UCLA

Over the course of Spanish colonial rule in Mesoamerica, church authorities received recurrent reportsthat human beings had transformed themselves into nonhuman animals. “Entangled Creatures: Intercultural Dialogues Over Human-Animal Transformation in New Spain, 1521-1770,” examines these narratives of interspecies metamorphosis in the Viceroyalty of New Spain (now Mexico) across the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, as a window into the religious, social, and environmental transformations wrought by Spanish colonization. The Iberian invasions of the Americas that began in 1492 and continued through the sixteenth century, initiated an unprecedented process of biological and cultural exchange that shaped the world thereafter. Through their introduction and proliferation of foreign crops and livestock, alongside their imposition of Catholicism, Spanish civil and religious authorities attempted to control and refashion Indigenous American landscapes, fauna, and human beings. Yet historical scholarship has largely assessed changes to spiritual and quotidian relationships with the natural world in colonial Latin America separately, through the distinct fields and methods of environmental and religious history. My research connects processes of ideological and ecological imperialism in New Spain, by viewing reports and discussions of human-animal transformation through the lens of entanglement, which discerns the ever-shifting cultural, social, and ecological networks of the Early Modern world in light of the colonial-subaltern power relations that shaped those interconnections. This dissertation argues that human-animal transformation and related phenomena in colonial Mexico illustrate how Indigenous notions and practices of human mutuality with nonhuman animals persevered and adapted, impacting creole and casta (mixed ethnicity) populations, but how colonial epistemic violence made those ways of thinking and being ever more difficult.