The University of Arizona Press
October 28, 2025
Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike in Mexico confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources it offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis. Rooted in Place by Rick A. López reveals how scientific endeavors were not just about cataloging flora but were deeply intertwined with the construction of identity and the political landscape at three pivotal moments in Mexican history. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.
In 1893, a crowd gathered in the Mexican Pavilion of Chicago’s Columbian Exposition to see the publication of recently rediscovered documents from the Royal Botanical Expedition to New Spain (1787–1803), including one of the most comprehensive lists of Mexican flora. Officials and scientists declared on this international stage that Mexico had at last joined the small club of modern, industrializing civilizations. And they presented the Royal Botanical Expedition’s report as a proud assertion of their government’s right to control its own natural resources.
It might seem strange that late nineteenth-century nationalists at this world’s fair would choose a Spanish colonial institution as a symbol of Mexican national sovereignty. The choice comes across as all the more perplexing if we recall that the purpose of the Royal Botanical Expedition had been to assert European imperial domination over Mexico and its natural resources. To make sense of this seemingly odd choice, we need to go a bit further back in time . . . actually, a lot further back, to the 1500s. We need to return to the moment shortly after the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs, when the Spanish royal court physician Francisco Hernández arrived in Mexico City, sat down with native doctors known as titicih (sing. ticitl), and recorded what they told him about Mexico’s plants.
Since the first moment of conquest, colonizers and the colonized alike confronted questions about what it meant to be from this place, what natural resources Mexico offered, and who had the right to control those resources and on what basis. Mexico is the third most biodiverse country in the world thanks both to its varied biogeography and to the long and distinctive history of human interactions with the region’s flora and fauna before the arrival of Europeans. This book is an account of how scientific intellectuals in Mexico laid claim to these diverse natural resources, first on behalf of the Spanish Empire and then in the name of the republic. It tells this story through three transformative and interlinked moments: (1) the royal expedition by Francisco Hernández during the late sixteenth century, which inspired naturalists to contemplate how Mexico’s native plants and cultures fit into the expanding world of Renaissance knowledge; (2) the Royal Botanical Expedition of the late eighteenth century that set out to build on the earlier findings by Hernández, while imposing Enlightenment science as a tool for studying and conquering the botanical frontier in New Spain; and (3) the late nineteenth century, when leading scientific intellectuals looked nostalgically on previous expeditions as they sought to forge Mexico’s future progress by harnessing nature, science, and indigeneity for the good of the republic.
These three moments, I argue, were links in a single chain in which scientific intellectuals (known as naturalists during most of the period covered by this book) debated what it meant to know and claim the flora rooted in Mexican soil—ranging from individual plants to forests and vegetated landscapes. And, in each link of this chain, they centered claims about the importance of indigeneity. The views of plants, place, and indigeneity that scientific intellectuals forged during these three crucial historical moments continue to shape current-day debates about what rights Mexico has to its natural patrimony, how these rights are distributed among its population, and how and why species and ecosystems should be protected.
Rick A. López is Anson D. Morse 1871 Professor of Latin American History and Environmental Studies at Amherst College. He is author of Crafting Mexico: Intellectuals, Artisans, and the State after the Revolution and has published articles and essays on the history of nation formation, race, aesthetics, and the environment in Mexico, as well on the history of the Latinx population in the United States.
