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introduction Writing Animal Histories ZEB TORTORICI AND MARTHA FEW On 12 January 1563, Juan Canuc was walking with his wife to a nearby ranch for livestock grazing when they heard a number of chickens clucking on the hillside near a large cross. According to Canuc’s testimony, which was translated from Yucatecan Maya to Spanish by a court-appointed interpreter, the couple found a young boy who ‘‘had his underwear loose and was sitting on the ground with a turkey [gallina de la tierra, a ‘‘chicken of this land’’—it being native to Mesoamerica] in between his legs.’’∞ The boy, a fourteenyear -old Maya named Pedro Na, from a small town near Mérida in Mexico’s largely indigenous Yucatán Peninsula, had been caught in flagrante delicto, committing the ‘‘unnatural’’ crime of bestiality. Canuc handed Na over to Spanish authorities, who threw him in prison and then tried him, apparently eager to make an example out of the boy. As was customary in bestiality cases, colonial authorities ‘‘deposited’’ the bird as evidence, but it died within a few days as a result of being injured by Na. Under questioning, the boy admitted, ‘‘It was true that yesterday afternoon in the said road, he came across some turkeys and chickens, and he took the said turkey and went to thehillsidewithitand,withthecarnalagitation[alteracióncarnal]hefelt... he had carnal access with the turkey.’’≤ Some weeks later, Pedro Na was sentenced to be taken from prison on horseback, with his hands and feet bound, accompanied by a town crier proclaiming his crime as he was brought to the central plaza, there to be publicly castrated and then permanently expelled from the province of Yucatán. Adding a macabre touch to the role of animals in spectacles and 2 • ZEB TORTORICI AND MARTHA FEW processions of public shame, on 14 February 1563 authorities pronounced, ‘‘[Because] the turkey with which the said Pedro Na committed the crime is dead and has been preserved, we order that as the sentence is carried out, the dead turkey shall be hung from Pedro Na’s neck as he is paraded through the streets of this city. After the said sentence is executed, the turkey shall be burned in live flames and turned into ashes.’’≥ The turkey was surely a rotten corpse by this point; after all, it had died at least one month before the sentence was carried out. As a number of historians have shown, bestiality cases like this one supply a surprising amount of information about human societies, sexual desires, legal traditions, the urban/rural dichotomy, and human-animal interactions in history.∂ But these cases also provide us with information about particular animals that is otherwise lost in the historical record, where one nonhuman animal tends to blur into another. Pedro Na’s case allows us to look, however fleetingly, at the fate of an individual animal as well as the culturally and theologically determined meanings and symbolism with which it was imbued at one particular moment in history. What can the turkey with which Pedro Na violently fornicated tell us about the experiences and representations of animals in history? The turkey , had it not died from the injuries inflicted by the sexual act, surely would have been killed by authorities, who, following injunctions set forth in the Book of Leviticus, would have burned, hung, or beaten to death those animals implicated in bestiality cases.∑ How do cases like this elucidate colonial encounters among and between human and nonhuman animals? How can we take the intertwined histories of two animals, one of them human, gleaned from archival documents such that we may critically interrogate human uses of and interactions with other animals? The case, which reveals the semiotic space in which one dead animal (put on public display) attained a political, moralistic, religious, and cultural significance in early colonial Mexico, certainly has the potential to broaden our understanding of animal symbolism and human dominion over animals as it was understood in the context of the violent interface between different cultures and the enormous changes wrought by colonization. Ultimately, the case of Pedro Na provides an entrance into the world in which certain forms of theological and juridical regulation of relationships and boundaries between humans and animals prevailed; but it also sets the stage to examine larger changes in animal husbandry and the use of European domesticated animals in rural agrarian economies in this mundane moment. We notice, for instance, the presence of Castilian chickens...

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