INVITE | Plant Lives by Luciano Concherio San Vicente on Among Ahuehuetes, Lawn Grass, and Spanish Moss
You are warmly invited to the next session of WiSER’s online seminar series
Plant Lives Critical Plant Humanities - Conversations from the Global South
Luciano Concherio San Vicente will speak on
Among Ahuehuetes, Lawn Grass, and Spanish Moss:
Chapultepec as seen through the Critical Plant Humanities
Click here for paper and images
This paper explores Chapultepec Forest as one of Mexico’s most significant biocultural spaces. While its central role in the country’s history —from the 15th century to the present— is unquestionable, plants have been largely overlooked in most scholarly analyses of the site. Here, we seek to reverse that tendency by placing vegetal life at the center of inquiry in order to better understand distinct episodes in the history of plant management in Chapultepec. First, we examine how one of the ahuehuetes (Taxodium mucronatum) underwent a process of memorialization in the final decades of the 19th century, being linked to the remote Indigenous past while also incorporated into civic-patriotic rituals commemorating the battles of Molino del Rey and Chapultepec in 1847. Through this dual association, the so-called “Ahuehuete of Moctezuma” was transformed into a living symbol of Mexican identity. Second, we explore transformations implemented between the late 19th and early 20th centuries under the influence of miasmatic hygienist theories, which promoted the development of urban parks for public health. In this context, we trace the importation of seeds —particularly ornamental species and lawn grasses— from France and the United States, emphasizing how such interventions reshaped the landscape both biologically and culturally. Third, we analyze a 1930s controversy surrounding Spanish moss (Tillandsia usneoides), which covered many of the forest’s trees. While some valued its romantic aesthetic, others advocated for its removal, citing harm to tree health. This conflict reveals a broader tension between ornamental and conservationist visions of the forest. Taken together, these three case studies—ahuehuete, lawn grass, and Spanish moss—open new interpretive pathways for understanding Chapultepec not only as a cultural and historical space, but also as a contested vegetal territory.
Luciano Concherio San Vicente (Mexico City, 1992) is an Assistant Professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He holds a B.A. in History from UNAM and an M.Phil. in Modern Society and Global Transformations (Sociology) from the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom. He earned a Ph.D. in History from UNAM and later completed a second doctorate in Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought at The European Graduate School. His work focuses on twentieth-century Mexican intellectual history, the history of indigenismos, and critical theory. He is the author of several books, scholarly articles, and essays published in widely circulated platforms such as The New York Times and The New Inquiry. His most recent publication is The Mexican Seventies: A Fragmentary Intellectual History (UNAM, 2025), co-edited with Ana Sofía Rodríguez. For several years, he has dedicated himself to studying Chapultepec and has worked on various projects within the urban park.
Monday, 2nd June 2025
4-5pm (Johannesburg time)
Click here to register
Plant Lives is a seminar series convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall.
It follows two previously successful series, Heated Conversations and Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres, convened by Isabel Hofmeyr and Sarah Nuttall
In these calamitous times, are plants a distraction from pressing problems, or a new way to approach them? Is the burgeoning field of the plant humanities just another fad with little bearing on the global South? Can we imagine a seedy and weedy politics in which plants are less metaphors for human logics and more themselves? Can we shift from an abstract concern with plant life to consider material plant lives? And if so, with what consequences?
This seminar series explores the global plant humanities and the conversations that plant worlds enable. We envisage a postcolonial plantarium* which encompasses plantations, pre-colonial pharmacopoeias, philosophy, phytopoetics (both visual and textual) and much more. Our starting point is 'ruderal', a term which describes a plant that grows in disturbed grounds. A plant humanities for the global South takes shapes at the intersection of enforced human and plant migrations and works in the wake of disturbance and damage.
Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at Wits University; Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WiSER, Wits.
*Thanks to Marianna Szczygielska and Olga Cielemęcka for this term