"To Deaden the Memory of the Act": Archival Iterations of Bestiality and Environmental Change in Colonial New Spain, 1563-1821

• In Event: Managing Animals

Abstract

This paper explores how records of the crime of bestiality—amply recorded and documented in Mexican and Guatemalan colonial archives—can be used by historians of Latin America to articulate the complex interrelationship between colonialism, environmental change, and human-animal interactions. Based on a corpus of 119 criminal cases and 25 Inquisition denunciations of bestiality throughout New Spain between 1563 and 1821, I explore how these records are demonstrative of environmental change and historical subjectivity in colonial Latin America. With the glaring exception of one case—in which a thirteen-year-old Maya boy named Pedro Na was caught having sex with a Mesoamerican turkey (gallina de la tierra) in 1563 in Mérida, Yucatán—these cases implicate only European domesticated animals such as donkeys, mares, dogs, mules, cows, goats, and sheep. This significant fact challenges colonial tropes and stereotypes that bestiality was an act perpetrated largely by native peoples due to their deviant desires and inherent “rusticity.” This record set also allows us to historicize particular animal deaths, given that colonial authorities ritualistically killed nearly all of the animals implicated in bestiality cases while meting out comparatively lenient sentences to the human offenders who initiated such acts. In the language of the courts, colonial authorities sought to “deaden the memory of the act” through the eradication of the physical evidence—the body of the nonhuman animal—at the same time that they assiduously recorded and transcribed the details of the crime within the documents that eventually ended up in Latin American historical archives. A careful focus on the historiographically marginalized crime of bestiality allows us to trace the contradictory representations of human perceptions of nonhuman animals in the historical past and in the archival present, taking the changing environment and landscape of New Spain as well as new animal husbandry practices into consideration.

Author

• Zeb Tortorici, New York University