Medicinal Snow as a Public Good: Indigenous Communities, Merchants, and Justice in Colonial Veracruz, Mexico

Abstract

In colonial Mexico (1521–1821), all territories and their natural resources were considered personal possessions of the Spanish Crown, integral parts of the royal estate, or Real Hacienda. The Crown managed these resources by imposing monopolies designed to generate revenue, which often came at great social cost. This paper examines how the Crown managed and controlled one of its lesser-known monopolies—the sale of snow—and how the enterprise affected the most vulnerable members of society, in this case marginalized indigenous communities and poor, sickly residents in the city of Veracruz. In this tropical seaport, snow was a prized commodity used to treat yellow fever, which first appeared in the New World in 1647 and plagued Veracruz for centuries thereafter. Through transcription and analysis of unpublished colonial documents, we illustrate how the Crown was torn over whether to manage its snow monopoly as a profitable colonial industry or to deploy snow as a public good. Findings reveal how and why the Crown chose the latter option; namely, a form of governance that focused more on the equitable distribution of resources than it did on simple profit maximization.