The Pliny of New Spain: Indigeneity, Authority, and Nostalgia in the Construction of Patriotic Science in Late 19th-Century Mexico

Enlightenment-era botanists from the Royal Botanical Expedition had been commissioned to complete the work from two centuries earlier by the Renaissance-era botanist Francisco Hernández. Yet they rejected his scientific authority and his embrace of indigenous structures of botanical knowledge. Despite the evident tension between these two expeditions, nationalist botanists of the late-nineteenth century claimed both of them as a unified source of authority for their own efforts to promote a patriotic, modern science that could lay claim to the plants that sprung from Mexican soil. This paper explains how and why these nineteenth-century scientists sought to reconcile these conflicting precedents to create the sense of a seamless heritage of patriotic science rooted in Mexican indigeneity.