Chocolate on the Borderlands of New Spain
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Chocolate on the Borderlands of New Spain Margaret A. Graham 1 & Russell K. Skowronek 2
Published online: 4 October 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2016
Abstract In modern grocery stores, chocolate is a small item dwarfed in the allotted shelf space by its bitter cousins, coffee and tea. Yet, in the first three centuries of the postColumbian era, the cacao-based drink, once reserved for the elites of Mesoamerica, was transformed into a beverage that was enjoyed across the Spanish colonial world and beyond to the rest of Europe and the respective colonial empires. We explore the archaeological and documentary evidence from both shipwreck and terrestrial sites in the borderland region of New Spain including California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, and the Philippines to illustrate the presence and use of chocolate from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. We show that the study of chocolate on the fringes of New Spain provides a lens for understanding the dynamics of larger issues surrounding the birth of the modern global economy. Keywords Chocolate . Chocolatera . Foodways . Spanish colonial
Introduction Large steaming mugs of hot chocolate are a common winter staple in ski chalets and homes across North America. Today’s drink is a mixture of chocolate, sugar, milk, and sometimes cinnamon that is highly processed into an Binstant^ powder to which boiling water is added. This convenient concoction is widely available and consumed by rich and poor alike. But before the modern era, chocolate was a very different drink, made in a distinctive way, and consumed by Mesoamerican elites. After the sixteenth century this beverage became the epitome of the nascent world economy as it was based on cinnamon from South, Southeast and East Asia, sugar from New Guinea, and cacao from Mesoamerica. In this paper, we explore chocolate and its associated material * Margaret A. Graham [email protected]
1
Department of Sociology & Anthropology, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, 1201 West University Drive, Edinburg, TX 78539, USA
2
Departments of History and Sociology & Anthropology, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg, TX 78539, USA
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Int J Histor Archaeol (2016) 20:645–665
culture along the northern borderlands of New Spain. We show that chocolate held a prominent place in the dietary, social, and economic lives of those living in the Spanish colonial borderlands. Through an examination of chocolate, we also illuminate the expansion of the Spanish colonial world initially in the Americas and later in Asia and Spain’s role in the emerging global economy. Historical archaeologists have written extensively about the English tea ceremony and the importance of tea in Eastern North America (Deetz 1977; South 1977). But tea, and later coffee, came long after hot chocolate as the preferred beverage for wealthy and, eventually, commoners in the Americas and Europe. This fact has not been well represented in the historical archaeology literature. The under-recognition of chocolate in
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