The Science of Useful Nature in Central America: Landscapes, Networks and Practical Enlightenment, 1784–1838

Abstract

Reformers in late eighteenth-century Central America, after a devastating earthquake in 1773 that destroyed their capital, Santiago de Guatemala, worked relentlessly to reimagine the landscapes of their kingdom, pushing away visions of ruin and decay to promote ambitious new plans to harness “useful nature” and, as Sophie Brockmann puts it, “turn the narrative of decline into prosperity” (p. 24). In her richly detailed and engaging new book, they seem to have been everywhere, reading Enlightenment science, writing letters to one another, and contributing articles and sharing field reports in the Gazeta de Guatemala, the newspaper published by the Real Sociedad Económica de Amantes de la Patria de Guatemala. Though the economic society was suspended between 1800 and 1810, for Brockmann its membership maps a loose network of reformers, including peninsulares and criollos, royal officeholders and local municipal officials, clergymen and soldiers, merchants and landowners. All were influenced by transatlantic intellectual currents but were largely preoccupied with distinctly Central American challenges. Few, she argues, were anticipating the end of colonial rule or advocating for it.Consider, for example, José Estachería, the president of the Audiencia de Guatemala, who in 1785, after receiving a letter from the parish priest of a remote village in Chiapas, recruited an Italian architect and a Spanish captain to survey the newly rediscovered ruins of the Maya city of Palenque. Their survey, of course, relied on Ch'ol Maya in the town, who knew the site. This is a familiar story that Brockmann, in her first chapter, frames in an interesting new way: a field project that engaged engineers and soldiers used to mucking about in the mud, not bibliophiles more comfortable in libraries, their minds on ancient texts and wild theories. Estachería expected reports that conformed to bureaucratic norms, modeled on relaciones and visitas, attentive to local geography and the particular natural resources that might have sustained an ancient city of such size and complexity but also contributed somehow to its ruin. The goal was to acquire practical knowledge of the landscape, to map roads, assess the fertility of soils, and catalog plants that might have commercial value. Brockmann acknowledges that news of the ruins, and descriptions of them that appeared in the Gazeta in the 1790s, aroused some speculation about their origins and the people who built them, but less so in Guatemala than in Europe, when, in 1822, reports like that of Antonio del Río were published in London.Subsequent chapters focus especially on the economic society's work and publications. Brockmann makes a convincing case that the purposes and energies of the society, first promoted by Archbishop Caetano Francos y Monroy in 1784 and licensed by the king in 1795, were defined less by initiatives emanating from the crown and more by loose partnerships among local and regional actors. Writing around the theme of “making enlightenment local,” she identifies many of these actors and samples their correspondences and published commentaries. Their plans attracted naysayers as well as advocates, as when an article was printed on the public health risks of banana trees in what Brockmann casts as “the great plantain debate” (p. 106).Chapter 4 is devoted to the economic society's most ambitious project, the Descripción Geográfica de Guatemala, a comprehensive cartography of the kingdom, with detailed local and regional maps drawn and annotated by Central American experts themselves. The work was conceived as an alternative to the encyclopedic approach of many European geographers, who were criticized by the editors for making, in Brockmann's words, “a mathematical abstraction of space” (p. 123). Her discussion of their commentaries on the futility of European cartographic conventions is rich and finely drawn, and especially interesting.Like Jordana Dym and others, Brockmann disavows framing the intellectual politics of late colonial Central America as precursors to independence. Nonetheless, in the last two chapters, her material informs our efforts to understand what was to come. She highlights the deep frustration that many reformers expressed, frustration with the scale of the environmental challenges, the failures of so many of their schemes, and the resistance, especially among Maya, to reform. Yet her final chapter documents the persistence of reformers under the federal republic. The economic society was revived by Mariano Gálvez, governor of Guatemala, in the 1830s. And, in 1832, Gálvez chartered a national Academy of Sciences, which sponsored new scientific publications and reformed the national university. New international collaborations began, especially with English field scientists and geographers, who enjoyed the sponsorship of merchant firms eager to invest throughout the region. This is familiar ground in the historiography, but Brockmann offers a concise overview that serves as an effective conclusion to her very fine study.