bridging the late pre-conquest and early colonial develop
ments, this chapter will present the salient features of landscape creation, destruction,
and renewal through horticulture, hunting, gathering, industry, and evolving patterns of
settlement. Attention will also be paid to the meanings ascribed to landscapes and natur
al features by indigenous and colonial actors, underscoring the close association of envi
ronment and culture in the historical development of colonial societies in Iberian Ameri
ca.
Keywords: environment, spatial borderlands, changing landscapes, cultural ecology, water management, arid
lands, tropicality
THE twin columns of environmental history and cultural geography have supported inter
disciplinary scholarship on the changing environments of North and South America. Its
conceptual frameworks are centered in the production of social space and the crafting of
cultural landscapes by both indigenous and colonial societies in the Iberian borderlands
of the Americas. In these regions diverse human communities confronted a multitude of
contrasting environments in deserts, forests, grasslands, river valleys, and mountain
ranges; over centuries, distinct cultures and communities created new versions of “na
ture” in the landscapes of their construction through different modes of appropriation
and production.
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The salient processes of landscape creation, destruction, and renewal through horticul
ture, hunting, gathering, industry, and evolving settlement patterns become especially
meaningful through late pre-conquest and colonial developments. Landscapes are under
stood as lived spaces created by human labor that hold both material and symbolic signif
icance for their inhabitants. In this sense, landscape histories necessarily highlight both
temporal and spatial continuity and periods of change linked to demography, climatic pat
terns, and resource use, arising from the introduction of metal tools, large domestic live
stock, new labor demands, and resource extraction. Woven throughout these themes of
material culture, the meanings ascribed to landscapes and natural features by indigenous
and colonial actors underscore the close association of nature and culture in the histori
cal development of colonial environments in the borderlands.
(p. 58) Historians of the Environment

Environmental history is relatively new for Latin America as a discrete field of scholar
ship. Yet, it has deep roots in the natural histories and cartographies that were produced
in the region itself by both native and Iberian chroniclers under pre-Hispanic, colonial,
and national regimes.1 Environmental history developed out of the conceptual frame
works and interdisciplinary research practices that have informed archival research and
shaped fieldwork in anthropology, archaeology, and geography. Focused largely on the
long-term reciprocal relations between distinct human communities and the natural set
tings in which their histories have evolved, it is centered in the materiality of these rela
tionships as seen in changing soils textures, stream flow, and the distribution of vegeta
tion and wild life which, in turn, are linked to settlement patterns, technologies, and cul
tural practices. Environmental historians seek to relate the material and cultural realms
of human endeavors to the transformation of nature, the production of lived spaces, and
the meanings that different social groups ascribe to those spaces.2
Environmental historians working in Latin America have developed their ideas in concert
with scholars researching similar questions for Europe, the Americas, Africa, Asia, and
the Pacific Rim. Arising from common themes dealing with agrarian systems, the con
struction of rural and urban spaces, water management, cultural adaptations to both
tropical and arid climates, and forest destruction and regrowth, these questions open the
way for comparing the specific cultural and technological adaptations that evolve in dif
ferent times and places. They intersect with central themes concerning the exercise of
power, the production and distribution of wealth, and the cultural realms of knowledge
that we associate with social, economic, and political history. The explanatory power of
environmental history arises, precisely, from the successful weaving together of nature
and culture, power and accommodation, negotiation and confrontation, to explore the
ways in which different human societies craft the landscapes in which they live in the
course of recurring conflicts and successive adaptations.3
Environmental histories of the Americas share common roots, but they have evolved from
different points of departure. Notwithstanding classic works like William Cronon’s
Page 2 of 29

Changes in the Land that focused on colonial New England, North American environmen
tal history developed largely in those regions of the South, Midwest, and West that were
considered moving frontiers where Anglo-American settlers clashed with indigenous com
munities, extended slave economies in some areas, and often misread the landscape in
their efforts to clear forests, open mines, breed livestock, and plant commercial crops.4
Entwined with the conservation movement of the early twentieth century, US environ
mental history became associated with notions of wilderness, nature preserves, soil con
servation, and forestry. Environmental historians have more recently turned away from
ideas of “pristine” natural settings and “balanced” ecosystems to emphasize disruption
and change in ecological patterns and humanly crafted landscapes through the interac
tion of historical societies and nature.5
In Latin America, by way of contrast, environmental histories have radiated out

(p. 59)
ward from the areas of dense pre-contact populations and centers of Iberian settlement
toward the borderlands on the fringes of empire. Scholars working across Latin America
and the Caribbean have developed creative avenues of research in collaboration with an
thropologists, archaeologists, and cultural geographers. Environmental histories of the
Andean and Mesoamerican regions and their respective borderlands are grounded in
these sister disciplines, focused in large measure on indigenous systems of food produc
tion and water management. Noteworthy features like the chinampas of the Valley of
Mexico—akin to the raised fields that William Deneven identified throughout the Andes
and the interior lowlands of South America—have marked in important ways the imprint
of sophisticated human societies on the physical environments they inhabited. Similar in
terpretative frameworks emphasizing the production of space and enduring cultural land
scapes have guided archaeological research on the interface between the Mesoamerican
frontier of Chalchihuites and the Tepehuán or Udami communities in the modern state of
Durango in northern Mexico.6
Indigenous systems for gathering and cultivating a wide variety of plants, soil enrich
ment, water harvesting, terracing, and canal irrigation constitute dominant themes of en
vironmental history, extending from pre-conquest and more recent pasts to the present.
Historians, botanists, and anthropologists have advanced research on the origins and dis
tribution of domesticated cultigens, taking as their point of departure the evolution of
maize (Zea maiz), manioc (Manihot sp. or casava), and quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) in
different varieties and locations.7 Environmental historians and ecologists recognize the
cultural and botanical significance of plant species and varieties that have evolved togeth
er with human communities. These include amaranthus, agaves, pitahayas, nopales,
tepary beans, and a host of other plants that occur in both wild and cultivated forms.8
Within the Mesoamerican world the richly documented antiquity of horticultural tradi
tions in Oaxaca has captured the attention of environmental scholars.9 Research on the
colonial transformations of space through land tenure, commerce, and labor in central
Guerrero relates these themes to the southern extension of the Nahua world, where the
Balsas River valley was a principal hearth of maize domestication.10
Page 3 of 29

Mesoamerica is commonly identified by its agricultural traditions, centered on maize in

different scales of planting ranging from the milpa—a household plot in which maize was
intercropped with other cultigens—to the lacustrian chinampas and larger fields sus
tained by irrigation. It is well to remember, however, that hunting remained an important
part of Mesoamerican cultures as an essential component of their subsistence economies
and as a ritualized activity that marked different spheres of power and sustained reli
gious sacrifices. The symbolic meanings of large animals like deer, jaguars, and eagles, at
times depicted with coyotes, emerge from the richly varied pictorial codices relating to
hunting and ritual sacrifice as well as the cosmologies and mythologized histories that
sustained the identities of distinct ethnic peoples in different regions extending from Cen
tral America to northern Mexico. In the southern Great Plains bison were central to both
the material environment and the hunting cultures of the peoples who shaped these
grasslands and cut wide migratory corridors through them.11
Terracing, cultivation, and the defense of community savannas and forests for
(p. 60)
hunting and gathering constitute three important poles for understanding the production
of space in the heartland of Mesoamerica and its borderlands. These themes extend to
water management and distribution as necessary components of both indigenous and
colonial agrarian landscapes. William E. Doolittle’s in-depth field research, culling ar
chaeological, geographical, and historical evidence for the hydraulic systems of the north
ern borderlands, other regions of Mexico, and southwestern United States, has identified
distinct techniques for accessing water that distinguish canal irrigation from other meth
ods of capturing or altering stream flow.12 In Cultivated Landscapes, Doolittle brought to
gether over a half-century of environmental scholarship to show how rural peoples al
tered their surroundings to produce cultivated spaces. These local adaptations created
chains of knowledge that reflect communication and transference of technologies across
considerable distances from one region to another.
For the Andean highlands of South America anthropologist John V. Murra established the
concept of an archipelago of ecological niches distinguished by altitude and the dominant
subsistence lifeways identified with each level: grains, tubers, and camelid grazing.13
While the archipelago was based firmly in pre-Hispanic indigenous modes of land use,
ethnohistorical research seemed to verify the resilience of these patterns through the
centuries since European contact and even into the present. Andean scholars coupled
Carl O. Sauer’s classic formulation of the man-land relationship with Murra’s altitudinal
archipelago to develop a notion of cultural ecology related to the geography of the
cordilleras and altiplanos of the western vertebrae of South America.14 More recently,
Karl Zimmerer has complicated the notion of a vertical archipelago with his geographical
and ethnographic observations of horizontal patterns of land use and crop variability in
the Bolivian Andes.15
Spreading eastward from the Andean cordilleras, the South American lowlands constitut
ed a series of overlapping riverine borderlands that followed the major tributaries of the
Paraguay and Río de la Plata river basins. Over time they became an extended transition
al zone between the Portuguese and Spanish imperial spheres. The lowlands covered
Page 4 of 29

marshlands like the Pantanal, which spans a vast borderland covering portions of
Paraguay, Brazil, and Bolivia.16 Constituting an ecotone among the biomes of the Amazon
ian rain forest, the deciduous dry forests of the Chaco and Chiquitanía, and the savannas
of the Cerrado, the Pantanal extended to different tropical and temperate latitudes in
which widely varied indigenous groups and mixed-race settlements of both free and un
free laborers created shifting frontiers with uncertain boundaries.17 These internal bor
derlands combined the riverine resources of their networks of streams and lagoons with
the grasslands and subtropical forests that supported sustainable foraging and horticul
tural economies, which were complicated by European livestock pastoralism and long-dis
tance trade. Here diverse ethnic groups and confederations created territorial claims that
were contested on many fronts at times in the shadow of Luso-Hispanic boundaries and at
other times independently of the European powers and their colonial subjects.18 Ethnic
groups that have persisted in these regions include Guaraní, Bauré, Chiriguano, Guarayo,
Kadiwéu, Guató, Bororó, Chiquitano, Minuano and Charrúa (p. 61) among others. Their
competing claims to resources along the river channels and in the savannas and forests
remained intimately tied to natural environments and humanly crafted cultural land
scapes. These material and spatial expressions of their ethnic identities supported ex
tended kin networks that were enlarged further through the enslavement of captives,
leaving an important imprint on the land.19
The Amazon basin, a vast lowland river system spanning both Portuguese and Spanish
South America, has inspired ecological research in anthropology, history, geography, and
literature. Beginning with foundational studies in cultural ecology and controversies over
the estimated size of contact-era native populations, histories of the Amazon have docu
mented an array of extractive industries, including rubber, timber, and mining, and their
consequences for natural and social conditions in the region.20 It has captivated an intel
lectual community of scholars and activists with concerns for soil conservation, livestock,
and the sustainability of Amazonian rainforests.21 Representing the largest rain forest in
the continent, the great Amazonian tropical basin is not entirely “natural,” because in
digenous peoples have nurtured its soils and vegetation, transplanting different speci
mens and stands of plants, and opened gardens by clearing vegetation and fallowing
around their shifting village sites.22
Ethnohistories of the colonial peoples of the South American lowlands have produced
valuable studies for the equestrian tribal captaincies that dominated the vast grasslands
of the Pampas extending into Patagonia, and for the mission pueblos built and maintained
by a wide diversity of indigenous peoples in the forested areas that supported swidden
agriculture. These literatures for the most part have dealt with the evolving political
structures, economic strategies, and cultural values evinced by native peoples who dealt
with Iberian imperial designs by asserting their spatial autonomy and claiming their sta
tus as colonial subjects through the governing councils (cabildos) and livelihoods that
were afforded them in the missions.23 The environment frames these carefully document
ed regional studies, but it does not constitute the principal avenue of research.
Page 5 of 29

Two foundational works, published in the 1990s, demonstrated the methodology for cen
tering Latin American histories in the environment. Set in different regions of North and
South America and working in different spatial scales, they established the terms of de
bate that shaped the field for over a decade. Warren Dean’s With Broadax and Firebrand
took as its dramatic subject the destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic rain forest of over
nearly five centuries, spanning distinct phases of economic exploitation, colonization, ur
ban development, the energy demands of modern industries, and the uneven gains and
losses of scientific research that too often marginalized local sources of knowledge.
Dean’s research methods incorporated the familiar themes of slavery, plantation
economies of sugar and coffee, the spread of livestock, and the demand for fuel in ways
that made the forest itself the subject of this work and set the tone for environmental his
tories that emphasized the impoverishment of natural habitats by colonialism and com
mercial capitalism. It inspired similarly environmentally focused histories of tropical plan
tations in Brazil and the Caribbean, with their economic rationale and labor systems, for
both the colonial and national periods.24
Elinor G. K. Melville’s A Plague of Sheep established a similar benchmark for envi

(p. 62)
ronmental history in Mexico. Structured more modestly than Dean’s study in its spatial
and temporal dimensions, nevertheless Melville’s history of the transformation of the
Valle del Mezquital in the first century following Spanish conquest articulated a powerful
thesis that influenced environmentally informed histories even as it invited debate and re
visionist studies. Melville employed quantitative analysis of the data she methodically
compiled from archival sources in Spain and Mexico relating to early colonial land grants
to argue that the consequences of Spanish conquest, due in large measure to the expo
nential growth of European livestock, transformed the subtropical agrarian landscapes
that had been managed for centuries by indigenous horticulturalists into a semi-arid re
gion dominated by mesquites and other xerophytic species. The Mesoamerican region
that Melville researched constituted a kind of internal borderland on the fringes of the
Valley of Mexico, leading northward to Querétaro, the camino real, and the mining fron
tiers of New Spain.25
Both of these pioneering works addressed issues of soil erosion, deforestation, and desic
cation through the destruction or impoverishment of the “natural” vegetation on the heels
of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, bringing with it Old World systems of resource
exploitation for commercial profit. Revisionist histories have questioned the general ap
plicability of Melville’s regional study focused on the Mezquital regarding the ecologically
destructive impacts of European livestock. Andrew Sluyter’s study of the Veracruz low
lands has shown that Iberian practices of livestock management following seasonal mi
gratory patterns between lowland marshes and highland pastures, allowed the grasslands
to recover from grazing herds and may even have contributed to the diversity of vegeta
tional communities. Insofar as these traditions were practiced in Spanish America, as
Karl and Elizabeth Butzer have suggested, the introduction of large domestic quadrupeds
may have been sustainable in some regions.26 Furthermore, indigenous communities liv
ing within the colonial sphere and nomadic bands that dominated the great plains of
Page 6 of 29

North and South America as well as African-descendant laborers (enslaved and free) be
came skilled herders who brought livestock into their economies and cultural patterns.27
In a similar vein, Dean’s portrayal of Portuguese, and then Brazilian, seemingly wanton
destruction of the Atlantic rain forest—and the botanical knowledge that its inhabitants
had gathered—has been met with nuanced criticism.28 It would seem that if North Ameri
can environmental histories were burdened with recovering a mythical wilderness, the
field in Latin America may have projected a long-term course of decline after the Euro
pean invasions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Yet, this judgment simplifies the
depth of Latin American interdisciplinary scholarship that links environmental themes
with histories of empire.
Alfred B. Crosby rewrote the history of the conquest over a generation ago with his
Columbian Exchange. This classic work set forth in clear terms the argument that the
most telling consequences of European landings in the Americas were not military or po
litical, but that for both the Old and New Worlds the encounters beginning in 1492 put in
to motion exchanges of commodities, seeds, and pathogens with botanical (p. 63) and eco
logical reverberations that reached across the globe. His subsequent major publications,
Ecological Imperialism and Germs, Seeds, and Animals, developed similar environmental
themes directed to European transcontinental expansion and the nonhuman, unintended
consequences of imperialist expeditions of conquest and resource appropriation. Crosby’s
work has been challenged and complemented by scholarship in anthropology and geogra
phy that highlights the original contributions of indigenous peoples and African laborers
(enslaved and free) to the global exchange of cultigens like maize, manioc (cassava), and
rice.29
Crosby’s biological view of history influenced Elinor Melville’s interpretation of the

changes in land tenure, indigenous economies, and the evolving landscapes of the Valle
del Mezquital. In her discussion of the long-term causes and pace of soil erosion in the re
gion, Melville addressed the debates surrounding the linkages between soil erosion in
central Mexico and cycles of population growth and decline.30 Melville argued that even if
population densities and slope terracing had created intensive patterns of cropping, in
digenous agricultural systems were sustainable. It was European livestock, she main
tained, first bovine cattle, then sheep, that brought about a rapid and irreversible trans
formation, turning a verdant well-watered valley into a semi-arid landscape dominated by
thorn forest brush species. The parallel decline in the indigenous population and the rise
in livestock herds changed the physical landscape and modes of land tenure, altering as
well the Spanish perception of the worth of the region, which—by the early seventeenth
century—was declared good only for sheep.
Research on health and population intersects with environmental history in important

ways. Historical demography has developed a formative literature linking the sciences of
medicine and epidemiology with the archival skills and textual analyses that are the
historian’s stock-in-trade. Alfred Crosby contributed to the development of this field,
along with the famous “Berkeley school” led by Sherburne F. Cook, Lesley Byrd Simpson,
Page 7 of 29

and Woodrow Borah. Working as a team, these scholars produced a series of monographs
employing quantitative analysis of tribute records and other materials that permitted
them to make demographic inferences regarding the relative size of indigenous popula
tions in different regions and periods. Their work culminated in a three-volume set of Es
says in Population History that reviewed their methods and the significance they drew
from their results.31 N. David Cook undertook similar kinds of studies for the Andean re
gion to establish the linkages between disease, population decline, and the broad outlines
of Spanish colonialism in Peru; Adam Warren brought together population movements,
medicine, and Bourbon policies for the eighteenth-century Andean region.32 Historical de
mographers who work at the micro level of individual parishes produce fine-grained so
cial histories, placing them in broader regional frameworks according to the nature of
their sources.33 Mission censuses and sacramental registers constitute productive
sources for the analyses of demographic movements in the Hispanic American border
lands.34 As this field has matured, it has shown that numerical analyses provide a first
step for interpreting the social, cultural, and environmental implications of shifts over
time in the concentration and dispersion of different communities and their reconstitution
within colonial settlements or in zones of refuge.
What then is historical about environmental history in the Iberian borderlands of

(p. 64)
the Americas? The answer is at least threefold. First, environmental historians emphasize
process; that is, changes in the land over time that are inexorably connected to human
habitation and to specific societal groups in geographically centered places. Secondly, en
vironmental history in the borderlands (and elsewhere) employs a highly varied toolkit to
work with different sets of data derived from documentary research, geography, biology,
and direct field observation. Even as historians rely heavily on the expertise of archaeolo
gists and ethnographers to reconstruct and analyze material culture, so do anthropolo
gists require the historians’ command of the archives to complete these analyses and
place cultural phenomena in historical perspective. Thirdly, the historian’s emphasis on
identifying differences allows scholars to locate periods of significant change, integrating
the material substance of environmental change with the intellectual heritage of ideas
about nature that emerges from texts and visual imagery. The following case studies illus
trate these components of environmental history for the Iberian borderlands of America.
Land Tenure and Environmental Change in the

Borderlands
Research on land tenure and resource use has contributed to social, economic, and envi
ronmental history by bringing together the legal, technological, and cultural dimensions
of territorial claims to the possession and usufruct of land. Debates regarding the “feu
dal” nature of landholding in Latin America, fueled by François Chevalier’s pioneering
work on northeastern Mexico, gave way to regionally focused studies that emphasized the
commercial uses of property by colonial settlers and institutions.35 Research on conflicts
between native communities and colonial subjects over arable land, water, and woodlands
Page 8 of 29

has evolved from a view that pitted the indigenous defense of communal resources
against the aggrandizement of private landowners to show the complex motivations of In
dian pueblos who took up the burden of litigation over land and the divided interests of
both indigenous and colonial parties to these disputes.36
The historical sources that lend themselves to reconstructing changes in land tenure pat
terns vary greatly for different regions. Mesoamerican painted histories and títulos pri
mordiales—purported original titles—provide intriguing mapped chronicles that link in
digenous territorial claims and water rights to ancestral noble lineages.37 Pictorial narra
tives produced by the Tlaxcalan, Otomí, Tarascan, Zapotec, and other groups who accom
panied (or led) Spanish expeditions to the northern and southern borderlands of the de
feated Mexica Empire staked territorial claims on the basis of their services to Crown and
church.38 These intricately detailed documents, crafted by indigenous artists in response
to the legal and fiscal demands of the colonial system, expressed their spatial boundaries
and the fluvial resources that comprised their patrimony. Codices of this (p. 65) type are
not available for the borderlands of New Spain or most of South America; however, the
documents generated in Spanish to meet the requirements of the Iberian judiciary pro
vide meaningful descriptions of contested parcels of land and their environmental signifi
cance for both native communities and colonial entrepreneurs.
Historians of northern New Spain have mined the land titles and descriptive reports pro
duced by ecclesiastical, military, and civil authorities to explore changing patterns of
landholding. They have narrated multiple conflicts for Nueva Vizcaya, including the prin
cipal mining districts north of Zacatecas in Durango and Chihuahua; New Mexico;
Coahuila, Texas, Nuevo León, and Nueva Santander in the northeastern portion of the
Chihuahuan Desert.39 Equally fecund research has focused on the northwestern
provinces that extended from the cordilleras of the Sierra Madre Occidental into the
Sonoran Desert and beyond to the Californias.40 Their work has centered on the distribu
tion of land and water rights across different communities and private estates as well as
colonization projects undertaken in Nueva Santander, Texas, and Alta California.41 Many
of these histories underscore the transference of resources from indigenous pueblos to
colonial proprietors—especially for the western and central corridors of Nueva Vizcaya—
and document the endurance of different forms of forced labor.42
The abundance of notarial and judicial records generated by conflicts over territorial
boundaries and the resources associated with specific parcels of land afford environmen
tal historians a challenging opportunity to experiment with new methodologies for read
ing these documents to identify clues regarding the physical conditions of disputed prop
erties and the values ascribed to the land. At stake were not only the valley floodplains
and terraces prized for indigenous milpas dedicated to maize, other native food crops,
and European grain production but also the uncultivated monte that comprised grass
lands, affording pasture for livestock, and forested ranges for hunting and gathering,
which served as natural reservoirs for food, clothing, building materials, fuel, and medi
cines. Elinor Melville and Alfred Siemens set instructive examples for assessing the im
pact of European livestock and cultigens on indigenous agrarian landscapes through their
Page 9 of 29

skillful combination of geographical training and archival research for different biomes in
the Mezquital of the central altiplano and in the subtropical savannas of Veracruz.43 Their
work has shown ways of analyzing land titles and litigated disputes in order to identify
landholdings by name, proprietor, and approximate location over time and, thus, project
the spatial advance of private ranches and haciendas amidst communal holdings and the
untitled royal lands (realengos) available for adjudication.
The language of colonial documents provides rich descriptive material, but lends itself
less readily to the exact quantification that would be desired by modern ecological stud
ies of transformations in vegetation communities and climatic conditions. While landhold
ings were measured according to the legally prescribed standards for different categories
of property related to livestock, these measurements were rarely exact—leading to long-
term disputes—nor were the sizes of herds regularly specified. In the unfenced thorn
forests and grasslands of the arid north, furthermore, uncounted portions of domestic
herds became feral, augmenting the environmental impacts of grazing and soil com
paction to an undetermined degree. Even so, like archaeologists sifting through shards
and (p. 66) lithic fragments, historians can find clues to ecological conditions marked by
vegetation, stream flow, and topography in the documents that record in written tran
scripts the verbal and spatial processes of measuring and awarding titles to the land.
One illustrative example comes to us from the early eighteenth-century Province of Os
timuri in northwestern Mexico, where colonial mining and ranching settlements were
recorded beginning in the 1660s surrounded by numerous indigenous villages and shift
ing or seasonal rancherías with deep histories of horticultural practices, foraging, and ter
ritorial rivalries. Extending from the cordilleras and canyons of the Sierra Madre Occi
dental to the river valleys of the coastal plain, the vegetation of Ostimuri ranged from
arid-lands cactae and succulents to thorn and short-tree forests. Its mixed quality evolved
from the highly varied conditions of climate, topography, and soils within a region further
modified by the cultural practices of cultivation and appropriation. Cycles of planting mil
pas and leaving them to fallow opened spaces for the redistribution of herbaceous plants,
trees, and shrubs, both restoring and changing the composition of the monte.
Land disputes arose in Ostimuri from the intersection of the mining and Jesuit mission
frontiers that intensified labor demands and hastened the encroachments of Hispanic col
onization on village lands. In 1715, the pueblo of Macoyagüi opened a legal suit against
Don Matheo Gil Samaniego, a miner and land owner in Ostimuri and the neighboring
Province of Sinaloa. One of four villages that comprised the mission of San Andrés de
Conicari, Macoyagüi brought together numerous highland rancherías from the piedmont
surrounding the main tributaries of the Mayo River.44 During the seventeenth century,
some twenty rural properties were registered for the province, ranging in size from one
to nine sitios.45 A number of agricultural plots susceptible to irrigation and grazing lands
in the monte had been adjudicated to entire missions or indigenous pueblos, and others
to Hispanic landholders; over time their possession changed hands across these colonial
sectors. Indian and Spanish smallholders planted their fields seasonally, letting some of
their plots fallow from one year to the next, and both villagers and individual ranchers
Page 10 of 29

grazed herds of bovines, sheep, goats, horses, and mules. Land use arrangements that at
one time may have been mutually negotiated gave rise to conflicting claims to pastures,
cropland, and water as herds increased, water tables fell, and biomes became more xero
phytic.
Disputes of this kind motivated the legal suit that the Pueblo of Macoyagüi brought
against Captain Gil Samaniego, denouncing his occupation of two pieces of land, Yori
carichi and Los Camotes, to which they held title. Together they measured approximately
776 hectares, where sixteen indigenous families had planted their milpas.46 Working
through an interpreter and the Protector of Indians, a Spanish official named for the case,
the village leaders of Macoyagüi pursued their case over the summer and fall of 1715 in
local magistracies located in the principal mining centers of the provinces of Ostimuri
and Sinaloa. The Indians demanded that Gil Samaniego cease planting in their lands and
take his cattle out of both Yoricarichi and Los Camotes. Their urgency became acute,
since 1715 was a year of drought and, because Gil Samaniego’s herds had fully occupied
the site and compacted the soil, the Indians had not planted their crops and, “in this
calamitous year, because of this, they had lost their harvests.”47
(p. 67) The terms in which this case was argued provide clues for understanding what was
at stake for the litigants of Macoyagüi and the values that underlay their testimonies. The
legal summary offers very little description of these two plots of land, but we can infer
from it some of the ways in which their occupation and use were conditioned by the ecol
ogy of the region. Los Camotes may have comprised a number of gardens in different
stages of cultivation and fallow, which would have supplied the Indians with firewood,
small game, and a variety of gathered plants for food, medicine, and fiber as well as the
crops they had planted and tended in any one year. The Indians’ milpas in Los Camotes
yielded maize and native legumes and squashes, including amaranthus, beans, cucurbits,
chilies, tobacco, cotton and camotes, a root crop for which the site was named, as well as
some European vegetables and legumes that the Indians learned to cultivate in their mis
sion. Such a diversity of plants would have germinated and ripened at different times of
the year, requiring seasonal labor to plant, tend, water, guard against predators, gather,
and store their harvests. In addition, these plots of land contained wild stands of agaves,
torotes (elephant tree), mesquite, acacias, and cactae and harbored animals and birds of
prey. Gil Samaniego’s usurpation of them deprived the Macoyahuis of cropland and monte
for hunting and gathering; both kinds of resources were essential for their survival, espe
cially in years of drought and scarcity. This brief narrative of one native community’s le
gal struggle to regain control over two portions of land in the highlands of northwestern
Mexico connects the material conditions of land, water, and biotic communities to deeply
ingrained notions of territoriality, local governance, and reciprocal labor. Even though the
documents do not provide detailed descriptions of the resources at stake for the litigants,
they do offer historians the opportunity to interpret their content in the light of environ
mental issues and information gathered from complementary sources.
Page 11 of 29

The structured content of judicial disputes over land tenure and of the procedures for ad
judicating land titles, including the physical inspection of the territories in question, call
ing of witnesses, and placement of boundary markers, occurs less frequently in the
archives for the interior borderlands of tropical South America. Warren Dean’s research
on the Brazilian Atlantic forest showed that the legal category of possession (posse) per
mitted the growth of livestock herds, sugar fields, and coffee plantations largely without
formal title. Practices rooted in the extensive occupation of land, with little attention to
soil or vegetation recovery, meant that large swaths of forested hillsides were burned and
cleared for commercial crops; once the soil grew “tired,” the de facto landowners would
move on to new possessions where they would repeat the process.48 Similarly destructive
cycles of clearing, exploitation, and abandonment of cultivated land established the
rhythm of colonization along the northward flowing Araguaia and Tocantins tributaries of
the Amazon basin in central Brazil. During the colonial era enslaved African and indige
nous laborers toiled at felling forests and opening agricultural fields (roças) and exten
sive fazendas in tandem with the mining frontiers of Minas Gerais and Goiás as Mary
Karasch has shown in Before Brasília. In more recent times, impoverished and indebted
laborers, often in entire family units, cleared forest and open fields only to be dispos
sessed by colonists (colonos), who claimed title to the land, and were thus impelled to cut
down and burn new forested areas.49
Brazil’s modern states of Mato Grosso and Mato Grosso Sur, named for the savan
(p. 68)
na grasslands and cerrado (low-canopy forests) that defined their landscapes, developed
through the extensive economies of livestock grazing and herding. As Robert Wilcox has
argued, different ecological conditions relating to soils, vegetation, and relative aridity
within this vast frontier region shaped land tenure patterns and conditioned the commer
cial expansion of the local ranching industry.50 Further west, in the Pantanal and Chiqui
tanía deciduous forests of lowland Bolivia, documented references to the land from both
colonial and early national periods describe the region both ecologically and economically
in terms of the vegetation cover, the livestock it supported, and hunting and extractive
products (animals skins, bird feathers, and medicinal plants).51 Large private cattle hold
ings in the Pantanal crossed the international borders that were contested by Mato
Grosso, Bolivia, and Paraguay, creating networks of labor migration and commerce.52
Bolivian authorities in the Prefectura of Santa Cruz de la Sierra ordered the privatization
of mission herds in Chiquitos, not the land itself, giving rise to indigenous protests and
the gradual erosion of their communal patrimony. By the mid-nineteenth century, the
western frontier of Chiquitanía, lying between the Andean foothills and Santa Cruz, held
a mixed population of Indians and non-Indians who practiced small-scale swidden agricul
ture and stock raising. Government attempts to establish taxable land rentals in this re
gion generated a heated correspondence between provincial officials and local clerics,
who protested these proposals on the grounds of ecological conditions, migratory prac
tices, and traditions of communal labor.53 Comparing these testimonies with the litigation
summarized above for Ostimuri suggests that the practices for marking spatial measure
ments and establishing effective occupation operated differently in the subtropical forest
Page 12 of 29

ed zones of the interfluvial plains of South America than in the agrarian landscapes of the
Andes and Mesoamerica or in the arid monte and river valleys of northern New Spain.
Water was as vital a resource as land. In documented land cases, often the value of the
land estimated for either sale or tabulating the royal fees for securing title was deter
mined by the availability of natural springs and streams or wells for irrigating crops and
watering livestock.54 Long-standing Iberian traditions with roots in medieval Spanish law
treated water rights for domestic and agricultural uses separately from land ownership.
Michael C. Meyer’s foundational work, Water in the Southwest, laid out these principles,
and Leslie Offut, Cecilia Sheridan Prieto, and Susan M. Deeds have shown how they oper
ated in water disputes for northern New Spain.55 Long before irrigation water was mea
sured in cubic feet or meters, it was distributed according to the days or hours that water
would flow from communally maintained canals and derivation ditches onto individual
plots of land.
Irrigation systems documented in historical records and partially recovered through ar
chaeological remains reflect the adaptation of Iberian conventions and techniques of wa
ter management—based on Roman and Arabic methods—to the natural environments and
cultural landscapes of the Americas. These technologies included the maintenance of
earthen canals for gravitational flow, the positioning of sluice gates for the apportionment
of water to individual users, and the opening of canals and ditches to serve ever (p. 69) in
creasing numbers of colonial land grants. Research for New Mexico focused on the
Puebloan and Hispanic communities during the colonial and national periods has illumi
nated the intricate engineering of webs of irrigation canals and the historical conflicts re
lated to local governance of the acequia systems that for over three centuries sustained
rural livelihoods in this northern borderland of Spanish America. The acequia madre, or
principal canal, channeled water from the closest stream or river to Hispanic settlements,
dug at an angle that would facilitate the flow of liquid to agricultural fields and return it
to the river downstream. Its distribution to Pueblos and Hispanic settlements was gov
erned by local agreements and enforced by alcaldes, officials appointed or elected with
authority for this purpose.56 Even as New Mexico Hispanos followed the conventions of
Spanish colonial law regarding the placement of settlements and the distribution of wa
ter, they repurposed Pueblo irrigation ditches and entered into agreements for sharing
this precious resource along the Río Grande del Norte and its tributary streams.
The acequia system created a different set of landscapes in northwestern Mexico, where
the gravitational flows of water for irrigation in portions of present-day Chihuahua, Du
rango, Sonora, and Sinaloa developed from both indigenous and Hispanic hydraulic sys
tems. Planting living fence rows and building earthen dams and weirs that traverse river
beds serve to fill irrigation ditches that direct the stream flow to planted fields in these
arid lands. Geographers, anthropologists, and historians have observed these locally man
aged irrigation systems and noted descriptions of their acequias and fence rows in mis
sionary accounts and land titles.57 The combination of weirs and fence rows controls
Page 13 of 29

flooding during the summer rainy season and captures silt carried by the rivers to create
layers of soil that over several seasons can be turned into cultivable milpas.
To the south, the Lerma River in western Mexico became a culturally managed watershed
under both pre-Hispanic Purépecha control and colonial administration. Known as
“Mexico’s breakbasket,” the area’s production of both indigenous and European grains
depended on the management of its hydraulic resources. The technological innovations
developed here to capture and store seasonal rainfall included dams, irrigation canals,
and cajas de agua, tanks that were built in naturally occurring basins and enhanced by
artificial embankments. These tanks permitted landowners to practice a controlled form
of flood farming by which fields were flooded during the rainy season, benefiting from the
organic materials contained in rainwater runoff, and then drained in order to plant crops.
Derived from water harvesting methods originating in ancient Egypt, these practices
were documented for the Lerma River basin and the Comarca Lagunera in north central
Mexico.58
Archaeological evidence for similar kinds of basins to store water and channel it through
canals for domestic use and small-scale garden irrigation appeared independently in the
pre-contact Salinas Province of southeastern New Mexico. The complex of villages known
to Spaniards as Gran Quivira or Humanas, probably inhabited by both Piro and Jumano
peoples, were built with stone construction, including residential blocks and ceremonial
plazas with kivas, semi-subterranean rooms used for rituals. Located on an arid plateau,
Quivira was supplied with water by a series of tanks placed at successive elevations that
emptied into canals leading into the villages. Adolph Bandelier, who first (p. 70) reported
systematically on the existence of these tanks or artificial ponds, hypothesized that the
tanks permitted agricultural peoples to thrive in a location distant from permanently flow
ing streams and sustain populations of over a thousand inhabitants.59
Even in regions where fresh water was abundant, as in the lowland river basins and sa
vannas of South America, seasonal agriculture and permanent settlement required tech
nological interventions in the natural environment. The raised fields were especially char
acteristic of the Mojos region of northwestern Bolivia (present-day Department of Beni),
whose rivers flow into the Amazonian drainage basin. Indigenous peoples of the region
combined fishing, gathering, hunting, and horticulture and managed the pluvial rhythms
of sharply demarcated wet and dry seasons by building earthen mounds that served for
planting root crops that could benefit from the flooded bottomlands without rotting dur
ing the rainy season. The creation and maintenance of these adaptive systems depended
on communally organized labor in both pre-Hispanic and colonial times; in the latter peri
od the Mojos towns became Jesuit missions governed largely by their indigenous
leaders.60
Page 14 of 29

Industry, Urbanization, and Landscape Trans

formations
Rural environments related to agrarian systems and the cultural and ecological signifi
cance of uncultivated lands are essential for understanding the survival of both indige
nous and colonial societies. It is important, however, to recognize the contributions of en
vironmental research for urban settings, viewed as historically produced spaces, with em
phasis on the health of their populations and the ways in which urban industries effect
ecological changes and transform landscapes within the cities and in the surrounding
countryside. A recent collective volume illustrates the versatile themes of urban environ
mental history regarding housing and domestic spaces, architecture, disease episodes,
and popular beliefs regarding health and illness.61 Mexico City became a dramatic sce
nario of changing urban landscapes through the long-term drainage public works—the
great desagüe—that over more than two centuries transformed the lacustrian environ
ment of this unique Mesoamerican center for trade, governance, and ceremonialism into
a land-based city. When the Spaniards made the Mexicas’ capital city the center of their
imperial rule in mainland North America, they failed to maintain indigenous systems of
water management that had controlled for salinity and flooding in a basin that had no
natural external drainage. Motivated by a series of catastrophic floods that caused physi
cal damage and spread epidemic diseases, in the early seventeenth century viceregal au
thorities experimented with a number of different engineering projects to drain the lakes.
Many of these projects failed, and public works dedicated to ridding Mexico City of dan
gerous floods continued into the early twentieth century. Recent histories of the desagüe
emphasize the environmental challenges and follies of the (p. 71) endeavor, the intellectu
al legacies of early modern science, and the dangers that awaited the thousands of labor
ers who were drafted to dig channels and build dikes.62
The importance of this drainage project bears directly on Mexico City, but its environmen
tal significance illustrates the issues of urban growth, topography, labor, disease, water
supply, and waste discharge that plagued many of the mining centers in the borderlands
of northern Mexico, the Andean cordilleras, and the interior of Brazil. Research on the
ecological problems of colonial mining has addressed the spatial dimensions of mining
centers following rapid growth and precipitous or gradual decline, the structural prob
lems of mining shafts and pillars that put workers’ lives at peril, deforestation due to the
consumption of timber for construction and fuel, and contamination of soil and water by
the use of mercury and nitrates for refining silver ores.
The Real del Parral in Nueva Vizcaya illustrates the environmental and economic impacts
of the mining industry in northern Mexico.63 Founded in 1630 as a second major bonanza
in the Province of Santa Bárbara, where mining had begun in the 1560s, Parral boasted
smelters, amalgamation patios, municipal offices, and merchant houses. The urban nucle
us and its labor force were supported by agriculture and stock raising, salt mining, tim
ber, and charcoal production in the surrounding area. By the mid-seventeenth century,
production in Parral was imperiled by the lack of charcoal to supply its foundries.64 Ore
Page 15 of 29

processing demanded shipments of reagents, lead oxides, copper pyrite and salt, supplied
from New Mexico, Mapimí, and Nuevo León, in addition to the mercury that was import
ed through royal monopolies and shipped from Mexico to Parral along the camino real in
protected convoys.65 Santa Bárbara and Parral were linked to entrepreneurial capital in
Zacatecas and, in turn, these mining centers fueled the expanding webs of Spanish do
minion in the western provinces of Sinaloa and Ostimuri through their consumption of fu
el, grains, hides, meat, and reagents and their ever-expanding webs of labor recruitment
on both sides of the Sierra Madre Occidental.66
Estimates of biomass consumption for the ore processing foundries radiating from central
Mexico, in Taxco, Sultepec, and Ixmiquilpan, to Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and San Luis Po
tosí, and north to Nueva Vizcaya and Sonora show that the industry exhausted local
woodlands at a rate far greater than domestic uses of charcoal and timber.67 Each of
these mining centers represented clusters of mines and foundries—the haciendas de ben
eficio—with differential impacts on their surrounding landscapes. Rates of forest destruc
tion have been calculated from the economic data available for total silver and gold pro
duction in New Spain. These rates seem to corroborate the warnings about vegetation de
pletion that were reported by colonial authorities. Based on the amount of heat needed at
each stage of refining the ore, it has been estimated that 6,332 m2 of forest were cleared
to produce one kilogram of silver; applying this ratio to the figures for silver production
that were registered and taxed yields a projection of over 315,000 km2 of felled woodland
to supply New Spain’s colonial mining industry (1550 to 1810). Furthermore, taking into
account the silver refined by artisanal producers in the informal economy, which did not
pass through the royal treasury, raises the estimate of cleared forests to over 391,000
km2 for the same period.68 Charcoal production became an important ancillary industry to
the reales de minas, largely in the hands of small indigenous (p. 72) and mixed-race pro
ducers. As such, it is important for both the environmental and social histories of colonial
mining, with different configurations in distinct regions.69 In the area surrounding San
Luis Potosí, where indigenous communities produced charcoal and sold it to the hacien
das de beneficio, they protested the operations of competing carboneros whom they ac
cused of trespassing their thorn forest monte and grasslands and of usurping village re
sources. In 1652 the combined Otomí and Guachichil community of Santa María del Río
successfully petitioned the alcalde mayor of San Luis Potosí to have a rival carbonero re
moved from their lands.70
Research on the long-term impacts of mining on the landscapes and societies of Latin
America remains compelling, even though the specific figures for mineral production and
the estimates for biomass consumption may be questioned. Formulas like the one cited
above used to convert registered quantities of silver into cleared stands of timber are, at
best, estimates that may be conditioned by forest regrowth or replacement vegetation
corresponding to grasslands and scrub forest. In addition, the environmental conse
quences of soil and water contamination due to mercury and other reagents as well as to
the livestock and tanning industries that served the mining sector compounded the prob
lems raised by deforestation.71 Research on mercury and other chemical contaminants in
the soils and in surface streams or underground aquifers brings the history of colonial
Page 16 of 29

mining to contemporary concerns in Latin America. Two case studies focused on Zacate
cas, Mexico, and on Guancavelica, the great mercury mine in highland Peru, have trained
a sharp lens on the problem and its implications for the environment and the health of hu
man populations today.72
The main threads of environmental history for the borderland regions of Spanish and Por
tuguese America emerge from a review of the historiography and the literature from cul
tural geography, historical demography, and anthropology as well as direct archival refer
ences from current research. The most significant findings for selected environmental
themes point to the documentation for land tenure and the clues it provides to landscape
transformations and to the environmental impacts of colonial urbanization, mining, and
related industries. Framing the environment in terms of the cultural formation of land
scapes, necessarily links nature, society, technology, and culture. In the borderlands of
North and South America, the salient geographic features that shaped the interaction be
tween different human societies and the environment constituted the contrasting cli
mates and vegetation of the Sonoran and Chihuahuan deserts, the sierras of northern
New Spain, and the tropical wetlands and fluvial systems of the Amazonian and
Paraguayan basins with their vast networks of tributaries flowing out of the Andean high
lands. These contrasts of aridity and tropicality do not represent polar opposites; rather,
they express the degrees of variation in the natural conditions of precipitation, land for
mations, stream flow, and soil composition that were molded into historical landscapes.
The environmental history of these regions exemplifies continuities found in the relation
ships between nature and both indigenous and colonial societies while pointing to periods
and places of significant ecological change. These parallel themes appear with (p. 73) spe
cial force in the histories of horticultural systems, water management, contrasting tradi
tions of pastoralism relating to Andean camelids and European livestock, the skills and
rituals of hunting and gathering, and the industries that had transformative impacts in
Latin American environments, especially sugar plantations and their mills and silver and
gold mines with their processing plants and foundries. The research on mining presented
here emphasized the destructive aspects of deforestation, soil and water contamination,
and conflicting claims to resources; nevertheless, these histories fit within a larger narra
tive of landscape creation and the regenerative adaptations of nature and human soci
eties even in the midst of destructive processes of vegetation removal, desiccation, and
accumulation of industrial wastes.73 Ecological borderlands, or ecotones, and historical
borderlands on the margins of imperial dominions mark truly significant scenarios in
which to observe the historical contests over resources and the dual processes of degra
dation and regeneration that continue to shape debates over environmental policies in
the Americas and other world regions to the present day.
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(1.) Antonio Barrera-Osorio, “Knowledge and Empiricism in the Sixteenth-Century Span

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Thomas J. Bassett, ed., African Savannas: Global Narratives and Local Knowledge of Envi
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in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013); Richard P.
Tucker and Harold K. Steen, ed., Changing Tropical Forests: Historical Perspectives on
Today’s Challenges in Central & South America (Durham, NC: Forest History Society,
1992).
(4.) William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New
England, rev. ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 2003); Max S. Edelson, Plantation Enterprise
in South Carolina (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); Andrew C. Isenberg,
The Destruction of the Bison. An Environmental History (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2000); Patricia N. Limerick, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the
New West (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000); Daniel H., Usner Jr., Indians, Settlers, and
Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783
(Chapel Hill: UNC, 1992); Richard White, The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Envi
Page 19 of 29

ronment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: Uni
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Press, 1997).
(5.) William Cronon, Uncommon Ground. Toward Re-inventing Nature (New York: W.W.
Norton, 1995); Richard White, “From Wilderness to Hybrid Landscapes: The Cultural
Turn in Environmental History,” The Historian 66, 3 (2004): 557–564; Emily Wakild, Revo
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(Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011).
(6.) William M. Deneven, Cultivated Landscapes of Native Amazonia and the Andes: Tri
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agricultura chinampera (Chapingo: Universidad Autónoma Chapingo, 1983); Fernando
Berrojalbiz, Paisajes y fronteras del Durango prehispánico (Mexico: IIE, IIA- UNAM 2012).
(7.) John Staller, et al., ed., Histories of Maize. Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Prehis
tory, Linguistics, Biogeography, Domestication, and Evolution of Maize (Burlington and
San Diego: Elsevier, Academic Press, 2006); Arturo Warman, Corn and Capitalism: How a
Botanical Bastard Grew to Global Dominance (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2003 [La historia de un
bastardo: maíz y capitalismo. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1988]).
(8.) Robert Bye and Edelmira Linares, “Botanical Symmetry and Asymmetry in the Mapa
de Cuauhtinchan No. 2,” in Cave, City, and Eagle’s Nest. An Interpretive Journey through
the Mapa de Cuauhtinchan No. 2, ed. David Carrasco and Scott Sessions (Albuquerque:
UNM, 2007), 255–280.
(9.) Kent Flannery, “Precolumbian Farming in the Valleys of Oaxaca, Nochistlán, Tehuacán
and Cuicatlán: A Comparative Study,” in The Cloud People: Divergent Evolution of the Za
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(11.) Guilhem Olivier, Cacería, sacrificio y poder en Mesoamérica. Tras las huellas de Mix
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icomiso Felipe Teixidor y Montserrat Alfau de Teixidor, 2015); Isenberg, The Destruction
Page 20 of 29

of the Bison; Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University
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(12.) William E. Doolittle, Pre-Hispanic Occupance in the Valley of Sonora, Mexico: Ar
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1988), Canal Irrigation in Prehistoric Mexico: The Sequence of Technological Change
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), and Cultivated Landscapes of Native North
America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
(13.) John V. Murra, El mundo andino: Población, medio ambiente y economía (Lima: IEP,
2002).
(14.) John Leighly, ed., Land and Life. A Selection from the Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); David Lehmann, ed., Ecology and Ex
change in the Andes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
(15.) Karl S. Zimmerer, Changing Fortunes: Biodiversity and Peasant Livelihood in the Pe
ruvian Andes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).
(16.) Jason B. Kauffman, “The Unknown Lands: Nature, Knowledge, and Society in the
Pantanal Wetlands of Brazil and Bolivia” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina, 2015).
(17.) Lachlan H. Fraser and Paul A. Keddy, ed., The World’s Largest Wetlands: Ecology
and Conservation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Hal Langfur, The
Forbidden Lands: Colonial Identity, Frontier Violence, and the Persistence of Brazil’s
Eastern Indians, 1750–1830 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006).
(18.) Pilar García Jordán, Para una historia de los Sirionó (Cochabamba: Instituto Mi
sionología, Editorial Itinerarios, 2011); Jeffrey Alan Erbig Jr., “Imperial Lines, Indigenous
Lands: Transforming Territorialities of the Río de la Plata, 1680–1805” (PhD diss., Univer
sity of North Carolina, 2015).
(19.) Juan Carlos Garavaglia, Pastores y labradores de Buenos Aires. Una historia agraria
de la campaña bonaerense, 1700–1830 (Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1999);
Thomas Whigham, Lo que el río se llevó: Estado y comercio en Paraguay y Corrientes,
1776–1870 (Asunción, Paraguay: UCA, 2009); Cynthia Radding, Landscapes of Power and
Identity. Comparative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from
Colony to Republic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Isabelle Combès, ed.,
Definiciones étnicas, organización social y estrategias políticas en el Chaco y la Chiqui
tanía (Santa Cruz de la Sierra: Editorial El País, SNV, IFEA, Actes Memoires 11, 2006);
Oscar Tonelli Justiniano, El Peabirú chiquitano: Ensayo sobre el ramal chiquitano de una
ruta interoceánica prehistórica (Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia: Editorial El País, 2007).
(20.) Betty J. Meggers, Prehistoric America: An Ecological Perspective (New Brunswick,

NJ: Aldine Transaction, 2010); Anna C. Roosevelt, Parmana: Prehistoric Maize and Manioc
Subsistence along the Amazon and Orinoco (New York: Academic Press, 1980); Warren
Dean, Brazil and the Struggle for Rubber: A Study in Environmental History (Cambridge,
Page 21 of 29

UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Barbara Weinstein, The Amazon Rubber Boom,
1850–1920 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983).
(21.) Marianne Schmink and Charles H. Wood, Contested Frontiers in Amazonia (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1992); Candace Slater, Entangled Edens: Visions of the
Amazon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Susanna Hecht and Alexander
Cockburn, The Fate of the Forest: Developers, Destroyers, and Defenders of the Amazon
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010); William F. Balée, Cultural Forests of the Ama
zon: A Historical Ecology of People and their Landscapes (Tuscaloosa: University of Al
abama Press, 2013); Seth Garfield, In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States,
and the Nature of a Region (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013); and Susanna
Hecht, The Scramble for the Amazon and the “Lost Paradise” of Euclides da Cunha
(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013).
(22.) Emilio F. Moran, Through Amazonian Eyes: the Human Ecology of Amazonian Popu
lations (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993); Emilio F. Moran, Environmental Social
Science: Human-environment Interactions and Sustainability (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell,
2010); Peter Gow, An Amazonian Myth and its History (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2001).
(23.) David Block, Mission Culture on the Upper Amazon: Native Tradition, Jesuit Enter
prise & Secular Policy in Moxos, 1660–1880 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1994); Barbara A. Ganson, The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); Raúl J. Mandrini, ed., Vivir entre dos mun
dos. Las fronteras del sur de la Argentina. Siglos XVIII y XIX (Buenos Aires: Taurus,
Aguilar, Altea, Alfaguara Salvador, 2006); Salvador Bernabéu Albert, Christophe Giudicel
li, and Gilles Havard, coords., La indianización: cautivos, renegados, “hommes libres” y
misioneros en los confines americanos (s. XVI–XIX) (Madrid and Paris: Ediciones doce
Calles, Ècole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2012); Julia Sarreal, The Guaraní
and Their Missions: A Socioeconomic History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2014).
(24.) Warren Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic
Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Reinaldo Funes Monzote, From
Rainforest to Cane Field in Cuba: An Environmental History since 1492 (Chapel Hill:
UNC, 2008); and Thomas D. Rogers, The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental
History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil (Chapel Hill: UNC, 2010).
(25.) Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Con

quest of Mexico (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
(26.) Karl W. Butzer and Elizabeth K. Butzer, “Transfer of the Mediterranean Livestock
Economy to New Spain: Adaptation and Ecological Consequences,” in Global Land Use
Change: A Perspective from the Columbian Encounter, ed. B. L. Turner II, Antonio Gómez
Sal, Fernando González Bernáldez, and Francesco di Castri (Madrid: CSIC, 1995), 151–
193; Andrew Sluyter, “The Ecological Origins and Consequences of Cattle Ranching in
Page 22 of 29

Sixteenth-Century New Spain,” Geographical Review 86 (1996): 161–77; and Andrew

Sluyter, Colonialism and Landscape: Postcolonial Theory and Applications (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield, 2002).
(27.) Raúl J. Mandrini, Carlos D. Paz, ed., Las fronteras hispanocriollas del mundo indíge
na latinoamericano en los siglos XVIII-XIX. Un estudio comparativo (Neuquén, Argentina:
Universidad Nacional del Comahue, Centro de Estudios de la Historia Regional, 2003);
Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity; Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire; Brian
DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Andrew Sluyter, Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cat
tle Herders of the Atlantic world, 1500–1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2012).
(28.) Mark Carey, “Latin American Environmental History: Current Trends, Interdiscipli
nary Insights, and Future Directions,” Latin American Research Review 14, no. 2 (2009):
221–252.
(29.) Alfred B. Crosby, The Columbian Exchange. Biological and Cultural Consequences of
1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), Ecological Imperialism. The Biological Ex
pansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and
Germs, Seeds, and Animals. Studies in Ecological History (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe,
1994); and Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery:
Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic world (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2009).
(30.) Sherburne F. Cook, Soil Erosion and Population in Central Mexico (Berkeley: Univer
sity of California Press, 1949), Ibero-Americana, 34.
(31.) Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, Essays in Population History: Mexico and
the Caribbean (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971–1979).
(32.) N. David Cook, Demographic Collapse: Indian Peru, 1520–1620 (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1981), The People of the Colca Valley: A Population Study
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982), and Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest,
1492–1650 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Adam Warren, Medicine
and Politics in Colonial Peru: Population Growth and the Bourbon Reforms (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010).
(33.) Thomas Calvo, Acatzingo: demografía de una parroquia mexicana (Mexico: INAH,
1973); Cecilia Andrea Rabell Romero, La población novohispana a la luz de los registros
parroquiales: avances y perspectivas de investigación (Mexico: IIS-UNAM, 1990); Elsa
Malvido, “La epidemiología. Una propuesta para explicar la despoblación americana,” Re
vista de Indias 63, no. 227 (2003): 65–78, and “El camino de la primera viruela en el nue
vo mundo: del Caribe a Tenochtitlan, 1493–1521,” Revista Cultura y Religión 2, 3 (2008):
1–12; Chantal Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera: La provincia de Santa Bárbara en Nueva
Vizcaya durante los siglos XVI y XVII (Zamora: El Colegio de Michoacán, 2006).
Page 23 of 29

(34.) Block, Mission Culture; Cynthia Radding, Wandering Peoples. Colonialism, Ethnic
Spaces, and Ecological Frontiers in Northwestern Mexico, 1700–1850 (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1997); Robert H. Jackson, Missions and the Frontiers of Spanish
America: A Comparative Study of the Impact of Environmental, Economic, Political, and
Socio-Cultural Variations on the Missions in the Rio de la Plata Region and on the North
ern Frontier of New Spain (Scottsdale, AZ: Pentacle Press, 2005); Susan M. Deeds, Defi
ance and Deference in Colonial Mexico: Indians under Spanish Rule in Nueva Vizcaya
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003); Steven W. Hackel, Children of Coyote, Mission
aries of Saint Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769–1850 (Chapel
Hill: UNC, 2005); Mario Alberto Magaña Mancillas, ed., Epidemias y rutas de propa
gación en la Nueva España y México (siglos XVIII-XIX) (Mexicali and La Paz, Mexico:
UABC, Instituto Sudcaliforniano de Cultura, Archivo Histórico Pablo L. Martínez, 2013).
(35.) These representative works shaped the historiography for Mexico, Peru, and Brazil.
François Chevalier, Land and Society in Colonial Mexico: the Great Hacienda (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1963 [1952]); Bernardo García Martínez, El Marquesado
del Valle; tres siglos de régimen señorial en Nueva España (Mexico: El Colegio de México,
1969); David A. Brading, Haciendas and Ranchos in the Mexican Bajío (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 1979); Eric Van Young, Hacienda and Market in Eighteenth-
Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675–1820 (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006 [1981]); John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in
Mexico: Social Bases of Agrarian Violence, 1750–1940 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Universi
ty Press, 1986); Susan E. Ramírez, Provincial Patriarchs: Land Tenure and the Economics
of Power in Colonial Peru (Albuquerque: UNM, 1986); Stuart B. Schwartz, Sugar Planta
tions in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge, UK: Cam
bridge University Press, 1985).
(36.) Charles Gibson, The Aztecs Under Spanish Rule: A History of the Indians of the Val
ley of Mexico, 1519–1810 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1964); William B. Tay
lor, Landlord and Peasant in Colonial Oaxaca (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1972); Nancy M. Farriss, Maya Society Under Colonial Rule: The Collective Enterprise of
Survival (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); Nancy Spalding, Huarochirí:
An Andean Society Under Inca and Spanish Rule (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1984); Frank Salomon, Native Lords of Quito in the Age of the Incas: The Political
Economy of North-Andean Chiefdoms (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1986); Brooke Larson, Cochabamba, 1550–1900: Colonialism and Agrarian Transforma
tion in Bolivia. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998); Luis Alberto Arrioja Díaz
Viruell, Pueblos de indios y tierras comunales. Villa Alta, Oaxaca: 1742–1856 (Zamora: El
Colegio de Michoacán, Fideicomiso “Felipe Teixidor y Monserrat Alfau de Teixidor,”
2011).
(37.) James Lockhart, The Nahuas after the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the
Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stan
ford University Press, 1992); Kevin Terraciano, The Mixtecs of Colonial Oaxaca: Ñudzahui
History, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Page 24 of 29

Press, 2001); Barbara E. Mundy, The Mapping of New Spain: Indigenous Cartography and
the Maps of the Relaciones Geográficas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and
Ethelia Ruiz Medrano, Mexico’s Indigenous Communities: Their Lands and Histories,
1500–2010, trans. Russ Davidson (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2010).
(38.) Laura E. Matthews, and Michel R. Oudijk, ed., Indian Conquistadors: Indigenous Al
lies in the Conquest of Mesoamerica (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007); Dan
na A. Levin Rojo, Return to Aztlán. Indians, Spaniards, and the Invention of Nuevo México
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2014).
(39.) Deeds, Defiance and Deference; Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera; Salvador Álvarez, El
indio y la sociedad colonial norteña, siglos XVI-XVIII (Durango: UJED, El Colegio de Mi
choacán, 2009); Michael C. Meyer, Water in the Hispanic Southwest: A Social and Legal
History, 1550–1850 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1984); John L. Kessell, Kiva,
Cross, and Crown: The Pecos Indians and New Mexico, 1540–1840 (Washington, DC: De
partment of the Interior, National Park Service, 1979); Ross Frank, From Settler to Citi
zen: New Mexican Economic Development and the Creation of Vecino Society, 1750–1820
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Malcolm Ebright, Land Grants and Law
suits in Northern New Mexico (Albuquerque: UNM, 1994); and Advocates for the Op
pressed: Hispanos, Indians, Genízaros, and their Land in New Mexico (Albuquerque:
UNM, 2014);
Leslie S. Offut, Saltillo, 1770–1810: Town and Region in the Mexican North (Tucson: Uni
versity of Arizona Press, 2001); Carlos Manuel Valdés, La gente del mesquite: los nó
madas del noreste en la colonia (Mexico: CIESAS, INI, 1995); Sean F. McEnroe, From
Colony to Nationhood in Mexico: Laying the Foundations, 1560–1840 (Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2012).
(40.) Cynthia Radding, “Colonial Spaces in the Fragmented Communities of Northern

New Spain,” in Contested Spaces of Early America, ed. Juliana Barr and Edward Country
man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 115–141; Gilberto López
Castillo, El poblamiento en tierra de indios cáhitas (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, El Colegio
de Sinaloa, 2010); Harry W. Crosby, Antigua California: Mission and Colony on the Penin
sular Frontier, 1697–1768 (Albuquerque: UNM, 1994); Ignacio Del Río, Conquista y acul
turación en la California Jesuítica, 1697–1768 (Mexico: IIH-UNAM, 1998); Hackel, Chil
dren of Coyote; and José Refugio De la Torre Curiel, Twilight of the Mission Frontier.
Shifting Interethnic Alliances and Social Organization in Sonora, 1768–1855 (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2012).
(41.) Patricia Osante, Orígenes del Nuevo Santander, 1748–1772 (Mexico: UNAM, 1997);
Frank De la Teja, San Antonio de Béxar: A Community on New Spain’s Northern Frontier
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995).
(42.) Cecilia Sheridan, Anónimos y desterrados. La contienda por el “sitio que llaman de
Quauyla,” siglos XVI–XVIII (Mexico: CIESAS, 2000); James F. Brooks, Captives and
Cousins. Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill:
Page 25 of 29

UNC, 2002); Sara Ortelli, Trama de una guerra conveniente: Nueva Vizcaya y la sombra
de los apaches (1748–1790) (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2007); Chantal Cramaussel,
“The Forced Transfer of Indians in Nueva Vizcaya and Sinaloa: A Hispanic Method of Col
onization,” in Contested Spaces of Early America, ed. Juliana Barr and Edward Country
man (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 184–207.
(43.) Melville, A Plague of Sheep; Alfred Siemens, “Extrayendo ecología de algunos docu
mentos novohispanos de la época temprana,” in Estudios sobre historia y ambiente en
América I: Argentina, Bolivia, México, Paraguay, ed. Bernardo García Martínez and Alba
González Jácome (Mexico: IPGH, 1999), 219–264.
(44.) Ernest J. Burrus, S.J. and Félix Zubillaga, S.J., El noroeste de México. Documentos
sobre las misiones jesuíticas, 1600–1769 (México: UNAM, 1986), 100–101, 384–385; An
drés Pérez de Ribas, Historia de los triumphos de nuestra santa fee entre gentes las más
bárbaras, y fieras del nueuo Orbe (Madrid: Alonso de Paredes, 1645), Libro VI, Cap VI,
253–254.
(45.) López Castillo, Poblamiento, Anexo 2, 225–228. A sitio, one of the most commonly
used land measurements, corresponded to 1,747 hectares (4,316 acres) for bovine cattle
and to 776 hectares (1,918 acres) for sheep or goats.
(46.) López Castillo, Poblamiento, 227–228, 235. Taymuco y Cerro Colorado, with 2 sitios
and 2 caballerías, Archivo Histórico de Sonora T LX-800; Yoricarichi y Camotes, with 1
sitio de ganado menor, Archivo Histórico de Jalisco, L 14–17, Archivo Histórico de Sonora
TXXI-286.
(47.) Archivo General de la Nación, Indiferente Virreinal, Caja 5907, exp. 77, f. 1r.
(48.) Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand.
(49.) Mary C. Karasch, Before Brasília. Frontier Life in Central Brazil (Albuquerque:
UNM, 2016); Schmink and Wood, Contested Frontiers.
(50.) Robert Wilcox, Cattle in the Backlands. Mato Grosso and the Evolution of Ranching
in the Brazilian Tropics (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017).
(51.) Radding, Landscapes of Power and Identity; Kauffman, “The Unknown Lands.”
(52.) Kauffman, “The Unknown Lands,” 79; Gary Van Valen, Indigenous Agency in the
Amazon: the Mojos in Liberal and Rubber-Boom Bolivia, 1842–1932 (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 2013).
(53.) Universidad Autónoma “Gabriel René-Moreno,” Museo de Historia (UGRM, MH),

Prefectural 1/6 (1826), José Lorenzo Suárez al Obispo de Santa Cruz; Archivo del Arzobis
pado de Santa Cruz (AASC) Provisorato, 2–7.
(54.) Radding, Wandering Peoples, 171–248.
Page 26 of 29

(55.) Meyer, Water in the Southwest; Offut, Saltillo; Cecilia Sheridan Prieto, “La construc
ción de territorialidades hídricas en el espacio noreste novohispano,” in Usos y desusos
del agua en cuencas del Norte de México, ed. Cecilia Sheridan Prieto and Mario Cerutti,
(Mexico: CIESAS, 2011) 67–98; Susan M. Deeds, “Escasez y conflicto: la historia del agua
en el noreste de la Nueva España,” in Usos y desusos del agua en cuencas del Norte de
México, ed. Cecilia Sheridan Prieto and Mario Cerutti (Mexico: CIESAS, 2011), 43–66.
(56.) José A. Rivera, Acequia Culture. Water, Land and Community in the Southwest
(Albuquerque: UNM, 1998); Sylvia Rodríguez, Acequia. Water, Sharing, Sanctity, and
Place (Santa Fe: SAR, 2006).
(57.) Radding, Wandering Peoples, 48–54; Gary Nabhan and Thomas E. Sheridan, “Living
Fencerows of the Río San Miguel, Sonora, Mexico: Traditional Technology for Floodplain
Management,” Human Ecology 5, 2 (1977): 97–111; William E. Doolittle, “Channel
Changes and Living Fencerows in Eastern Sonora, Mexico: Myopia in Traditional Re
source Management?,” Geography Annals 85, A, 3–4 (2003): 247–261.
(58.) Martín Sánchez Rodríguez, “Mexico’s Breadbasket: Agriculture and the Environ
ment in the Bajío,” in A Land between Waters Environmental Histories of Modern Mexico,
ed. Christopher R. Boyer (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2012), 50–72; Leticia
González Arratia, Historia y etnohistoria del norte de México y la Comarca Lagunera
(Mexico: INAH, 2007).
(59.) Adolph Bandelier, Final Report of Investigations among the Indians of the South
western United States, carried on mainly in the years from 1880 to 1885, part I (Cam
bridge: John Wilson & Son, University Press, 1890), 286–289. Papers of the Archaeologi
cal Institute of America. American Series, III.
(60.) Deneven, Cultivated Landscapes; Block, Mission Culture.
(61.) Rosalva Loreto López, coord., Perfiles habitacionales y condiciones ambientales: his
toria urbana de Latinoamérica, siglos XVII-XX (Puebla, Mexico, and Munich: BUAP,
CONACYT and Deutsches Museum, 2007).
(62.) Vera S. Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial

Mexico City (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014); Matthew Vitz, A City on a Lake:
Urban Political Ecology and the Growth of Mexico City (Durham: Duke University Press,
2018).
(63.) Robert C. West, The Mining Community in Northern New Spain: The Parral District
(New York: AMS Press [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1949], 1980); Chantal
Cramaussel, “Sociedad colonial y depredación ecológica: Parral en el siglo XVII,” in Estu
dios sobre historia y ambiente en America I: Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico, Paraguay, ed.
Bernardo García Martínez and Alba González Jácome (Mexico: Colegio de Mexico, IPHG,
1999).
(64.) Cramaussel, “Sociedad colonial y depredación ecológica,” 98.
Page 27 of 29

(65.) West, Mining Community, 12–14, 36–44, Map 5, “Sources of Reagents Used in the
Parral Mines,” 28.
(66.) Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera; Cramaussel, “The Forced Transfer of Indians.”
(67.) For estimates of deforestation due to timber consumption and the production of
charcoal for fuel see Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert and David Schecter, “The Environmental
Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-Rush: Silver Mining and Deforestation in New Spain, 1522 to
1810,” Environmental History 15 (2010): 94–119.
(68.) Studnicki-Gizbert and Schecter, “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-

Rush,” 99–100, Figure 1, and Appendix 1. For silver mining in New Spain and Peru, see
Richard L. Garner, “Long-Term Silver Mining Trends in Spanish America: A Comparative
Analysis of Peru and Mexico,” American Historical Review 93, 4 (1988): 898–935; on cred
it and finances, Eduardo Flores Clair, coord., Crédito y financiamiento a la industria min
era: siglos XVI–XX (Mexico: Plaza y Valdés, 2006).
(69.) Studinicki-Gizbert and Schecter, “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-

Rush,” 102–109; Alejandro Montoya, “Población y Sociedad en un Real de Minas de la
Frontera Norte Novohispana. San Luis Potosí, de finales del siglo XVI a 1810 (PhD diss.,
Université de Montreal, 2003); Carlos Rubén Ruiz Medrano, “El Real de Minas de Bo
laños, Jalisco en el siglo XVIII: transformaciones territoriales y cambios sociales,” Región
y sociedad XXVI, 60 (2014): 191–227.
(70.) Archivo Histórico del Estado de San Luis Potosí—Alcaldía Mayor (AMSLP) 1652.2,
Exp. 11, fojas 1–6. Simón López de Castro, defensor general de los indios y por lo que to
ca a Don Miguel de Avalos, Gobernador de la Frontera de Santa María del Río de Atonon
ilco y Juan Miguel, alcalde, contra Miguel de Silva. For similar documented disputes in
Nueva Vizcaya, see Deeds, Defiance and Deference, 61–62, 128–129, 162–164.
(71.) Elinor G. K. Melville, “Global Developments and Latin American Environments,” in

Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, ed., Tom Griffiths and
Libby Robin (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997) 185–196; Elinor G. K.
Melville and Bradley Skopyk, “Disease, Ecology, and the Environment,” in The Oxford His
tory of Mexico, ed., William H. Beezley and Michael C. Meyer (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2010) 203–234.
(72.) Tetsuya Ogura, Jorge Ramírez-Ortiz, Zenaida María Arroyo-Villaseñor, Sergio

Hernández Martínez, Jesús Pablo Palafox-Hernández, Luis Hugo García de Alba, and
Quintus Fernando, “Zacatecas (Mexico) Companies Extract Hg from Surface Soil Contam
inated by Ancient Mining Industries,” Water, Air, and Soil Pollution 148 (2003): 167–77;
Nicholas A. Robins, Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of
Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011);
Jerome O. Nriagu, “Mercury Pollution from the Past Mining of Gold and Silver in the
Americas,” The Science of the Total Environment 149 (1994): 167–81.
Page 28 of 29

(73.) Luis Aboites, Demografía histórica y conflictos por el agua; dos estudios sobre 40
kilómetros de historia del Río San Pedro, Chihuahua (Mexico: CIESAS, 2000).
Cynthia Radding
Cynthia Radding is the Gussenhoven Distinguished Professor of Latin American Stud

ies and History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research and
teaching on Iberoamerican frontiers during the colonial and early national periods fo
cus on the intersection of environmental and social history through interdisciplinary
methodologies. Her publications include Landscapes of Power and Identity: Compar
ative Histories in the Sonoran Desert and the Forests of Amazonia from Colony to Re
public (2005); she is co-editor with Paul Readman and Chad Bryant of Borderlands in
World History (Palgrave, 2014). Radding has published articles in Hispanic American
Historical Review, The Americas, Boletín Americanista, and Latin American Research
Review as well as numerous chapters in collaborative publications in Mexico, Bolivia,
the U.S., and Europe.
Page 29 of 29

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Crafting Landscapes in the Iberian Borderlands of the Americas

Crafting Landscapes in the Iberian Borderlands of the

Print Publication Date: Dec 2019 Subject: History, European History

Abstract and Keywords

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(p. 58) Historians of the Environment

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In Latin America, by way of contrast, environmental histories have radiated out­

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Mesoamerica is commonly identified by its agricultural traditions, centered on maize in

Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 05 May 2021

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Elinor G. K. Melville’s A Plague of Sheep established a similar benchmark for envi­

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Crosby’s biological view of history influenced Elinor Melville’s interpretation of the

Research on health and population intersects with environmental history in important

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What then is historical about environmental history in the Iberian borderlands of

Land Tenure and Environmental Change in the

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Industry, Urbanization, and Landscape Trans­

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Cramaussel, Chantal. “Sociedad colonial y depredación ecológica: Parral en el siglo XVII.”

Cramaussel, Chantal. Poblar la frontera: La provincia de Santa Bárbara en Nueva Vizcaya

Isenberg, Andrew C. The Destruction of the Bison. An Environmental History. Cambridge

Melville, Elinor G. K. A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of

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Studnicki-Gizbert, Daviken, and David Schecter. “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colo­

(1.) Antonio Barrera-Osorio, “Knowledge and Empiricism in the Sixteenth-Century Span­

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(20.) Betty J. Meggers, Prehistoric America: An Ecological Perspective (New Brunswick,

Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 05 May 2021

(25.) Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Con­

Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 05 May 2021

Sixteenth-Century New Spain,” Geographical Review 86 (1996): 161–77; and Andrew

Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 05 May 2021

Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 05 May 2021

(40.) Cynthia Radding, “Colonial Spaces in the Fragmented Communities of Northern

Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 05 May 2021

(48.) Dean, With Broadax and Firebrand.

(53.) Universidad Autónoma “Gabriel René-Moreno,” Museo de Historia (UGRM, MH),

(54.) Radding, Wandering Peoples, 171–248.

Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 05 May 2021

(60.) Deneven, Cultivated Landscapes; Block, Mission Culture.

(62.) Vera S. Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial

(64.) Cramaussel, “Sociedad colonial y depredación ecológica,” 98.

Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 05 May 2021

(66.) Cramaussel, Poblar la frontera; Cramaussel, “The Forced Transfer of Indians.”

(68.) Studnicki-Gizbert and Schecter, “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-

(69.) Studinicki-Gizbert and Schecter, “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colonial Fuel-

(71.) Elinor G. K. Melville, “Global Developments and Latin American Environments,” in

(72.) Tetsuya Ogura, Jorge Ramírez-Ortiz, Zenaida María Arroyo-Villaseñor, Sergio

Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 05 May 2021

Cynthia Radding is the Gussenhoven Distinguished Professor of Latin American Stud­

Subscriber: New York Public Library; date: 05 May 2021

In Latin America, by way of contrast, environmental histories have radiated out

Elinor G. K. Melville’s A Plague of Sheep established a similar benchmark for envi

Industry, Urbanization, and Landscape Trans

Studnicki-Gizbert, Daviken, and David Schecter. “The Environmental Dynamics of a Colo

(1.) Antonio Barrera-Osorio, “Knowledge and Empiricism in the Sixteenth-Century Span

(25.) Elinor G. K. Melville, A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Con

Cynthia Radding is the Gussenhoven Distinguished Professor of Latin American Stud