The Pine Nut Trade in 17th-Century Mexico

People living in the vast region between the Rio Grande Rift and the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt have enjoyed pinyon seeds or nuts (piñones) for thousands of years, harvesting different varieties for their own community’s consumption, but also to trade with others. Piñones were a short-distance trade good for much of the trees’ cultivation history. Then, during the 1600s, Spanish colonists in New Mexico intersected with pre-existing trade networks by selling Colorado pine nuts in mining towns in northern and central Mexico. They found a market even though the availability of different pine nut species throughout this range had previously precluded the need to acquire the product via long-distance trade. This paper reconstructs the expansion of the pine-nut trade to examine indigenous economic activity in light of colonial intrusions, which included massive deforestation in the Mesoamerican highlands. The analysis focuses on the intersection between indigenous and Spanish trade networks during the seventeenth century. Indigenous groups in New Mexico continued to harvest and trade pine nuts during this time, and Spanish colonists were among those who acquired them. This exchange left a written record that testifies to preexisting networks of exchange, but also points to commercial changes that benefitted both native people and colonists. This affirmation of native participation and profit in the pine-nut market (involving native and foreign consumers) is a necessary corrective to historical narratives that stress colonial exploitation at the expense of highlighting native economic agency. In reality, Indians succeeded in keeping their own trading networks and even in making some gains from Spaniards’ economic activity because colonists depended entirely on their products and labor. The pine-nut trade thus provides a lens into the understudied commercial aspect of Native-European relations in the frontiers of the Spanish empire.