Reforestation and Jaguar Predation in 16th-Century New Spain

In recent decades, scholarship on contact, conquest, and colonization in the New World increasingly considers the roles of non-human historical agents in affecting change. The environment as well as the plants and animals within it heavily influenced decisions made by humans. Using an interdisciplinary group of sources, this presentation contributes to the growing field of human-animal relationships by exploring the impact of early colonial reforestation on Indigenous-big cat conflicts in early colonial New Spain. Human-big cat conflicts occurred in Central Mexico prior to Spanish colonization, but they sharply rose during the mid-late sixteenth century due to the gradual regrowth of forests occurring in tandem with the proliferation of new sources of prey through cattle ranching, sheepherding, and other forms of animal husbandry. Both processes jointly resulted in the expansion big cat hunting zones and an increase in violent encounters between Indigenous people and predators. Mesoamericans sought reprieve from colonial institutions to either protect them from predation or eliminate the threats entirely. Notably, this presentation will be in conversation with recently published scholarship like Marcy Norton’s The Tame and the Wild, and it will supplement this work by considering lesser-known archival sources like land grants and petitions to procure arms. Some Nahua elites petitioned colonial officials for permission to carry arms explicitly for hunting big cats that preyed on their peers or communally owned animals, and some Nahua communities permitted the introduction of Spanish estates with the understanding that they would buffer the population from fatal attacks.