Of Horses and Men, Mules and Labourers. Human-Animal Semantics, Practices and Cultures in the Early Modern Caribbean

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to discuss two human-animal relationships that proved particularly salient in the early stages of the so-called Spanish Conquest and became dominant in the early modern Caribbean and colonial Mexican world. On the one hand, the conquistadors’ narratives stressed the importance of their horses and the figure of the conquistador riding on his horse became an iconic depiction of centauric superiority. The conquistadorial mounted couple contrasts starkly with an equally iconic human-animal relationship: the muleteer and the mule. Depicting labour as a collective of human and animal workforce challenged the social boundaries between what was considered human and animal in yet another historically relevant way. This article, therefore, stresses an approach that takes modes of interaction as a starting point to discuss body history in early modern Amerindian contexts beyond strict human/animal boundaries.