Silk raising in New Spain (the morales of the Mixteca and the Valle de Atlixco)

Mulberries and silkworms reached Mexico in the 1530s and were taken up so fast that a friar writing in 1540 named growers drawing three and four hundred pounds of raw silk. The trees stood on indigenous land, which is why a law of 1549 ordered the audiencias to stop encomenderos making Indians raise silk on their own morales. By 1748 an official found the industry gone from the Oaxacan town still called La Seda: the growers had killed the mulberries themselves.