The University of Arizona Press
November 6, 2025
The University of Arizona Press’ podcast features an interview with Rick A. López, author of Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570–1914. Rick López is Anson D. Morse 1871 Professor of Latin American History and Environmental Studies at Amherst College. He 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.
Asked about why he started writing the book in the podcast, López answered, “As a historian, I began as a modernist, and I accidentally went back to study colonial era Mexico. And it all started because I wanted to read a book when I got interested in environmental studies. And I wanted to know about the connection between nature and nation in Latin American countries.” He says there were many books about the connection between American exceptionalism and wilderness as well as books about the connection to nature for European countries, but not about other places. “I was surprised to find there weren’t any such studies [connecting nature and nation] of Latin America . . . so before I knew it, I was writing this book!”
Listen to the full podcast here.
About the book:
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.
Focusing on the ways people, environment, and policies have been affected by political boundaries, historian Rick A. López explores the historical connections between political identities and the natural world. López analyzes how scientific intellectuals laid claim to nature within Mexico, first on behalf of the Spanish Empire and then in the name of the republic, during three transformative moments: the Hernández expedition of the late sixteenth century; the Royal Botanical Expedition of the late eighteenth century; and the heyday of scientific societies such as the Sociedad Mexicana de Historia Natural of the late nineteenth century.
