Food Security in the Americas: Avocados, Honey, and Oilseeds: Stories from Mexican Fields and Beyond

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Speakers: Viridiana Hernández Fernández, Assistant Professor of History, University of Iowa; Angélica Márquez Osuna, PhD Candidate, History of Science, Harvard University; Jayson Porter, Voss Postdoctoral Research Associate, Institute at Brown for the Environment and Society, Brown University
Moderated by: Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Professor of the History of Science and Antonio Madero Professor for the Study of Mexico

Viridiana Hernández is a historian of modern Latin America, specializing in the 20th-century environmental history of Mexico. She received her PhD in History from the University of California, Davis in 2021. Her research interests focus on the many forms in which the transnational movement of people, food commodities, and agricultural technologies change rural landscapes in Latin America. Currently, she is working on her first book project, “Guacamole Ecosystems: Agriculture, Migration, and Deforestation in Twentieth-Century Mexico,” that challenges the assumption that bureaucrats, scientists, and large-scale farmers were the primary actors in a long path of transformations of the Mexican countryside in the twentieth century. Through the case study of avocado cultivation in Michoacán, where eighty percent of the avocados consumed in the U.S. are grown every year, Dr. Hernández analyzes how indigenous and mestizo peasants and returned migrant workers transformed their local landscape and economy by appropriating and adapting outside agricultural innovations, the varied effects of their participation in transforming ecosystems and power relationships, and their role as investors and negotiators in the global agribusiness complex. Her research has been supported by several grants and fellowships, including the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Latin American Studies Association (LASA), and the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.

Angélica Márquez Osuna studies the history of Latin America from a global perspective, specializing in environment, race, labor, agriculture and farming practices. Her dissertation, Colonized Bees in the Tropical Frontier: Beekeeping and Modern Apiculture in the Yucatán Peninsula, Florida, and Cuba from 1760-1940, is about the history of beekeeping practices and industrial apiculture in the context of the Spanish colonization and the development of global capitalism. It focuses on the relocation of the European honeybee Apis Mellifera, which did not exist in the Americas before colonization, and the displacement of the native stingless bee Melipona beecheii, which is also capable of producing large amounts of honey and wax and has been bred by Maya communities for over 3,000 years in the Yucatán Peninsula. Her research looks at the commonalities, connections, and differences between three locations, crucial for the development of apiculture in the tropics: Florida, Cuba, and the Yucatán Peninsula. Angélica’s work emphasizes geopolitics, the changing borderlands in the history of colonialism and capitalism in the Americas, and the role of bees and beekeepers in these processes. Angélica was born and raised in México. She holds an M.A. degree in Anthropological Sciences from the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán. In 2016 she completed a second M.A. in History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Angélica was awarded the Charles A. Hale Fellowship for Mexican History by the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) in 2022.

Jayson Maurice Porter is a Voss Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society (IBES) at Brown University. His research specializes in food systems, environmental politics, science and technology studies, and racial ecologies in Mexico and the Americas. Jayson is an editorial board member of the North American Congress for Latin America (NACLA), a staff blogger for Black Perspectives, and an environmental specialist for Noria Research's Mexico and Central America Program. Find his research in Environmental Humanities, Environment and Society: Advances in Research, Washington Post, and The Organic Center.

Presented in collaboration with Deparment of the History of Science