706041 HOS0010.1177/0073275317706041History of ScienceCandiani research-article2017 HOS Special Issue: Iberian Science: Reflections and Studies Reframing knowledge in colonization: Plebeians and municipalities in the environmental expertise of the Spanish Atlantic History of Science 2017, Vol. 55(2) 234–252 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275317706041 DOI: 10.1177/0073275317706041 journals.sagepub.com/home/hos Vera S Candiani Princeton University, USA Abstract Promoting a better understanding of the phenomenon of colonization and its connection with environmental knowledge and technology, this article proposes a reframing of research agendas to take into account the municipal character of colonization in the Hispanic realm and to ask new questions. Questions should address what human– ecosystem relations, and the ways of knowing and techniques for transforming the physical realm, can tell us about colonization itself; who the historical agents involved were, and what these actors knew, learned, and did in their environments. Using the Basin of Mexico’s drainage and the agency of commoners, this article proposes that colonization depends on the massive deployment and generation of tacit knowledge about how to harness matter, energy, and time for the reproduction of human societies; the quotidian appropriation and reworking of autochthonous knowledge, techniques, and technology by the colonizing groups; the collaboration of the local populations in whom these are vested; and the agency of commoners with practical skills, environmental knowledge, and technological savvy derived from and honed in the realm of material production. In the Ibero-American realm, these agents were primarily commoners with skills in agropastoral production and the building trades; race, ethnicity, language, and gender were secondary conditions. Keywords Colonization, environmental expertise, environmental engineering, hydraulic technology, land, water, soils, architecture and construction, cities, Habsburg rule, settlement. Corresponding author: Vera S Candiani, Dept. of History, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA. Email: candiani@Princeton.EDU Candiani 235 A mar revuelto, ganancia de pescadores, the saying goes in Spanish: “it’s good fishing in troubled waters.” Historians of the early modern Iberian Atlantic and in the developing field of global history have churned up the historiographical waters, chopping and swimming through obstacles that have stood in the way of a better understanding of historical processes. Reconfiguring thinking across the fields it touches, bringing back a revitalized economic, political, and social history and the longue durée, this scholarship is asking new questions about two of the fundamental phenomena of the period: the emergence of capitalism and the formation of nation-states and empires. Historians of science, meanwhile, have been doing their own reconfiguring to our understanding of the third fundamental early modern phenomenon: the revolution in knowledge and knowledge-making that the emergence of experimental science and the reformulation of universal laws with motion catalyzed. Collectively, I believe, we are ready to converge upon early modernity and to go fishing in these waters to produce a comprehensive and integrated understanding of this crucial period. Or almost ready, since this understanding can only be complete if it also sweeps into its fold the fourth fundamental phenomenon of the epoch: colonization. This is where Ibero-Americanist scholarship comes in. We bring to the table excellence in the study of colonization, which our polyglot economic, social, political, and cultural historians have been unpacking for generations, shining light back onto the history of capitalism, nationstates, and empires in the process. Ibero-Americanist scholarship also has a lot to say about the revolution in knowledge. But to do so, as the articles in this special issue suggest, it has had to struggle against a variety of misconceptions to even gain access to the debate table. This effort has diverted its energy from creating more autonomous and less reactive research questions and optics, as well as from engaging directly with colonization. This article hopes to do exactly this, and in the process help promote a productive synthesis of scholarships. To begin, colonization is not the same as colonialism or imperialism. Colonization is a transformation of socio-ecosystemic relationships in any given geography that happens as a result of the intervention by alliances of social groups and classes that were previously alien to it. In the early modern period, these interventions and the resulting transformations happened on both sides of the ocean and at the same time, their actors forming empires and nation-states simultaneously. This makes transatlantic and so-called “internal” colonization creatures of the same dynamic and all-encompassing process of the period. This definition contrasts with standard, imprecise understandings of colonization as (a) the expansion of some ethnicities or nations (homogenized as “Spaniards,” “the English,” and so on) over others (“the indigenous”) and their territories and (b) as coterminous with colonialism, understood as that commercial and state drive to control resources and markets for profit. Colonization did not necessarily lead to an Atlantic cleavage between “colonies” and “metropoles”; colonialism did. The latter did not prevail in the Hispanic realm until the eighteenth century.1 The confusion between the two has meant that despite the growing literature about the symbiosis between colonialism 1. Vera S. Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2014), ch.8. 236 History of Science 55(2) and Hispanic and European imperial science, we actually know surprisingly little about colonization itself: who exactly executed it, how did it look on the ground, and why? A productive convergence of scholars and historians of science, technology, and the environment, as well as those of capitalism and colonization, all with their respective toolboxes, could take on questions such as these and move forward (or back?) together toward more integrated, big picture issues. It would also be taking a step toward an epistemic and cognitive reconciliation of the “two cultures,” if you will. For all this, we do not need to invent new tools. Repairing existing ones will do. The utility of the Zilsel thesis comes to mind – that early modern academic thinkers essentially learned the experimental method by observing the tinkerings of common yet “superior” craftsmen.2 These insights have been developed for various locales, dynamics, and groups of what one could call “organic” experts and craftsmen in the European continent.3 Beyond Europe, Joseph Needham first used it advantageously to answer his own big questions about why it was Europe and not China that incubated modern science during early modernity, given that Chinese civilization had had the advantage in “applying human natural knowledge to practical human needs.”4 Needham’s great merit was to have shot Zilsel’s insights out to the global sphere. These two movements have been pursued recently, but for them to reach full fruition they will have to conceptually transcend the confines of the Old World. This means three things. It implies rescinding the anachronistic nation-state as the unit of analysis, following the lead of comparative and global history. This alone could be “paradigm-shifting,” as Pamela H. Smith put it.5 I agree with Lissa Roberts that the concepts it has generated (“contact zones,” “transculturation,” “circulation”) are useful.6 But they are still too blunt for grappling with crucial differences among the phenomena of contact, conquest, colonization, colonialism, and imperialism, and so cannot lead the comparative and global moves to their fullest impact on how we understand knowledgemaking and usage. Instead, we must be precise about these differences, and neither stop at crossing the oceans to the “peripheries” as topic, action, or site of studies, nor ignore the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Lastly, as Karel Davids has pointed out, the 2. Edgar Zilsel, “The Origin of William Gilbert’s Scientific Method,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2 (1941): 1–32 and “The Sociological Roots of Science,” American Journal of Sociology 47 (1942): 544–62. 3. In, for instance, Karl Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea: Environmental Expertise in Renaissance Venice (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Eric Ash, Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 4. Joseph Needham, “Science and Society in East and West,” in The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), pp. 190. 5. Pamela H. Smith, “Science on the Move: Recent Trends in the History of Early Modern Science,” Renaissance Quarterly 62 (2009): 345–75. 6. Lissa Roberts, “Situating Science in Global History: Local Exchanges and Networks of Circulation,” Itinerario 33 (2009): 9–30. Candiani 237 current scholarly shift to reconnect techne and science must also converge with how scholars of the pivotal phenomena that shaped early modernity go about studying it, borrowing from and lending to economic, social, and political historians.7 Given the explosive colonization drives in that period, this means focusing first on an interrogation of how knowledge worked within this phenomenon. While my focus here is on colonization and knowledge in the Iberian Atlantic, these conceptual moves are of course widely applicable. As this article will show, the connections between processes in the history of technology and science and in colonization become visible when we put clearly defined social actors, work, and production in “sociomaterial environments” at the root of inquiry into both realms – and possibly only then.8 While here I will only explore the connection between colonization and the tinkerings of common people with practical skills, the link with scientific inquiry and experimentation is the logical next step.9 Conditions of colonization Colonization happened everywhere on a necessarily physical, material basis, penetrating deep into the fiber of everyday life. Telluric environmental knowledge was a crucial component of physical colonization globally, but so was the sensitivity to it among the plebeian migrants who became colonists. Who the human groups giving and taking were and what their priorities were, as well as the relationship between providers and takers, determine the logic by which knowledge was obtained and used, and what the syntheses and outcomes looked like. Spanish colonists did not aim at dislodging Amerindians from their territories and appropriating their lands, for the simple reason that land without people on it, creating value through work, was virtually worthless. Indeed, at the very beginning and before the mid-sixteenth century when the crown stepped in to regulate the behavior of conquerors and colonists, soldier–settlers and would-be encomenderos had little or no interest in unpopulated and unsettled places, seeking to keep, not expel, what indigenes lived in their jurisdictions. During the seventeenth century, indigenes continued to be valuable assets to the Habsburg monarchy and colonists alike – as laborers, yes; as autonomous peasant producers of primary goods, also; but, additionally, as sources of know-how in sometimes intractable terrains and conditions. This is especially evident in places such as the Basin of Mexico − densely populated by highly complex, pluriethnic populations formerly subject to polities of different hierarchies and territorial claims. This would change in the eighteenth century with the new dynasty. The Bourbons shifted away from this appreciation of telluric (indigenous or creole) technical and scientific knowledge and expertise. They sought to undo the semi-autonomous status of American possessions in order to remake them as mere extractive and trade colonies. Then colonization gave way 7. Karel Davids, “Introduction. Bridging Concepts: Connecting and Globalizing History of Science, History of Technology, and Economic History,” Isis 106 (2015): 835–9. 8. I am empathetic with Lissa Roberts’ proposals in “Producing (in) Europe and Asia, 1750– 1850,” Isis 106 (2015): 857–65. 9. See chapters 3 and 5–7 in Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land (note 1). 238 History of Science 55(2) to colonialism, and to a marked preference for metropolitan experts and institutions. I propose that colonization is impossible without four conditions: (1) the massive deployment and generation of tacit knowledge about how to harness matter, energy, and time for the reproduction of human societies; (2) the mundane appropriation and reworking of local knowledge, techniques, and technology by the colonizing groups; (3) the collaboration of the populations in whom these are vested; and, therefore, (4) the agency of commoners with practical skills, environmental knowledge, and technological savvy derived from and honed in the realm of material production. In the Ibero-American realm, a fifth condition is that these commoners be subjects of the king − Christian and born or naturalized into the empire: race, ethnicity, language, and even gender were at best secondary in this context. Here then is a framework within which to consider not just environmental expertise and the engineering of landscape, but all areas where knowledge, knowing, and intervention upon the physical world interacted among themselves and with colonization, typically through work. Such connections are exemplified briefly where the areas just referred to intersect − practical environmental and landscape shaping expertise − and at the granular level of matter, energy, and time that underpins the everyday in the early modern Basin of Mexico. But they would be equally visible in the Old World as well, had we the space here to show how. A municipal and plebeian framework In the Ibero-American “empire of towns,” colonization began with the act of conquest or founding of a city or town and with the constitution of its corporate government, the cabildo or municipal council. This simultaneous launching and ordering of the material and the institutional construction of settlement is one of the peculiarities that framed and directed plebeian know-how about environments and how to harness them. The other is royal patronage, which contrasts with most other models of European overseas colonization during this epoch. When combined, they constitute the framework with and within which scholars of early modern science, technology, and expertise might help to explain colonization in the Iberian realm. Since the beginning of transoceanic exploration until about the mid-seventeenth century, for the crown, the point of any enterprise was not solely about “gold” and “riches,” but also about discovery, conquest, and peopling to expand (and then protect) the dynasty’s patrimony consisting of lands and subjects. This was expressed in the royal contracts (capitulaciones) signed with the captains and financiers of all such expeditions, which would eventually become quite specific as to the number of towns, the number of Spaniards to be settled in them, the criteria for choosing sites, and more.10 Once founded, the newly christened civic entity became the key “instrument of colonization.”11 Such municipal colonization required two important things: assured natural resources and the right settlers. Experience showed that, barring indigenous hostility, pirate attacks, 10. Francisco Domínguez Compañy, Política de poblamiento de España en América: la fundación de ciudades (Madrid: Instituto de Estudios de Administración Local, 1984), pp.39–54. 11. Lyle N. McAlister, Spain and Portugal in the New World. 1492–1700 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp.133–52. Candiani 239 and natural catastrophes, the key to initial success was a combination of compact, urban settlements, women, agriculture, and town commons. The crown assured access to land, water, and biota for its settlers by the institution of mandatory and inalienable municipal commons (ejidos and dehesas) for pasture and gathering for both Spanish and indigenous towns. For these institutions to be effective, expertise on the ground was key. The ideal colonist was not necessarily a Spaniard; any subject of the king was a potential settler of new lands. This included Christianized indigenes and free blacks, as well as people from the various kingdoms of Spain, and it is what explains the diffusion of agropastoral technologies and other productive technologies from far and wide within the empire. Municipalities became the mechanism for subjecting all populations and Spaniards to orderly living, or vida en policía. In the indigenous realm (the república de indios), the crown made villages, towns, and cities indistinctly into pueblos de indios endowed with most of the privileges of Hispanic municipalities. Thus, the two main tools used to acculturate indigenes to Christian, orderly, monogamous, agricultural lives were the pueblos de indios (among settled agricultural societies) and the producing missions (among semisedentary cultures). Systematic urbanization and controlled emigration of Iberian men and women with suitable social extraction and practical métiers would, it was hoped, assure good and loyal behavior among Spaniards and their dependents. The priority for the crown became stable urban-centered settlement, be it indigenous or Hispanic, as this was the means best thought to assure its possession of the wealth of the Indies and the multiplication of its kingdoms. This is what explains the noted ubiquity of the municipality as a Hispanic colonizing tool and what makes it the basic unit of the empire. A Spanish town’s first function as a maker of proper subjects was to begin turning the members of an expedition from soldiers into settlers. By far the largest contingent within any expedition, the hueste or gente of would-be soldier–settlers were people who worked with their hands − agriculturists, herders, horticulturists, property-less workers, artisans, as well as a good number of landless peasants and urban lumpen elements.12 Unless they died, assimilated into indigenous groups, or returned to Spain, these folks would generally become the primeros pobladores, or first settlers.13 It was these commoners, juridically tied to the territorial units of the towns, who did the hard work of beginning to transform a foreign landscape into “the embryo of a province or transoceanic region of the Spanish monarchy.”14 Thereafter, effective and permanent settlement of newly acquired territories required plebeians with productive expertise − this was the kind of colonist the crown preferred. This makes municipality the essential institution on the ground and within it, agropastoralists and builders the essential actors in the transformation of landscapes and, as a result, the primordial perceivers, holders, organizers, and developers of knowledge about 12. Francesco D’Espósito, “La hueste indiana en los protocolos notariales de Sevilla: las primeras expediciones al Río de la Plata (1534–1552),” Temas Americanistas 29 (2012): 65–81. 13. Gabriel Guarda, “Tres reflexiones en torno a la fundación de la ciudad indiana,” in Francisco de Solano (ed.) Estudios sobre la ciudad de iberoamericana (Madrid: CSIC, 1983), pp.89–106. 14. José Miranda, Las ideas y las instituciones políticas mexicanas (Mexico City: UNAM, 1978), p.30; Richard Morse, “Introducción a la historia urbana de hispanoamérica,” in Solano, Estudios, pp.9–54 (note 13). 240 History of Science 55(2) the new environments encountered in the New World.15 During the period of Habsburg rule, the value of both institution and actors for the monarchy was in their ability to materialize effective occupation, not in their “race.” The corollary of this is that municipal sovereignty over its own terrain and the hinterland, the agency of skilled commoners of all sorts, and the dynastic change must permeate our approach to knowledge if we are to better interrogate the relationship between colonization and socio-ecosystemic change, and between colonization and scientific knowledge and technological praxis. What mattered for the monarchy in this early period was to be able to claim subjects and lands characterized by orderly, civilized, and Christian life, and whether the human personnel achieving this were European or not was relevant to other matters but not to the subjection of the territory to the dominion. So, while important for some analytical aspects, demonyms, race, ethnicity, and even gender cannot be the primordial analytical gateways for the physical dimensions of colonization. Certainly not for technology and landscape engineering, where artifacts are often tagged as “hybrid” or “mestizo,” while knowledge becomes “European” or “creole.” Using such descriptors not only treats objects, processes, and people as products of random genetic combinations, but also, by so swiftly categorizing it thus, also prematurely forecloses on deeper understandings of the things in themselves and their relationships to processes around them. Instead, we ought to focus on asking: What can these human–ecosystem relations and the ways of knowing and techniques for transforming the physical realm tell us about colonization itself? Who were the historical agents involved, defined in terms other than the simply demonymic or racial (“Spanish,” “indigenous,” and so on)? What and how did these actors know, learn, and do in their environments? Simple methods for simple questions Addressing these questions does not require sophisticated new concepts or methodologies. To analyze what humans were up to in their environments during the formative epoch of capitalism and cis- and transatlantic colonization, two concepts are particularly useful − class and social reproduction, or the access human groups have to the means of production in the context of their pursuit of their own household or lineage’s subsistence and propagation of the group as a whole, from one generation to the next. Of all human groups, agropastoralists (the class of peasants included) have the most direct relationship with energy, matter, and time. Each class and group has its peculiar mode of social reproduction − of securing its own continuity. And all will try to replicate these modes across time and space not because they are stubborn or retrograde, but because to deviate is to risk time-tested 15. This is not to counter the position of Romano and Van Damme on the role of the city as node for lettered elite actors in the making of natural knowledge, but to contextualize and scale it and them properly relative to their actual, specific weight in the necessarily material realities of colonization. See Antonella Romano and Stéphane Van Damme, “Science and World Cities: Thinking Urban Knowledge and Science at Large (16th–18th century),” Itinerario 33 (2009): 79–95. Candiani 241 cultural and cognitive capital for unproven methods. Agropastoralists are no different in this regard, but what makes them historically distinct from all groups who no longer enjoy this access or prefer not to use it directly, peasants and all agropastoralists use work to extract the nourishment, shelter, and resources necessary for their reproduction as households and groups directly from their environment. They do this independently of the property regimes framing their access to land, water, biota, energy, and their own time. All peasant groups ingest and expend energy directly from and upon the environments containing the calories and the nutrients necessary to life. Like any other group or species, they tend to protect the materials and social basis of the practices and strategies of survival and persistence that time proved to them to have been successful and efficient from other groups vying for (a) the use of the same units of energy, matter, and time or (b) the greater share of the product of work. This is what in the Ibero-American realm governed the behavior upon the landscape of conquerors and indigenous nobles, missionaries and crown officials, indigenous commoners, and soldier–settlers, all of it constrained and channeled through the municipality. It is what makes agropoastoralists and builders (Hispanic or indigenous) the prime actors in the engineering of landscapes and in the generation and deployment of environmental knowledge. Not having at their disposal a comprehensive corpus of textually or iconographically recorded and formalized knowledge about the early modern New World, in the early days of colonization, all non-American settlers who did not have immediate control of populations to supply them could only succeed by observation, imitation, and experimentation. The first step was essentially the same method followed by Bernardino de Sahagún and others to compile the Florentine and other codices: they resorted to informants.16 This behavior, I propose, continued well into the seventeenth century, especially when colonists encountered novel conditions. But agropastoralists and builders were special among settlers because their primary mode of knowing was not formalized textually or iconographically, but “tacit” − that is, knowledge that is embedded and transmitted in the gestures and sequences of work, and in objects themselves, which we acquire through observation, imitation, and communication with our fellow humans, much like a young child apprehends what is to him a new world.17 While fairly common among anthropologists who have real-time contact with their subjects, for historians observing tacit knowledge in action is a more complicated proposition. It must be inferred from action, process, and physical description captured in the material or documentary record, much like scholars have done for those who transformed landscapes in places like Venice and the Languedoc.18 16. None of the ethnographic works of early chroniclers circulated during the phase of colonization. 17. Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966); Alison Gopnik et al., The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us about the Mind (New York: Harper Perennial, 2001). 18. See Appuhn, A Forest on the Sea (note 3), and Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009). 242 History of Science 55(2) Prime movers and makers: agropastoralists Knowing about food was key. In the literal first days of a settlement, the need for it and for drinking water could be dire. Hispanic soldier–settlers could sustain themselves from indigenous supplies or from victualing merchants in earlier coastal settlements, such as Santo Domingo in the islands or Cartagena on the mainland. But this was not always possible due to distance, excessive demand on merchants from too many outfits of discovery and peopling, or the inability or unwillingness of indigenes to provide food. As in Navidad and Isabela of Hispaniola, Santa María la Antigua of the Darién, or Santa María del Buen Aire in the Río de la Plata, most cases of extinction of an urban settlement in the first four decades of American exploration were due to hunger, weakness from insectborne disease, and depopulation (by death or abandonment of the site), created by one or all of these impediments to the satisfaction of the basic needs of the colonists.19 After these nefarious experiences, the crown went from being favorably disposed to the founding of commercially oriented, feitoria-style beachheads fed from the outside or demanding minimal sustenance from indigenes to realizing the need for all settlements to be self-sustaining and durable. This shift was manifested in evolving measures and policy statements intended to stabilize possession. The king’s 1573 Nuevas ordenanzas de descubrimiento, población y pacificación de las Indias summed up this early shift in approach.20 The starting point for all food is soil and water. Soil is neither a pristine nor a passive element, but something that, like other ecosystems, has been subjected to modification, conservation, degradation, and formation (including the highly fertile dark earths of the Amazon) by settled or semi-sedentary populations throughout the world, mainly for agricultural purposes. This is what ethnopedology, a subspecialization within ethnoecology, investigates. Practices in the Americas concentrate in arid and semi-arid regions, mountain slopes, and lowland tropics and often predate the arrival of Europeans, and either they or their consequences (such as abundant crop stores) were noted by expeditionaries and colonists. They include runoff management (dammed or not) to channel sediment-heavy seasonal waters onto agricultural soils, where they deposit their silt (Zuni and Hopi for maize agriculture); floodplain deposition (Orinoco and Amazon basin peoples such as the Kayapó); terracing with duripans and argillic materials (Andean and arid Mesoamerican slopes); wetland raised beds (Basin of Mexico and among the Zenú of the Mompox, Colombia), among a vast pluricultural repertoire of indigenous soil-forming and harnessing technologies.21 19. Laura María Iglesias Gómez, La Transferencia de tecnología agronómica de España a América de 1492 a 1598 (Madrid: OEPM, 2000), p.74; Ricardo Piqueras Céspedes, “Episodios de hambre urbana colonial: las hambrunas de La Isabela (1494), Santa María La Antigua del Darién (1514) y Santa María del Buen Aire (1536),” Boletín americanista 48 (1998): 211–23. 20. See English translation in Axel I. Mundigo and Dora P. Crouch, “The City Planning Ordinances of the Laws of the Indies Revisited,” The Town Planning Review 48 (1977): 247–68. 21. J.A. Sandor et al., “The Heritage of Soil Knowledge among the World’s Cultures,” in Benno P. Warkentin (ed.) Footprints in the Soil: People and Ideas in Soil History (Amsterdam, Boston: Elsevier, 2006), pp.43–84. Candiani 243 All these cultures developed a corpus of soil knowledge passed on through practical orality and at times through grapho-pictorial works. Among those who recorded their soil science, the Nahua peoples of Mesoamerica, as most other complex Amerindian civilizations, had highly detailed classifications for types of soils found in their domain and their productive suitabilities, as documented in the Florentine Codex as well as the works of Francisco Hernández (Historia Natural de la Nueva España, 1577) and Martín de la Cruz (Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis, 1552), and of administrative compilations such as the Matrículas de Tributos (indigenous tribute registries).22 Documenting whether and how Hispanic colonists tapped into this knowledge is difficult, mainly because few if any put pen to paper about their own practices. However, the cartographic record issued from land surveys and grants, as well as reports by magistrates for the questionnaires of the Relaciones Geográficas, and those of technicians inspecting sites for public works, for example, reveal that among non-indigenes, the indigenous categories and nomenclature for soils were used, sometimes in manners that show familiarization with the substance and the depiction of preconquest knowledge and recording traditions. Thus, while colonists might not notice, appropriate, and redeploy into their own economies the entire corpus and practices of indigenes regarding soils, the latter remained extant within the república de indios and as a result indirectly subsidized the social reproduction of non-indigenes in the república de españoles. Chinampas, for example, remained a purely indigenous form of local knowledge, but their produce sustained indigenous as well as Hispanic populations in the Basin of Mexico and was a reason why the desiccation of its lakes did not target those which sustained this form of food production. Builders in and of environments Within the urban core of the Hispanic municipality, producers were often nucleated in guilds. Of all the guild occupations, master builders played a key role, as it was they who erected the central features of the material edifice of the colonizing cities. While most plebeians built their own homes, workshops, and rural installations themselves, resulting in the kinds of ‘organic’ vernacular architecture that James Deetz described for AngloAmerica,23 infrastructure such as aqueducts, drainages, public fountains, streets, bridges, buildings (including the palaces of secular and religious authorities), and so on were the domain of the licensed architect. With roles that were akin to those filled nowadays separately by public health officials, planning commissions, and assessors, early modern guild architects in the Americas championed the civilizing mission of the Renaissance city in the hinterland: they investigated and shaped the material conditions for the urban colonization of the New World.24 22. B.J. Williams, “Aztec Soil Knowledge,” in Warkentin, Footprints, pp.17–42. 23. James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: The Archaeology of Early American Life (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977). 24. The literature on master builders in the early modern Americas is ample. Salient works for Mexico include Martha Fernández, Arquitectura y gobierno virreinal: los maestros mayores de la ciudad de México, siglo XVII (Mexico City: UNAM, 1985); Joaquín Bérchez, 244 History of Science 55(2) Master architects were instrumental in the management of the hinterland for the good of the city, making them agents of colonization for their municipalities. They did this in a number of ways. Through surveying terrains to decide where to place dams, aqueducts, bridges, and other structures, they gathered information about land, water, property, and production relations. In building such structures, they effectively placed objects in the hinterland that were designed to fulfill one or more of three functions: convey hinterland resources to the city; deflect unwanted things away from it (water, people); or spatially organize or coordinate the movement of goods, energy and people between city and country. How did these men know how to perform such duties in American settings full of unfamiliar materials and seasonal availabilities? Treatises might be one source, and indeed in important capitals the most prominent master architects did own such works. But while treatises addressed some of the challenges facing founders of new cities, such as site choice, layout, and how to ensure the means for the supply of a town’s subsistence by erecting diverse mechanisms and structures for water extraction and carriage, it is not at all clear that builders actually used these works as much more than stylistic guides.25 Likewise, the oft-cited royal ordinances of 1573 came too late to function as much more than compilations of the lessons from urban foundations that had already taken place and survived.26 If textual sources were not their main source for building technology, experiential learning during many years of apprenticeship with an elder craftsman was. In the City of Mexico, a mostly practical licensing guild exam culminated in apprenticeships.27 But along the way and throughout his active career, a builder learned by observing physical structures built by his predecessors. In New Spain, as in the Andean region, these ancients happened to be indigenes whose major built works were destroyed during the conquest and the subsequent recycling of materials for the Hispanic building boom. Nonetheless, chroniclers did gather this information from indigenous informants, while Hispanic maestros learned indigenous construction materials and processes from examining extant pre-Hispanic construction and observing the Indian workers and artisans on their crews.28 In the Basin of Mexico, for instance, the Indian usage of tezontle, a light and porous reddish rock abundant in the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt, was adopted by Hispanic builders. Although not considered a noble stone by Europeans, maestros took note of its pre-Hispanic use and how their indigenous workers treated it and promptly redeployed the material into distinctly European shapes such as vaults and arches. In the City of Mexico, tezontle began to appear more frequently in Hispanic construction after the earthquake of 1542 demonstrated the risk of using denser and heavier stone on the clay soils that covered much of the bottom of the basin. Architects learned to carve and place 25. 26. 27. 28. Arquitectura Mexicana de los siglos XVII y XVIII (Mexico City: Azabache, 1992); and Carlos Chanfón Olmos (ed.), Historia de la arquitectura y el urbanismo mexicanos (Mexico City: UNAM, 1997). Susan Verdi Weber, “The Secret Lives of Buildings in Colonial Quito,” Construction History 28 (2013): 21–46. Jorge E. Hardoy, El modelo clásico de la ciudad colonial hispanoamericana (Buenos Aires: Instituto Torcuato di Tella, 1968), p.40. Bérchez, Arquitectura, pp.40–42 (note 24). Weber, “Secret Lives” (note 25). Candiani 245 tezontle to decrease the load of the monumental structures of civic and religious colonization that they built on the none-too-solid ground of the city, all without sacrificing strength.29 In a lacustrine region where humidity crept up any porous material, it was just as important that maestros learned to grind tezontle and mix it with lime, wax, or tar to seal off foundations before building on them.30 Later, they combined these tezontle techniques with other traditional earthwork constructions to reinforce and raise several of the causeways linking urban centers throughout the lacustrine basin.31 As with tezontle, indigenous constructive know-how, on both a technical and an epistemological level, was key for mainly rural occupations.32 Equally crucial was the experiential knowledge of other plebeians whose occupations engaged them directly with physical landscapes − people who knew local soils, hydrologies, rock, vegetation, fauna, microclimates, and so on. It is important to note that these forms of expertise were not only vernacular, but also widespread among the ‘donor’ populations (indigenous or not), as opposed to being the privileged domain of a few specialists. This made them useful and ubiquitously available for artificers to synthesize into their métiers. This is nowhere clearer than in the most complex and extensive environmental engineering project of the early modern Americas, the desiccation of the Basin of Mexico, to which we will now turn to illustrate all aspects of this article: municipal colonization and the attendant commoner knowledge of agropastoralists and builders. Integrating commoner expertise under a municipal umbrella in Mexico Because the ‘Valley’ of Mexico is high up and lacking a natural drainage, by the time Hernán Cortés defeated the Mexica in 1521 it had actually long been an enclosed basin of interconnected lakes whose level rose during the rainy season and fell during the dry months. For the plant and animal species that lived there, this seasonal flooding was not a disaster, it was necessary to life itself. So too for the human animal that began settling here some 11,000 years ago and eventually built powerful city-states along the shores of these lakes and wetlands. In the fourteenth century, the Mexica gradually rose to hegemony among peer lordships and built Tenochtitlan in the middle this enclosed system of lakes. In the center was Lake Texcoco, lowest in elevation. North were Lake Zumpango at about six meters above Lake Texcoco and Lake Xaltocan at about half that; south were Lakes Chalco and Xochimilco, both hovering around three meters above the central lake. Runoff from the surrounding mountains flowed into the lakes and remained there until it evaporated or was absorbed by the soil. Both the lords of these cities and the commoners in the rural districts engineered water management systems at every scale to achieve a combination of 29. Bérchez, Arquitectura, p.45 (note 24). 30. Chanfón Olmos, Historia, vol. II, p.271 (note 24). 31. Luis González Obregón, in Junta Directiva del Desagüe del Valle de Mexico, Memoria histórica, técnica y administrativa de las obras del Desagüe del Valle de México, 1449–1900. 2 vols. (Mexico City: Tipografía de la Oficina Impresora de Estampillas, Palacio Nacional, 1902), vol. I, p.123. 32. For urban indigenous expertise in construction, see Weber, “Secret Lives” (note 25). 246 History of Science 55(2) goals: maximize food production; segregate brackish waters from fresh ones; import fresh water where necessary; and ensure communications for governance, movement of goods, warfare, and diplomacy. Specialized state officials and engineers in the indigenous metropoles managed the movement and composition of water in the basin through their damcauseways, which served both to connect the major urban centers along the shores of the lakes and inside the lakes to each other and to segregate one body of water from another (especially the brackish from the fresh) and the web of smaller dams that radiated out from Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco that were articulated to the larger structures. The assumption that “water” and “land” were variable, multifunctional, and not clearly distinguished from each other impregnated all these works. Indigenes allowed water to submerge fields in the rainy season, used it to irrigate dry agriculture, encouraged it to perform its functions in fertility-sustaining ecological processes, and harnessed it to make the cities navigable. The entire Mexica realm, with its subject towns, was incomprehensible without its watery landscape. The marshy ecosystems this dynamic created were an important element in the social reproduction of communities of commoners, which was based on irrigated and wetland cultivation supplemented by hunting, fishing, and gathering that counteracted the risk posed by the frequent and huge variations in bio-physical conditions. Indigenous hydraulic devices deployed by the Mexica state or by commoner communities were designed to accommodate or support these dynamics and uses of marshes and lakes. These devices represented an extraordinary range, but it is important to note that the know-how flowed from the bottom up, from those with the most immediate contact with the means of sustenance. Communities of agroproducers were the basis for the vast irrigation systems of networked canals, covering hectares of land. These communities also sustained river diversions that opened up alluvial planes to cultivation and the various types of chinampas that sprang up throughout the lacustrine system and its shores, as well as the complementary organizational techniques to propagate and capture the bounty in the marshes and the migratory fowl that descended upon them. As in all agricultural societies throughout the world, then and now, this kind of engineering required sophisticated knowledge about and techniques to harness not just the different kinds of waters (flowing, torrential, lacustrine, spring, brackish in different degrees, vegetated, sediment-bearing, clear, and so on), but also the different qualities of earths and soils that interacted with them to greater or lesser degrees. Historians often gloss over who actually possessed which aspects of this environmental knowledge by sweeping it all into the general category of ‘indigenous’, but it is important to distinguish between state engineers and agronomists − for lack of better terms − serving Tenochtitlan or any of the other lordly polities in the basin (Texcoco, especially), and peasant ones. This is because the collapse of the indigenous states in the face of the Spanish military conquest removed only one element from the Amerindian environmental engineering and knowledge landscape − the capacity of these states to command and deploy work and resources for large-scale projects − even though, as with all realms of knowledge, the subsequent depopulation by disease and dislocation would also affect the survival of knowledge per se. But peasant and commoner knowledge survived nonetheless. The most visible immediate structure that both the crown and its partners on the ground colonized was the Mexica empire’s capital city, Tenochtitlán-Tlateloco, with its impressive physical and organizational infrastructure. The hydraulic part of this infrastructure, made from various meticulously assembled combinations of stone, rubble, earth, and Candiani 247 plant materials, continued to function after the conquest as it had before, albeit gradually deteriorating, such that by the mid-sixteenth century, changes in the usage of the soil, plowing, and further deforestation on the surrounding slopes resulted in the silting of the lakes with each rainy season’s runoff. This gradually reduced the storage capacity of the lakes and made them overflow with increasing frequency onto what had become the Hispanic City of Mexico. By 1555, when the first serious taste of muddy floodwaters shocked them into paying closer attention to the inherited hydraulic infrastructure, Spanish colonists and rulers alike had already mounted a reliable apparatus for rulership that allowed them to take on the role earlier played by the Mexica state in engineering the environment. As urban flooding frequency increased, this is exactly what the colonists did – mobilize the power of the imperial state, as well as the municipal authority of the City of Mexico, to eliminate the problem. They would not move their sumptuous imperial city and lose all its built wealth; they chose instead to remove the water with a massive artificial drainage project targeting the five lakes. Always having in their long view the ultimate desiccation of all but the southernmost lakes, for the moment the social elites and city and imperial governmental bodies in the viceregal capital settled for a more modest drainage design − the Real Desagüe de Huehuetoca − that sought to deprive Lakes Mexico and Texcoco, the lowest lakes around the city, of ‘excess’ or undesirable water.33 This is covered in my book, Dreaming of Dry Land, where I explain more than you ever wanted to know about this project. It was not the lakes per se, but the tendency of their water to seasonally flood the city, that presented a problem for the Hispanic urban elites and the crown. As a result, their conceptualization of the drainage project was simple and remained stable throughout the colonial era: the sole purpose of the Desagüe was, for royal authorities and city notables alike, the “security, conservation and perpetuity” of the imperial city.34 This meant that they sought to protect the wealth (buildings, commercial inventory, and the sources of rents and therefore income) and the infrastructure of rulership from flood damage. To them, this translated into partial desiccation. But significant physical, financial, technological, social, juridical, and political constraints made desiccation too difficult to implement right away, and so authorities and notables compromised, settling for eliminating flooding, as opposed to controlling or managing it. This overarching conceptualization, as well as its short-term compromise, were firmly embedded on the ground thereafter by the common men who worked on the project in the seventeenth century. The Desagüe in a nutshell The chief contributors of floodwater were the Cuautitlan River and the lakes formed in its sub-basin, where runoff and seasonal rainwater collected (Lakes Zumpango, Xaltocan, 33. Lakes Chalco and Xochimilco, in the southern part of the basin, contributed large amounts of spring water to the lake system as well, but this freshwater was crucial to the balance of salinity in the lakes at the lowest elevations, Lakes Mexico and Lake Texcoco, while the chinampas of this region provided most of the horticultural products consumed in the City of Mexico. 34. Archivo Histórico de la Ciudad de México, Actas de cabildo sesiones ordinarias paleografiadas, vol. 356 A, minutes of September 17, 1607. 248 History of Science 55(2) and San Cristóbal), all in the northwest quadrant of the basin. The Cuautitlan River originally discharged toward the large lake that surrounded the city and thus became the pivot around which the Desagüe turned. The central structures of the Desagüe consisted of a trench or an unlined canal which channeled water from the Cuautitlan River stored in Lake Zumpango, which in turn also collected runoff and excess from Lakes San Cristóbal and Xaltocan, into a tunnel cutting under the encircling mountains; this tunnel transferred the water to the Tula River on the other side through an exit channel. Together, the tunnel and channels completed in 1608 were more than 13 kilometers long. This entire structure was supplemented with a massive 17–25 kilometer-long diversion dam for the Cuautitlan River, which directed it away from the lowest lakes and toward this structure. This structure was pivotal, for it was the only thing that stood between the torrentially swollen river and the city during the rainy season. The entire system operated as a flush toilet rather than a continual drain. During the rainy season, the resident wardens of the Desagüe managed the dams and floodgates to direct water in two directions: what water from the diverted Cuautitlan River could be safely conveyed away into the Desagüe (canal and tunnel structure) went there; the rest of it, as well as runoff water in the northwestern quadrant of the basin, was directed into the chain of lakes formed by Lake Zumpango, Lake Xaltocan, and the newly created Lake San Cristóbal. The water remained in these reservoirs over the following dry season. Then, just before the rainy season, the wardens opened the floodgates on Lake Zumpango’s dam and flushed it, as well as parts of the other two lakes, if necessary, into the Desagüe. This left the lakebeds ready to receive the new watery onslaught. The fundamental flushing functioning did not change until the nineteenth century, basically because the overall conceptualization implemented by the Desagüe’s seventeenth-century artificers remained stable even as the works accrued structures and devices to improve its functioning and extend its reach. Alternatively described as a marvel of either creole or Iberian engineering, this ultimately unsuccessful but nonetheless spectacularly inventive, daring, complex, and difficult project in fact was neither groups’. What defines it is not the nationality or identity of its technology or its technicians, but the process and logic by which these technicians tapped into and redeployed all technical and environmental expertise available to them, especially local agropastoral masteries (of both indigenous peasants and Hispanic cultivators) over waterflows, terrains, soils, and vegetation. Despite not being designed to ‘improve’ marshlands and terrains that in the English-speaking world might be considered ‘wastes’, the Desagüe did favor colonization of the countryside in two ways. First, as intended, by projecting onto the countryside the priorities of the city, engineering its Desagüe to end the effects of seasonal fluctuations in the relationship between water and land, fixing what and where land and water were supposed to be, and draining away much of the latter. This in itself was a projection of European urban priorities onto the hinterland and hinterlakes that can only be described as colonization, but it does not mean at all that urban elites used the Desagüe to colonize their rural and lacustrine environs by literally occupying them. Rather, their Desagüe allowed them to colonize by subjecting to their needs and definitions the water, land, and life forms in the region: lakes that communities managed and alternately used as productive marshy ecosystems during the wet seasons and as agricultural land in the dry now became reservoirs regulated for the needs of the city. Candiani 249 Secondly, when these conditions combined − the fixing of definitions of water and land, the banishment of flooding into the corner of the troublemakers, and the restrictions on use − they all militated against the ecological autonomy of the peasantry visà-vis other classes in the countryside and the City of Mexico. They thereby unintentionally militated in favor of the second form of colonization of the countryside: the propagation into it of private relations of property and production. As long as they remained fluid and in communal control, land, water, and the things that were produced with them could not become distinct, quantifiable elements liable to taking on an exchange value mobilized through the market. Selling or buying units of landwater was not possible − one transacted over units of land or units of water. This was reflected in the measuring systems imported by Europeans, which had no units of “land-that-becomes-water” or of “water-that-evaporates-leaving-land.” Once divorced from each other, land and water could become measurable inputs in the commercial production of crops and goods. In other words, urban aristocrats and representatives of the crown conceptualized, designed, and deployed their Desagüe onto the landscape for the sole purpose of protecting built wealth and sources of income, rents. and taxes in the capital, colonizing interactions among water, land, and people in the countryside for their benefit in the city. But taking advantage of the Desagüe’s structures and rules, indigenous and non-indigenous agropastoral entrepreneurs nonetheless colonized social relations of property, production, and exchange. And all this despite the drainage’s failure as a device for flood-prevention in the city itself. That the drainage existed at all, and was built successfully, was due to savvy commoners who were long-time denizens of the Basin of Mexico and had their eyes open to local environmental knowledges in the city’s hinterland. At the inception of the project and during its first century of existence, the knowledge about the hydrology, hydraulic structures, vegetation, soils, locally manifested seasonal fluctuations, history of water, and land management in the subregion was locally held. The technicians of the city knew this to be the case and were sensitized to the importance of this knowledge by the mere fact of being long-term denizens of, and employed in, the basin. It was these men, and not metropolitan experts, who pinpointed the location for the works and the crucial role played in the entire project by the Cuautitlan River diversion dam. A detailed look at this structure will have to suffice as an illustration of the myriad ways in which residents, colonist artificers, and non-metropolitan engineers commanded telluric, usually tacit knowledge for the benefit of their social betters in the imperial city. Flows of environmental and materials expertise The Cuautitlan River was a critical aspect of the Desagüe project: its diverted artificial course fed into the Desagüe de Huehuetoca instead of pouring onto the City of Mexico. It had also been critical to the pre-Hispanic rulers of Tenochtitlan. Around 1435, the Colhua people under Aztec rule changed the course of the Cuautitlan with an earthworks dam of stakes, grasses, and compacted soil, forcing it to drain into the western portion of Lake Zumpango to the north. Ten thousand Indians had built this work over a period of 250 History of Science 55(2) seven years.35 This great effort was justified by the desire of lords to both save the town of Cuautitlan and increase the agricultural output of the area. During this pre-Hispanic period, the town of Teoloyuca emerged as a key player in the region, partly because the longest part of the Cuautitlan diversion earthworks lay in its lands. Apparently, in addition to the earthworks channeling the river, every year two thousand Teoloyucan Indians also built another dam with ephemeral materials and techniques. This dam was placed in the new course of the river during the dry season, when, lacking other sources of water, the river’s reduced flow was forced into a system of four irrigation ditches fanning out from the east margin of the river. When the rains arrived, the bulging river swept the dam away and resumed its northward course.36 Long after the conquest, Teoloyuca still possessed such keen and season-specific knowledge not just about how to handle the river, but also about the ideal sorts of earths and grasses to be used in the dams, where to find them, how to extract and convey them, how to assemble the whole, and when in the year to do this. Spanish authorities in the city became aware of this background and local knowledge as early as 1587. Just as importantly, they learned that among the indigenes this hydraulic knowledge was not the private domain of a few trained experts but was collectively held, while clearly Hispanic landholders in the region also knew about it. All of this information helped Desagüe authorities decide to continue the Cuautitlan River diversion dam with grass and earth throughout the entire colonial period, despite the hazardous impermanence of these materials. The option was rebuilding it with more durable materials. Indeed, the Cuautitlan River diversion earthworks were actually in the process of conversion to a stone and mortar structure shortly before 1623, and the designer of the Desagüe, Enrico Martínez, recommended stonemasonry for the entire length of the dam. Yet from then on, the Cuautitlan diversion remained an earthwork.37 Why so? The evidence indicates that colonial authorities chose the less costly structure of earth and grass mainly because local indigenous knowledge and forms of deployment of labor made it viable and because adopting it also allowed them to transfer the cost of labor, materials, and other aspects of the regular maintenance of the structure onto the district’s Hispanic and Indian neighbors. Savings resulted both from not rebuilding the dam in mortar and stone and from keeping the design familiar to Indian townships who could then be compelled to maintain it at their own expense. The men who mediated this ingenious adaptation of indigenous expertise for the benefit of a Hispanic project were 35. Teresa Rojas Rabiela, “Aspectos tecnológicos de las obras hidráulicas coloniales,” in Teresa Rojas Rabiela, Rafael A. Strauss K., and José Lameiras (eds.), Nuevas noticias sobre las obras hidráulicas prehispánicas y coloniales en el valle de México (Mexico City: SEP-INAH, 1974), pp.85–133. 36. A. Rafael and K. Strauss, “El area septentrional del Valle de México: problemas agrohidráulicos prehispánicos y coloniales,” in Rabiela et al., Nuevas noticias, pp.152–3 (note 36). 37. Enrico Martínez, Verdadera relación de la obra que se hacía para desaguar esta laguna de México (1628), in Secretaría de Obras Públicas (ed.) Obras públicas en México. Documentos para su historia Relaciones del Desagüe del Valle de México, Secretaría de Obras Públicas Años de 1555–1823, Vol. 3 (Mexico City: 1976), pp.33–4. Candiani 251 primarily master builders and people with agropastoral enterprises in the northwest quadrant of the Mexican Basin. Men such as Juan Serrano, a master architect employed in the Desagüe, who reported on both the indigenous techniques involved in the repair of the albarrada, or dam, that kept the Cuautitlan in its artificial course toward the tunnel and canal, and the seasonal timing and rationale of the works. Serrano called for the usage of live grasses in this earthen dam. The grasses, which he called by their native name zacate, were to be extracted from the soggy ground during the rainy season so as not to break off the roots, because these “little roots are able to grow and bind themselves, as they are still green and tender and stamping on them very moderately and after two days under the sun they become as hard as a wall and with the humidity therein the grasses sprout and the little roots become entangled.”38 While European builders were familiar with earthworks and the usage of sods, here the key use of zacate as the bind is an example of re-elaboration of techniques from commoner indigenes – zacates are local species, tolerant to salinity and drought, also useful for pasture. They rely on rhizome reproduction, with stems several meters long that spread like a mat. In short, they are versatile plants whose specific uses would be most familiar to a denizen of Mexico. The end This overall pattern of colonists and their institutions and know-how enjoying a fair amount of autonomy from direct intervention by the crown is in fact characteristic of Habsburg rule, for which long-term stability, and continuity of dominion, revenue, and income security, were more important than short-term gains and “profitability.” The Bourbons would change all that, especially from 1762 on, bolstering the power of the monarchy vis-à-vis all other social sectors and turning the crown’s New World kingdoms into true colonies through a variety of measures designed to rein in the autonomy of their elites, recapture American wealth, and ensure markets for Spanish goods. Charles III, Charles IV, and their ministers touched every aspect of the colonial order and the link with Spain, from production to trade, administration to taxes, religion to science, urbanism to art − and of course, engineering, public works, and nature itself. Key agents of this shift were military engineers and the new academies founded by the crown. In New Spain, increasing numbers of metropolitan-trained royal military engineers arrived and intervened in the Desagüe with proposals to rationalize the works, change its labor practices, and inject metropolitan expertise, values, and aims into the drainage. So too would the mathematicians and academic architects of the Real Academia de San Carlos, which began operating in the City of Mexico in 1786. All to no avail. When it came to any proposal that threatened either the coerced character of the labor system or the shifting of a large part of the costs of Desagüe maintenance onto indigenes and Hispanic rural enterprises, the enlightened metropolitan reforms that sought instrumental and organizational technologies were met with a wall of opposition and sabotage. Having been the artificers of colonization, neither the urban elites nor their technicians were particularly willing to be dislodged by colonialism. In 38. Quoted in Candiani, Dreaming of Dry Land, p.141 (note 1). 252 History of Science 55(2) other words, eighteenth-century styled colonialism failed because colonization and the knowledges it had mobilized had worked. The municipalities and the cultivators, breeders, and builders within them had done their job well. Declaration of conflicting interests The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article. Funding The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Author biography Vera S Candiani, a native of Argentina and graduate of UC Berkeley, Vera S. Candiani teaches early modern Latin America at Princeton University. Her first book, Dreaming of Dry Land: Environmental Transformation in Colonial Mexico City (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2014), won the Conference for Latin American History’s Elinor Melville Prize for best book in Latin American environmental history. Her current projects are comparative – one examines the relationship among commons, peasants and colonization in the early modern French, English and Spanish Americas; the other, wetland desiccation and enclosure in France, England and Mexico.