Nation and Nature: Patriotic Representations of Nature in Late Colonial Spanish America

Jorge Cañizares Esguerra

This study explores the role that naturalists had in fashioning a Creole proto-national identity on the eve of the Wars of Independence. Creole naturalists offered utopian discourses that confirmed Creole patriots in the belief that the new nations were viable economic-political units; they also promoted the hope that each proto-national space was poised to become a major commercial emporium. Although America at large was presented as a continent of natural wonders, Creole naturalists emphasized the singularity of each proto-national space, each different from the rest and exceptional. This very singularity of each colonial space allowed Creole naturalists to call for the development of localized and distinct sciences, which in turn, reinforced the senses of distinctiveness and difference. [WP# 98031]