Ricardo Aguilar-Gonzalez
I am a historian of pre-Hispanic to colonial and modern Latin America specialising in Mexico and Central America. My main research interests are Indigenous negotiation and reinterpretation of colonial policies, including Christianisation. I have conducted research on Mesoamerican history, colonial Indigenous nobility, conquests and alliances between indigenous peoples and Iberian peoples, colonial indigenous taxation, and more recently, on the social history of foods and drinks. I have also worked transcribing and publishing critical editions of colonial literature such as Alexander von Humboldt's (1804) Tablas geográfico-políticas de la Nueva España, (IIH: UMSNH, 2004), a summary of criollo and Indigenous knowledge about colonial Mexico and Central America used by Humboldt to craft his (1825-27) Essai Politique… More recently, I co-authored, along with art historian Angélica X. Afanador-Pujol don Antonio Huitzimengari's (1553) petition (UNAM, 2019, see more below) to the king for a pension based on his participation in the 'pacification' war against the unconquerable Indigenous peoples (Guachichiles, Pames and Guamares) from western and northern Mexico.
More broadly, my research and teaching interests focus on exploring the long history behind current social issues across Latin America, such as structural poverty and its connections to race and gender, the primitive accumulation of capital, and the legacies of social classification in contemporary societies. To achieve this, I delve into seemingly unrelated yet historically significant themes, including taxation, food prices, Indigenous peoples' reinterpretation and negotiation of Christianity, the roles of Indigenous and African enslaved peoples in mining haciendas, women's involvement in bread and beer production to sustain family and community economies, and environmental changes in pre-Hispanic, colonial, and modern Latin America.
Below, you will find more details about my PhD research on food, bodies, and colonization in Mesoamerica during the early modern period (approximately 1400-1600 CE). Additionally, I share information about my ongoing project on the social use and meanings of bread, brief introductions to my published work, details on my public engagement efforts, and ways to reach out to me.
Sculpture of Tlaltecuhtli reused as wheat millstone in sixteenth-century colonial Mexico @MNA, INAH, Mexico.
Recent research
During my PhD I conducted research on the social history of foods and drinks in the colonisation of the Mesoamerica (a region comprising part of modern Mexico and Central America, and termed as New Spain by Spanish colonisers). I studied how foods and drinks were embedded in political and religious meanings (both in the context of festivals and in the everyday life). Moreover, analysing Kiche-Mayan, Central Basin Nahua and Purepecha myths on the origin of sustenance and humans, I showed how Mesoamerican foodstuffs, particularly maize, deer, and fermented drinks, were deeply engrained in the making of kin and the keeping of the social realm. My work was awarded honourable mention at the United Kingdom Latin American History Network (UKLAH) dissertation prize based on the following grounds:
‘‘Sustenance: foods, drinks and bodies in the colonisation of Mesoaemrica, 1350-1600’ is a wide-ranging and compelling history which draws together distinct literatures in a new way, placing studies of pre-Columbian cosmologes, social histories of conquest, and food food history in dialogue. It is vividly written and deeply researched, making excellent use of close and ‘distant’ reading techniques associated with digital humanities. By zooming into topics such as hunting and bread-making, it generates important new insights into how Indigenous societies resisted and adapted to colonial rule’ (UKLAH Dissertation Prize Judges, University of Sheffield 24 May 2024).
From April 2023-April 2024 as Institute of Advanced Study Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick I conducted ethnohistorical research on the colonial and social uses of wheat and maize breads in the Purpecha and mestizo towns Paracho, Patamban, and Pátzcuaro in Mexico.
I am currently working on two papers dealing with the Mesoamerican Indigenous knowledge on foodstuffs, landscapes, and I am preparing a research project (Breadwinners) on the comparative history of women baking and selling breads and fermented drinks in two colonial towns: Real del Monte (Mexico) and Lipez (Bolivia).
A focus on breads
As part of this research, I also got involved with the Digging into Early Colonial Mexico (DECM) research group based at Lancaster University. Training provided by this research group led by Paty Murrieta Flores and Raquel Liceras Garrido allowed me to work on the 12 volumes of the Relaciones de Indias. I digitally annotated these primary sources related with breads (Mesoamerican and Mediterreanean). I used, along with Dr Godwin Yeboah, the DECM historical gazetteer to geolocate the production and ingestion of fourteen different types of bread across New Spain (colonial Mexico and Guatemala). We thus related the introduction of Mediterranean breads with elevation and farming landscapes. The result of this geohistorical trail was that indigenous knowledge about the cultivation of landscapes, and labour were the keys to adapt foreign crops in colonial Mexico and Guatemala. We have thus written the paper ‘Foodscapes of breads in colonial Mexico and Guatemala using a historical gazetteer’.
Publications
I have co-authored, with art historian Angelica Afanador-Pujol, Don Antonio Huitzimengari: Request and Life of an native noble in sixteenth-Century New Spain, (Mexico, UNAM, 2019, in Spanish), a monographic study on the intellectual context of production of a petition for royal grants mercedes reales to the king in 1553, and the transcription of don Antonio’s 1553 written appeal. Heirs of the pre-Hispanic rulers composed, or commissioned to create, the writing of reports based on the testimonies of witnesses that confirmed their deeds in the conquests of Mesoamerica. Petitions for grants, such as the ‘información’ of Don Antonio, provide an account of the conquests and colonisation of Mesoamerica, from the perspective of the native elite. It also shows that, far from the nationalistic assumption that understands the ‘Conquest’ as a single event based on the Spanish seize of Mexico-Tenochtitlan in 1521, there were myriad conquests across Mesoamerica in a continuum from 1518 to 1573. Governors from indigenous sovereignties negotiated, reinterpreted, and adapted Spanish conquest legal structure to survive politically in the colonial realities of New Spain.
I have also edited the 14-chapter book Tilling and Opening Pathways: Essays on Memory and Regional History in honour of Gerardo Sánchez Díaz (Morelia, UMSNH, 2022, in Spanish). The essays of this book emerged from the study of indigenous, military, religious and education communities in quest to collect, archive and organise the memories that provided a common basis in what is currently known as western Mexico from pre-Hispanic to modern times. The unifying premise of this book is that the region, and not the nation, is the most immediate and vivid space for the creation of social memory. Region is fraught with social meanings because it is a space that it is experienced by its inhabitants. Four essays, including the introduction, deal directly with the relation between social memory and the shaping of regions. Ten essays, ranging from land tenure disputes, the use of Morelia cityscape as warzone in nineteenth century, regional social tensions caused by nationally centralised agro-industrial development in post-revolutionary Mexico, are based on case studies on western Mexico from pre-Hispanic to modern times.
I have also published book chapters on colonial indigenous history and book reviews in Mexican history journals.
Work experience
I have taught history at the University of Warwick (UK), and historiography, regional history, history of Mexican art and ESOL at UMSNH, UNAM, UNLA in Morelia.
I have also worked as head of the ‘Luis Chávez Orozco’ Research Library for the year 2016-17 and as editor of the Publications Board from 2017 to 2018 at the Department of History at Michoacan State University (Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Morelia).
I was founder of the Bachelor’s degree on Geohistory at UNAM, Morelia, where I created in 2011-2012 the curriculum for the module ‘Ancient World to Renaissance, Historiography and Geohistory of the West’. I was part of this programme and I regularly taught this module from 2014 to 2018.
Conference organiser
- Organiser of Histories of Global Recipes: a Workshop on Sources and Methods. Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Warwick, 19 October 2023.
- Organiser of Food Reflection Forum: Food, Religion and Writing at University of Warwick Global Research Priorities, 26 July 2021.
- Co-organiser of Food and Drink Reading Group at the University of Warwick from 2019 – 2022.
- International Conference: Convergent sights on the city, at Saint Nicholas Hidalgo Michoacán State University, Morelia, August 14-16, 2017. DOI: dx.doi.org/10.14350/rig.59583
- ‘Honourable guests arrive before dusk’: Hospitality, hospitals and foreignness in the Iberian world, at Saint Nicholas Hidalgo Michoacán State University, Morelia, August 17, 2017.
Education
2018 - 2023 University of Warwick, (PhD) History
2021-2022 Associate Fellow in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (AFHEA:
PR255720)
2006 - 2008 Department of History, Michoacan State University (UMSNH, Morelia) (MA research) Mexican History.1999 - 2003 School of History Michoacan State University (UMSNH, Morelia), History.Professional training
17th Summer School in Food History, Food Cultures and Food Studies at University of Tours and IEHCA (Université d’Été Histoire et Cultures Alimentaires en el Institut Européen d’Histoire et des Cultures de l’Alimentation (IEHCA) at Université de Tours, Domaine de la Croix Montoire, Tours, France, 25 de September to 1 October 2019.
Spatial Humanities Summer School, Lancaster University Digital Humanities Hub, 16 – 19 July 2019
Contact details:
jricardoaguilarglez@gmail.com
jose-ricardo.r.aguilar-gonzalez@warwick.ac.uk
Sponsors
Chancellor's International Scholarship, The University of Warwick
Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Morelia
Institute of Advanced Study, The University of Warwick
Conacyt, Mexico
