Colonial Cataclysms: Climate, Landscape, and Memory in Mexico's Little Ice Age

Abstract

Bradley Skopyk's book is an innovative social and landscape history of climate in central Mexico under Spanish rule. This was the time of the Little Ice Age—whose final chapter marked one of the wettest and strongest climate events of the Holocene—and a subsequent phase of unprecedented flooding and soil erosion.The book offers a precise documentation of precipitation and weather events over some 300 years. To do so, Skopyk draws on a remarkable suite of methodologies and sources. They include dendrochronology, stalagmite studies, an exhaustive archival inventory of weather events, historical maps, Nahuatl etymology, and historical geographic information systems. Skopyk's results show a two-phase movement: an abnormally wet period from the conquest to the 1670s, followed by a return to a long-term climatic mean that was characterized by a more balanced alternation of wet and dry years. This new climate history revises a view that has, since the eighteenth-century studies of José Antonio Alzate y Ramírez, emphasized droughts and aridification.Colonial Cataclysms also reconstitutes the landscape changes wrought by the shifting climate of viceregal Mexico. Skopyk follows the histories of water and dirt in two watersheds—of the Zahuapan River in Tlaxcala and the San Juan River in the Teotihuacán Valley. He shows that although the eighteenth century was drier, it was characterized by a surge of flooding events that were more frequent and powerful and that greatly scaled up soil erosion. This was not slow and invisible change. Retreating floodwaters dropped 30 centimeters or more of sediment. In a matter of decades, church entrances found themselves meters below street level. Rivers switched courses. Wetland drainages clogged up and dried out. It was a period of tremendous geomorphological change.That this should happen not in the wettest period of the last millennium but in the drier period that followed is the nub of the book. It argues that a landscape's vulnerability to flooding was as much determined by local agroecologies as by the weather itself. Here Skopyk turns to the history of Nahua and Otomi farmers. He shows how they sustained themselves through the triple crisis of conquest, epidemic, and the Little Ice Age by incorporating new animals and techniques and by taking up small-scale market production. By the late seventeenth century, the farmers of Tlaxcala and Teotihuacán were in position to capitalize on a boom in pulque consumption. One-third of Tlaxcala's arable land was, in short order, turned over to the commercial production of maguey, which was extensively monocropped on the sloped terraces of the metepantli system. The problem was that the metepantli was highly vulnerable to erosion. It required a great deal of labor to maintain the terraces and keep the soils in place. Epidemics around the turn of the eighteenth century sharply reduced community numbers. When the rains came, the terraces broke down, and the slopes were stripped down to bedrock.To this main account Skopyk adds a final and more reflexive chapter. It examines the arbitration of a land conflict in 1761. The dispute involved Indigenous cabildos, Spanish hacendados, and small communities. What is of interest to Skopyk are the histories that each party evoked to fix their claims on what was, by then, an already very different landscape. He shows the fabrications, the errors, the interests at play in the social memories of territory.Skopyk's study treats a complex and shifting field of interaction between long-term weather patterns, geomorphological change, and agrarian social history. The methodological challenges involved are considerable. Skopyk dedicated many years of archival research and interdisciplinary collaboration to resolving them. Two long appendixes and a constant line of in-text exposition detail how he did so. Dozens of maps, charts, and illustrations further expand on the textual account. This is a densely argued text, one mainly destined for colleagues and graduate students as a standard-setting environmental history. It extends the existing historiography on climate and waters in colonial Mexico developed by the likes of Georgina Endfield, Virginia García Acosta, Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, and Vera Candiani. For readers beyond its immediate scholarly community, Colonial Cataclysms offers a sophisticated and historically grounded intervention into more contemporary discussions on climate change, adaptation, resilience, and vulnerability.