Centering Animals in Latin American History

Animals have played a central role in Latin American history. They have been consumed as meat, hunted for their fur and fleeces, converted into luxury commodities, employed in religious rituals and medicine, cherished as domestic pets, and even married in mock religious ceremonies! From the llamas sacrificed to the sun by the Incas to the dogs and horses of the Spanish conquistadores, animals have shaped the cultural, social, and economic development of Latin America and have left an indelible imprint on human societies. Centering Animals offers engaging insight into the manifold contributions of animals to Latin American history, making a timely and valuable addition to the growing field of animal studies.As its title suggests, Centering Animals shifts nonhuman animals from the margins of Latin American history to the center and asks “what Latin American histories look like if we choose as the standpoint of our observation a focus not only on the human-animal interaction but also on the experiences and histories of the nonhuman actor in the unfolding of history” (p. 3). Recovering animal experience is challenging, given the anthropocentric nature of most historical sources, but the contributors use a variety of innovative approaches to show how animals have shaped, and in some (though not all) cases “experienced,” the historical settings in which they lived. The volume is impressive in its chronological and geographical scope, ranging from the early sixteenth to the mid-twentieth century and featuring chapters on Mexico, Peru, Guatemala, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Cuba, Argentina, and the Dominican Republic. It does not purport to be comprehensive but aims instead to showcase a cross section of different methodologies that might be fruitfully applied to the history of animals.The collection is divided into three sections. The first, “Animals, Culture, and Colonialism,” focuses on interspecies interactions after the Spanish conquest. León García Garagarza's chapter explores the fascinating case of the Otomi Indian Juan Teton, who exhorted Indians not to eat European animals and prophesized that those who did so would be turned into cattle. Martha Few studies attempts to exterminate locusts in colonial Guatemala from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, while Zeb Tortorici uses Inquisition records to study canine baptisms, marriages, and funerals in eighteenth-century Mexico, assessing their various possible meanings as social satire, interspecies affection, or acts of blasphemy. All three chapters highlight the different ways in which humans related to animals in the colonial era and the preexisting cultural constructions that mediated these relationships.Science and medicine provide a second framework for interrogating human-animal relations. Adam Warren's chapter focuses on the medicinal uses of New World animals and shows how Kallawaya knowledge about the healing properties of native fauna entered colonial medical texts. Heather McCrea examines the different regimes for dealing with disease in postindependence Yucatán, where attempts to control epidemic-causing insects were often closely associated with efforts to control the native Maya population. Neel Ahuja moves into the twentieth century to examine the role of monkeys as experimental subjects in postcolonial Puerto Rico. Imported into the island by US scientists in 1939 to develop a vaccine for polio, many monkeys escaped from their colony to become an invasive species, damaging agriculture and local wildlife. Ahuja traces “the historical conjunctions of nonhuman primate bodies, medical research institutions, Puerto Rican nationalism, cultural fears of government secrecy, and the transnational and transcolonial politics of the global primate trade” (p. 181). Animals could function as both causes of and antidotes to human disease. Centering Animals shows how animal products were used to cure and harm human bodies and how the transmission and application of medical knowledge were shaped by wider cultural and social contexts.The final section, “The Meanings and Politics of Postcolonial Animals,” addresses the relationship between animal welfare, conservation, and national identity. Reinaldo Funes Monzote charts the rise of animal protection in nineteenth-century Cuba, pointing to the connections between compassion for animals, civilization, and moral reform. John Soluri examines the ecological impact of sea lion hunting in nineteenth-century Patagonia, and Regina Horta Duarte offers a parallel study of the trade in birds' feathers in Brazil, emphasizing the role of international scientific exchange in shaping conservation policies. Lauren Derby follows with a fascinating examination of the political and symbolic functions of one particular animal, the goat, which was used as a motif for the dictator Rafael Trujillo after his assassination in 1961. Several contributors explicitly broach the issue of animal agency, positioning animals as historical actors rather than passive victims. Soluri, for example, notes how the movements and behavior of the seals themselves affected the hunting process, though he questions how far we can recover the historical agency of animals from human sources.Centering Animals is an important addition to animal studies that simultaneously provides a new lens through which to view key issues in human history. Whether as resources, victims, or historical agents, animals have indeed been central to the development of Latin America. This book brings their contribution to the fore and opens exciting new avenues for future research

Anthropocentrism · Ethnology · Geography · Latin Americans · Political science · Sociology · Variety (cybernetics) · Anthropology · History · Latin American history and culture · Law

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