Scents in Colonial Sonora: A Sensory Approach to Early Modern Natural Knowledge

My project focuses on how sensory history can be used to read colonial sources from seventeenth and eighteenth century Colonial Mexico. I use Jesuit correspondences and reports to reconstruct the role of scent in shaping environmental knowledge about the northwestern frontier of Colonial Mexico by looking at how olfactory history can expand on both the global Jesuit exchange network of early modern scientific information and the Indigenous practices and natural knowledge concerning the Sonoran Desert and its surrounding area. I am focusing on several fragrances as case studies for understanding the role of scent in recreating past environments and will use both text excerpts and visual representations to explain to viewers how olfactory history allows for new interpretations of historical texts, as well as the intersection of scent with environmental histories by including maps of the region drawn from primary sources and botanical illustrations from the eighteenth century. Between illustrations, maps, and select excerpts from primary texts, I hope to use this poster session to provide an introduction to viewing a region from the Spanish Empire in a new way that emphasizes European and Indigenous uses of natural materials and the cross-continental and trans-Atlantic network of environmental knowledge that coalesced in the early modern era. I will utilize environmental history, Jesuit studies, landscape studies, and Indigenous methodologies to study the intersection between religious and environmental change during the colonial period in northwestern Mexico. The implications of these colonial shifts in land and water use, the flora and fauna of the Sonoran region, and the forced resettlement of Indigenous communities has had long-lasting impacts that continue to shape the current U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Sensory history allows for a way to reconstruct elements of this earlier period in new and profound ways that create a continuum with contemporary projects seeking to emphasize Indigenous botanical knowledge and species in the region, as well as a alternate lens through which to view Jesuit source material from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.