The Iberian fruit trees of the Argentine subtropics (1493-1767)
Citrus seeds taken on at Gomera on Columbus's second voyage, and peaches brought from Chile by Nunez de Prado in the 1550s, became naturalised populations that Andean and Guarani communities took over and put to medical uses no European pharmacopoeia had recorded. The Jesuit missions grew oranges in the communal Tupambae until the expulsion of 1767 inventoried them. The peaches of the Quebrada are now named as a marker of local identity.
Why this wins its question: Columbian Exchange coverage in English is almost entirely a one-way traffic report - maize and potatoes east, horses and smallpox west - with the westward plant transfer reduced to a list of species and no dates, no routes and no afterlife. This object gives the westward transfer the same treatment the eastward one usually gets: the specific cargo of the second voyage in the chronicle's own Spanish, taken on at Gomera; naturalised Citrus populations in the Americas by the last quarter of the sixteenth century; the peach entering north-western Argentina over the Pacific route with Nunez de Prado in the 1550s and fruiting by December 1552; the orange grown communally in the Tupambae of the Guarani missions, reconstructable because the 1767 expulsion inventoried it. It then follows the trees past the colonial period to the thing that makes them worth an entry at all - communities that incorporated, redefined or abandoned them by their own decision, built medical uses for them that no European text supplied, and now name a peach variety as a marker of who they are. The dispossession is quoted from the same authors in the same paragraph, because a transfer story that drops it is describing an orchard and calling it a history.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The citrus arrived with the second voyage. The chronicle wording quoted in the study is "pepitas y simientes de naranjas, limones y cidras, (ademas de) melones y de toda hortaliza" - seeds of oranges, lemons and citron, besides melons and every kind of garden vegetable - taken aboard at Gomera in the Canaries in 1493. What crossed the Atlantic first was not a shipment of fruit but a seed stock and the horticultural practice that went with it.
Within three generations the trees were no longer a colonial garden crop. By the last quarter of the sixteenth century several representatives of the genus Citrus, oranges and lemons among them, were already naturalised in the Americas - reproducing without cultivation and spreading beyond the plots they had been planted in.
The peach came by a different road and the road is documented. Peaches entered north-western Argentina from Chile, following the route of the Pacific, in the decade of 1550, with the expedition of Nunez de Prado; they thrived, and by December 1552 a wealthy fructification was described. Two years from planting to a recorded harvest is the measure of how well the species suited the Andean valleys.
In the Guarani missions the orange was grown as a communal crop, not a priest's ornament: the study describes orange groves belonging to the Tupambae, the community gardens worked for large-scale production, with a greater diversity of fruits in the gardens of the priests and in the colleges of the order at Buenos Aires, Cordoba, Santa Fe and Asuncion. Much of what can be said about mission horticulture is known because the Jesuits were expelled in 1767 and their property was inventoried: Brabo's expulsion inventories, together with Paucke's descriptions, are the record.
The recipients were not passive. The study's conclusion is that native people did not resign their prominence in decision-making, and took an active part, "either incorporating as rejecting, redefining, or abandoning customs, objects, and products". The medical uses recorded for citrus in the region - against putrid fever, intestinal parasites and stomach complaints, and later for respiratory and circulatory conditions - are local elaborations rather than transcriptions of a European pharmacopoeia.
The end state is an identity rather than an import. Local varieties have been configured which are considered as defining a particular agricultural context and are recognised as an identity factor by the settlers who grow them - the "duraznos de la Quebrada", the peaches of the Quebrada de Humahuaca. A tree that arrived on a sixteenth-century expedition is now part of what the people of that valley use to say who they are.
The same authors set this against what it arrived inside, and the counterweight is theirs, not imported: "the breakup of natives spaces occurred along with the establishment of a new regime of exploitation and production, either politically or culturally imposed by the Europeans". The orchards and the dispossession are one process. An account of the fruit trees that omits the second half is not describing the same event.