{ "id": "grana-cochinilla-de-oaxaca", "type": "entity", "name": "Grana cochinilla: the Oaxacan dye insect, its husbandry, and who actually produced it", "summary": "The scarlet dyestuff of Oaxaca was bred on nopal plots under a husbandry that a Mexican compilation of 1855 describes down to the basket journeys carrying the mother insects nine leagues into the sierra to escape the rains. The same account states that the greater part of the cochineal entering commerce came not from the estates with sixty thousand nopal plants but from the small plots of the Indians.", "locale": "en", "tags": [ "americas", "mexico", "oaxaca", "new-spain", "agriculture", "trade", "natural-history", "indigenous-knowledge", "textiles", "eighteenth-century", "spanish-empire" ], "relations": [ { "rel": "related", "target": "anil-de-nueva-espana" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "mercurio-volante-1772" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "alzate-gacetas-de-literatura-1788" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "columbian-exchange" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "republica-de-indios" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "manila-galleon" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "cordova-arte-y-vocabulario-zapoteca-1578" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "mixtec-printed-philology-1593" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "real-ordenanza-de-intendentes-1786" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "capsicum-out-of-the-americas" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "real-compania-guipuzcoana-de-caracas" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "nixtamalization-and-the-maize-transfer" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "vainilla-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "cempoalxochitl-de-la-nueva-espana" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "palo-de-campeche-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "silk-raising-in-new-spain" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "algodon-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "achiote-bixa-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "tuna-y-nopal-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "comercio-y-mantenimientos-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "abejas-sin-aguijon-de-las-indias" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "seda-de-la-nueva-espana" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "tianguis-y-mercados-de-indios" }, { "rel": "related", "target": "landivar-rusticatio-mexicana-1782" } ], "questions": [ "What was grana cochinilla and where did it come from?", "Who produced the cochineal that Europe dyed with?", "How was cochineal bred and harvested in Oaxaca?", "Was cochineal an animal or a plant?", "Why did cochineal production concentrate in Oaxaca?" ], "claims": [ { "id": "c1", "text": "The account used here is a Mexican compilation of 1855, and it says what it is: the Apendice al Diccionario universal de historia y de geografia, coleccion de articulos relativos a la Republica Mexicana, gathered and coordinated by Manuel Orozco y Berra with articles by Jose Maria Andrade, Bernardo Couto, Joaquin Garcia Icazbalceta, Jose Maria Lafragua, Miguel Lerdo de Tejada, Manuel Payno, Francisco Pimentel, Guillermo Prieto, Jose Fernando Ramirez, Ignacio Rayon, Francisco Zarco and others, tomo I and eighth of the whole work, Mexico, imprenta de J. M. Andrade y F. Escalante, 1855. Its cochineal article names its own authorities - the third memoir published by Caldas in the continuation of the Semanario de la Nueva Granada, itself an extract of instructions sent to Bogota by the viceroy Bucareli; Humboldt at libro IV chapter X of the Ensayo politico; number 26 of Los ocios; and, for the zoology, the Compendio elemental de zoologia published in 1854 by Pio Bustamante Rocha of the seminario de mineria. None of those was opened for this object, and the claims below are worded as what this compilation states.", "sources": [ "apendice-diccionario-universal-1855-cochinilla" ], "confidence": 0.9 }, { "id": "c2", "text": "The commercial position of the dye is stated without inflation and with its decline attached. The article on the insect calls it, for the beauty and fastness of the red tint it produces, one of the most esteemed objects that Mexico has furnished to the industry of the other nations of the world; and says of the precious Mexican cochineal that as a class of dye it had come near to driving the other species out of commerce - the lac of the East Indies, the Chinese scale used in certain candles, the kermes of the coscoja used in Barbary and the Levant and formerly in Europe, the Polish scale once used for scarlet dyes - and would doubtless have made them forgotten altogether if it could have been had at a lower price. The same article closes by noting that the product was by then, unfortunately, not as considerable as before.", "sources": [ "apendice-diccionario-universal-1855-cochinilla" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c3", "text": "Its geography had already narrowed to one province. Oaxaca, the article says, is at present almost the only province of Mexico and of the world that cultivates the fine cochineal, though not long since Puebla and Nueva Galicia also possessed this branch of rural industry, which was anterior, Humboldt is quoted as saying, perhaps to the irruption of the Toltecs. By 1855 the district of Guadalajara scarcely gave a fortieth part of Oaxaca's product, and the cultivation had lately spread in several districts of the south, principally San Marcos Tuxtla and Chiapas.", "sources": [ "apendice-diccionario-universal-1855-cochinilla" ], "confidence": 0.8 }, { "id": "c4", "text": "Who produced it is the fact that most often disappears from accounts of the trade, and this one states it plainly. Some estates, on Humboldt's authority, had fifty and up to sixty thousand nopal plants; \"pero la mayor parte de la cochinilla que entra en el comercio, es suministrada por las pequenas nopaleras de los indios\". The export of Oaxaca in grana, granilla and powdered grana is given as 4,000 sobornales or 32,000 arrobas. A dyestuff that reached the looms of Europe as a luxury import was, at its origin, the work of indigenous smallholders.", "sources": [ "apendice-diccionario-universal-1855-cochinilla" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c5", "text": "The husbandry described is exacting and it is theirs. The ground is cleared and fenced, with interior fences crossing at right angles to divide the plot into squares about twenty-five varas on a side against the strongest winds, each square set out with fifteen cord-drawn lines and twenty-four holes to a line. Nopal cuttings of two or three pencas are planted, kept clear of every strange plant and of the worms, spiders and other insects that lodge in the nopal, and not allowed to rise above four feet so that the work can be done; the more spiny and hairy varieties are preferred because they protect the insect better against flying insects, and the flowers and fruits are removed so that intruders lay no eggs in them. In the hot valleys a year and a half brings the nopal to perfection, in temperate or cold places two or three years are needed.", "sources": [ "apendice-diccionario-universal-1855-cochinilla" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c6", "text": "Seeding the plantation is a piece of husbandry with no European analogue. Pencas of the tuna de Castilla, a spineless nopal much esteemed in America for its gigantic stature and its fruit, are bought in April or May, sold with the insects already attached in the markets of Oaxaca, and kept some twenty days in caves or huts before being hung in the air under straw sheds. When the fecund females are ready they are placed, before the young are born, in nests made of parasitic plants called paxtles magueitos, of palm fibre or other vegetable matter, some twenty to twenty-five mothers to a nest; the nests are carried to the nopal plots, hooked on the spines and moved from penca to penca so that the brood is well distributed, and turned from time to time so that the light quickens the eggs. The mothers die in the nests, and their bodies dried in the sun form the grana called zacatillo, handsome to look at but of little tint and little value.", "sources": [ "apendice-diccionario-universal-1855-cochinilla" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c7", "text": "The most remarkable practice in the account is a seasonal migration of the insects, and it is credited to indigenous growers as an ancient custom. Humboldt is quoted for it: the indios nopaleros, particularly those living near Oaxaca, observe a very ancient custom, which is to make the cochineal travel. In the plains and valleys of that province it rains from May to October, while in the neighbouring sierra of Istepeje the rains fall between December and April; so instead of sheltering the insect in huts during the wet season they place the mothers layer by layer, covered with palm leaves, in baskets of bejuco carried on the shoulder with the greatest speed to the sierra nine leagues from Oaxaca, where they live until October and are brought back the same way. The Mexican makes the insects travel to keep them from the damp, the passage adds, as the Spaniard makes the merinos travel to defend them from the cold.", "sources": [ "apendice-diccionario-universal-1855-cochinilla" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c8", "text": "The killing and curing determined the price, and the trade names are set out with the reasons. The insects must be killed as soon as they are harvested, or the eggs of the females begin to quicken. Some are plunged in hot water and sifted; some killed in a heated vessel and stirred with a spatula until, as the Mexican says, se frie; some suffocated in the sun or in the circular ovens called temazcales that serve for vapour baths; some drowned in cold water sometimes mixed with vinegar. The dry method is preferred because water carries off part of the colouring matter. The most esteemed is got by laying the insects in layers in a deep narrow vessel for twenty-four hours, so that their own heat increased by their accumulation suffocates them; that keeps its powder and is called jaspeada, what is killed in water loses it and is called denegrida, and what is killed on hot plates is called negra. Traders preferred the whitish or jaspeada precisely because it was less exposed to the fraudulent admixture of gum, wood, earth and other ingredients with which the dye was adulterated.", "sources": [ "apendice-diccionario-universal-1855-cochinilla" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c9", "text": "The natural history was contested for a long time, and the article records the error rather than hiding it. The insect was for a long time known by the name of grana, which some old writers thought originated in the mistake of classing it as a fruit of the nopal in the form of a grain; when it was observed to be a living being it was given the name of grana-cochinilla, or simply cochinilla. The scientific description the article prints is nineteenth-century and Mexican, quoted from the Compendio elemental de zoologia published in 1854 by Pio Bustamante Rocha, professor of the seminario de mineria and of the special school of agriculture, who names the species coccus cacti, describes the winged male and the apterous female with her sucker, and reports the analysis by Pelletier and Caventou which yielded a particular red colouring substance called carmine along with stearine, oleine, an odorous acid principle, phosphate of lime and of potash, chloride of potassium and carbonate of lime.", "sources": [ "apendice-diccionario-universal-1855-cochinilla" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c10", "text": "The article also names the eighteenth-century Mexican scientific literature on the subject, which this object was unable to reach. Readers who want the minute particulars, it says, may study them in the extensive memoir on this precious insect written in 1777 by \"nuestro compatriota el presbitero D. Jose Antonio Alzate\", printed in the third tome of his gacetas. That memoir was not opened for this object, no full-view digitisation of the third tome of the Gacetas de literatura having been found; the reference is recorded as what the 1855 compilers state, and nothing here rests on Alzate's text.", "sources": [ "apendice-diccionario-universal-1855-cochinilla" ], "confidence": 0.85 }, { "id": "c11", "text": "What this object does not establish belongs on the record beside what it does. The 1855 account describes labour and technique but says nothing about the terms on which indigenous growers sold - the repartimiento de mercancias by which district magistrates advanced goods against future cochineal is outside everything opened here, and is neither asserted nor denied. Nor is the total value of the trade, its share of the exports of New Spain, or the condition of the growers established by this source. The account is also written after independence by men with a stake in the standing of Mexican industry, and its judgements about quality and about the decline of the product should be read as theirs.", "sources": [ "apendice-diccionario-universal-1855-cochinilla" ], "confidence": 0.85 } ], "takeaways": [], "faqs": [], "evidence_tier": "secondary", "evidence": { "level": "industry_observation", "source_types": [ "paper" ] }, "moat_flag": false, "winning_edge": "English writing on cochineal is dominated by the commodity story - the scarlet of European armies and cardinals, the Spanish monopoly, the smuggled insects - and the growers appear in it as an anonymous supply. This object argues from a Mexican compilation of 1855 that describes the husbandry itself, and quotes it: the plots divided into squares of twenty-five varas with fifteen cord-drawn lines and twenty-four holes to a line; the nests of paxtles magueitos holding twenty to twenty-five mothers each; the ancient custom, credited to the indios nopaleros near Oaxaca, of carrying the insects nine leagues into the sierra of Istepeje in baskets of bejuco so that they meet the dry season and never the wet, a practice the source compares to the transhumance of Spanish merinos; the four ways of killing the insect and the trade names jaspeada, denegrida and negra that followed from them; and the statement that the greater part of the cochineal entering commerce came from the small nopal plots of the Indians and not from the estates with sixty thousand plants. It also names what it cannot reach - Alzate's memoir of 1777, and the terms of sale - instead of filling the gap with assertion.", "confidence": 0.75, "last_verified": "2026-08-10", "canonical_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/grana-cochinilla-de-oaxaca", "api_url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/api/k/grana-cochinilla-de-oaxaca.json", "jsonld": { "@context": "https://schema.org", "name": "Grana cochinilla: the Oaxacan dye insect, its husbandry, and who actually produced it", "description": "The scarlet dyestuff of Oaxaca was bred on nopal plots under a husbandry that a Mexican compilation of 1855 describes down to the basket journeys carrying the mother insects nine leagues into the sierra to escape the rains. The same account states that the greater part of the cochineal entering commerce came not from the estates with sixty thousand nopal plants but from the small plots of the Indians.", "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/grana-cochinilla-de-oaxaca", "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html", "dateModified": "2026-08-10", "citation": [ { "@type": "CreativeWork", "name": "The articles COCHINILLA MIXTECA and COCHINILLA in the Apendice al Diccionario universal de historia y de geografia, coleccion de articulos relativos a la Republica Mexicana, tomo I", "url": "https://books.google.com/books?id=7ITVAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA588" } ], "@type": "Article", "headline": "Grana cochinilla: the Oaxacan dye insect, its husbandry, and who actually produced it" } }