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.
Why this wins its question: English-language accounts of the Columbian exchange move maize, potatoes and horses and almost never mention that Spain put a silk industry into southern Mexico within a decade of the conquest, or that it died. This object carries the three primary texts, opened page by page: the 1541 chapter with the royal plantation of a hundred and ten thousand mulberries, the second brood of worms observed in June 1540 and the native silkworm nobody had bothered with; the 1549 law naming the encomenderos who made Indians rear silk on their own trees; and the 1748 survey of a pueblo called la Seda whose people had ruined the mulberries because they expected to be harried for the profit. Achievement, coercion and abandonment in the words of the men who wrote them down.
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 transfer is documented from inside it. Fray Toribio de Benavente, Motolinía, closed his Historia de los indios de la Nueva España at Tehuacan in 1541, and the chapter on the valley of Atlixco describes the Spanish holdings there as already planted with mulberries — "los morales que tienen puestos y ponen cada dia, porque hay muy grande aparejo para criar seda" — within twenty years of the fall of Tenochtitlan. The text is read here in the 1858 Icazbalceta printing, so the wording is an editor's reconstruction from manuscript, not an autograph.
The scale was a state undertaking, not a curiosity. In the same valley, Motolinía writes, "ahora se hace una heredad para el rey, que tiene ciento y diez mil morales, de los cuales están ya traspuestos mas de la mitad, y crecen tanto, que en un año se hacen acá mayores que en España en cinco"; and in the city of los Ángeles, now Puebla, some Spanish householders held "cinco y seis mil piés de morales" apiece.
The expectation was explicit and enormous. Because so much was being planted there and elsewhere, he writes, "desde aquí á pocos años se criará mas seda en esta Nueva España que en toda la cristiandad", and Puebla would be "el principal lugar del trato de la seda". That is a projection by an interested witness, not an output figure, and is read as such.
The agronomic reason for the optimism is stated and is checkable. The mulberries put out leaf from the beginning of February and stayed in tender leaf until August, so that once the first crop of worms was gathered a second could be started; Motolinía reports having seen the second brood of that year himself — "yo he visto los gusanos de la segunda cria en este año de 1540, en principio de Junio ya grandecillos, y que habian dormido dos ó tres veces". Two crops a year is the whole economic case for the transfer.
The same chapter records that Mexico already had silkworms of its own and that nobody had used them. Before the seed came from Spain, he writes, "yo ví gusanos de seda naturales y su capullo, mas eran pequeños y ellos mismos se criaban por los árboles sin que nadie hiciese caso de ellos, por no ser entre los Indios conocida su virtud y propiedad". What Spain supplied was not the insect but the domesticated strain, the mulberry and the reeling craft.
The cost appears in the crown's own law within eight years. Libro VI, título V, ley xxxxviiij of the Recopilación — given by Charles V and the governors at Valladolid on 22 June 1549 — opens by stating the abuse plainly: "LOS Encomenderos de Nueva España, demas de los tributos que perciben, hacen que los Indios les crien seda, valiéndose de los morales que tienen en sus tierras, en que reciben perjuicio, y daño, quitándoles sus frutos, y grangerías." The Audiencias are ordered to remedy it so that the Indians "gocen de sus haciendas libremente, sin estorbo en sus grangerías, y aprovechamientos, como personas libres, y vasallos nuestros". The mulberries stood on indigenous land; the compulsion was to work them for someone else.
Two centuries later the industry survives only as a place name. Joseph Antonio de Villa-Señor's Theatro americano, printed at Mexico in 1748, describes the jurisdiction of Guejolotitlán, on the road from Mexico to Antequera in the valley of Oaxaca — a district of some nine hundred and fifty families, administered by a Dominican in Zapotec with Mixtec spoken in several of its pueblos — and records that it contains "el Pueblo nombrado la Seda, en el qual antiguamente avia crecida copia de enxambre de gusanos de seda, cuyo beneficio daba notable utilidad, no solo á esta Jurisdiccion, sino á la Region mysteca su vecina, de donde tomó nombre la Seda".
The reason he gives for the collapse is the sharpest thing in the record, and it is not competition. The people of the place judged that by profiting from this noble cocoon they would be harried for it — "empero les pareció á sus cerriles habitadores, que por desfrutar el beneficio de este noble capullo, avian de ser percegidos, no solamente suspendieron la cria del enxambre, sino que inutilizaron los morales de su sustento". They did not merely stop; they destroyed the trees that fed the worms. Read against the law of 1549, that is a rational response to a profitable crop attracting forced labour, and it is a Spanish official who writes it down. The inference is the object's, not the source's, which is why the confidence is below 0.9.
The second reason he gives is reallocation of labour. Of silk in the district in 1748 he writes "oy ay muy poca, á causa de averse destinado los Indios á otras haciendas, como son las de grana, mayces, y algodon" — the Oaxacan hinterland having been turned over to cochineal, maize and cotton. The old use survived in the cloth: with the silk of that rearing, he says, the ancients used to enamel their cotton clothing.
What these documents cannot establish is worth stating. None of them gives an output series, a price, or a count of the indigenous households that reared silk; Motolinía is a promoter writing in 1541, the law of 1549 proves the abuse alleged rather than its extent, and Villa-Señor is summarising returns sent in by local officials nearly two centuries after the fact and reporting a local explanation, not an investigation. Chinese silk arriving on the Manila galleon after 1565 is the cause usually named in the general literature; it is not named on these pages, and no claim here rests on it.