Over the course of three centuries, the cochineal dye, originally from the valleys of Oaxaca in central Mexico, was one of the most expensive and coveted sources of red in the Atlantic and Mediterranean worlds. A deep, intense carmine of great durability, cochineal worked its alchemy to colour the modern era. The choice of red for all luxury textiles, it suffused the state robes of royalty and nobility, military uniforms and folk costumes. The clothes of the Ottoman sultan were steeped in cochineal red, as were the togas of cardinals in Rome. And some of Europe’s most famous painters, from Tintoretto to Titian, from Rembrandt to Van Gogh, used cochineal to signal the dignity and opulence of their sitters and make their canvases flicker with life and fire.

Properly speaking, the dye is the pulverised body of the cochineal insect, Dactylopius coccus. The insect produces carminic acid to defend itself against predators and spends most of its life feeding on cacti of the genus Opuntia. Fittingly, in Nahuatl, the dye is called nocheztli, meaning ‘blood of the prickly-pear cactus’ (Figure 1). Some of the earliest representations of cochineal appear in the records of tributes imposed by the Mexicas or Aztecs on the peoples of their vast empire (Figure 2). The dye made its first journey across the Atlantic among the gifts sent by Hernán Cortés to Emperor Charles V. By the 17th century, cochineal, a monopoly of the Hispanic monarchy, constituted an extraordinary source of revenue, surpassed only by silver. Like silver, it travelled the route of the Spanish galleon. Stocked in leather pouches, cochineal arrived first in the Spanish harbours of Cadiz and Seville, whence it was traded and distributed to the world’s most renowned textile-producing centres, such as Toledo, Segovia, Florence, Milan, Lyon, Amsterdam and Venice, and as far as Cairo and Goa. It was only after the invention of cheap, mass-produced artificial dyes in the mid 19th century that cochineal lost its global relevance.

Given its tremendous commercial potential, it is unsurprising that other European powers, in particular the British and French monarchies and the Indies trade companies, sought to secure a stake in its production and distribution. In his Voyage to Jamaica, Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum, dedicates a few lines to ‘this good commodity’. Referencing two of the more popular theories about cochineal, e.g. that it was a worm or a berry (the name grana cochinilla, as the dye is still called in Mexico, is a vestige of this belief), Sloane identified the plant on which it grew as ‘Opuntia maxima’ (Figure 3). This ‘tree’ had spread across the island of Jamaica, brought there from the American mainland by a Spanish priest, but cochineal did not. As Sloane wrote, in Jamaica no one had ever observed ‘that Worm upon any of their Trees’. Privateering, not animal husbandry, was the surer way to acquire the dye in Jamaica.¹

Some decades later, in 1777, French botanist Nicolas-Joseph Thiéry de Menonville risked life and limb to travel through the cochineal-producing valleys of Oaxaca as a spy, on a mission to extract cacti and cochineal and gather the information necessary to reproduce them in the French dominion of Saint-Domingue. For his courage, he earned the title of royal botanist to the French king. But his endeavour to make the jardin du roi in Port-au-Prince a growing field for cochineal failed. In the colonial contexts of the modern world, where medicines, plants, animals, books and practices travelled globally, cochineal invites us to think about the limits of circulation and networking. Surely, not all things circulated equally easily; sometimes, not even spying or piracy managed to break secrets or monopolies exerted over certain stuffs. Why?

A reading of the most complete treatise on cochineal offers an answer. The same year Thiéry de Menonville made his way from the port of Veracruz to Oaxaca and back, José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez, one of New Spain’s most respected and prolific scholars, was charged by Viceroy Antonio María de Bucareli with producing a detailed report on cochineal. Alzate’s Memoria sobre la naturaleza, cultivo y beneficio de la grana (Treatise on the Nature, Cultivation and the Processing of Cochineal) is, like the rest of his oeuvre, an enlightened effort to inventory and study the commercial, economic and medical uses of Mexico’s natural treasures.² Alzate begins his Memoria in a critical fashion typical of enlightened Creole discourse in Hispanic America, dismissing the ‘absurd and ridiculous things’ written by European naturalists who lacked first-hand knowledge of the thing in question. No, the cochineal ‘mother’ does not wander about the cactus but instead stays attached to one place during its entire adult life. Yes, the species does have male individuals and thus offspring do not spontaneously materialise through putrefaction but are the product of sexual reproduction. Against such nonsense, Alzate presents the results of his own experiments and observations of the insect’s morphology and life cycles.

For precise information on the cultivation and harvesting of cochineal, Alzate relied upon his Oaxacan informants. The cultivation of cochineal was a labour-intensive task carried out exclusively by indigenous communities. It depended on detailed knowledge of seasonal cycles of cold and rain, and on regimens of care such as building nests for the insects before releasing them onto the cactus, sheltering them from the cold and protecting them from predators and dirt by brushing them gingerly with squirrel and deer tail hairs. To harvest the insects after they reached maturity, the indios scraped them gently off the cacti and then ‘suffocated’ them, either by drying them in the sun (although this diminished their weight, hence their value) or by placing them in wood-fired saunas or temazcales (Figure 4). The final product, cleaned of impurities and chaff, was packed in leather bags and shipped to regional trading centres, then on to the ports of Veracruz and Acapulco, whence the red dye made its way around the Atlantic and Pacific worlds. In the process, adulteration by mixing cochineal with sticks, brazilwood or grains was not uncommon.

For Alzate, the intricate native care required for production of the dye was one of the reasons cochineal could not be transplanted from New Spain to other locales. Thus, Thiéry de Menonville’s ‘theft’ of cacti and insects and his unsuccessful attempt to cultivate cochineal in Saint-Domingue were doomed to fail. ‘The French colony’, Alzate wrote, ‘expected great profit, but their hopes have vanished because the trade in cochineal will continue only as long as it is cultivated by the phlegmatic and astute Indian artisans: it is not a trade that can be plied by other castes of labourers.’

Alexander von Humboldt would repeat these conclusions some years later in his Essai politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne, a statistical treatise on New Spain’s resources, from its mines and demographics to its agricultural products – including, together with ordinary staples like maize and potatoes, cochineal and vanilla.³ The passages devoted to cochineal draw heavily on Alzate’s Memoria, although Humboldt does not cite the source of his knowledge explicitly. Like Alzate, the Prussian suggests that ‘despite the excessive price of cochineal’, there are no incentives to cultivate it outside New Spain, ‘in countries where one knows how to take advantage of time and work’. For Alzate, on one hand, cochineal thrived locally because Mexico’s native artisans had the temperament suited to produce it: artistic agility and the capacity for hard work. Humboldt, on the other hand, thought cochineal implied an amount of toil that was simply not commensurate with the ‘universal’ capitalist values of labour and hours. It was simply too laborious for those who valued their time.

While agreeing with Alzate that it was impossible to transplant cochineal production to another land, Humboldt represented a very different approach to the natural world and its riches. For Humboldt, nature was available to man in the form of resources, that is, as things that can be counted and standardised, are transferrable from one place to another and are thus available for development and financial speculation. As the Prussian aristocrat mused, ‘the smallest corner of the world, if it may come to be the property of European colonists … will become witness to the activities that have engaged our species in the last centuries. A colony brings together in a small space all the precious things discovered by man on the surface of the globe.’ Cochineal, despite its preciousness, would find no room in such a small place because it did not translate into values like time or money.

Alzate, on the other hand, had very serious misgivings about translation, whether it meant moving between languages or between geographies. He assiduously opposed the first lessons in Linnaean taxonomy, which arrived in New Spain in 1789 along with a botanical garden and a chair of botany. He opposed the Linnaean system on moral and intellectual grounds, in the former case because, as a priest, he believed Linnaean sexual classifications exposed young men to lascivious thoughts, and in the latter, because the new nomenclature erased the original or older names of things. For Alzate those words held knowledge about the origins, meanings and uses of things. Against an abstract, Latinate system of universalisation, Alzate upheld a Neoplatonic vision of natural history as the contingent coming together, in dense and complex ways, of words and things. In our 21st-century world, colour lacks history; we are mostly unaware of where the colours we inhabit come from. Alzate’s Memoria invites us to rethink perfect red as an assemblage of plants, insects, meteorological conditions, qualities of soil and climates, and temperaments, of places and of people.

FURTHER READING

Alzate y Ramírez, J.A. (1991) Memoria sobre la naturaleza, cultivo y beneficio de la grana [1777] (Mexico City: Archivo General de la Nación).

Butler Greenfield, A. (2005) A Perfect Red: Empire, Espionage, and the Quest for the Color of Desire (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.).

von Humboldt, A. (1811) Essai politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne (Paris).

Moreno de los Arcos, R. (1989) Linneo en México: la controversia sobre el sistema binario sexual (Mexico City: UNAM).

Museo del Palacio de Bellas Artes (2018) Rojo mexicano: la grana cochinilla en el arte (Mexico City: Secretaria de Cultura).

Padilla, C., and B. Anderson (2015) A Red Like No Other: How Cochineal Colored the World (New York, NY: Skira Rizzoli).

Phipps, E. (2010) Cochineal Red: The Art History of a Color (New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University Press).

¹ H. Sloane, Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbadeos, St Christophers, and Jamaica (London, 1725), vol. 2, 152–4.

² J.A. Alzate y Ramírez, Memoria sobre la naturaleza, cultivo y beneficio de la grana [1777] (Mexico City: Archivo General de la Nación, 1991).

³ A. von Humboldt, Essai politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne (Paris, 1811).