Centering Animals in Latin American History: Writing Animals into Latin American History

2. Killing Locusts in Colonial Guatemala

2 Killing Locusts in Colonial Guatemala MARTHA FEW Aside from a few insects that we see as beneficial to humans—such as ladybugs who kill other insects destructive to flowers and crops, or bees that produce honey—when we think of insects, we often want to kill them. We kill lice that infest our children’s hair, exterminate bedbugs that colonize the mattresses we sleep on, and ‘‘dip’’ our pets to eradicate fleas and ticks that hide in their fur. We buy and use products, such as Terro Ant Killer II and Combat Roach Killing Gel, whose names underscore the uneasy and violence-tinged relationship humans have with insects. Historically, government agencies have conducted numerous insect-extermination campaigns in the United States and internationally, such as the gypsy moth eradication campaign of the 1890s in Massachusetts, Mexican programs that utilized ddt against mosquitoes in the 1950s, and the California state government’s use of malathion aerial-spraying missions to kill the medfly that threatened the state’s multibillion dollar agribusiness industry in the 1980s and again in the 1990s.∞ From society’s perspective, insect-extermination campaigns have had high stakes, from protecting public health to ensuring stable food supplies and the well-being of local and regional economies. Coordinated human efforts to exterminate specific insects prior to the late nineteenth century, before the development of chemical insecticides and the professionalization of entomology as a modern field of scientific endeavor, have an important but little studied history.≤ This is the case for state-directed locust-extermination campaigns in colonial Guatemala, a geographic area that roughly comprises what are today southern Mexico KILLING LOCUSTS IN COLONIAL GUATEMALA • 63 and the nation-states of Central America, and that was the site of preColumbian Mesoamerican civilizations that included the Maya.≥ During three-plus centuries of Spanish colonial rule, from the early sixteenth century to the early nineteenth, devouring locust ‘‘clouds,’’ ‘‘plagues,’’ and ‘‘swarms’’ consumed and transformed Guatemala’s landscape, destroying food crops and stripping the countryside of living vegetation. Guatemalans considered these insects as invaders who threatened their livelihoods and their very lives. Yet for the most part historians have focused on insects such as locusts only in supporting roles in a greater narrative describing the history of agriculture and public health.∂ Even those working in the growing field of human-animal studies have rarely paid much attention to insects or placed them at the center of historical analyses. A welcome exception is Eric C. Brown’s edited volume Insect Poetics, in which contributors explore modern insect representations and symbolism, read through literature, visual media , and popular culture.∑ In addition, the journal Antennae that focuses on visual cultures related to nature has three exclusively insect-themed issues.∏ However, the research in these publications tends to emphasize insects as displayed or represented in art, museums, film, and literature, and not the histories of human relationships with the actual insects themselves. Under the framework of recuperating the presence of insects in history, focusing on the locust provides a useful starting point. Locusts have long figured in the imagination of various cultures as an important and potentially ominous species. Ancient Assyrians prayed to the god Ashur, whose iconography includes a locust familiar.π Locust plagues similarly afflicted ancient Greece, where Athenians erected a statue of Apollo Parnopios in recognition of his skill at repelling the insects.∫ Islamic cultures attribute important roles to insects, including locusts, as part of their sacred texts.Ω Judeo-Christian cultures also give locusts prominent roles in their sacred history from ancient times up to the present day. The Old Testament is filled with references to locust plagues, such as the plague visited upon Egypt when the Pharaoh refused to free the Israelites referred to in Exodus .∞≠ Similarly, the prophet Joel describes a visitation of locusts as an apocalyptic symbol associated with the invasions of Babylon and Assyria. The New Testament also contains references to locusts as literal harbingers of the apocalypse, as in Revelations 9:3: ‘‘Then over the earth, out of the smoke, came locusts, and they were given the powers that earthly scorpions have.’’∞∞ Into modern times, Christian cultures in Europe and the Americas 64 • MARTHA FEW have read locust plagues as evidence of divine wrath and as apocalyptic portents, and used a variety of strategies including locust excommunication in efforts to halt the insect swarm’s spread.∞≤ Writing insects into history is methodologically and...