The University of Arizona Press
When: Tuesday, October 23, 2025
Time: 4:30-6:30 p.m.
Where: Kinney Center for Interdisciplinary Renaissance Studies, 650 East Pleasant Street, Amherst, MA
Rick A. López celebrates his new book Rooted in Place: Botany, Indigeneity, and Art in the Construction of Mexican Nature, 1570–1914, with a seminar at the Kinney Center in Amherst, Massachusetts. This Five College Renaissance Seminar is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase. López is Anson D. Morse 1871 Professor of Latin American History and Environmental Studies at Amherst College.
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.
