Silk raising in New Spain (mulberries, silkworms and the pueblo called la Seda, 1530s-1748)

Spain moved mulberries and silkworm seed to Mexico within a decade of the conquest, and by 1541 a royal plantation in the valley of Atlixco held a hundred and ten thousand trees while a friar predicted more silk here than in all Christendom. The same records carry the cost: a law of 1549 against encomenderos who made their Indians rear it, and a 1748 survey of a pueblo actually named la Seda whose people had stopped the rearing and ruined the mulberries themselves.