History of Science, Stanford University, Department of History, 450 Jane Stanford Way, Building 200, Stanford, CA, 94305-2024, USA.
Ber Wiss. 2021 Jun;44(2):228-244. doi: 10.1002/bewi.202100001. Epub 2021 May 6.
Spanish naturalists established the Viceregal Botanical Garden of New Spain in Mexico City in 1788 to advance agriculture, manufacturing, and medicine. This colonial institution also served the ideological role of cultivating agents of empire. Rather than establish the garden in the already robust tradition of American botany, the Spanish appropriated this space, employing Creole students and servant workers to Europeanize local botanical knowledge through taxonomic colonialism. The different agendas at work in the botanical garden, which straddled the colonial and revolutionary periods in Mexico, destabilized not only this institution, but also the empire itself from the ground up. That the contributions of the agents of the garden have been forgotten is evidence of the fragility and failure of a European institution in the American colonial state.
1788 年，西班牙自然学家在墨西哥城建立了新西班牙总督区植物园，旨在推动农业、制造业和医学的发展。这所殖民机构还具有培养帝国代理人的意识形态作用。西班牙人并没有在已经强大的美洲植物学传统的基础上建立这座植物园，而是占据了这个空间，利用克里奥尔学生和佣工，通过分类殖民主义使当地的植物学知识欧洲化。这座植物园跨越了墨西哥的殖民和革命时期，其中的工作议程不仅使该机构不稳定，而且还从根本上动摇了帝国本身。这座植物园的工作人员的贡献被遗忘，这证明了一个欧洲机构在美洲殖民国家的脆弱性和失败。
